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Comment Good news for yoga instructors (Score 3, Insightful) 466

"The seats Southwest has put on nearly its entire fleet are 31 inches apart, about an inch less than before"
" Boeing says. American's newest 777s are set up 10-across in coach"

I'm 6'6" (198cm) and on behalf of tall people everywhere can I express a warm and heartfelt welcome to this policy of even further reducing the amount of room available, if this trend continues soon the we tall people will only be able to fly coach by adopting the Dwi Pada Sirsasana pose which if nothing else should please yoga instructors.
Announcements

Journal Journal: The Gopher is dead, long live the Gopher!

With all the commotion this week over the launch of FireFox 3 and Wine 1.0 there were a couple of software announcements that might of passed by most of the world but which I found quite exciting...

First, to coincide with the launch of FireFox 3 the Overbite project went public with the first public release of their FireFox 3 add-on that brings "gopherspace back to modern operating systems and browsers".

Comment The summary (Score 1) 3

I just read through the summary translated into English.

It seems they are proposing

1: The introduction of a digital identity to be used for public as well as private services on the Internet.

2: That automatic security updates are encouraged (this is slightly different to what the original poster mentioned).

3: Compulsory PC inspection "to develop and introduce a PC inspection which will in future be required when using public services on the Internet" (yep, this is the scary one)

4: Compulsory mail filtering

5: Security rating for software

6: Blocking of websites that are without doubt works as an active part of the IT crime

7: That the use of online data storage be promotes and that "public authorities give the rights, that include data stored on third-party servers, a critical view".

_____________

As to proposal 1, whatever they do if it's adopted by bank and financial service companies it will be hacked in under a fortnight.

As to proposal 2, encourage all you want but companies will only do what makes financial sense.

As to proposal 3, show me your warrant/court order - I think Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights could come into play here.

As to proposal 4, again I'm pretty sure Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights could come into play here.

As to proposal 5, no comment

As to proposal 6, It's easy enough to use a dns sever other than your ISP's if you want to see what your missing.

As to proposal 7, A persons data should have the same rights and legal protections wherever they choose to store it but in many countries this is not the case so yes a review is probably in order.
Privacy

E.U. Regulator Says IP Addresses Are Personal Data 164

NewsCloud writes "Germany's data-protection commissioner, Peter Scharr told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address, 'then it has to be regarded as personal data.' Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. If the E.U. rules that IP addresses are personal, then it could regulate the way search engines record this data. According to the article, Google does an incomplete job of anonymizing this data while Microsoft does not record IP addresses for anonymous search."
Privacy

E.U. Regulator Says IP Addresses Are Personal Data

NewsCloud writes "Germany's data-protection commissioner, Peter Scharr told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address, 'then it has to be regarded as personal data.' Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. If the E.U. rules that IP addresses are personal, then it could regulate the way search engines record this data. According to the article, Google does an incomplete job of anonymizing this data while Microsoft does not record IP addresses for anonymous search."

Feed The Register: 999 comes to VoIP (theregister.com)

Emergency calls are go, barring break-ups

Ofcom, the UK regulator, has decreed that VoIP services are going to have to connect 999 calls to the emergency services, though not until September 2008.


Linuxcare

Journal Journal: A glimpse into the lives of sysadmins and users 5

I had an epiphany earlier today: I think I realize why many sysadmins come off as being assholes. It stems from the fact that for them, computers are easy, rather than some magic box with blinky lights on it. Another thing to consider is some people (sysadmins) see new things as a challange or a problem to be solved while others (joe users) see problems/change on the computer as a scary thing. Change is bad, because it means they can't get their work done.

Media

Submission + - BBC tech head: "BBC not in bed with Bill Gates (tech.co.uk) 1

whoever57 writes: According to the BBC's head of technology, there are only a small number of Linux visitors to the BBC's website and this is the reason that the BBC's iPlayer only supports Windows XP Why he expects a large number of Linux based visitors to his site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear. He also thinks that "Launching a software service to every platform simultaneously would have been launch suicide", despite the example of many major sites that support Linux (even if this is through the closed source flash player). How the small number of Linux visitors could cause "suicide" is not explained. Most software processes envisage launching to a select group first, then working out the bugs, then making it available to the largest group.
Censorship

Submission + - Viacom Wants Industry Wide Copyright Filter (pcworld.com)

slashqwerty writes: Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. "They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies," he noted. "Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems." How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?

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