Slashdot Mirror

I just updated my mirror page with a link to this slashdot article. I thought I'd post the others on the list here for everyone's edification (and because the server of my personal web page probably wouldn't take it if you went there for it!)

• Wired: Mattel Stays on the Offensive (27 Mar 2000 2:45PM PT)
  "Upping the stakes in a battle over a utility that reveals Cyberpatrol's list of off-limits websites, Mattel threatened mirror sites with contempt charges during a court hearing Monday afternoon."
• ZDNet: Hackers settle Cyber Patrol suit (27 Mar 2000 2:11PM PT)
  "ACLU attorney 'surprised' as programmers surrender rights to their hack of Cyber Patrol filter and agree to permanent injunction."
• ZDNet: ACLU slams Cyber Patrol tactics (27 Mar 2000 4:03AM PT)
  "The American Civil Liberties Union criticized Internet filtering software maker Microsystems Software Inc. and its parent company Mattel Inc. on Friday, accusing them of attempting to limit free speech on the Internet."
• Wired: Mattel's Filter Fiasco to Court (27 Mar 2000 3:00AM PT)
  "A federal judge in Boston will hear arguments on Monday over whether a program that reveals Cyberpatrol's secret blacklist should be banned from the Internet."
• ZDNet: You've got a subpoena! (24 Mar 2000)
  "Call it legal spam. Lawyers in the Cyber Patrol legal battle have created an e-precedent -- sending subpoenas by e-mail."
• CNN: Cyber Patrol decoding brawl gets ugly and international (21 Mar 2000)
  "A legal dispute between a U.S. toymaker that produces a popular Internet pornography filter and two programmers that decoded the software could heat up into a messy international brawl."
• Slashdot: Mattel/Cyber Patrol Censors Critics Again (20 Mar 2000)
  "Mattel is updating the Cyber Patrol blacklists for all of their customers to include the homepages of the authors and all of the mirrors, blocked under every blocking category the product has."
• USA Today: Judge helps Mattel zap effort to undermine filter (20 Mar 2000)
  What a misleading headline. Yet another example of McPaper earning its abysmal reputation.
• Wired: CyberPatrol Hackers Lose Round (17 Mar 2000)
  "A federal judge in Boston has tried to ban the distribution of a computer program that reveals CyberPatrol's secret list of sex sites."
• Slashdot: Mattel dislikes being embarrassed (16 Mar 2000)
  "In addition to demanding the removal of the decryption utility, Mattel is also seeking the logfiles of the Swedish ISP that hosts the decryption utility, to identify everyone who has downloaded it to date. Today's news was filled with Mattel's PR lies about their suit."
• Wired: Mattel Sues Over Blocking Hack (16 Mar 2000)
  "Toy-maker Mattel has sued two programmers who revealed how to circumvent its CyberPatrol blocking software."

Several news outlets uncritically ran Ted Bridis's AP newswire story characterizing the decryption program as a tool to let children view pornography:

"A company that makes popular software to block children from Internet pornography is suing two computer experts for distributing a method for kids to deduce their parents' password and access those forbidden Web sites."

• SJ Mercury News: Software Co. Sues Hackers (15 Mar 2000)
  
• cnet: Hackers crack online porn filters (16 Mar 2000)
  cnet's version adds this interesting paragraph:

  "Early today, activists copied the utility and details of the effort and began distributing them across the Internet on nearly two dozen Web sites that duplicated Jansson and Skala's original work. Those efforts apparently were coordinated on technology Web site Slashdot.org, where the lawsuit was roundly condemned."

• CNN: Software company files lawsuit against hackers (16 Mar 2000)
  CNN's version also adds the cnet paragraph and some additional reportage, but still mischaracterizes the program. However, their later coverage was more evenhanded.

You might want to check out CNet's pretty good Wireless Phone comparison DB. It compares phones and plans; it's good for getting a good idea about phones, but not great for phone plans - I found better deals by just calling the service providers directly.

Regards,
Brent

You might want to check out CNet's pretty good Wireless Phone comparison DB. It compares phones and plans; it's good for getting a good idea about phones, but not great for phone plans - I found better deals by just calling the service providers directly.

Regards,
Brent

They also have some user opinions -- but there aren't very many except for the popular brands

Let's try to put a positive spin on this affair.

According to this report, "The company said today it doesn't expect to be hurt financially by the situation."

"The company believes the reported unauthorized reconfiguration of the i-opener Internet appliance has not had material impact on its operating results or general product availability," it said in the statement.

So the stock price moved up a little, reasssuring investors.

The truth is that Netpliance always intended to lose money on the machines. According to the SEC reports, about half of the cost of the machines--but that was not "cost" as we know it--it is being charged to "marketing expenses" instead of to hardware expense. But the accounting might suffer because only $100,000 was allotted to returns, much too low in any case.

So there's nothing immoral about buying the machine and not buying the ISP contract. Netpliance tried to sell the iOpener at $299 and then $199 and there were not enough takers. They found customers at $99, and the marketing dollars were well spent in making a lot of people aware of the machine. For the same reason, a new restaurant that opens is wise to skimp on tables and force customers to wait in line. There's nothing like a line outside to encourage more customers to wait for something that must be "that good for people to wait for."

Now that Linux and BSD programmers have opened up the iOpener, maybe we can see how it fits into an Open Source model instead of the foolish business model Netpliance tried.

The technology of the iOpener is about 2 years old now, but is well balanced between CPU, RAM, and so on. The fact that it lacks a floppy drive is an advantage for the "thin client" model.

What I would like to see would be a bunch of these machines in a classroom connected to a Linux server but not directly to the Internet. They could use either USB Ethernet or connect to a multiport serial card, whichever is cheaper.

Maine Governor King has already proposed spending $300 for each Maine 7th-grader to have a laptop. I bet few Maine classrooms have enough power outlets to support laptops, but they could accommodate these iOpeners easily.

Linux could come in as a client OS cheaper than the QNX licenses, as well as to run the server PC, which need not be an expensive machine either.

All this would take is for somebody to take this business model to somebody who can put it together better than did Netpliance. Who will do that?

This article at news.com claims the manufacturing costs are closer to $300-$400.

ouch

--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.orgASM,
tel. +44 (0)7092 005700

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10080-100-158 1508.html?tag=st.dl.10001_103_1.lst.td

Cheers,
-j.

According to this news.com article it's not 64 Netfinity 256's (does there even exist a Netfinity 256 model?), but 256 2 CPU Netfinity servers. (Maybe the new Netfinity 4000's... ?)

Most DVDs have the distributor's logo, and a bit of animation as the main menu is drawn. That's fine. Some of them, as others have mentioned, also force you to watch the FBI warning. Not so nice. But, as could be expected of large corporations, they're now starting to realize that they can put ads there too. Disney decided to stick 4 minutes of ads at the beginning of the Tarzan DVD. Not surprisingly, some people complained. Disney responded by saying that the ads are "a benefit for consumers."

Myself, I like trailers. I just don't want to be told when to watch them. Many DVDs include a "trailers" item on the main menu, and I always watch them, just to see if there is anything interesting. But forcing me to watch them every time I put the DVD in the player? That's a bit much. In Disney's A Bug's Life, they had screen where they showed the boxes of other Disney titles, but no trailers. It seems like Disney hasn't realized that one of the selling points of DVD is that it is interactive, not linear. Perhaps ads are a benefit to consumers; however, forcing us to watch 4 minutes of them every time we use the DVD is just annoying.

"Tarzan" DVD forces viewers through a jungle of previews

Now that's a technical innovation. And one techie without much influence in a political situation. Various news sources have been noticing the story at various levels this week.

My theory is that it's to divert media (and pro-Linux posters') attention away from the story on WebTV's Melissa-like bug:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006- 200-1576095.html

and you don't even have to log in.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-1575458.html? tag=st.ne.1002.bgif.1003-200-1575458

And indeed, there are some last-minute Iridium bidders.

someone may yet save this
go here:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-1575212.html? tag=st.ne.1002.thed.1004-200-1575212

Go news.com!
I think this is good. it would be an awful waste of technology.. and its a really good idea for civilian use, if only it were cheaper.

--jay

This article here seems to say otherwise.

Personally, I think it would be an AWEFUL waste of an established satellite network to just burn it up. It's not like it costs money to just have them orbit for a while.

---------

Curiously, this article on news.com, written within ten minutes of the article referenced, makes it seem that there may be a savior for Iridium.

It seems to say a lot about trademarks there... but is all cybersquatting trademark-related? Remember a few months ago when they started allowing domain names longer than 22 characters? From the news stories, it sounded like many people locked themselves in their basement that day and registered hundreds of generic domains -- anything they could think of between 23 and 63 characters in length. Their intention was clearly to get rich -- but not off of trademarks. Unfortunately, these rules don't seem to discourage this sort of behaviour. So if I want to set up a legitimate service under the name workerscompensation.com, I'm still going to have to pay some loser a million dollars for it, even though all they ever did with the site is put up a "This domain is for sale" notice. (Note: there is no such notice at workerscompensation.com; this was just an example.)

I've seen a lot of those "this domain is for sale" notices. Entire companies seem to be based around domain squatting. What about generic domain names that redirect you to other completely unrelated sites? (One day I was looking for information on printers, so I typed in printers.com, just for fun. No, it's not porn.)

Some great sites out there for hardware reviews and news:

• The Tech Report
• Ars Technica
• AnandTech
• HardOCP

Also, I like to check the user opinions at Cnet and Sysopt. Its always nice to know what the average person thinks of the product after they've bought it and used it.

just my $0.02

CNET.com article: Corel to offer free Linux image editor

ZDNET.com article: Canvas moves to Linux

PC Mag Review: Canvas 7

Some more corrections/thoughts that seem to have gotten missed in this discussion so far:

1) It's not necessarily an AMD chip

Many of you seem to be under the impression that the X-Box will be using an Athlon variant (presumably a Spitfire), but the name of the CPU vendor was conspiciously left out of today's announcement. Indeed, according to this article at C|Net, MS has decided to go with Intel for the CPU instead of AMD as earlier rumored.

If I had to guess, I'd say this means a 600 MHz Coppermine modified to support Willamette's new SSE2 instructions, which look quite impressive. (Although the most impressive things I've read about them (see this article at Ace's) are in regards to their double-precision SIMD performance, and IIRC games almost always use single-precision floats.)

This makes sense because two of Willamette's other signature features--a 20-stage deep pipeline and a double-pumped ALU--don't make sense here; games don't need much in the way of integer performance, and the deep pipeline is only good for increasing clock speed (indeed, clockspeed being equal, it slows things down)--and is definitely not necessary to reach 600 MHz.

On the other hand, Willamette's "400 MHz" (really quad-pumped 100 MHz) bus might not be such a bad idea for a next-gen console. Indeed, it might be just the thing to keep the NV15 based graphics chip full of data. The problem, of course, is cost, cost, cost. Which leads me to my next point:

2) 600MHz isn't such a bad decision

Yeah, I know that by the time this thing comes out, new PC's will be sporting 2 GHz Willamettes and 1.8 GHz Athlons. However, there's one problem with all y'all going around saying that that means that the X-Box should have a much faster chip too; those 2 GHz chips are going to be selling for something like $800-$1000 a piece.

And then there's the problem of how chips are normally clocked versus how they need to be clocked for a fixed-spec market like a console. You see, when Intel (or AMD, or whoever) makes a chip, they don't stick a clock multiplier on it until it's done. They make the chip, then test it to see how fast it can reliably run (this depends on lots of factors, among them the quality of the particular piece of silicon; there's no way to definitively know this number without actually testing it), and then stick on a multiplier such that it runs at that speed (actually a speed bin or two lower, just to be safe). This means that some (very very very small) percentage of P3's ends up being smacked with a 10x multiplier and being sold as a 1GHz chip; some get an 8x multiplier and are sold at 800MHz; and some--but just a few--can't manage to run reliably at even 600 MHz (or whatever the lowest speed P3's are sold at these days is), and are tossed in the trash).

Now the thing is, all of this probability stuff is built into the price. You see, it costs Intel exactly the same--around $70, IIRC--to make that one chip that ends up being branded at 1 GHz as it does to make the one that gets sold at 600 MHz. The difference is, it takes a whole lot of chips before they make one that's good enough to run at 1 Ghz. And a bunch of them are lost to the trash bin along the way. That's why they charge different amounts for the faster chip--to make up for the fact that they're harder (but *not* more expensive) to make. And that's (partially) why even the cheapest P3's still cost about $200--far more than the cost to fab each particular one.

In the console market, though, that little trick just doesn't work. When you're fabbing CPU's for the X-Box, either it runs at 600MHz, or you throw it away. Furthermore, since the entire thing is only going to cost $300, the CPU better not cost more than, say, $35 or $40; after all, that $300 has to include 64 MB of (possibly Rambus??) RAM, the graphics chip you're buying from NVidia, which itself will have probably 32 MB and possible 64 MB of RAM (possibly DDR RAM); an 8 GB hard drive, a DVD drive, a motherboard, a stylish case, a controller, possibly a keyboard, probably pretty impressive sound support, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. Point being, you want to make sure you can make these chips run at 600 MHz with *very high yields* in comparison to the yields that Intel and AMD normally achieve.

Furthermore, with a kickass graphics chip (and especially one that has hardware T&L like the GeForce does and the NV15 will) the speed of the CPU is much less important. Indeed, as Kyle over at HardOCP showed (check here and here), with today's fastest chips, in real-world conditions it is sometimes faster to run with a GeForce's Hardware T&L turned *off* (i.e. so the CPU calculates T&L) than with it on! On the other hand, that same GeForce, when paired with a mediocre CPU, speeds things up tremendously. Of course, the T&L in the NV15 will be considerably improved, such that it will no doubt be a great help when paired with that 600 MHz chip. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's a waste when paired with those 2 GHz Willamettes everyone wants in the X-Box instead.

3) The X-Box will perform identically to a 600 MHz / 64 MB RAM PC of today--i.e. worse than a PS2

Absolutely definitely maybe not.

First the absolutely not: the real guts of the X-Box is not its 600 MHz CPU, but rather its NVidia based graphics chip. Even today, a pretty slow Celeron with a kickass graphics card--i.e. a DDR GeForce--will be pretty competitive with the latest Ghz P3 with a very respectible graphics card, say a Matrox G400, when it comes to running games. Indeed, in many situations (i.e. at high resolutions), it will run just as fast as that Ghz P3 with the same kickass GeForce--and much faster than the P3 with the Matrox--because at high resolutions (i.e. 1280 and 1600), the limiting factor is always the fill-rate of the video card. Course, this doesn't help if you're running at TV resolution, but you get my point: for games, the video card is *more* important than the CPU--and the GPU in the X-Box will be much better than any graphics card on the market today.

Next, the definitely: the X-Box, like all consoles, will only come in one spec. That means game developers can program their games knowing exactly what they'll be running on--and taking full advantage of that as much as possible. This means, amongst other things, that they won't have to design their games to look adequate across a wide range of resolutions and graphical detail levels, but can instead concentrate on making it look good and run fast at the one graphical level it will be run on. Secondly, this means that, like on any other console, developers will be able to dip below the API level and reap the speed benefits that come from being able to program a much lower levels, including hand-tuning important graphical code at the register-level in the GPU. This can only be done when you know that the specs of the machines that will run your game are all identical.

Now for the maybe: one of the major "points" of the X-Box is that it will be nearly compatible with normal PCs, which of course come in all shapes and flavors. The difficulty here is that, in order to maintain this compatibility, developers would need to stay at the API level, and would need to design their games from a hardware-agnostic point of view, which would remove most of the benefits of uniformity I just mentioned. However, I'd guess that what will most likely happen is that developers will keep most of their code at the D3D level, but still optimize the most important routines for the X-Box's GPU. The end result will be that X-Box games *will not* run on PC's (although PC games might run on X-Box??), but that it will still be considerably easier to port PC games to X-Box than to any other console. On the other hand, it's reportedly very easy to port PC games to the PS2, so maybe this advantage isn't as great as MS banked on. In any case, it's important to note that it's this same loss of the benefits of uniformity which has lead to almost no Dreamcast games making use of the Dreamcast's ability to run WinCE and hence pseudo-D3D. Indeed, I believe that MS has officially withdrawn their WinCE support of Dreamcast due to a complete and total lack of interest from Dreamcast developers.

4) It's Windows, and it's a PC, so it will be confusing, take forever to boot, and crash like crazy

This is almost certainly wrong. For one thing, the X-Box will be running a version of what up to now has been called Embedded NT--which should be extremely stipped down and quite reliable, as well as offering very short boot times. (Reportedly the PS2's boot time is quite long for a console--on the order of 5 seconds or so.) Furthermore, probably most Windows crashes come as a result of either bad drivers--which should never happen on a standardized machine like the X-Box--or as a result of problems with memory management of legacy code--again, no problem since there will be none--or with multitasking apps not behaving themselves--which won't be a problem since the X-Box will only run one thing at a time. Furthermore, 64 MB of RAM should be more than adequate, considering the lack of multitasking and the fact that the OS will be much much leaner than normal Windows or NT.

On the other hand, I have to say that the prospect of an 8-gig hard drive scares me a bit, if nothing else than because it offers the possibility of quite a lot more complexity and variations in end-users' actual setups. I doubt MS will allow anything like DLL hell to manifest itself, though; I'm sure the X-Box OS will keep every program's DLLs seperate and well managed, especially since this is a (more like the) feature of MS's upcoming-and-stupidly-named Windows ME.

Phew. So--do I think the X-Box will be phenomenally successful? No, not really, I don't. While I do believe that it will be more powerful that the PS2 on a theoretical level, I don't know if the difference will shine through in the games. Basically, there are two possibilities: most X-Box developers will try to keep their games as trivial ports from their PC counterparts, in which case they won't be able to take advantage of the uniformity of having a single machine to develop for, and thus the PS2 will be more impressive, or X-Box developers will try to "program to the metal", in which case they will be a year behind on the learning curve of low level programming, and thus their games will probably never decisively beat what's coming out for PS2 at the same time.

On the other hand, I think that it just might be successful (depends on if the PS2 actually conquers the world beforehand, as many predict), and I'd give it about equal odds to succeed as, say, Nintendo's Dolphin.

Enter Ignition. Another News.com article mentions the new wireless investment group started by former Microsoft execs and McCaw Cellular execs. About $140 million was initially invested by Qualcomm among others... I wonder if they're considering stepping up to the plate to acquire the sattelites. Could they be thinking about competing against their former figureheads? I know I'd be more comfortable with competition in the worldwide wireless data market... especially where Gates is involved.

Enter Ignition. Another News.com article mentions the new wireless investment group started by former Microsoft execs and McCaw Cellular execs. About $140 million was initially invested by Qualcomm among others... I wonder if they're considering stepping up to the plate to acquire the sattelites. Could they be thinking about competing against their former figureheads? I know I'd be more comfortable with competition in the worldwide wireless data market... especially where Gates is involved.

You can read the DOJ report for yourself here. CNN is somewhat correct - it does say that "existing substantive federal laws appear to be generally adequate." However, it emphasizes the dangers to security posed by anonymity, and it does not shut the door on new laws.

We've got an archive of other related articles on our Law Enforcement Online page.

A. Keiper

did it have an intel or amd chip damnit?

According to this article on C|Net, it will be powered by an Intel CPU and a Nvidia graphics chip. This is a complete change over everything I had heard about the subject before I read the C|Net article.

Either way we're talking about a systems that isn't scheduled to ship for almost two years. Who knows when we'll actually see them on store shelves. I feel like they're hyping this thing in an attempt to damage Playstation 2 sales so that the market isn't compltely controlled by Sony by the time the Xbox sees the inside of a retail store.

joe

Maybe they do have something to hide?

Did you read Peacefire's site? According to them:

We found that portions of the Web sites of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU.org), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT.org), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC.org), and the Censorware Project (Censorware.org) were blocked by I-Gear in its "pornography" category. On the other hand, none of the major pro-censorship groups (enough.org, frc.org, afa.net, fotf.org, etc.) had portions of their Web sites blocked.

And the pro-censorship response?

"I don't trust that Peacefire is telling the truth," Taylor said. "It's all part of the cyberpunk revolution. They don't like the government telling them that they don't have free access to the Internet. It's like 'Lord of the Flies,' and they think they have the conch."

Oh, God, what an idiot. There are so many things wrong with that statement, I don't know where to begin!

At that time, Microsoft invested more than $100 millions in Inprise, and that really scared the hell out of me. Like many Java-CORBA developers, I was not too happy to hear that Microsoft - the DCOM protagonist - had just gained access to one of the top CORBA product: VisiBroker.

Now I'm a bit more at ease because we've got two opposite and strong politics:

1. Corel-Inprise with Corel LINUX, VisiBroker and IAS, WordPerfect, J/CBuilder;
2. Microsoft-Inprise with Windows, DCOM/DNA/MTS, MSOffice and Visual Studio.

Now, I really can not understand why Microsoft invested in Inprise. It is the most aggressive competitor they had for long. And I wish them all the best...

Does that make Verisign a greedy octopus-like corporation?

Here's the c|net story on the Verisign/NSI deal.

Cnet's News.com reported August 19 of last year: Motorola buys Metrowerks for $95 million. The Metrowerks homepage says:

CodeWarrior
Metrowerks
A Motorola Company

On a similar vein, one web site (MacOSrumors?) indicated that there might be some problems between Motorola and IBM with regard to the G4. IIRC, IBM may have the ability to produce the G4's with a faster clock speed than what Motorola can produce. This would not necessarily be surprising as IBM has some impressive chip production capabilities.

BTW, has anybody documented problems with these faster clock speeds and 900 MHz cordless phones? Just wondering.

The bathroom is the one place I don't really mind ads. It's more interesting than staring at a wall.

Whenever new technology is created, someone will come up with a way to put ads on it. The internet is covered in them, many freeware programs are starting to come with a built-in ad window, and now cell phones. Here are two more examples:

"Tarzan" DVD forces viewers through a jungle of previews -- First Disney makes you watch the FBI warning before enabling the Menu button, now they're putting 4 minutes of ads at the beginning. (I wonder if you could hack a software DVD player to disallow the disabling of the menu button.)

Ads Take Aim at Online Music -- How would you like to have banner ads embedded in your downloaded music files, and have them displayed in an "always on top" window while the music is playing. (They're trying to get it integrated into Winamp, etc.) Oh yeah, DoubleClick supplies the ads.

• Amazon.co m, Barnes & Noble settle lawsuit
• Barnes & Noble Fights for Best-Seller' List
• Advertising Battle Of The On-line Bookstores (Adlaw)
• Tons of related links on C|Net

Another thing that struck me while thinking about this whole thing. Remember what Ford did? He patented ideas so that others couldn't patent them and abuse the patents. He then allowed everyone to use his ideas for free. Perhaps that's what Jeff is doing here. I have no proof, but I'm hoping it's that way.

--

This article claims AMD is going to announce their 1GHz Athlon on Monday. Of course, one can only imagine what supply is going to be like. ;-)

IMHO, the Mac has had a lot of strong shareware development, but personally, the hastle of getting the $10 or $20 bucks per install isn't worth the effort of putting in nagware or timeout schemes - i'd rather put my time and effort into building better features than lock users out.

In my practical experience from being the principal on a MacOS open source project (http://www.webdav.org/goliath), I decided to use the GPL over other licenses (including LGPL) for the fact that it offers me and my code the best protection. The other side of the balance can include, however, adoption of your project/library. For example, there is only one WebDAV client library for MacOS (mine), and it is open source. Putting that under LGPL would put me and other open source developers at a disadvantage since any commercial software vendor (Apple included) could come down and basically incorporate the code into a commercial product and benefit at the cost of open source initiatives. In other cases (like the GNU GLibC), it may be beneficial to LGPL the source to gain acceptance/ubiquity.

My biggest challenge has been growing a community around my product, but I've been surprised at the number of places where links to the project have shown up (C-Net and Apple.com especially). I've also been lucky in that my project is part of a bigger, open standrad and cross platform community (being the associated WebDAV protocols).

The thing that would help me the most as a MacOS open source developer would be for Apple to open up their ADC seeding for a minimal cost to qualified open source developers (qualified being that you've at least shipped something and minimal cost being enough to cover CD-ROM pressing/shipping charges and adminstrative expenses). I hope that the development tools derived from the NeXTStep ProjectBuilder and InterfaceBuilder remain free and come with MacOSX; having GCC for mach-o binaries is going to be a boon as well. I love the MetroWerks environment, but for the $500 it costs, gdb/gcc and make work for me.

Doubleclick has gone back on it's promise not only not to collect personal information such as real names, ss# etc, but also on the promise not to sell the info they collected to third parties. That means if you searched for something on deja news or other search engines, browsed any sites with doubleclick banners etc., all that info is being collected(including keywords you searched for), matched with your real name and real address which doubleclick gets (I assume) from sites where you registered, and then all that is being sold to third parties.

I bet e-truste, or whatever they're called, doesn't mind, doubleclick did change their privacy statement after all (in case it didn't occur to you to check recently).

Good bye privacy, hello big broth...ahem, doubleclick.

CNet has an interesting interview with iCraveTV's Bill Craig.

iCraveTV.com exec discusses his start-up's short life

It turns out they had intended to pay for their content through the copyright board of Canada. There is also a mention of plans to "sell a subscription-based service in partnership with pay channels like CNN and MTV." It almost sounds like he's planning to start it up again if they can find a way to reliably block people from outside of Canada, or if someone with more money takes the networks to court over the same thing. (The article mentions Yahoo and AOL.)

CNet has an interesting interview with iCraveTV's Bill Craig.

iCraveTV.com exec discusses his start-up's short life

It turns out they had intended to pay for their content through the copyright board of Canada. There is also a mention of plans to "sell a subscription-based service in partnership with pay channels like CNN and MTV." It almost sounds like he's planning to start it up again if they can find a way to reliably block people from outside of Canada, or if someone with more money takes the networks to court over the same thing. (The article mentions Yahoo and AOL.)

And if the JVM improves for Linux, how hard would it be to port such a tool? Not very, I'm guessing.

Here's an interview with the CEO of iCraveTV on C|Net.

damn it, i submitted this hours and hours ago (with better links) :)

other links:

CNNFn
yahoo

This is all very interesting, in lieu of the FCC's recent ruling that cable providers do NOT have to do this. Perhaps AOL/TimeWarner isn't as bad as we thought, perhaps not :)

Anthony

Read this .
Look in the middle of the page. He said he would release 2.4 pre as soon as he got home. I guess he didn't go home yet ;)
Actually I would rather see more development than an unstable release, but it would be good to get a new approximate time for the 2.4pre from linus. Maybe March, April, RSN.. etc

"This is pretty broad," said Walter Linder, a patent attorney with Faegre & Benson in Minneapolis. "I think there might be a lot of Web sites that will have to change their affiliate programs to get around this."

Linder said the patent could even be broad enough to cover single links that would simply go from an affiliate to Amazon's home page, instead of to specific items. [The C|Net story.]

Doesn't this patent banner ads? Think about it.

Site A links to Site B's homepage or product page.

User clicks link on Site A which brings them to site B.

Site B pays Site A a fee/commision for same.

IANAL but affiliate programs seem quite similar to banner programs. Looking at the above use case, I can't tell whether that is a banner or an affiliate

There's a review of it at Cnet

The CDROM's were usually document retrieval CD's full of sales lit for such large corporations as Tandem, Northern Telecom and FedEx. I couldn't really tell you which CD's got the GPL'ed code and which didn't; but because we tended to just reuse all the source to all the previous CD's on the next CD, the chance are pretty good that the graphics effects got rolled into an awful lot of programs even when it wasn't actually used.

They also did some consumer titles such as the 2Market Home Shopping catalog CD (with such catalogs as the sharper image with products on the CD) and the CD Version of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.

I was pretty angry about them using the GPL'ed code but I really wasn't in a position to do anything about it. It was during a pretty low time in my life and I just needed to keep working.

Medior is defunct now as an independent corporation, but it was purchased by a small networking outfit you may have heard of - America Online who renamed it AOL Productions. AOL inherited all the assets of the company, the source code, rights to everything, most of the engineers and executives. I left just before the buyout.

Eventually AOL Productions was shut down and sucked into AOL. But a lot of Medior people are still working for AOL, including former Medior President and Founder Barry Schuler who is now AOL's President of Interactive Services.

You might drop him a line and ask for the source code for all the CD's that included the GPL'ed graphics effects libraries.

Regards,

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Microsoft may seem, from the article, to be an okay place to work (why not work where all the money is), however, Microsoft's business practices do not change. The two articles below outline (1) price gouging and (2) low-quality product release, both in reference to Windows 2000. Bill Gates is responsible for the software which comes out of MS. If he had not used a slew of anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices to force his OS onto 90% plus of desktop computers, we would not have to deal with his sub-standard products, since real competition would have ousted him and his company years ago. Do not claim to know what other people do and do not realize.

Licensing fees a feature of Windows 2000, researcher says

Microsoft's new corporate operating system could force many businesses to pay thousands of dollars in additional licensing fees, a research firm said today.

...charges built into how Microsoft sells its software would affect a large percentage of companies upgrading to Windows 2000 ... Many of these fees are not up-front, said analyst Michael Gartenberg.

First Win2000 Fix Out

Windows 2000 is aimed at the suits. Twenty-four hours after the rollout of the new OS, Microsoft issues a compatibility patch that lists 45 popular games. Can you say productivity decrease? By Andy Patrizio.

For good measure, here's an article on the Anti-trust Trial set to resume today. It supports the reality of MS's practice. Read carefully.

Microsoft trial set to resume

WASHINGTON--The Microsoft trial resumes tomorrow with arguments before a federal judge to help him decide whether the abuse of monopoly power he found in November amounts to a violation of the nation's antitrust laws.

Microsoft may seem, from the article, to be an okay place to work (why not work where all the money is), however, Microsoft's business practices do not change. The two articles below outline (1) price gouging and (2) low-quality product release, both in reference to Windows 2000. Bill Gates is responsible for the software which comes out of MS. If he had not used a slew of anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices to force his OS onto 90% plus of desktop computers, we would not have to deal with his sub-standard products, since real competition would have ousted him and his company years ago. Do not claim to know what other people do and do not realize.

Licensing fees a feature of Windows 2000, researcher says

Microsoft's new corporate operating system could force many businesses to pay thousands of dollars in additional licensing fees, a research firm said today.

...charges built into how Microsoft sells its software would affect a large percentage of companies upgrading to Windows 2000 ... Many of these fees are not up-front, said analyst Michael Gartenberg.

First Win2000 Fix Out

Windows 2000 is aimed at the suits. Twenty-four hours after the rollout of the new OS, Microsoft issues a compatibility patch that lists 45 popular games. Can you say productivity decrease? By Andy Patrizio.

For good measure, here's an article on the Anti-trust Trial set to resume today. It supports the reality of MS's practice. Read carefully.

Microsoft trial set to resume

WASHINGTON--The Microsoft trial resumes tomorrow with arguments before a federal judge to help him decide whether the abuse of monopoly power he found in November amounts to a violation of the nation's antitrust laws.

Not sure when it was anounced but this story was on C|Net over two weeks ago.

What's really interesting is that even though FreePC has failed its legacy will live on. Hardware profit margins are now slim to non-existent and almost every major PC manufacturer is now involved in selling internet access to customers as a way to increase revenue streams from their customers. Who said scorched earth business models don't benefit the consumer?

Sold here . Who cares about the source code?

I can't believe that no one has mentioned this: the RIAA lawsuit has nothing to do with the Beam-It technology, its security, or MP3 encoding. Nothing.

To provide the music stream, MP3.com has to have ripped versions of every CD. They claim that they've got a database of 40,000 CDs available to be "beamed".

The RIAA claims that MP3.com didn't BUY these 40,000 CDs; that they made unauthorized copies to create their database.

Here is the relevant information from this CNN story:

But the RIAA is accusing MP3.com of creating an unauthorized digital music catalog of up to 45,000 CDs, claiming many of the copyrighted works are the property of its members.

"Simply put, it is not legal to compile a vast database of our members' sound recordings with no permission and no license," Hilary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA, stated in the letter. "Obviously, you are not free to take protected works simply because you want them."

[snip]

But legal experts say that by creating a catalog of digital music without an explicit license, MP3.com has overstepped copyright laws.

"I don't know what MP3.com is thinking," said Lon Sobel, editor of the Entertaiment Law Reporter and a former Loyola University Law School professor. "Under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, consumers get the right to make copies of material for their own non-commercial uses. It does not give others the right to do it on consumers' behalf."

This RIAA statement reiterates:

The lawsuit against MP3.com has nothing to do with MP3 technology. It has to do with MP3.com, the company, taking music they don't own and haven't licensed to offer new services to make money for themselves.

While all these discussions are fascinating and relevant to many outstanding legal issues, they somewhat miss the point of this particular lawsuit.

If Win2K really needs that sort of a Mhz boost then Microsoft HAS to push intel to release as fast as they can, so people feel obliged to upgrade, and they can turn out the 'old' machines that would run NT4 just fine, but would run NT5^H^H^HWin2K like a dog.