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Wouldn't it be better to say " CNET buys rival Ziff-Davis for $1.6 billion " than "CNET buys rival Ziff-Davis for $1.6 billion. The story is here".

Wouldn't it be better to say " CNET buys rival Ziff-Davis for $1.6 billion " than "CNET buys rival Ziff-Davis for $1.6 billion. The story is here".

Whats next? The blind sueing eBay, MSN, AOL, ...

No, that already happened. Last year, no less.

there is a news.com article right now talking about just that.

click/a>

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June 30, 2000: MP3 Summit Ian at MP3 Summit webcast
You can find Ian's hour long talk at the MP3 Summit about 1 hour 8 minutes into the Wednesday webcast.

June 16, 2000: Guardian Free market fight for music moguls
Interesting article in a British national newspaper.

May 27, 2000: LA Weekly Genie 1, Bottle 0
Very amusing article on Freenet and copyright. Highly recommended.

May 24, 2000: Channel 4 News Hackers stay one step ahead
A very cool news item talking about recent attempts by the British government to censor the Internet and how Freenet will make this very difficult. Includes text and streaming video of the item.

May 23, 2000: Libération L'anarchie est au bout du clavier
An interesting French article about Freenet, concentrating on the freedom of information aspects of the system rather than just copyright.

May 12, 2000: National Post Napster secured page in Internet history
Interesting description of why Freenet is not vulnerable in the same way that Napster is, although I must say that their "final thought" is slightly perplexing!

May 12, 2000: O'Reilly Network Gnutella and Freenet represent true technological innovation
A nice article concentrating, for a change, on the technical side of Freenet and Gnutella. Reasonably accurate, although it understates the efficiency improvement that Freenet should provide (describing it as of comparable efficiency to the WWW where it should be much more efficient).

May 12, 2000: Het Nieuwsblad Vrijheid van downloaden
A Belgian article about Freenet.

May 10, 2000: Houston Chronicle Software developer pledges to foil all intellectual property watchdogs
A version of the article below, doesn't require that you register.

May 10, 2000: New York Times The Concept of Copyright Fights for Internet Survival
One of the better articles; concentrates on the copyright issue. Requires free registration.

April 27, 2000: PCFormat Daily FreeNet
A brief article on Freenet.

April 27, 2000: Heise News-Ticker World Wide Anarchy: Netz ohne Kontrolle
A German article on Freenet.

April 26, 2000: CNET.com Free, anonymous information on the anarchists' Net
Entertaining article with some nice quotes.

April 17, 2000: The Irish Times Anarchy Rules Alternative Web
A rather amusing article on Freenet.

April 16, 2000: Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
An interesting article discussing distributed systems and how systems like Freenet are actually in a similar spirit to the original Internet.

April 13, 2000: El País Freenet propone una red sin censuras, alternativa a la WWW
A Spanish article about Freenet.

April 10, 2000: Slashdot.org FreeNet's Ian Clarke Answers Privacy Questions
A very informative interview conducted by the readership of SlashDot.org, probably the closest thing to a FAQ, aside from our faq.

March 25, 2000: ABC News Freedom on the Net?
A rehash of the New Scientist article below, but likely to reach a much larger audience.

March 25, 2000: New Scientist Out of control
A "big bad Internet"-style article, but it is reasonably well researched and seeks the opinions of those who might be considered Freenet's opposition.

March 23, 2000: Heise.de Ein Netzwerk, das Zensur unmöglich machen soll
A German article on Freenet.

March 14, 2000: OLinux Freenet, a polemic concept to deal with WWW
An English translation of a Brazilian interview with Ian Clarke. Focuses on the technical aspects of Freenet, and goes into a reasonable amount of detail as to how the system works.

March 10, 2000: Webwereld Anoniem Freenet ultieme schuilplaats voor piraten
A Dutch article on Freenet. My Dutch is a little rusty but it looks like it is primarily inspired by the Wired article below.

March 8, 2000: no spoon FreeNet : le réseau anonyme distribué qui supplantera le Web
An excellent French article on Freenet, draws an interesting parallel between Freenet and the writings of Neal Stephenson.

March 3, 2000: Need To Know sufficiently advanced technology: the gathering
A brief but excellent article again approaching Freenet from a pro-freedom standpoint.

February 24, 2000: PigDog Journal Get in on the Ground Floor of Freedom
A very positive little article describing Freenet and why they think it is interesting using some rather "colorful" language.

August 14, 1999: Brave Gnu World FreeNET
One of the first articles about Freenet back when it was 100% theory. Still an excellent introduction to the way Freenet works.

Remember meatnik? He did more time than many rapists and murderers, and while he cracked a lot of systems and was privy to a lot of confidential information, he never actually stole a single penny. In addition, contrary to official Corporate Myth,[1] he never even caused any damage -- he simply revealed security flaws (which needed to be fixed regardless) in an inappropriate manner in order to feed his own information fetish

Mitnick was a repeat repeat offender. He violated many laws other than "cracking." He served a couple years for cloning cell phones, a crime that he pleaded guilty to, by the way. The thing that made him dangerous was the fact that they kept cathing him and yet he just continued to break the law. So yeah... he's guilty of being a moron more than anything, but he's hardly the poor little vicitmized hacker that some would make him out to be

EarthLink will do FBI's surveillances itself.

tune

Found some cases that make interesting reading.

lawsuit over implementation

cross examination. Note how subjective it gets.

more lawsuits

btw, I didn't work for any of the companies mentioned in any of my posts, just in case there are lawyers reading this. My main point is re. the legal fine points that determine whether a work of software is "shoddy" or done according to "expectations". Anybody who has used any software can probably sense the gaping loopholes which can result from describing how software performs, what was expected, etc. It just takes skilled lawyers to determine this in legal terms. Geeks tend to think of technical details when they talk about expections and good results. Lawyers think of law. The former is irrelevant in lawsuits...

"Together, the proprietary innovation and the purported faults in standards compliance mean that Web pages created to work for IE--widely considered to be the dominant browser--won't work with browsers from Netscape, Opera Software and other providers."

Really? Seems to me that since IE 4, _most_ of the web has been equally accessible to Netscape and IE. Even the latest version of Opera works well with DHTML pages I've made. With 5.5, you would have to go out of your way to use the new Flash integration features so they would not work with Netscape. Some may use it in Intranet environments, some may continue to offer multiple views of their site. Some may decide that 86% of the potential audience is enough.

No matter how you slice your GIFs, it seems to me that most of the extra work web developers have had to cope with since IE 4 is because of Netscape 4's proprietary almost-a-real-DOM.

And after all that work, I wonder how many Netscape 4-compatible pages will break when Mozilla finally ships?

As for CSS1 support: while MS is far from perfect, IE 5 is wayyyyy more stable then any version of Netscape I've ever seen. I keep downloading Mozilla builds. It's getting better, but, we have been waiting a looooooong time!

Forgive me if I don't think of the W3C members as Olympian gods dispensing truth from the mountain-top. These people also have their own corporate, political and personal biases. Headbutting is what it is! So calm down! If MS follows through on their "software rental" plans, the entire Windows platform will probably self-destruct: MS Software Rental plans

Hey, what's that sound? 500-million CDs spinning up to install Linux! (they would have downloaded it but Mozilla kept crashing ;)

CNet reports: Japanese firms team on Linux OS for mobile devices.
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Here on news.com.

The right way to put a lid on Internet gambling is to make gambling-related credit-card debts non-enforceable. This has already happened in California. People can still send money orders out of the country, but it's harder to get into debt that way. All that's needed is to make it easy to get refunds from credit card companies for gambling debts, and the credit card companies will stop dealing with online casinos.

By the looks of things, things aren't working as well as planned.

There is a lot more progress to be made before online voting can become a reality. Authentication, verification, and privacy are all major issues.

But another interesting issue is platform support. Unless you support all platforms, online voting is not going to become reality. The fact that you would exclude people from a form of voting simply based upon their platform is not going to fly in court. Sure you can go out and physically vote, but in sparsly populated states (Montana, Arizona, etc.) this may be much harder and more time consuming than point, click, vote.

Consider the Arizona primary. The online voting allowed was Windows-only. This caused a stir (small, but still...) based on the fact that many people were locked out of voting because they choose not to use Windows.

This article discusses Arizona's online voting.

And this one talks about the disregard for all other platforms in the primary voting.

The news.com article you were looking for is here.

Also see this cnet article.

Also see this cnet article.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

This is bullshit.

As many laws as those clowns in Congress make each year to protect big businesses, you'd think they'd find time to help protect the Constitution.

This is the correct page: Link.

...use a larger hammer.

Honestly, when this happens to a company like Sony, you really can't (shouldn't) be surprised that they withdrew it, changed it so it wasn't half-assed, and refiled it.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar here, since I love *almost* everything Sony makes (anyone who's met me will know this is true), but I think Sony dropped the ball on their original suit.

I remember reading an article about how Sony breaks even on the PlayStation unit itself, and just makes money on the games. If this is true, then Sony should have nothing to worry about, since people have to buy the games anyway to use them with Connectix's software...

...or then again, can you use burned "backup" copies with it? Does the software check for the validity/legitimacy of the PlayStation CD inserted?

As an interesting side note, you can actually get black "PlayStation" CD-Rs -- unfortunately, they're almost impossible to find. (PlayStation CDs aren't actually black, they're dark blue -- hold one up to bright light and look around the center hole. Since the laser light is infrared, it goes right through a dark blue disc with no problems.)

--

...use a larger hammer.

Honestly, when this happens to a company like Sony, you really can't (shouldn't) be surprised that they withdrew it, changed it so it wasn't half-assed, and refiled it.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar here, since I love *almost* everything Sony makes (anyone who's met me will know this is true), but I think Sony dropped the ball on their original suit.

I remember reading an article about how Sony breaks even on the PlayStation unit itself, and just makes money on the games. If this is true, then Sony should have nothing to worry about, since people have to buy the games anyway to use them with Connectix's software...

...or then again, can you use burned "backup" copies with it? Does the software check for the validity/legitimacy of the PlayStation CD inserted?

As an interesting side note, you can actually get black "PlayStation" CD-Rs -- unfortunately, they're almost impossible to find. (PlayStation CDs aren't actually black, they're dark blue -- hold one up to bright light and look around the center hole. Since the laser light is infrared, it goes right through a dark blue disc with no problems.)

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So, this wasn't a victory at all, it's an illustration of some of the more questionable aspects of the legal system. Apparently, Sony can keep trying until the get the lawsuit right, and force Connectix to waste more and more time and legal expenses on it. Imagine you were being sued and the company bringing the lawsuit could just file it again and again.

Sony has refiled their suit against Connectix.

In conclusion, Sony remains evil, but at least the forces of evil have been held at bay... for now.

Not anymore. According to this C|Net piece: "Sony said today that it has refiled a suit against Connectix alleging that the company's software that allows PCs to run games developed for the PlayStation violates Sony patents. A Sony representative said the company dismissed its lawsuit a day before a hearing in the case on the judge's advice to avoid "procedural issues that may have been appealable.""
So, Sony it's at it again. We have to restart this whole /. thread with a twist.

Wish I was there..

wish
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This CNET article talks about Gateway and IBM using Transmeta processors. I think this is a big victory for Gateway over Dell.

kwsNI

About the only thing I see promising is up-coming disposable cell phones. Techlust seems to come at some cost, and its more than the ultimate feast at Red Lobster.

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Its kinda scary to think that in just a few days, some entity could construct a website that was fully capable of attracting enuff attention and thereby garranteeing enuff signatures to stop slashdot from posting any material not strickly technical and totaly devoid of opinion.
Unfortunately it takes a long time for the government to decide what to do, but thankfully it takes a long time for the government to decide what to do.
On a practical note, your link yeilds no such story, this site expects you to pay for the service.
Try cnet instead.

Goodhew made no secret of Microsoft's intention to upstage Sun and Java. "Unlike some of our competitors who are trying to find an organization that will rubberstamp their proprietary control of the standard, we're aiming to work extensively with a standards body," he said.

Here I have a whole bunch of links to further information about wearable computers and "enhanced reality" for anyone interested:

• A Brief History Of Wearable Computing
• Affective Computing
• BBC News: Japan Eyes Wearable PC
• Charmed Technology
• CNET.com: 10 Technologies That Will Take Over - #8
• CNN: Excuse Me, Is That A Monitor On Your Head?
• CNN: MIT 'Cyborgs' Bridge Gap Between Man And Machine
• CNN: Turn On, Jack In, And Geek Out With Wearable PC
• CNN: Wearable Systems May Cut Labor, Save Time
• CNN: Xybernaut Now Has Linux For Wearable PCs
• CNN Poll: Do You Want A Wearable Computer?
• Computer For The 21st Century, The
• ComputerWorld: Wearable Computers - Digitally Attired
• Context-Aware Computing
• CTHEORY: Body Delirium
• DisplayWear Incorporated
• Extreme Computing
• Handykey, Inc. Wearable Computing Page
• Houston Chronicle: Future Phones Home, The
• ICBorg
• Intelligent Information Filters And Enhanced Reality, by Alexander Chislenko
• ISWC- International Symposium on Wearable Computers
• Marvin Elizondo's Wearable Computing Page
• MicroOptical
• MIT-IDEO Wearables Intro
• NetWork Fusion: Armani, Karan, Xybernaut? 02/01/999
• PBS: Scientific American Frontiers Transcripts - Inventing The Future (Aired Fall 1996)
• PC World News: Wearable PC To Debut At Comdex
• PopSci.com Headlines: CyberFashions
• Slashdot Articles: Wearable PCs Under Linux
• Smart Rooms
• TechWearable
• TekGear
• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

Well, I too sell computer equipment and have for about 13 years. I have never seen ram marked up %800 or even close. It would be interesting if you could show proof that you did indeed sell ram for an %800 markup. %50 would be a huge markup that few people would be silly enough to willingly pay.

Aside from your incredible claim, I was talkig about the price that memory manufacturers get for volume, wholesale, unmounted chips. Historically, memory sales have been so competitive that margins have been razor thin at times.

One link from cnet that might be informative for you, says: "This is price erosion, as opposed to a free fall," the likes of which resulted in below cost pricing up until mid-1998, Giudici said. "Pricing is more rational now--most [manufacturers] are eking out some sort of margin," he noted, adding that PC demand looks to remain strong--a situation that bodes well for memory makers.

Note that "below cost pricing" usually means "no profit".

You can find many references to the shallow profits that memory makers have had for the last 15 years if you go look. Memory chips (different from memory sticks) are sold mainly in large volume, by contract at a fixed price for a certain period. This way, memory packagers and consumers get a consistent supply and price. The price that the memory chip maker gets according to contracted agreement is usually constant while the cost of manufacture may change due to raw material shortages or equipment failures, etc...

Double Click, aka "Cookie Monster", is infamous for getting into trouble with placing cookies in their banners. Intuit is being sued by users of its Quicken.com website right now because people clicked banners on their website placed by Double Click and this lead to personal data, "including tax preparation and bill paying tools" were sold to third parties. More info on that lawsuit here.

Cookies can, and often do, store very personal information and can be a breach of security in some cases, but they're not all evil. For the casual browser, cookies can be useful to say the least.

I know for sure though, I don't want to be caught on Double Click's bad side. (1 2 3)

"If my personal data were legally considered to be my property, then every time I gave my personal information to someone, I could insist that they only use it in certain ways, not share it with others, delete it at a certain time, and even that they pay me for it."

It's funny that you mention this. Property rights are the same excuse employers are using in order to fire someone who sends an unappreciated amount or type of e-mail using their system. As a firewall administrator for a large corporation, I can tell you that companies live by this rule. It appears that the courts are agreeing with its corporate partners. While it may be true that employers cannot listen to private conversations on a telephone, it appears that the laws do not apply to e-mail. I strike that one up to the technologically inept government some of us share.

I am currently trying to fight this rule inside my workplace. I know it's a losing battle because of the court cases but when a disclaimer is added to an e-mail that states something to the effect of this message is meant only for the person sending and the person addressed but we're still monitoring that same message, I find this quite misleading and to me seems grounds for a lawsuit.

I tend to view slashdot readers as anti-corporate but in this case, you're right about your concerns. Hopefully the privacy laws will change but it doesn't appear it'll happen anytime soon.

AOL has submitted it's IMX draft to the IETF and it is available on the Internet at http://aim.aol.com/openim. Here's news of the story on C|Net.

As for the MSFT BIOS lock deal with Dell i'm not exactly sure how new this is. My IBM Aptiva i bought in April last year did not come with Windows 98 but instead with an IBM Recovery disk that would only install on my Aptiva 9which i found out much to my chagrin after assembling a new machine and being forced to buy a copy of Windows for it). I am surprised this practice is just getting mention now. It is VERY old news to me and I'm sure it is to other IBM Aptiva users.

I hope this doesn't come off sounding pedantic, but no, I don't own a Pilot. I own a Palm. And before that I owned a PalmPilot Professional. In fact, Pilots haven't been produced for about two years now, not since Palm lost their lawsuit to Pilot Pen Company. For anyone interested, here's a little Palm History.
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I read about this over at news.com and some things NEED to be cleared up.
1: The FTC does not care about AOL opening up the protocol because it is a free service.
2: Furthermore the article states "We are planning to put out to the industry a way we think that can be done in terms of commitment to interoperability. (The industry) will hear something from us soon,"
The SOON means whenever AOL get's around it. They will probably say WE are the standard in their proposal. And it will get drafted to death by Microsoft and others which will delay the process. There is and won't be a universal chat client for a long time.

Here's a more detailed article on C|Net basically AOL has said they will soon present a proposal for interoperability with AIM. This seems like instead of making the protocol open, they'll release some sort of AIM API. The FTC investigation of the AOL-Time Warner merger is also sited as the cause for this move my C|Net. It's about time AOL did this, heck even Jesse Berst ranted about this yesterday.

And I quote them all. . .

Here is the article on eFront. And here is the Register article about FTC's request.

And here are some additional background links from c|net: 1 and 2. Each of those is extensively linked to additional information about AOL's previous runins with Tribal Voice and MS.

And I quote them all. . .

Here is the article on eFront. And here is the Register article about FTC's request.

And here are some additional background links from c|net: 1 and 2. Each of those is extensively linked to additional information about AOL's previous runins with Tribal Voice and MS.

here is the link

Right at the end of the project a coworker put in an easter egg where if you clicked on his name in the about box, you'd see a full-screen photo of him holding his newborn child. This was in the first 2Market CD in November of '94

He showed me this and I asked to add myself. When you clicked on my name, you'd get a recording of me saying "Hi Mom", then giving instructions to search for something in the product search.

We'd already screwed with the search keywords so that searching for certain terms resulted in product matches that were somehow funny. I think if you searched for "Mike" you got a spy camera. I think nearly everyone on the project has a product associated with their name that they got to choose themselves.

The easter egg wasn't discovered until after a quarter million CD's were pressed. Even if they could afford to re-press them, there wasn't time.

The result of this was that I was assigned the special job of ensuring that this never happened again at Medior.

Medior was later acquired by America Online and renamed AOL Productions. I think it's since been shut down.

The fellow who assigned me the special task of ensuring no more easter eggs were programmed into our products was Barry Shuler, who is now some bigwig at AOL and is pictured here in a CNet article.

2Market happened just as the web was just beginning, before there was a significant amount of e-commerce. I think we did a really good job, and I was impressed with how well everyone pulled together to ship the product. I think the user experience of shopping from the CD was much better than shopping via a 28 or even a 56 kbaud modem, which is still what most people have.

But it didn't last long, I think competition from the Internet put it out of business. I think some kind of CD/Internet hybrid, where bulk content like sound files and multimedia movies of product demos on a CD, interacting with a web site to get live content and updated prices would be pretty cool.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

"The Aqua, which should be ready for volume production by November, comes with a Transmeta Crusoe processor, a Linux OS and a Sony Memory Stick port, said Julia Kuo, a project manager for the company."

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10040-100-886 616.html?tag=st.dl.10040_106_16.ls t.td

"Professional Minesweeper is the BEST product ever. really."

Gonzo... please... say it ain't so!

And besides the "Palm-plus-expansion-board"-stuff from uclinux, there's the LART as a research project and the upcoming Yopy (see below).

It may only be the first PDA being shipped with Linux. So let's forgive the misleading emphasis:-) But they definitely have to do something about the "system requirements" for the Desktop Partner. vtech.com states: "Microsoft Windows® 95 or Windows® NT Workstation" :-( But netcraft says their webserver is running apache on BSD:-)

On the plus side: 8 MB of SDRAM, plus 2 MB flash for operating system and applications for about $179 against $157 for the Palm IIe with it's 2MB (using http://computers.cnet.com/ list prices, since I haven't seen the Helio being shipped in europe (anyone?)).

But, as stated in another comment, they have to go a long run with Palm being something like a de facto standard (besides the "Windows powered" stuff:-). And, don't forget the Samsungs studies for a "hi end" GNU/Linux-powered PDA: The Yopy. 32MB RAM, 32MB(64MB) Flash Memory and a 206MHz ARM RISC 32bit Microprocessor.

So, I'm not that convinced that "The Helio may make a break for the running of the PDA-of-choice-for-Linux-geeks yet".