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Thursday, April 01, 2004 |
Feds crank up heat on P2P, new House bill promises prison for "pirates". I just filed a story for Wired News
on a new House bill that proposes prison time for file-swappers -- and
on today's Justice Department announcement of a new
intellectual-property task force to analyze how the department
addresses issues like the unauthorized sharing of digital software,
music and movies.
Justice spokesman John Nowacki declined to disclose
further details on the membership of the [Intellectual Property Task
Force], or what specific activities it will pursue.
The task force was created in the wake of criticism by some members of
Congress that the Justice Department has not done enough to crack down
on digital piracy. The announcement took place on the same day that a
House judiciary subcommittee unanimously approved a bill that would
punish file swappers with up to three years in jail for first offenses,
and up to six for repeat offenses.
Sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman (D-California) and Lamar Smith
(R-Texas), the bill targets heavy users of peer-to-peer networks and
those who pirate copies of feature films. The bill outlines a new
piracy deterrence program for the FBI, and calls for the Justice
Department to create an antipiracy "Internet Use Education Program." If
signed into law, Justice would receive $15 million for investigation
and prosecution of copyright-related crimes in 2005.
If signed into law, H.R. 4077 -- the "Piracy Deterrence and
Education Act of 2004" -- would be the first to punish file sharing
with jail time. The bill also takes aim at camcorder copiers who sneak
into film screenings. Anyone who "knowingly uses or attempts to use an
audiovisual recording device in a motion picture theater" to copy a
movie could face up to six years in jail.
Link to Wired News story.
Text version of PDEA should be available through Thomas shortly, here: Link. Update: PDF version (63Kb) of the PDEA is now available here: Link. [Boing Boing] 
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Powerbook battery tracker.
A new beta app for tracking your Powerbook's battery health just got
posted to VersionTracker. The release version promises
network-awareness so that you can compare you battery's health to
others'.
iBatt is a new PowerBook battery tool which can diagnose
your battery's health, and generate graphs showing battery utilization
trends. Whereas the system only provides you with current charge level,
iBatt tells you total battery capacity, rate of charge/discharge,
current battery voltage, and battery state. The release version will
have network support to compare your battery's health with other
batteries in your PowerBook model.
Link [Boing Boing]
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Homeless Hacker profile in Wired. Great Wired profile of Adrian Lamo, the Homeless Hacker who got busted for using the NYT's Lexis-Nexus account.
In theory, it's easy to see Lamo as a good guy. Unlike many hackers -
even whitehats - he never uses a pseudonym and makes no effort to hide
his identity. If the company he notifies appears grateful, he will
often offer to help plug the hole he's discovered for free. Poulsen,
for one, believes that Lamo "practices a style of hacking - open,
brash, illegal, but carefully observant of an unwritten code of ethics
- that went out of style a decade ago."
Indeed, Lamo's hacks are uncommonly witty and at times almost
inspiring. Once, after tunneling into Excite@Home's customer service
database, Lamo pulled the email and phone number of a customer whose
complaint had gone unanswered for a year. Lamo called him up, chatted
briefly, then offered to forward him all the company's internal
correspondence pertaining to the original complaint.
Link [Boing Boing]
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Keanu stars in A Scanner Darkly.
Boing Boing pal Dave Gill points us to news that Keanu Reeves will star
in the Hollywoodization of A Scanner Darkly, based on Philip K. Dick's
masterpiece SF novel about drugs and schizophrenia. As Dave says,
"uh-oh." According to Variety, Richard Linklater may direct the film,
employing the same live action-to-animation technique seen in Waking
Life. I suppose it's no surprise that Keanu was chosen for the role.
After all, The Matrix was the ultimate PKD rip-off. Link
[Boing Boing]
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Mephisto
morphed art-pr0n. Our pals at Fleshbot say:
Sure, any hack with a copy of Photoshop and a few hours can turn women
into barnyard animals,
but if you want to see beautiful models transformed into slugs,
chocolate bars, or five-and-a-half foot tall anthropomorphic
cigarettes, you'll have to consult the work of a master. (Anyone
curious to see how Britney looks as a pig, cow, or dog should check
this out as well.)
Mephisto
Gallery (photomanipulations @ doc.furvect.com) [Boing Boing]
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Top 5 Tips for Virus Writers.
Trash It: Creating the perfect virus takes more than just good code --
you need drive, determination, and some good old-fashioned know-how.
Check in with our resident virologist to learn how to earn your place
in Viral Valhalla. [Extremetech]
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As the Worms Turn. Shootout: We put seven of the latest worms to the test to see who gets around the fastest and who wreaks the most havoc. [Extremetech]
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Gentlemen, Start Your Viruses….
Roundup: Whether you're looking for the merely annoying or hunting down
that perfect ISP-killing DoS worm, you've come to the right place.
Today, we examine three state-of-the-art system infectors and try to
determine which is right for your agenda. [Extremetech]
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Macromedia Flex. 
The Flex strategy first began to crystallize two years ago when
Macromedia rolled out the Flash 6 player, Flash MX development tools,
and ColdFusion MX server. The possibilities were exciting, and the
back-end environment was comfortably based on Java and Web services.
But the client-side discipline was alien to the corporate programmer.
One obstacle was the ActionScript 1.0 language, which lacked
the strong typing and formal class model that a Java programmer would
expect. The solution to this problem arrived last fall when Flash MX
2004 introduced Flash Player 7 and support for ActionScript 2.0. Yet
the Flash IDE was still built around the concept of making a movie, not
coding an application. Flex presents a development model that will make
immediate sense to an enterprise developer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
The sample Flex app that appears in the story is the RSS reader
that Macromedia's Christophe Coenraets wrote. I guess RSS readers are
now the official benchmark for next-generation markup-driven
development. Here's the same thing done in XAML.
... [Jon's Radio]
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Phone, Fax, Email, IM. With all of the recent talk about Instant Messaging in libraries,
I thought I would point out an obvious, but often overlooked, point.
Librarians need to consider adding their IM names to their personal
business cards and signature files. I'm not even talking about doing
this mainly for patrons, but for each other. After all, younger
librarians may prefer to talk to you this way.
"I'm not alone on this. I communicate solely with a number of people
using not the voice features of my phone, but through texting and IM.
On one occasion I called a friend of mine and the first thing he said
was, 'Uh, what's with the voice communication?' " [walking paper] [The Shifted Librarian]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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