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Submission + - Oldest German Webzine Telepolis taken offline

An anonymous reader writes: Last Friday, December 6, 2024, the German online magazine Telepolis (www.telepolis.de) took the entire archive offline from the time of its founding in early 1996 to the beginning of 2021. Since then, older articles and the associated discussions can no longer be accessed.

If one clicks on a link that leads to one of the affected articles or a forum post, a page appears that says:

"This text will no longer be made available.
This text will no longer be made available by Heise Medien GmbH & Co. KG. Further information can be found in the presentation and updates on the work of the editorial team (link: https://www.telepolis.de/Ueber...). If you are the author of the text, please contact archivtp@heise.de."

The beginning of 2021 was the time when the founding editor Florian Rötzer retired and his successor, Harald Neuber, took over.

The blocking probably started at the beginning of December; on December 6, 2024, the editor-in-chief Harald Neuber issued a statement (https://www.telepolis.de/features/Qualitaetsoffensive-Telepolis-ueberprueft-historische-Artikel-10190173.html) in which he justified the procedure.

The texts published since the beginning of 2021 were the responsibility of the new editor-in-chief and would correspond to the journalistic standards set out in the current mission statement of 2022 (link: https://www.telepolis.de/Ueber...).

Older texts would have been removed from the archive at the beginning of December because their quality could not be guaranteed. The questionable quality was justified by possible copyright infringements of some texts.

No other reasons are given.

The old texts would be reviewed now; some of them were to be checked according to the quality criteria of the new editorial team, revised and then possibly put back online.

There is no statement on the future of the forum and the comments.

Telepolis, founded by Armin Medosch and Florian Rötzer, was created at the end of 1995 and went online in March 1996. It was the first German-language online magazine that was even published in print for a time.

From the start the declared intention was to deal with social, cultural, scientific and political aspects of the Internet beyond technical issues.

Awarded the Grimme Prize in 2002, the most prestigious media prize in the German-speaking world, Telepolis was known for its liberal stance that also allowed for controversial discussions. One of the most sensational articles was a series of articles on ENFOPOL; other surveillance systems were also reported on. A short history with Palmares can be found here: https://www.heise.de/tp/featur...

The publisher is Heise-Verlag, which publishes several IT periodicals.

Note for non-German-speaking readers: The translations from translate.google are quite accurate.
Patents

IBM's Teri-is-a-Girl-and-Terry-is-a-Boy Patent 277

theodp writes "The USPTO has granted IBM a patent for utilizing naming conventions to assign gender-based avatars for instant messaging. A user named Teri, IBM explains, would be given a girl avatar, while a user named Terry would be provided with a boy avatar. The three IBM 'inventors' were stymied by users named Pat, who as a result will be assigned a 'generic, genderless human figure image as his or her avatar.' Way to honor that significant-technical-content patent pledge, Big Blue!"
Programming

Scripting In Commodore BASIC For Windows & Linux 213

SomeoneGotMyNick writes "Someone more nostalgic than I am, and with a lot of time on their hands, had created a scripting language based on Commodore BASIC for Mac OS X. They recently finished a version that works on Windows and Linux. You can pass the text of a BASIC program as a parameter to the program. I found it odd that it took 1.8 MB of source code to compile to an interpreter that used to fit in 8K of ROM space. If this ever becomes popular, perhaps we'll see Obfuscated CBM BASIC contests." In a simliar vein, in the comments someone points out what is essentially an open source AmigaOS Classic.
Wireless Networking

Low-Bandwidth, Truly Remote Management? 215

kaiser423 writes "I'm looking to integrate some highly critical solutions into what would essentially be a remote, moving datacenter. No operators will be allowed at the site, and we may be able to have a high-speed INMARSAT data link. As a backup, we're planning to have multiple redundant low-speed Iridium data links. Essentially, we're looking to be able to power up/down and reboot some computers, and be able to start/stop some programs. We're willing to write the terminal interfaces necessary for our programs, and possibly do the remote desktop thing with some of our 3rd-party programs. But what is out there that would give us this type of access, work robustly over a high-latency, low-bandwidth stream, and would be tolerant to intermittent network outages? Please hold the pick 2 of the 3 jokes, I know they're contradictory goals; I'm looking for a compromise here! These boxes would regrettably nearly all be running Windows (with some VxWorks). Does anyone out there remember those days, and have any solutions that they preferred?" Read on for a few more details of this reader's requirements.
United States

Suit Claims Diebold Voting Machines Violate GPL 252

An anonymous reader writes "Diebold Inc. and its subsidiary, Premier Election Solutions, is using Ghostscript in its electronic election systems even though Diebold and PES 'have not been granted a license to modify, copy, or distribute any of Artifex's copyrighted works,' Artifex claims in court papers filed late last month in US District Court for Northern California. The gs-devel list first brought up the possible GPL violation a year ago."
Government

Concerns About ACTA In EU, Canada 75

Elektroschock writes "An EU document on the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty was leaked. The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US and emerging economies, widen the enforcement measures to include criminal sanctions for patent infringements, and introduce internet content filtering measures. Civil society groups such as the FFII criticize the ACTA process because negotiation documents are not made publicly available by the governments. The EU document ('fact sheet') from the EU Trade Commissioner explicitly mentions: 'Internet distribution and information technology — e.g. mechanisms available in EU E-commerce Directive of 2000, such as a definition of the responsibility of internet service providers regarding IP infringing content.'" And an anonymous reader adds Michael Geist's push for more transparency around ACTA negotiations in Canada.
Cellphones

Verizon To Charge Content Providers $.03 Per SMS 260

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Verizon is going to start double-dipping by charging both consumers AND content providers for SMS text messages. Verizon has informed content partners that it will levy a $.03 charge for messages sent to customers, effective November 1. From RCRWireless: 'Countless companies could be affected by the new fee, from players in the booming SMS-search space (4INFO, Google Inc. and ChaCha) to media companies (CNN, ESPN and local outlets) to mobile-couponing startups (Cellfire) to banks and other institutions that use mobile as an extension of customer services.'"
Windows

Windows 7 To Dial Down UAC 390

Barence writes "Engineers working on Windows 7 have admitted Vista's User Account Control was too intrusive, and are promising to tone it down in the forthcoming Windows 7. 'We've heard loud and clear that you are frustrated,' says Microsoft engineer Ben Fathi. 'You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.' According to Fathi, when Vista first launched, 775,312 unique applications were producing prompts — so some may be annoyed that it won't be scrapped entirely, but at least Microsoft is listening. The comments echo those of Steve Ballmer, who admitted at a conference in London that 'the biggest trade-off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I'm not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade-off.'"
Image

Slashdot's Disagree Mail 202

Slashdot has one of the best discussion systems there is. It's grown and adapted over the years to meet various challenges and suit the needs of our users. A lot of time and effort has gone into it and we are always open to user input to help make it better. Some of our best ideas start as user suggestions and we appreciate the feedback. Of course they can't all be gems and sometimes the suggestions we get are unworkable or just bizarre. Here are a few of my favorite unhelpful, helpful suggestions.
Security

World Bank Under Cybersiege In "Unprecedented Crisis" 377

JagsLive sends in a Fox News report on large-scale and possibly ongoing security breaches at the World Bank. "The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July. In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month. In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank's senior technology manager referred to the situation as an 'unprecedented crisis.' In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public." Update: 10/11 01:15 GMT by T : Massive spyware infestations might be good cause to reevaluate the TCO of non-Windows systems on the desktop.
The Internet

Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu 215

David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"
Security

Government Begins Securing Root Zone File 198

Death Metal notes a Wired piece on the US government beginning the process of securing the root zone file. This is in service of implementing DNSSEC, without which the DNS security hole found by Dan Kaminsky can't be definitively closed. On Thursday morning, a comment period will open on the various proposals on who should hold the keys and sign the root — ICANN, Verisign, or the US government's NTIA.
Encryption

First Secure Quantum Crypto Network Up and Running 102

John Lam was one of many readers to send in news that on Thursday, "at a conference in Vienna, Austria, as reported by the BBC, a European Community science working group built a quantum backbone using 200-km of standard commercial optical fiber running among seven sites and successfully demonstrated the first secure quantum cryptographic key distribution network. In addition, each of the seven links used a different kind of quantum encryption, demonstrating interoperability between the technologies. To paraphrase, the project focused on the trusted repeater paradigm and developed an architecture allowing seamless integration of heterogeneous quantum-key distribution-link devices in a unified framework. Network node-modules managing all classical communication tasks provide the underlying quantum devices with authentic classical channels. The node-module architecture uses a layered model to provision network-wide, end-to-end, provably secure key distribution."
Robotics

Robotic Suit For Rent In Japan 202

xTantrum writes with an AP story that begins "A robotic suit that reads brain signals and helps people with mobility problems will be available to rent in Japan for $2,200 a month starting Friday — an invention that may have far-reaching benefits for the disabled and elderly."

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