toxicx - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Doubt it will shut down cloud storage... (Score 1) 342

by toxicx on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @04:41PM (#46827447) Attached to: Aereo To SCOTUS: Shut Us Down and You Shut Down Cloud Storage

The DirecTV analogy is exactly what this argument is about. Here's the problem:

- DirecTV (and cable companies) pay local channels for retransmission rights. (Since 1992's Cable Television Protection and Competition Act, a concept called "Retransmission Consent" has been the guiding law. See: http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedi... )

- Aereo does not pay these fees, because (it argues) it is not a "video program distributor", but instead a company that rents out the use of antennas and DVRs across the internet.

All of the analogies to mp3.com and similar services aren't nearly as relevant as they should be.

Comment Re:I think this is bullshit (Score 1) 1746

by toxicx on Thursday April 03, 2014 @07:04PM (#46655481) Attached to: Brendan Eich Steps Down As Mozilla CEO

In 29 US states, you can be fired for being gay. In those same 29 states, a company can choose not to hire someone because they are gay. So no, we don't have the same laws. Most businesses absolutely can (and do) discriminate against openly gay employees.

US Twitter Spying May Have Broken EU Privacy Law 342

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 13, 2011 @01:35AM from the playing-nice-with-others dept.

Stoobalou writes "A group of European MPs will today push EU bosses to say if the US government breached European privacy laws by snooping on Twitter users with links to whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will today pose an oral question to the European Commission, seeking clarification from the US on a subpoena demanding the micro-blogging site hand over users' account details."

The Murky Origins of Zork's Name 70

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 09, 2010 @11:44PM from the murky-enough-for-a-grue dept.

mjn writes "Computational media researcher Nick Montfort traces the murky origins of Zork's name. It's well known that the word was used in MIT hacker jargon around that time, but how did it get there? Candidates are the term 'zorch' from late 1950s DIY electronics slang, the use of the term as a placeholder in some early 1970s textbooks, the typo a QWERTY user would get if he typed 'work' on an AZERTY keyboard, and several uses in obscure sci-fi. No solid answers so far, though, as there are problems with many of the possible explanations that would have made MIT hackers unlikely to have run across them at the right time."

Submission + - NSA monitors all web traffic: ex-AT&T tech (rawstory.com)

Submitted by Sir Tandeth on Thursday November 08, 2007 @09:10PM

Sir Tandeth writes: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=3833172&page=1 A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom giant forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a "secret room" to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984. Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access.

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