Slashdot Mirror

FutureDomain writes "A bill which just passed the House Financial Services Committee would require Internet Service Providers to block access to sites hosting financial scams that pose as members of the government-backed Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). The bill, called the Investor Protection Act and sponsored by Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), is broad enough to block not only websites, but email and any other 'electronic material.' 'Internet providers are also worried that Kanjorski's requirement — and the accompanying civil penalties and injunctions — would apply even if the blocking is not technically feasible.'"

mmaney writes "As part of its 2009 open source best practices research, MindTouch asked C and VP level open source executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. The list is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Over 50 votes from executives in Europe and North America were cast. There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was mentioned because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government. Notably absent, however, are any influential women." Relatedly, Matt Asay (who is also on the list) writes about the decreased need for open-source evangelism, noting that several people on the list are there "not because they're open-source cheerleaders, but because they have helped vendors and customers alike understand how to get the most from open-source investments."

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is on a never-before-seen legal rampage against high profile internet spammers. Today Facebook was awarded yet another nine-figure settlement, this time for over $700 million. Facebook also has a criminal contempt case on Wallace, which means a high likelihood of prison, a big win for the internet and a milestone in cyber law. 'The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,' Jeremy Fogel wrote in his judgment order, which permanently prohibits Wallace from accessing the Facebook Web site or creating a Facebook account, among other restrictions."

binarybum writes "Often forgotten, but the independent open source spirit lives strong in the once Mozilla project — now SeaMonkey. Version 2.0 is finally out and rivals Firefox with similar features but integrated email with a small footprint." The Register has a short piece on the 2.0 release, which mentions that SeaMonkey is now based on Firefox 3.5.4. Stephen Shankland lists some of the features in a handy bullet-point style, too. I'm using the new release right now; it's crashed once — but only once — in several hours of use.

Ponca City, We love you writes "The LA Times reports that in an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale. Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster and Netflix would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers. 'The studios are wrestling with declines in DVD sales while the DVD rental market has been modestly growing,' says Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix. 'If we can agree on low-enough pricing, delayed rental could potentially increase profits for everyone.' Three studios have already tried to impose a no-rental period of about a month on Redbox, the operator of kiosks that rent movies for $1 per night, believing that Redbox's steeply discounted price undercuts DVD sales. Redbox has responded by suing the studios, seeking to force them to sell it DVDs simultaneously with competitors. Meanwhile, the company is stocking its kiosks with DVDs it can't otherwise obtain by buying them from retailers."

Aristos Mazer sends word of research out of iRobot on a "chembot," or morphing blob robot, that looks like dough and moves by shifting its sides from solid-like to liquid-like states. This will allow it, in theory and after lots of refinement, to pass through cracks by squeezing. iRobot calls the new technique "jamming." The research project was funded by DARPA. The video clearly shows the early stage the work is in, but when you think about it the possibilities are a little unsettling.

An anonymous reader writes "Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, according to the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world's first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The Finnish people are also legally guaranteed a 100Mb broadband connection by the end of 2015."

inglishmayjer was one of several readers to send in the news of a major bug in Apple's new OS, 10.6 Snow Leopard, that can wipe out all user data for the administrator account. It is said to be triggered — not every time — by logging in to the Guest account and then back in to the admin account. Some users are reporting that all settings have been reset and most data is gone. The article links to a number of Apple forum threads up to a month old bemoaning the problem. MacFixIt suggests disabling login on the Guest account and, if you need that functionality, creating a non-administrative account named something like Visitor. (The Guest account is special in that its settings are wiped clean after logout.) CNet reports that Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix.

inglishmayjer was one of several readers to send in the news of a major bug in Apple's new OS, 10.6 Snow Leopard, that can wipe out all user data for the administrator account. It is said to be triggered — not every time — by logging in to the Guest account and then back in to the admin account. Some users are reporting that all settings have been reset and most data is gone. The article links to a number of Apple forum threads up to a month old bemoaning the problem. MacFixIt suggests disabling login on the Guest account and, if you need that functionality, creating a non-administrative account named something like Visitor. (The Guest account is special in that its settings are wiped clean after logout.) CNet reports that Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix.

With the latest release of the popular anti-malware tool Ad-Aware, Lavasoft has added what is being referring to as "Genotype," a heuristic-based behavioral detection engine. In addition to a new (and what appears to be faster) method of detection and elimination, there are a few incremental updates like the simple/advanced toggle and a potentially always-on "gaming mode," which attempts to do real-time filtering while you are playing games, watching videos, or just browsing.

mjasay writes "Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.' In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'"

mjasay writes "Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.' In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'"

mjasay writes "Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.' In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'"

thadmiller writes "Comcast is launching a trial on Thursday of a new automated service that will warn broadband customers of possible virus infections if the computers are behaving as if they have been compromised by malware. For instance, a significant overnight spike in traffic being sent from a particular Internet Protocol address could signal that a computer is infected with a virus, taking control of the system and using it to send spam as part of a botnet." Update: Jason Livingood of Comcast's Internet Systems Engineering group sent to Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mailing list a more detailed explanation of what this trial will involve.

Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between. "I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Atonomo.us mailing list. For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had. The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source."

CNet is reporting on a press conference and speech given by Verizon's CTO, Dick Lynch, at the FTTH Conference & Expo in Houston, in which he advocated for metered broadband pricing. "Lynch said during that press conference according to reports that in the future broadband service will likely be sold in packages based on how much bandwidth a person consumes. This metered approach is similar to how the wireless industry has operated. ... 'We're going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes, and at the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable,' GigaOm quoted him as saying. ... Lynch didn't say that Verizon had metered broadband plans in the works today. And he was quick to point out that the company is not shifting its pricing, But he did say that he hoped the that the Federal Communication Commission's plans to make Net neutrality principles formal regulation would not hurt broadband providers' ability to offer such premium bandwidth offerings, Telephony Online reported."

NotBornYesterday writes "AT&T is accusing Google of being a hypocrite when it comes to Net neutrality because it blocks certain phone calls on its Google Voice service. 'By openly flaunting the call-blocking prohibition that applies to its competitors, Google is acting in a manner inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the FCC's fourth principle contained in its Internet Policy Statement,' Robert Quinn, AT&T's senior vice president focusing on federal regulation, said in a statement. Google blocks certain calls to avoid high costs due to a practice known as traffic pumping. Rural carriers can charge connection fees that are about 100 times higher than the rates that large local phone companies can charge. In traffic pumping, they share this revenue with adult chat services, conference-calling centers, party lines, and others that are able to attract lots of incoming phone calls to their networks. Google responded by saying that the rules AT&T refers to don't apply to Google Voice for several reasons. Google Voice is a software application that offers a service on top of the existing telco infrastructure, it is a free service, and it is not intended to be a replacement for traditional telephone service. In fact, the service requires that users have a landline phone or a wireless phone."

mjasay writes "Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, made a somewhat surprising comment at LinuxCon in Portland, Ore., on Monday: 'Linux is bloated.' While the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux 'huge and scary now,' according to Torvalds." TuxRadar provides a small capsule of his remarks as well, as does The Register.

eldavojohn writes "The BBC and others are reporting on the US Department of Justice's recommendation to a New York court that they reject the Google book deal. The deal has received considerable attention, but for the most part it has been negative."

alphadogg writes "Facebook has agreed to shut down its much-maligned Beacon advertising system in order to settle a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in August of last year, alleged that Facebook and its Beacon affiliates like Blockbuster and Overstock.com violated a series of laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the California Computer Crime Law. The proposed settlement, announced late on Friday, calls not only for Facebook to discontinue Beacon, but also back the creation of an independent foundation devoted to promoting online privacy, safety and security. The money for the foundation will come from a US$9.5 million settlement fund."

CNet reports on a new money battle brewing between those who generate music and those who profit from selling it on the Net. "Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all. These groups even want compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples. ... Apparently, the music industry can't obtain the fees through negotiations. They have begun lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would require anyone who sells a download to pay a performance fee..."

Mike writes "As lighting manufacturers phase out the incandescent bulb, and CFLs look set to define the future of lighting, Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years (if used 5-1/2 hours a day). With a lifespan 40 times longer than their incandescent counterparts, Panasonic's new EverLed bulbs are the most efficient LEDs ever to be produced. They are set to debut in Japan on October 21st. Let's hope that as the technology is refined their significant cost barrier will drop — $40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb, even one that promises to save $23 a year in energy costs."

Several different sources are reporting that Skype is shutting down their "Extras" program. The program was designed to help developers release third-party applications for the VoIP service. "Developers and users will have some adjustment time, though. Skype won't certify any new submissions, but it won't yank support for existing Extras either, that is, until their certificates expire. You'll still be able to install existing Extras through the Windows desktop client, and you'll still see them featured in the Skype shop. Skype will also continue to maintain its public API. Since many Skype Extras are sold to users as premium content, the shut down also has a financial impact for profiting developers. They'll have [...] until December 11, to continue using Skype Credit. Developers will need to submit a final invoice by January 25th; after that Skype will shutter its third-party shop."

An anonymous reader writes "The Slashdot community has recently questioned what Oracle will do with Sun hardware if and when Oracle's acquisition of Sun closes. And it seems that speculation about the future of SPARC hardware has been common among Slashdot commenters for years. That said, it seems newsworthy that Oracle is going out of their way with some aggressive marketing directed at IBM to state clearly their plans to put more money than Sun does now into SPARC and Solaris." MySQL is not mentioned in this ad, perhaps because (as Matt Asay speculates) the EU is looking closely into that aspect of the proposed acquisition.

traycerb writes "It's been 10 years since 9/9/1999, when the Dreamcast launched on American shores. The hardware was ahead of its time; online capability, web browser, a visual memory unit, and a controller that anticipated the much-loved Xbox 360 controller. The games were amazing: Jet Set Radio (the first popular 3d cell-shaded game on a console), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (still the apotheosis of 2-d fighting; just try finding a copy on ebay), Soul Calibur (still looks good compared to the recent Xbox/PS3 versions), NFL 2K (came out of nowhere, and was so good that it shook EA into spending tens of millions of dollars to seal up exclusivity for NFL rights), and many others. No doubt some of the reasons for the Dreamcast's demise lay with Sega, whose dubious hardware decisions (ahem, 32x) finally caught up to them, in the form of ambivalence from both developers and gamers, just as the console-making world was shifting to the multinationals with big pockets who were willing to spend it on pricey hardware design (or could absorb the cost of faulty hardware design). It was also one of the first consoles widely used for homebrew. In honor of the 10th anniversary, a new game is being released for the Dreamcast, called Rush Rush Rally Racing. The Dreamcast is dead! Long live the Dreamcast!"

twitter writes "Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), Microsoft's euphemistically named digital restrictions scheme, is the target of another spyware and false advertising lawsuit. 'Microsoft this week was sued in a Washington district court for allegedly violating privacy laws through Windows XP's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) copy protection scheme. Similar to cases filed in 2006, the new class action case accuses Microsoft of falsely representing what information WGA would send to verify the authenticity of Windows and that it would send back information [daily IP address and other details that could be used to trace information back to a home or user]. The complaint further argued that Microsoft portrayed WGA as a necessary security update rather than acknowledge its copy protection nature in the update. WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.' There were at least two other lawsuits launched in 2006 over WGA. According to the Wikipedia article, none of them have been resolved. The system is built into Vista and Windows 7."

theodp writes "Google touts its partnership with the District of Columbia government, presenting it as quite the Google Apps success story. So as part of his coverage of last week's Gmail outage, nextgov's Gautham Nagesh called the DC government, but was told they hadn't heard of any reports of outages among city employees. Nagesh wrote this off to safeguards put in place for the government by Google, but readers tipped him off to another explanation: 'Despite all the press releases trumpeting Google in DC,' an anonymous commenter wrote, 'Exchange is still the city's primary email system.' Nagesh followed up, and was surprised to learn that there is indeed no Gmail in DC government. This all seemed rather strange to Nagesh, considering how much attention former DC CTO and current Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has received for implementing Google Apps for District employees. Reporting separately, CNET's Elinor Mills was told by a DC spokeswoman that while Google Apps is available to 38,000 DC city employees, only 4,000 are actively using it. The spokeswoman added that Gmail could potentially replace Microsoft Exchange, 'but this decision has not been made yet.'"

Xerolooper writes "What would the world be like if everyone could enjoy the same patent system we use in the USA? From the article: 'A senior lawyer at Microsoft is calling for the creation of a global patent system to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world.' They have already attracted opposition from the open-source community and the Pirate Party. According to the article, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will be meeting in Geneva on the 17th and 18th of September."

Selanit writes "Since David Waitzman wrote his tongue-in-cheek Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, there have been occasional attempts to actually transmit information via pigeon. One group back in 2001 successfully sent a PING command. But now there's a practical use for pigeon-based communications: photographers working for the white-water rafting company Rocky Mountain Adventures send memory sticks full of digital photos via homing pigeon so the photos will be ready when the rafters finish up. The company has details on how the pigeons are trained and equipped. It may not be a full implementation of the Pigeon Protocol, but it works in narrow canyons far off the beaten path — and just as David Waitzman presciently predicted, they occasionally suffer packet loss due to hawks and ospreys."

TheZid writes "A newly proposed bill would give Uncle Sam the power to disconnect private sector computers from the internet in the event of a 'cyber security emergency.' As usual, our government is trying to take away our privacy by citing security. What actually counts as a 'Cyber-Security Emergency?' Does the president now have the option of disconnecting people when they disagree with his policies? How about disconnecting bloggers that criticize his health care reform? What counts as an emergency? Can political opponents be deemed a cyber-security emergency?"

After Sony's announcement of the PS3 Slim earlier this week, CNet took a look back at size-reducing hardware revisions over the past couple decades in console design, noting that they're gradually arriving sooner and sooner after the initial release. "Does that mean it'll creep even lower, into two-year or even yearly cycles between major revisions? Quite possibly, yes. It's worked very well with handheld gaming devices, and even some consumer electronics devices like iPods. Apple has turned out slimmer, more powerful versions of the iPod every year since 2001, and yearly events like E3 put continued pressure on console makers to show off something big. In the case of the PS3 Slim though, it could just be that the PS3 had to be pushed out to meet its launch window, and that the Slim is what Sony was going for in the first place. Advances in the PlayStation 3's core technology, like the cell processor, also underwent changes since the console launched, including changes to fabrication that have taken the chip down from 90 nanometers to 65, then 45 — the size that can be found inside the Slim. These changes meant less power consumption, smaller components, and easier cooling."

uolamer writes with word that the Economic Crimes Bureau in Sweden has opened an investigation into the upcoming purchase of The Pirate Bay by Global Gaming Factory X. Quoting: "The Swedish newspaper SvD reported Saturday that authorities are looking for possible insider trading after Global Gaming's stock jumped a week before they announced plans to acquire The Pirate Bay. Trading of Global Gaming shares was halted by AktieTorget, a Swedish exchange, on Friday after officials there requested proof that Global Gaming had enough money to complete the sale. Global Gaming has yet to produce the required documentation. Until officials get the proof they need, they said they won't allow the stock to be traded again."

uolamer writes with word that the Economic Crimes Bureau in Sweden has opened an investigation into the upcoming purchase of The Pirate Bay by Global Gaming Factory X. Quoting: "The Swedish newspaper SvD reported Saturday that authorities are looking for possible insider trading after Global Gaming's stock jumped a week before they announced plans to acquire The Pirate Bay. Trading of Global Gaming shares was halted by AktieTorget, a Swedish exchange, on Friday after officials there requested proof that Global Gaming had enough money to complete the sale. Global Gaming has yet to produce the required documentation. Until officials get the proof they need, they said they won't allow the stock to be traded again."

Death Metal points out a CNet report saying that the Justice Department has come out in favor of the $1.92 million verdict awarded to the RIAA in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case. Their support came in the form of a legal brief filed on Friday, which notes, "Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed." It also says, "The Copyright Act's statutory damages provision serves both to compensate and deter. Congress established a scheme to allow copyright holders to elect to receive statutory damages for copyright infringement instead of actual damages and profits because of the difficulty of calculating and proving actual damages."

bonch writes "On Friday, Microsoft posted to a mailing list that IE developers are reviewing the HTML 5 standard for future versions of Internet Explorer. They've given some feedback on the current editor's draft, saying that they 'have more questions than answers' and criticizing many of HTML 5's new tags, like <header>, <footer> and <aside>, calling them 'arbitrary' or unnecessary. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft waited too long to try to influence basic parts of the spec that most of their competitors have already adopted."

Barence writes "Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has taken the unusual step of responding in the comments of a blog posting that claimed Windows 7 was suffering from a potential 'showstopper bug'. Stories had been sweeping the Internet that using the chkdsk.exe utility on a second hard disk would lead to a massive memory leak bringing the operating system to its knees in seconds. Responding to a blog post titled 'Critical Bug in Windows 7 RTM,' Sinofsky wrote: 'While we appreciate the drama of "critical bug" and then the pickup of "showstopper" that I've seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level.' He signs off with the words: 'deep breath.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to yesterday's site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on, according to a Facebook executive. The blogger, who uses the account name 'Cyxymu' (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNet News." Here are user Cyxymu's LiveJournal Google cache and LiveJournal account (unreachable at this writing). Larry Magid writes on CNet that this individual blogs about independence of a breakaway region of Georgia. Macworld has some speculation in other directions on the motivations behind the DDoS attack.
Update: 08/07 19:52 GMT by KD : Cyber attacks on Cyxymu are not new. For over a year Evgeny Morozov has been calling attention to him as the first digital refugee.

An anonymous reader writes "A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to yesterday's site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on, according to a Facebook executive. The blogger, who uses the account name 'Cyxymu' (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNet News." Here are user Cyxymu's LiveJournal Google cache and LiveJournal account (unreachable at this writing). Larry Magid writes on CNet that this individual blogs about independence of a breakaway region of Georgia. Macworld has some speculation in other directions on the motivations behind the DDoS attack.
Update: 08/07 19:52 GMT by KD : Cyber attacks on Cyxymu are not new. For over a year Evgeny Morozov has been calling attention to him as the first digital refugee.

The elusive Precision dropped a submission in my lap about a DDoS taking down Twitter running on CNet. It's been down for several hours, no doubt wreaking havoc on the latest hawtness in social networking. Won't someone please think of the tweeters? Word is that both Facebook & LiveJournal have been having problems this AM as well.

ericatcw writes "Users hoping that Windows 7's arrival will mean less power drain on their MacBook laptops may be disappointed, writes Computerworld's Eric Lai. Running Windows 7 in Boot Camp caused one CNET reviewer's battery life to fall by more than two-thirds. But virtualization software such as VMware Fusion suffer from the same complaints. Some blame Apple's Boot Camp drivers (the last ones were released in April 2008); others lay the blame at Windows' bloated codebase. With Apple and Microsoft both trying to avoid responsibility for improving the experience, Windows 7's reported improvements in power management will be moot for MacBook users for a while."

Geoffrey.landis writes with a snippet from CNET reporting another example of offputting treatment at Apple's App Store: "'In this case, it's a dictionary app called Ninjawords (so called because ninjas are 'smart, accurate, and really fast') that was rejected three times over the course of two months, mostly because 'objectionable' words could be looked up and found in the dictionary's search function, Gruber reported.' PCWorld also reports the story." Note that the app was eventually approved, but only after a few go-rounds and changes.

Ponca City, We love you writes "The Washington Post reports that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has called members of Congress to inform them that the 'cash for clunkers' program will be suspended because the program has run out of money, and congressmen say they intend to ask the Obama administration to divert some funding from the existing economic stimulus package to maintain a scheme that they see as genuinely stimulative. 'Clearly, this has been a very stimulative program that's got consumers back into the car market. It's our hope that possibly more funds can be made available,' says Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association." If there is more funding, though, a report on CNET says it may come out of money to have been set aside for renewable energy loans by the US government.

suraj.sun points out CNet coverage of Palm's newest OS release, which restores the ability to synch with iTunes that iTunes 8.2.1 had broken. "The news was posted on Palm's blog where it listed the new features and enhancements of the software update and nonchalantly added at the end: 'Oh, and one more thing: Palm WebOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That's right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).' Bold move, Palm. Bold move. It'll be interesting to see how Apple responds, and do you suppose the use of the phrase 'one more thing,' a phrase that Apple CEO Steve Jobs often uses to introduce a new product at the end of his keynotes, was intentional or am I just reading too much into this?"

tlhIngan writes "Physical intimidation of a Foxconn employee, 25 year-old Sun Danyong, and a possibly-illegal search of his house may have led to suicide after an iPhone prototype in his possession was lost. Foxconn is Apple's long-time manufacturing partner for the iPhone. Entrusted with 16 iPhone prototypes, Danyong discovered that one was missing and searched the factory for it. When it didn't turn up, he reported the incident to his boss, who ordered his apartment searched. There are reports of physical intimidation by Foxconn security personnel. This ended tragically on Thursday at 3 AM, when Danyong jumped from his apartment building to his death." VentureBeat notes that "Apple exerts immense pressure on its business partners [to] help it maintain secrecy." An Apple spokesperson said this to CNet: "We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A judge rules that IP addresses are not 'personally identifiable information' (PII) because they identify computers, not people. That's absurd, but in truth there is no standard definition of PII in the industry anyway, because you don't need one in order to write secure software. Here's a definition of 'PII' that the judge could have adopted instead, to reach the same conclusion by less specious reasoning." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts.

US District Court Judge Richard Jones's recent ruling in Johnson v. Microsoft has been much ridiculed for saying that IP addresses are not "personally identifiable information" (PII) because they identify computers, not individual users. Legions of critics have pointed out that this is like saying home addresses are not PII because they identify houses, not people. And it was pretty silly for Jones to say that "the only reasonable interpretation" of PII would be to exclude IP addresses from the definition — when, as the plaintiffs pointed out, Microsoft's own website defined PII to include IP addresses. (Microsoft has since removed from that definition from their online glossary and replaced with a link to their privacy statement.)

But the open secret in the privacy tech industry is that nobody knows exactly what "personally identifiable information" means anyway, and nobody cares, either. This is not because industry leaders don't care about privacy and security. They do. But being a good, privacy-conscious software architect has nothing to do with nit-picking the details of what counts as PII. If you're designing the new Hotmail, you should just know that passwords should be encrypted when users log in over the Web, that third parties should not be able to query the Hotmail database and harvest e-mail addresses, that users shouldn't be able to extract personal data such as birthdates that are associated with another user's e-mail address, etc. If you don't instinctively know those things already, then memorizing a definition for "PII" is not going to make you a good security-conscious programmer.

Conversely, the major security threats facing Windows users — malware infection through security holes in Windows and Internet Explorer — have nothing to do with the definition of PII or the finer points of Microsoft's privacy policy. There may even be public relations gurus at Microsoft who are glad to see the "IP addresses as PII" controversy in the headlines, if that relatively minor privacy issue distracts the public from the vastly more serious threats posed browser security holes.

There are indeed published definitions of "PII" — the US Office of Management and Budget Memo 07-16 defines PII as:

"information which can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity, such as their name, social security number, biometric records, etc. alone, or when combined with other personal or identifying information which is linked or linkable to a specific individual, such as date and place of birth, mother's maiden name, etc."

But that doesn't pass the test of what makes a good definition, which is: If two different people read that definition, and then you gave them an example of a piece of data (such as the school that someone graduated from), would they usually be able to agree on whether that data counts as "PII?" How about IP addresses? From the written definition alone, there's no way to tell for sure.

I actually worked as a contractor at Microsoft at the onset of the PII craze, and in order to commence working on what would eventually become Windows Live, we all had to watch a streaming video about PII, what it was, how to secure it, etc. Near the beginning, the narrator gave some examples of PII, including e-mail addresses, and mentioned that PII should be encrypted when transmitted over the Internet. (I'm not violating any confidentiality; these standards were all publicly released later.) Full of first-week-on-the-job idealism, I looked up the narrator in the company directory and earnestly typed out an e-mail raising some points, such as: Doesn't Hotmail display your e-mail address over an unencrypted connection when you're signed in to Hotmail? And anyway, because the standard e-mail protocols always transmit To: and From: addresses unencrypted over the Internet, how would it ever be possible to "encrypt e-mail addresses in transit" anyway? Wouldn't it make more sense to specify that individual e-mail addresses can be transmitted in the clear one at a time, but if we're ever transferring a large number of them in bulk, it would be wise to encrypt the list, to reduce the chance of it falling into the hands of a spammer?

Then the video kept rolling, and making more statements that seemed to contradict earlier ones, or that were too vague to give me any idea of what I was actually supposed to do in a given situation, and eventually I got the point: We do care about privacy and security. But, there is no algorithm that can determine unambiguously what counts as "PII" or what you're supposed to do in order to safeguard it. You just have to use your common sense and ask around if you're not sure. The main point of the video is to reinforce how important this is, not to impart any actual information.

So Judge Jones could have picked from many possible definitions of "PII," and nobody would be able to call him "wrong," as long as the industry doesn't know what it means, either. What he was really trying to decide was whether Microsoft violated its promise "not to collect PII" during the Windows Update process, because the IP addresses of users doing the downloads were visible to Microsoft's servers. The plaintiffs made some other claims in Johnson v. Microsoft that I think have more merit (basically, arguing that the "Windows Genuine Advantage" anti-piracy tool should not have been foisted on users without their consent as part of the Windows Update process), but on this particular point, I think they were bound to lose on the claim that collecting IP addresses during a download was a privacy violation. After all, if the judge had ruled in their favor on this point, Microsoft would have had to discontinue Windows Update in order to comply with the ruling, and I don't think anybody wants that.

So, maybe Judge Jones just decided that he didn't want to be known as the judge who outlawed Windows security updates, so he determined in advance that he was going to rule that Microsoft did not violate users' privacy by collecting IP addresses during Windows Update. Then he worked backwards from there to find reasoning that supported this conclusion. That's not really how it's supposed to work, but at least he could have had good intentions.

Unfortunately, the reasoning that he hit on was the absurd argument that IP addresses are not PII because they identify computers, not the people who own them. Here's something that he could have said instead:

"I'm not counting IP addresses as PII, because in order to find out who was using an IP address at a particular time, you have to subpoena the ISP. That's what makes them different from names and home addresses, which can be matched to individual people without a subpoena. As long as Microsoft isn't subpoenaing ISPs to find out who was using a particular IP address, for all practical purposes they are not 'personally identifiable.'"

Judge Jones actually started out in that direction by quoting from another case, Klimas v. Comcast Cable Communications, Inc., where the court wrote, "We further note that IP addresses do not in and of themselves reveal 'a subscriber's name, address, [or] social security number.' That information can only be gleaned if a list of subscribers is matched up with a list of their individual IP addresses." And that list matching up subscribers with the IP addresses they were using at a given time, can only be obtained with a subpoena. Jones could have quit while he was ahead and stuck with that reasoning, and he would have avoided all the ridicule that came from his statement about IP addresses.

Or maybe Judge Jones could have just said,

"Look, you don't have a standard definition for PII anyway. You adapt it to each individual situation, in order to determine what privacy protections should be built into each program, by using your common sense. So that's what I'm doing to do in this situation too. And my common sense tells me that having IP addresses visible to Microsoft's servers during the Windows Update process, is not a privacy violation, because that's how downloads work."

That's as good a definition of PII as any. Now let's get back to the real work of stopping Russian porno spammers from pwning our machines in the first place.

mjasay writes "Microsoft used to call the GPL 'anti-American.' Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft calls the GPL 'ally.' Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."

mjasay writes "Microsoft used to call the GPL 'anti-American.' Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft calls the GPL 'ally.' Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."

suraj.sun sends in this excerpt from CNet: "One of the most recognizable brands in the history of illegal downloading is due to officially resurface, perhaps as early as next week, sources close to the company told CNET News. Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies. For the past few months, a beta version has been available. The company tried recently to ratchet up expectations with a series of vague, and what some considered misguided, press releases. The site will open with over 1 million tracks." The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.

theodp writes "As GE readies appliances that communicate with smart meters in the hope of taking advantage of cheaper electricity rates, CNet asks a big question: Are consumers ready for the smart grid? Right now, most utilities only offer a flat rate, not time-of-use pricing, so the example of a drier that reacts to a 'price signal' about peak rates by keeping one's clothes wet until a more affordable time is pretty much a fantasy. And longer-term, a big question is whether consumers will want to deal with the hassle of optimizing household appliance energy usage themselves, or be willing to relinquish monitoring and control to utility companies — with a concomitant loss of privacy. After all, losing one's copy of 1984 is one thing — losing one's lights and refrigerator is another thing altogether."

theodp writes "As GE readies appliances that communicate with smart meters in the hope of taking advantage of cheaper electricity rates, CNet asks a big question: Are consumers ready for the smart grid? Right now, most utilities only offer a flat rate, not time-of-use pricing, so the example of a drier that reacts to a 'price signal' about peak rates by keeping one's clothes wet until a more affordable time is pretty much a fantasy. And longer-term, a big question is whether consumers will want to deal with the hassle of optimizing household appliance energy usage themselves, or be willing to relinquish monitoring and control to utility companies — with a concomitant loss of privacy. After all, losing one's copy of 1984 is one thing — losing one's lights and refrigerator is another thing altogether."