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Comment Re:Turn the tables (Score 1) 1364

by MBGMorden (#29809277) Attached to: Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law

I'm sure you're right, but realized that you're talking about CALIFORNIA. Probably the most gay-friendly state in the union. I wouldn't be too quick to assume that the rights homosexuals have there are the same rights they have in most of the country. Particularly in the Bible Belt region. Allowing gay marriage? Hell I'm straight myself but get accused of being gay and half ran out of a room as I suggest that maybe, just maybe it's not fair to lynch mob every gay person in sight (or as I've heard suggested, "roundin 'em up and gittin rid of 'em").

Comment Re:The Law of Unintended Consequences (Score 1) 1364

by TheCarp (#29809251) Attached to: Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law

> The ONLY reason for such a list, is future harassment.

Sure, that is, until people who never signed it find their name on the list.

Seriously... if a petition to ammend your state constitution to allow police officers to ass rape anyone they see on the street.... how would you know that your name wasn't improperly added to the list of signers if the list wasn't publically posted?

What does signature validation consist of anyway? They check the names against the voter roles and addresses? Nice. Does anyone actually bother to mail people and say "Hey, you actually signed this, right?"

Hell, I could draw up a petition and have a few hundred "signatures" by the end of the day if that is the standard. Omar Ravenhurst wouldn't even need to sign.

-Steve
Businesses

Submission + - Stanford teaching MBAs how to fight open source (stanford.edu) 2

Submitted by
mjasay
mjasay writes: "As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish "Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects," a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise "the commercial vendor...to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy." The professors also suggest that "embrace and extend" is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors. If open source were innocuous to proprietary profits, there would be no market for such research."
Privacy

Submission + - Web is Evil, Says Canadian Privacy Czarina (thestar.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The web is evil and must be stopped — because it makes public information TOO public. So says Canada's Privacy Commissioner. She wants to "anonymize" court records by substituting initials for names. The Toronto Star quotes Jennifer Stodddart as saying "The open court rule, which is extremely historically important, has now become distorted by the effect of massive search engines ...Court decisions and other related documents "which contain all sorts of personal information" are now searchable worldwide, which was never intended when openness rules were devised." All Stoddart's proposal would do is erect a minor barrier for the techno unsaavy. Researchers, reporters geeks and most teenagers would still be able to figure out who's who. Stoddart seems to believe only in an abstract notion of freedom and access — but only as long not too many people use it and no one suffers. She cites the case of someone who is upset at reading the divorce case of her parents. Is Stoddart a danger or a menace? Or just clueless?
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Spore creatures now outnumber Earth species

Submitted by GBC
GBC writes: AFP is reporting that, as of a week ago, the number of creatures in the "Spore" database exceeded the number of known species on Earth. They are created using "Creature Creator", which is available in a free (with limited parts) or paid download at the Spore website. Will Wright seems extremely happy with the progress so far: "We hit 100K in 22 hours and a million by the end of the first week. The numbers are just blowing us away." It looks like EA/Maxis have a potential bestseller on their hands based on those numbers. So have you played God and created anything so far?
The Internet

Submission + - Microsoft Misleads on Canadian Copyright Reform

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As the battle rages over a Canadian DMCA, Microsoft Canada has published an op-ed in a political newspaper that Michael Geist describes as astonishingly misleading and inaccurate. Microsoft tries to argue that Canadian copyright law provides no legal protections, even after it received the largest copyright damages award in Canadian history just one year ago.
Censorship

Submission + - Collapsed UK bank attempts to censor Wikileaks (wikileaks.org)

Submitted by James Hardine
James Hardine writes: Wikileaks has released a couple of hilarious legal demands over a confidential briefing memo entitled Project Wing — Northern Rock Executive Summary. Northern Rock Bank (UK) collapsed spectacularly late last year on the back of the sub-prime lending crisis and was re-floated by the Bank of England at a cost of over £24bn. The memo was used by the Financial Times, the Telegraph and others. It attracted a number of censorship injunctions, as reported by the Guardian, which only Wikileaks continues to withstand. In their legal demand to Wikileaks, Northern Rock's well-known media lawyers, Schillings, invoke the DMCA & WIPO, claim it'll be 10 years in prison for Wikileaks operators for not following the UK injunction, but then, incredibly, refuse to hand over a copy of the order unless Wikileaks' London lawyers promise not to give it to Wikileaks. Finally they claim copyright and more — on their demands! The letters raise a serious issue about the climate of censorship in the UK, where one can apparently easily obtain a censorship order — a judge made law — that everyone is meant to obey, but no one is meant to know.
Media

Journal SPAM: DRM Nightmare - Use HD and Lose Previously Purchased Media 7

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Davis Freeberg ran into the nightmare scenario of losing access to his DRM-disabled purchases, simply by upgrading a PC monitor. "I recently purchased a new HD monitor, but when I installed it, I lost the streaming capabilities on Netflix's website. When I tried to troubleshoot the issue, I had to agree to let Netflix "reset my DRM" by destroying my Amazon.com files. Because Hollywood wants to punish people for using techn
Security

Submission + - SquirrelMail Repository Poisoned (beskerming.com)

Submitted by
SkiifGeek
SkiifGeek writes: "Late last week the SquirrelMail team posted information on their site about a compromise to the main download repository for SquirrelMail that resulted in a critical flaw being introduced into two versions of the webmail application (1.4.11 and 1.4.12).

After gaining access to the repository through a release maintainer's compromised account (it is believed), the attackers made a slight modification to the release packages, modifying how a PHP global variable was handled. As a result, it introduced a remote file inclusion bug — leading to an arbitrary code execution risk on systems running the vulnerable versions of SquirrelMail.

The poisoning was identified after it was reported to the SquirrelMail team that there was a difference in MD5 signatures for version 1.4.12.

Version 1.4.13 is now available."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Revokes an OOXML Promise (groklaw.net) 1

Submitted by
640 Comments Are Enough for Anyone
640 Comments Are Enough for Anyone writes: "Microsoft is going back on one of their promises concerning OOXML. While they originally promised, and got some to vote for OOXML, based on the premise that the ISO would take control of the standard if it were approved, Microsoft is now reversing that position and keeping near-full control over OOXML with the EMCA. This is significant because the EMCA is the group that originally rubber-stamped OOXML, and it seems unlikely that they will correct the problems when they were the ones who hid the 662 comments in individual PDFs on a password-protected website earlier this week, and the ECMA group working on OOXML is Microsoft controlled. In Microsoft's new plan, the ISO would only be allowed to publish lists of errata and would be unable to make OOXML compatible with existing ISO standards, while the EMCA would be the one to control any new versions of the standard."

Feed Techdirt: MPAA Trying To Rootkit Universities? (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Just as the MPAA is strongly pushing for a new law that would require universities to take proactive measures to prevent unauthorized file sharing from happening on university networks, the group is also apparently pushing certain universities to install some MPAA-sponsored software to monitor network usage. However, after examining this "toolkit" some are noticing that it appears a lot more like a "rootkit" than a "toolkit." Depending on how a university's network is configured, it could actually reveal a lot of private info to the outside world. The software also phones home to the MPAA, despite promising not to report back any information. There are a few other oddities as well. While it could password protect some of the exposed content, it never prompts the user to do so -- and, at the same time, it disables logging who accesses the pages revealing all the info. While it could all be a coincidence, effectively the MPAA has made it so that it (and others) can spy on university network usage without being tracked in many cases. People in the article note the similarity to the Sony rootkit situation, where software designed to "protect" actually opened up huge security vulnerabilities.

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Operating Systems

Submission + - MIT releases the source of MULTICS, father of UNIX (kirps.com)

Submitted by
mlauzon
mlauzon writes: "This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened.

Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a "simplified" successor to MULTICS (the name "Unix" is itself a hack on "Multics"). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000.

From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from the following page (it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler):

http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/

Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational computer system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the software should be considered to be an outstanding source for computer research and scientists. It is not yet know if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS.

Special thanks to Tom Van Vleck for his continuous work on www.multicians.org, to the Group BULL including BULL HN Information Systems Inc. for opening the sources and making all this possible, to the folks at MIT for releasing it and to all of those who helped to convince BULL to open this great piece of computer history.


Source: kirps.com"
Privacy

Submission + - RCMP Tolerates Piracy for Personal Use (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
mlauzon
mlauzon writes: "The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations.

Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting caught, at least not in Canada.

According to the RCMP it is impossible to track down everyone who downloads music or movies off the Internet. The police simply does not have the time nor the resources to go after filesharers.

"Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted," Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview with Le Devoir. "It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it," he added.

St-Hilaire explained that they rather focus on crimes that actually hurt consumers such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances.

A wise decision, especially since we now know that filesharing has absolutely no impact on music sales. On the contrary, a recent study found that the more music people download on P2P-networks, the more CDs they buy."

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