Slashdot Mirror

the eric conspiracy writes "Bloomberg news is reporting that Motorola and AMD are in talks to include manufacturing of Motorola CPUs at AMD's Dresden facility. This could help cash-strapped AMD particularly if its x86 compatible line runs into problems. Motorola and AMD already have cross-licensing agreements - AMD gets its copper technology from Motorola, while Motorola uses AMD's specialized RAM chip technologies. "

LordOmar writes "According to this CNET article McAfee has filed for a 57.5 Million Dollar IPO. Don't even get me started on Weather Futures. " *sigh* And I can remember when they were just a shareware anti-virus coming. How times have changed (cue weepy music).

TheSync writes "CNET is reporting that the state of New Mexico is in federal court defending its law that prohibits exposing minors to "harmful" material via the Net, in this article. "Harmful to minors" is the new catchphrase for attacks on Internet freedom of speech, now that "decency" limits are clearly unconstitutional. "

The article discusses several state CDA-like laws being challenged, as well as COPA, aka CDA II. People should keep in mind that but for the ACLU, it would right now be illegal to publish any material on the internet that would be deemed "harmful to minors" in any state in the union. I think people tend to forget that. -- michael

BRTB writes "It seems that Intel has actually done something right: realized that its new 820 chipset (with Rambus memory support and speed increases) is so expensive for computer builders and end users - on the order of $500 added to the cost of an 820-equipped machine - that it's decided to cut back on production. Check out the News.com article here."

cswiii writes "C|Net has this story about NCR suing Netscape over nine patents said to be infringed. " NCR is suing over nine patent infringements for "organizing and retrieving information from computer databases". We'll update this story as more details come out.

It looks like emachines has trouble coming from many sides. This story at News.com makes it sound like things are so bad that the company's upper management ought to commit hari-kari. This is sad; I bought one of their early units for my wife and, even if it's not the world's greatest PC, it was a good value for the money. I'd hate to see this fine low-cost vendor go away. We need companies like this to keep the "biggies" on their toes. (Thanks go to NetSlave Steve Gilliard for this lead.)

It looks like emachines has trouble coming from many sides. This story at News.com makes it sound like things are so bad that the company's upper management ought to commit hari-kari. This is sad; I bought one of their early units for my wife and, even if it's not the world's greatest PC, it was a good value for the money. I'd hate to see this fine low-cost vendor go away. We need companies like this to keep the "biggies" on their toes. (Thanks go to NetSlave Steve Gilliard for this lead.)

This has been submitted a fair amount, although it came out on the 18th. Microsoft has admitted to paying for ads from a California insitute. The institue, The Independent Institute got 240 academic experts to sign a document saying that the anti-trust case was bad for the consumer. Basically, it appears that the Institute ran the ads, while Microsoft reimbursed them for the cost of placing the ads, and the travel involved. Mmm...dirty tricks.

We recently covered the possibility that 3Com would spin-off their PalmPilot division. There's been an increasing amount of confirmation about this move, and C|Net has done an indepth look at the story. From the perspective of how business operates, it's an interesting story alone, but it's even more curious in light of the recent announcement regarding the Handspring. Where do you folks see the PalmPilot ending up?

Justin Ng writes "CNet reports that the 8MB Palm Vx is due October 4th, and as a result Palm V and Palm IIIx models will be slashed in price. Read about it here. " Seems like it will be what the the Palm IIIx was to the Palm III. Wonder what sort of upgrade path will be provided...

Floydian Slip pointed us to a news.com story that talks about some researchers who have successfully sent HDTV over I2. Sort of a proof of concept thing for using the new network for broadcasting TV. It'll still be an ungodly amount of time before its practical, but I'm convinced on-demand media (music is already happening, TV will come) is the future. I love the idea of not dedicating a whole bookcase to VCRs, CDs, and DVDs, so I'm excited to see it.

limited wrote in about the October issue of Scientific American, in which, he says, "there is a Special Report on High Speed Inet Access." Great in-depth tech stuff! In related (and IMO excellent) news, here's a News.com story Zyber sent in about a new ruling from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that requires cable TV operators to sell access to competing Internet service providers. Perhaps the US FCC will be smart enough to follow the Canadians' lead. One can only hope.

Effugas writes "Apparently displeased that individual artists might try to contact their fanbase All By Themselves(TM), Sony has been inserting clauses in their contracts that assign eternal ownership of any URL that even slightly references the artist's name to The Company. " Sent some shivers down my spine.

In a coordinated release, both the UK and US have issued their worldfwide Y2k preparedness reports. No real suprises here - Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and the heartland of China. The strongest warnings were given in reference to the Ukraine, which the US State Department has recommended not traveling to around the end of 1999. More interesting was the UK's warning about the US, citing potential failures in "limited disruption to the water supply; to internal travel using small airports; and to small health facilities" as an ongoing concern.

As promised last Friday, here's more on the Munich conference. Pay attention or wait to be forced to label your internet content. It's your choice.

A number of articles have appeared in the online press about Munich. Half of them are just rehashes of press releases - nothing very useful there. Some of them are fairly in-depth (we think CNET and the NY Times had the best coverage), but none of them really give you the big picture. We're going to try to. Let us know how we do.

The first thing that the press is missing is that there are (well, were) two meetings in Munich, not one. The first is the one you heard about: a meeting called by the Bertelsmann Foundation, part of the huge Bertelsmann publishing empire, which sponsored the Internet Content Summit. They're getting together to have a little feel-good session about "self-regulation" of internet content. By self-regulation they don't mean that end-users regulate their own behavior; they mean that ISPs regulate users instead of government doing so directly. Users will still be regulated, of course. And the regulation will be driven by what the national government wants. It's just that government will lay their heavy hands upon the ISPs, and the ISPs will act as the enforcers rather than law enforcement. Think of it as a distributed system - government assumes the role of a second-line rather than first-line manager. At a previous internet content summit, this type of regulation was described as "soft law" versus "hard law", and we think that's a good way to think about it. They are not talking about voluntary, individual actions of corporations - they are talking about imposing laws and restraints on the citizenry through another means. Self-regulation = soft law, but law nonetheless.

The first meeting is interesting for a number of reasons, but not terribly ominous - the people meeting were not previously working together, and all that will come out of it is thoughts and ideas. The second meeting is rather more dangerous.

The second meeting, scheduled in conjunction with the first, was of the principals of INCORE, Internet Content Rating for Europe. This group consists of a number of European corporations and protect-the-children groups and their sole goal is to establish a single rating system for use across Europe (they're also coordinating with Australia). Of course, the members of this group overlap significantly with the first - for example, Jens Waltermann, director of the Bertelsmann Foundation and sponsor of the first meeting, is also one of the prime movers in INCORE - which ought to tell you why the Bertelsmann conference is so slanted towards ratings systems as the sole means of protecting the children.

But why is this going forward? As at least one slashdot poster pointed out in the discussions of last week's article, rating systems have been discussed before, and haven't come to anything yet.

What happened is the government (the European Commission, in this case) decided to get serious. They buckled down, and at the end of 1998, allocated funds to be spent on the development of a global rating system. About $11 million is allocated to be spent on developing this system, so the corporate participants can be reasonably assured of being reimbursed for all their plane fares and hotel costs. (Question: if it's so voluntary, how come the government is paying people to develop it?)

The European Commission's plan runs from January 1999 to December 2002, four years. 1999 is scheduled for development and meetings. 2000 is scheduled for rollout and beta testing. 2001 and 2002 are allocated for the encouragement process and tweaking - making sure everyone is toeing the line. There's plenty of time allocated because it's important to make sure that the resulting rating system aligns with national laws - for instance, since Germany outlaws hate speech, one of the rating categories will involve hate speech, and Germany will outlaw the transmission of any content rated in this category into the country. Laws can be "hung" off the rating categories, if they're set up properly.

The rating system will be based off the American Recreational Software Advisory Council's system, that they originally developed for video games and then, when threatened by Congress with the CDA, transformed for internet content. (The funny thing is, for the first year that RSACi was being promoted for use on webpages, it still had all the original references to video games. Pretty sad.) RSAC was recently folded into the Internet Content Rating Association, basically so they can revamp the RSACi system and submit it to the European Commission for approval and funding. Who is the chairman of ICRA's board of directors? Jens Waltermann again. Are you beginning to see a pattern?

Civil liberties groups world-wide have finally recognized the threat that government-mandated rating systems pose to the internet. The ACLU was the first major group to speak out against them, in their 1997 paper Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning?. But for this Munich conference, the chorus was loud and close to unanimous - the Global Internet Liberty Coalition condemned it, the ACLU condemned it, Electronic Frontiers Australia condemned it, Internet Freedom (UK civil liberties group) condemned it.

Several civil liberties groups managed to wrangle themselves invitations to the conference. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is attending and distributing a book free of charge to all participants (besides the attack on free speech, EPIC is irritated because the European Commission has also recommended that online anonymity be strictly prohibited for all European Union residents - after all, if they're anonymous, it's harder to make them obey the law). Nadine Strossen of the ACLU published the statement she's making to the Conference, harshly opposing the labeling requirements; even Esther Dyson, a tremendous supporter of rating systems, expressed her unease at the slant of the conference.

Strossen's comments above neatly summarize the civil liberties community's objections to so-called self-rating systems, and we urge all readers to take a look at that link above. She makes several points:

1. Self-Rating Schemes Will Cause Controversial Speech To Be Censored
2. Self-Rating Is Burdensome, Unwieldy, and Costly
3. Conversation Can't Be Rated
4. Self-Ratings Will Only Encourage, Not Prevent, Government Regulation
5. Self-Ratings Schemes Will Turn the Internet into a Homogenized Medium Dominated by Commercial Speakers

Strossen is far more eloquent than we are, and she makes the points extremely well. Take a look, it's worth your time.

But back to the conference. The main document to come out of the conference is their Memorandum on Self-Regulation (538K), released yesterday. A number of "internet experts" contributed to the report - mostly these same people we've been seeing, representatives of the companies that want the Net to be kid-friendly (increase profits!) and protect-the-children groups from throughout Europe, and representatives from various governmental agencies. They lay out their censorship proposal in some detail. The basics are laid out in a single phrase: "Content providers worldwide must be mobilized to label their content...".

Prepare to get mobilized.

"It is in the best interest of industry," they say, to take the steps necessary to "enhance consumer confidence" and meet "business objectives." The suits invited must all have nodded their heads to this one: if only they could get the obnoxious people off the net, then all the soccer moms and grandpas would feel safe enough to fire up a browser and finally type in their credit card numbers.

So, problem: naughty stuff on the net. Answer? Open source! <spit>

On p. 59 of the 60-page memo is a neat diagram that looks almost like an API to a multi-layer code library. Except in this case, the bottom slice is the underlying technology of censorship (PICS), and the top slice is the user's experience of censorship (at the browser).

Sitting on top of PICS is Layer 1, in which the content creators - that's you, me, and everyone else who makes anything public on the internet - label our data with a "basic vocabulary" of keywords. If we write porn, we call it porn. Simple enough so far?

Next comes Layer 2, which is where the fun stuff starts to happen. Here, third parties can invent "template profiles." These combine the keywords in interesting ways. The idea is that in one country, the ratings systems will typically rate porn as bad but violence as OK; in another, perhaps the opposite; someone else will invent a profile for use in schools that blocks everything noneducational; a profile for your company's router might block all sports but let profanity through; a national profile for Australia might block all sex but let stupid political grandstanding through; and so on.

These template profiles should be, according to Bertelsmann, "open source."

How are they going to do this? They can't rely on a NetNanny or SurfWatch to rate the net: censorware has been a dismal failure in practice, the software just doesn't work because there's too much of the net and too few censorware employees to evaluate it all.

What they need instead is for you, the author, to do their work for them. Remember that "basic vocabulary" of keywords? It turns out you're not just going to pick porn vs. non-porn. Oh no. After all, you have to provide enough information for the profiles to work with.

That means you're going to be rating everything you publish according to:

"e.g.: gratuitous violence,
frontal nudity,
explicit sexual acts,
crude language,
vulgar language,
sports,
extreme hate speech,
arts,
aggressive violence,
death to humans,
medicine,
non-explicit sexual acts,
strong language,
history, ..."

E.g.? E.g.!? There's more?

Well, there has to be more. In fact, Bertelsmann has only scratched the surface. In order for there to be enough "template profiles" to be worth mentioning, the variety of keywords has to be extreme.

Be ready to run down a checklist for everything you write and decide whether it contains gratuitous or non-gratuitous violence, explicit or non-explicit sex acts. Please rate from 1 to 10 how much art and history was in that last post of yours. Don't think you'll have a choice about doing it - your ISP will be enforcing it upon you, as a condition of service.

And the "template profiles" that are provided for the end user? These profiles are just simple sets that group the predefined keywords together. If I'm the CEO of NetSitterPatrol, I group keywords 1, 3, 5, and 12 together and call it "NetSitterPatrol Profile."

And if I'm a national government that's cracking down on porn, violence, hate speech, or vulgar language (your government wouldn't do anything like that, would it?), I'll just add the keywords for indecency, abortion information, hate speech, racism, or whatever else I want to censor, and give the list to the backbone providers in my country to filter out and protect the delicate citizens. Hey look, I'm an open source programmer!

by Michael Sims and Jamie McCarthy

ajlaw writes "American Express with be deploying a new blue card the contains an embedded chip for use when making purchases on the Internet. The card's chip will be used for security in shopping on the Web. The company will distribute free card readers for customers to hook up to their computers. " Wierd-they have no details, but apparently the card swiping is supposed to be more secure then typing it in-but I'm not sure how.

A reader sent us the link-o-meter to the story about how Clue Computing beat toy giant Hasbro over a 3 year long legal dispute over clue.com (Hasbro owns the Clue board game). Some are hoping that this will mean small business have a precent to call in in the case of legal disputes over names trademarked by different folks-and in related news, Hasbro will be purchasing Wizards of the Coast, Magic:The Gathering card maker, and owner of TSR, Inc.

TheTomcat writes "Big deal. Another MP3 player, huh? Not quite. This story at news.com talks about a new MP3 device that plays MP3 CD's, audio CDs and comes with a built-in FM tuner. While it has no capabilities to store songs (like the Empeg or the Diamond Rio), this would be IDEAL for my car. Hook it up to a decent power supply, an amp, and voila, out goes my current CD deck. It even comes with 10 seconds of anti-skip for Construction season (aka Summer), a remote control, and a built-in EQ. I'm drooling. [scheduled release: November]"

Scott writes "Just got done reading this article over at C|Net, which claims to answer the 10 most frequently ansked Linux questions. Noticed lots of links to various HOWTO's, and a few to the LDP. Overall, it seems someone actually made an effort with this one. "

Scott writes "Just got done reading this article over at C|Net, which claims to answer the 10 most frequently ansked Linux questions. Noticed lots of links to various HOWTO's, and a few to the LDP. Overall, it seems someone actually made an effort with this one. "

FolkWolf sent us a link to CNET which as an article on Red Hat Backlash speculated on by the The Gartner Group. Basically revolves around the recent investment announcements. They talk about RH walking a line between boasting their successes, and alienating themselves from the community.

CynicalBastard writes wrote in to send us a link to something interesting that recently appeared on CNet. It's a special section on Linux with articles on Alternative OSs, Linux, Linux vs. NT, and project Heresy.

Terrence W. Zellers writes "TcX's MySQL has won cnet's best affordable database award. " Now if I could just get it to stop leaking we'd be much more stable over here. But I dig mysql anyway.

Toast writes "According to CNET, Linux (and some other alternative OSes) are the #1 trend for 1998. They cite the Gimp and StarOffice as two reasons why alternative OSes are gaining popularity. According to CNET, 'Alternative OS-makers no longer need rely on their "Microsoft sucks, and we're not Microsoft" appeal. This year, the sentiment is "Our OSes stand on their own merits." And this year, they can back it up.' " Ya know, a year ago nobody in the media mentioned Linux. Sure, Slashdot was easier to run because there were fewer articles to pick from, but now, Linux is recognized everywhere. Very cool.

Toast writes "According to CNET, Linux (and some other alternative OSes) are the #1 trend for 1998. They cite the Gimp and StarOffice as two reasons why alternative OSes are gaining popularity. According to CNET, 'Alternative OS-makers no longer need rely on their "Microsoft sucks, and we're not Microsoft" appeal. This year, the sentiment is "Our OSes stand on their own merits." And this year, they can back it up.' " Ya know, a year ago nobody in the media mentioned Linux. Sure, Slashdot was easier to run because there were fewer articles to pick from, but now, Linux is recognized everywhere. Very cool.

Holiday writes "Sun Microsystems has changed the name of Solaris 2.7 to Solaris 7. Apparently they wish to follow HP's lead into large version numbers." In related news Microsoft's NT 5.0 will be renamed Windows 2000. And since we're talking NT, here is a review of its latest features. I find it amusing that command line enhancements are among them. It's also interesting to see that while data may be imported from NDS, it can't be exported back again -- reducing the value of Novell's NDS... Thanks to Vertigo1 and Phantom of the Operating System.

BOredAtWork wrote in to send us this CNET Article on DivX. For those who don't know, DivX is sorta DVD, but evil because they want you to buy the disc, and pay $5 a pop to play it after the first 48 hours. Oh, and it will only work in your player. Sounds like a great idea if you are a shrew.

Graeme McLaughlin sent us a link to an interesting where Gil Amelio Speaks about Apple, and how Jobs is taking all the credit for Amelio's work. Sounds reasonable, but I'm still skeptical.

C|Net is running a review of "alternative" operating systems for the Intel platform. The review talks about the various political and technical merits of Linux, OS/2, FreeBSD, BeOS, and New Deal Office 98. The article is very fair, and presents a suprisingly well supported discussion of benefits and disadvantages of the operating systems. Worth a read.

C|Net is running a review of "alternative" operating systems for the Intel platform. The review talks about the various political and technical merits of Linux, OS/2, FreeBSD, BeOS, and New Deal Office 98. The article is very fair, and presents a suprisingly well supported discussion of benefits and disadvantages of the operating systems. Worth a read.

Nicholas Murphy wrote in to tell us that Builder.com's big Linux experiment has recieved something of an update. Dan talks about his preconceptions with Linux, and even mentions Slashdot! Interesting stuff and I hope he's successful.

Nir Arbel wrote in to tell us that Cnet has awarded Apache the 'best Internet server application of the year'. Sorta related is Craig Boesch who wrote in with a link to covalent.net who recently released the Raven SSL module for Apache. It's a commercial program, but 7% of every purchase goes back to Apache. I really love seeing companies release cool commercial add ons to cool programs, and giving something back.