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MPAA Boss Makes Case for ISP Content Filtering 282

Posted by Zonk from the same-old-routine dept.
creaton writes "At the annual UBS Global & Media Communications Conference yesterday, MPAA boss Dan Glickman banged on the copyright filtering drum during a 45-minute speech. Glickman called piracy the MPAA's #1 issue and told the audience that it cost the studios $6 billion annually. His solution: technology, especially in the form of ISP filtering. 'The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected ... and I think that's a great opportunity.' AT&T has already said it plans to filter content, but others may be more reluctant to go along, notes Ars Technica: 'ISPs that are concerned with being, well, ISPs aren't likely to see many benefits from installing some sort of industrial-strength packet-sniffing and filtering solution at the core of their network. It costs money, customers won't like the idea, and the potential for backlash remains high.'"
Patents

Everyday Copyright Violations 431

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the copywrong-extortion dept.
Schneier has pointed out a great law review article about the problems with copyright. The author takes a look at normal daily practices and how many commonplace actions actually result in what can be considered copyright violations. "By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John's activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing."
Google

A Google Blunder- the Sad Story of Urchin 164

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-analytics-is-free dept.
Anenome writes "Google has a track record of buying startups and integrating them into its portfolio. But sometimes those acquisitions go terribly wrong, as Ars Technica argues has been the case with Google's 2005 purchase of web-analytics firm Urchin Software Corp. 'In the wake of Google's purchase of the company, inquiring customers (including Ars Technica) were told that support and updates would continue. Companies that had purchased support contracts were expecting version 6 any day, including Ars. What really happened is this: Google focused its attention on Google Analytics, put all updates to Urchin's other products on the back burner, and rolled out a skeleton support team. Everyone who forked over for upgrades via a support contract never got them, even though things weren't supposed to have changed. The support experience has been awful. Since the acquisition, we have had two major issues with Urchin, and neither issue was solved by Google's support team. In fact, with one issue, we were helped up until the point it got difficult, and then the help vanished. The support team literally just stopped responding.'"
User Journal

Journal Journal: HIV is a 'double hit' to the brain

Journal by stemceller
New evidence reported in the August issue of Cell Stem Cell, a publication of Cell Press, offers a novel perspective on how the HIV/AIDS virus leads to learning and memory deficits, a condition known as HIV-associated dementia. A protein found on the surface of the virus not only kills some mature brain cells, as earlier studies had shown, but it also prevents the birth of new brain cells by crippling "adult neural pro
Security

Cambridge Researcher Breaks OpenBSD Systrace 194

Posted by kdawson from the without-a-trace dept.
An anonymous reader writes "University of Cambridge researcher Robert Watson has published a paper at the First USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology in which he describes serious vulnerabilities in OpenBSD's Systrace, Sudo, Sysjail, the TIS GSWTK framework, and CerbNG. The technique is also effective against many commercially available anti-virus systems. His slides include sample exploit code that bypasses access control, virtualization, and intrusion detection in under 20 lines of C code consisting solely of memcpy() and fork(). Sysjail has now withdrawn their software, recommending against any use, and NetBSD has disabled Systrace by default in their upcoming release."

Feed Engadget: Nintendo confirms red and black DS, launching August 21st (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming

Plain white had a good run, but Nintendo is bringing other parts of the rainbow to the US at last, with a new red and black DS Lite that'll be shipping bundled with Brain Age 2. The rumored pair are officially hitting the shelves August 21st for $150, says Nintendo, and while we can't guarantee the new color scheme will help boost your IQ, at least you'll look a tad more refined scribbling furiously on a "Crimson and Onyx" handheld.

[Via Joystiq]

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