Link

(Thanks, Wiley!)

Link

(Thanks, Chris!)

Good luck to them. We've won this fight in the lower court, and we'd all better hope we win it again on appeal, too: otherwise, you can kiss the idea of general-purpose networks goodbye: network operators will have to build their systems to police their users' activities, using fallible human judgement or even more fallible algorithms to grant or forbid access to the network depending on the file you're trying to share.

"This is not just a case about peer-to-peer," countered Fred von Lohmann, who represents Streamcast and is senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It is a case that will determine whether technology companies are allowed to innovate or whether they have to ask permission from copyright owners before they build new products."

The legal doctrine tested in this case is the same one that protects companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft from being held liable when someone uses HP CD burners or Internet Explorer to commit copyright infringement, von Lohmann said.

"It's important to protect the Betamax doctrine, so the price of innovation doesn't become a huge lawsuit from the entertainment industry," he said.

In the landmark Sony Betamax case in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not liable for contributory copyright infringement for selling VCRs that allowed consumers to tape content from their televisions.

This will be an important day in the history of the future. Hold your breath and hope. And give to EFF -- someone's got to fight this fight.

Link

Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported to exist in the software that may allow an at...

Several vulnerabilities in the handling of YMSG p...

A vulnerability has been reported to exist in the software that may allow an att...

Due to a lack of access validation to the '_admin' directory, malevolent users may be able to e...

JBrowser has been reported to be vulnerable to directory traversal vulnerability that may allow ...

A problem in pfexec included with Sun Solaris has been identified. Because of this ...

Extremophiles comprise principally bacteria, which have the remarkable ability to thrive in conditions that would be hazardous to other lifeforms - extremes of temperature, radiation, salinity, and metal toxicity...

One promising discovery is a glycoprotein which prevents Antarctic fish from freezing... Other Antarctic discoveries include an extract from green algae for use in cosmetic skin treatment, and anti-tumour properties in a strain of yeast.

Link

(via /.)

'Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignore the other stuff,' he said. But 'it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,' he added, 'because that's where the quality perception is.'

This was by far the most interesting thing I've read about Google in 2004: the value proposition is in the 20 percent that represents the least-frequent queries in the service. It's the same reason that PirateNapster, with millions of songs (most of which you didn't care about) was a million times better than LegitNapster, with a few hundred thousand songs, most of which you can hear by turning on the radio. It's the difference between an ASCII ebook that you can print of turn into a PDF or run through text-to-speech or any of a million tasks that most of us don't care about and a frozen ebook in a DRM format that you can only use in the ways that the publisher's research has indicated are most popular.

Link

(via Battelle)

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In a statement issued Sun...

A vulnerability has been reported to exist in the software that may allow an attacker to include ...

A vulnerability has been reported to exist in PhpGedView that may allow a remote attacker to acce...

A problem has been identified in the creation of...

It has been reported that tcpdump is vulnerable to a denial of service when some packet types are rec...

He said he would spend as long as a week making his album jackets. He originally put the cardboard records inside because the covers were too flimsy otherwise. And then he began adding fake promotional stickers, seven-inch singles to accompany the records, lyric sheets, gatefold sleeves, fan club information and nearly every other detail imaginable. "I wanted everything to be my own stuff and my own ideas," he said, "and not copy from anybody else."

Mingering Mike's dream, he said, was to be known for his music, and for his songs to inspire people. Thus, he tackled subjects like the growing drug problem in the United States on the cover of "The Drug War" and compulsory military service in his apocryphal reissue of an apocryphal soundtrack to the apocryphal film "You Only Know What They Tell You."

Link

(Thanks, Star!)

"In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: 'Times New Roman 14'," said the memorandum.

The new font "takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look," it said, adding that after February 1 "only Times New Roman 14 will be accepted."

Link

(via Ben Hammersley)

Bodington is prone to a vulnerability that may permit remote users to gain unauthorized ac...

Inlook may potentially disclose sensitive information to malicious local users due to insecure permissions for the /....

It seems to me that this his-n-hers duvet cover would be a great way to finally settle any lingering arguments over who gets which side (and would make life easier if you were, you know, "getting to know someone"), but at $276, it might be cheaper to go for a session or two of counselling.

Link

(via Geisha Asobi)

At last year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Danny O'Brien, Quinn Norton and Jon Gilbert invited ten people to come pitch tents in their nearby backyard, where there was WiFi, water, and electricity. They called it Emerging Man, a cross between Emerging Tech and Burning Man. They even had a geodesic dome.

This year, ETCON is being held in San Diego and the kids don't have a backyard to throw open to the public, so I suggested that they get in touch with the DachB0den crew, the hacker group who run the wonderful ToorCon, an astounding tech-security conference at which I spoke last year.

One thing led to another, and DachB0den has opened up its wicked hacker loft (here are my pictures of the space from the ToorCon afterparty in September) in downtown San Diego as a communal crashspace for some of this year's ETCON attendees.

The roster filled up fast, but as with the Emerging Man space, there's every reason to believe that the Dachb0den loft will become a social nexus for this year's ETCON, and there's also every reason to believe that there will be some dropping out and shifting around, so don't give up hope if you're looking for an ETCON crashpad.

There is, of course, a Wiki wherein the whole affair is being planned. I love watching this stuff come together.

Link

(via Oblomovka)

How do I know this? Because last year, Hollings sent a letter to Chairman Powell urging him to open proceedings into the apocalyptically stupid Broadcast Flag, and the memo was released as a Word file.

Word files contain tons of metadata about their creation and revision, including things like the name of the person to whom the version of Word used to create the document was registered, which is how we busted Hollings. NTK sometimes pulls apart the Word-based press-releases coming out of the UK government and shows how the New Labor taskmasters are rewriting (and upbraiding) the Old Labour bureaucrats who produce the initial drafts.

After years and years of this sort of humiliation, MSFT has finally gotten wise and shipped the "Remove Hidden Data" add-in for Office XP/2003, which "you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in your Microsoft Office application."

Of course, the "add-in" only cover a couple recent flavors of Office and doesn't work on the Mac, so for the rest of us, there's still a pretty good reason not to use Word for any sensitive electronic document dissemenation.

And, of course, it remains to be seen whether the "Remove Hidden-Data" function actually removes all the hidden data -- MSFT has devoted so much engineering to obfuscating its file format to lock out competitors from shipping a compatible word-processor, there's really no good way to evaluate this claim.

Link

Only one snag: CBS wouldn't run the winning ad. They claimed that it would be too topical for them (though an ad equating drugs with terrorism and a Janet Jackson's nipple were both peachy keen). So much for open political discourse in America.

Here's the SuperBowl ad you didn't see. It's licensed under a Creative Commons license, so you can make copies, you can share it with your friends, you can put it on your hard-drive and show it to your kids when they ask you what happened to America.

Link

(via Vertical Hold)

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Link

(via Making Light)

I've seen walkthroughs and screenmovies of video-games that explain or show how to win and find all the Easter Eggs, but this takes the cake.

It's a how-to-win guide for Super Mario Brothers, and the authors have invented an ingenious, ASCII-based tablature for noting the proper keypresses at each moment in the game for a perfect win.

It's hard to say what's more impressive here: the obsessive documenting of the winning strategy or the marvellous creativity in the invention of the tablature itself.

Link

(Thanks, stx!)

Good luck to them. We've won this fight in the lower court, and we'd all better hope we win it again on appeal, too: otherwise, you can kiss the idea of general-purpose networks goodbye: network operators will have to build their systems to police their users' activities, using fallible human judgement or even more fallible algorithms to grant or forbid access to the network depending on the file you're trying to share.

"This is not just a case about peer-to-peer," countered Fred von Lohmann, who represents Streamcast and is senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It is a case that will determine whether technology companies are allowed to innovate or whether they have to ask permission from copyright owners before they build new products."

The legal doctrine tested in this case is the same one that protects companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft from being held liable when someone uses HP CD burners or Internet Explorer to commit copyright infringement, von Lohmann said.

"It's important to protect the Betamax doctrine, so the price of innovation doesn't become a huge lawsuit from the entertainment industry," he said.

In the landmark Sony Betamax case in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not liable for contributory copyright infringement for selling VCRs that allowed consumers to tape content from their televisions.

This is an important day in the history of the future. Hold your breath and hope. And give to EFF -- someone's got to fight this fight.

Link

Teresa invites us into the world of the "slushreader" -- the editor who goes through the unsolicited manuscripts, deciding which will to have a chance at publication and which will go back to their creators, and then analyses the mental model of this process implicit in the RejectionCollection.com commentary. The disconnect is profound and highly thought-provoking. At the very least, this should be required reading for anyone who aspires to a career in the arts (where the stiff competition from your fellow would-bes gives decision-makers the ultimate buyer's market).

But even if you don't want to write or paint or sing for a living, this is important stuff, illustrating the core principles of life in a world where we strive to get busy people to recognize the merit of our contributions.

Herewith, the rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections:

1. Author is functionally illiterate.

2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.

3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.

4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.

5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.

6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.

7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.

(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)

Link

BME: If someone brought their fish to you for a piercing, would you do it and what would you charge?

WILLIAM: Yes, as long as it was a fish of substantial size. People have asked me to pierce Betas and there?s no way I would. I don?t think I could charge for the service, just the jewelry.

BME: What?s morally worse, piercing a human baby?s ears, or piercing a fish?s ?labret??

WILLIAM: Well, I pierced a baby?s lobes once and I?ll never do it again! I?ll pierce fish again though.

Link

(via Fark)