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A troubling fact about Google is that Google can exerce de facto censorship by quietly removing sites from its index. Since Google is what many people use to look for information on the WWW (I myself don't use so-called portals, and I know many people who use Google as their startup page), this may effectively prevent them from finding those sites.

Think that I'm paranoid? I'm not implying that Google would do that out of bad will, or that they have a political or economic agenda. Yet, Google is a US corporation, and US laws (on copyright, against so-called software piracy, etc...) can be used against it by corporations with larger pockets and larger legal teams. For instance, the Church of Scientology has had Google remove links to sites discussing the Church's teachings.

This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored. We can therefore rightly fear that fear of litigation may force Google to take more and more controversial sites off.

I don't understand this company... they are a bunch of cry babies!
When Apple released Safari these fools cried a bloody river
Now after they complained about the cost of producing a Mac version of Opera... they release a linux version.
For some reason I don't expect this company to be around for much longer... just my opinion.

From RFC 2549
The highly unofficial CPIP WG
Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight

Mandatory babelfish translation

Or a zdnet article

its amazing that AOL is circumventing the FCC rules, I was pretty disapointed when AOL IM protocol wasn't forced open during the merger but this is ridiculous. To brashlly declare it doesnt hold a dominant control over IM, have they forgotten about AOL IM & ICQ???

News.com article
"The petition argues that AOL's IM services, AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, face more competition from Microsoft and Yahoo, both of which have launched video conferencing features on their respective IM clients. The petition also disputes the order's original argument that AOL's dominance would increase given the lack of interoperability, now that MSN and Yahoo have amassed millions of users as well.

"There is no longer any plausible reason to conclude either that AOL is dominant or that the market is in danger of 'tipping' to AOL," said Northwestern University professor William P. Rogerson, who provided an affidavit on behalf of AOL Time Warner. "

also alarming, William P. Rogerson is the Chief Economist of the FCC

"Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected."

"They're not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion ... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion."

"Today we slaughtered them in the airport. They are out of Saddam International Airport. The force that was in the airport, this force was destroyed."
"NO", snapped Mr al-Sahaf, "We have retaken the airport. There are NO Americans there. I will take you there and show you. IN ONE HOUR!"

"Listen, this explosion does not frighten us any langer. The cruise missiles do not frighten anyone. We are catchign them like fish in a river. I mean here that over the past two days we managed to shoot down 196 missiles before they hit their target."

"It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don't know why they were fired into Kuwait."

"They are sick in their minds. They say they brought 65 tanks into center of city. I say to you this talk is not true. This is part of their sick mind."

"Our initial assessment is that they will all die"

"Those are not Iraqi soldiers at all. Where did they bring them from?"

Sources:
zdnet article
Iraqi Info Minister Fan Site(down atm, but will be back soon)
Working Version of previous site as of 4-12-03 3:15AM CDT

Fox News rules by the way. Watch it everyday! Go Sean Hannity!

The site of a card carrying R, me!

Just out of curiosity, does anyone think /. should have a policy regarding these kind of press releases? Sometimes they may contain useful information to be sure but here you have the Vice President of this very organization really just having the editors post a promo puff piece. Not to impinge on the credibility of an institute represented by the amazing "Father of Invention" as proclaimed by that hard hitting news source the Boulder Daily Camera, but seeing how this issue has come up recently for google it seems relevent to wonder if /. to should be considering it as well.

I know, the new mySQL release (see the recent news.com story about the 4.1 release.

However, the work-arounds you mention (temp table etc) are just that. Work arounds. And the final release is still about eight months down the road.

And there are still no stored procs or foreign-key support. Those are show-stoppers for any highly transactional site.

But mySQL IS getting better. Which is good.

...remember that Apple has been planning its own online music-buying service for a while now, having announced it just last month. Obviously this is a BIG step towards making that successful for themselves.

It's MICROSOFT'S JAVA IMPLEMENTATION.

The problem is NOT Java.

The problem is (and always has been) Micro$oft's purposely broken version of Java.

Most of the headlines give very misleading takes on nearly every semi-weekly critical patch. Rather than fix a problem they alone produced (in this case with their Java-variant) , the response seems to be to work on editors to change headlines and/or slide unfavorable articles quickly off the front of the site and into the back pages. Rather than improving performance, interoperability, stability or security, new EULAs forbid the publication of benchmarks. Or Ballmer or Gates, in extreme cases, chase after decision makers with junkets, golf trips and such.

And the same problems surface again and again.

Isn't it about time some kid points and shouts, "the emperor has no clothes"? We are not dealing with a crappy software company, but at best a skilled marketing company or at worst a pyramid scheme.

It's MICROSOFT'S JAVA IMPLEMENTATION.

The problem is NOT Java.

The problem is (and always has been) Micro$oft's purposely broken version of Java.

Most of the headlines give very misleading takes on nearly every semi-weekly critical patch. Rather than fix a problem they alone produced (in this case with their Java-variant) , the response seems to be to work on editors to change headlines and/or slide unfavorable articles quickly off the front of the site and into the back pages. Rather than improving performance, interoperability, stability or security, new EULAs forbid the publication of benchmarks. Or Ballmer or Gates, in extreme cases, chase after decision makers with junkets, golf trips and such.

And the same problems surface again and again.

Isn't it about time some kid points and shouts, "the emperor has no clothes"? We are not dealing with a crappy software company, but at best a skilled marketing company or at worst a pyramid scheme.

is support for more than 4GB of memory a first for 32-bit x86 operating systems?

As others have noted, Windows NT 5.0^H^H^H^H^H^H2000 also supports it.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission gave his blessing on Wednesday to an emerging technology that would provide high-speed Internet service through power lines.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell toured a house in suburban Maryland that had been set up to showcase the new service, which transmits e-mail, Web pages, telephone service and other data over the existing power grid and through standard electrical outlets.

In the living room, Powell listened to an Internet radio broadcast and watched the movie "Ice Age" on a flat-screen 42-inch television streaming from another computer miles away.

No need to guess, AMD already paid their dues to Microsoft. Jerry Sanders (founder and former CEO of AMD) testified in favor of Microsoft in their anti-trust trial. Well, to be fair, AMD claims that this was not to encourage Microsoft to port to x86-64, but it certainly did seem like it at the time.

Here's a story about it.

What about this location tracking scheme in the US and this report?

You should read on the subject before you start calling security conscious people like me paranoid.

Maybe that's their idea: "they're not about to change anytime soon, that'll be too difficult for them; let's go ahead and jab them with this new license."

AMD holds up Athlon. Waiting for Windows to port to it. Microsoft may have "moved on"; but it wasn't ~that~ long ago. Remember MP3s ???

If I read the interview at ZDNet correctly, the Opteron can due both 32-bit addressing or 64-bit addressing.

To quote directly: One product feature "is the integration of the memory controller onto the microprocessor silicon, which of course is a good thing for memory latency, and hence a very good thing for performance."

32-bit applications will also get this feature, meaning that they should see improvements as well. It's not exclusive to the 64-bit apps. Both should due well on this architecture.

This is no news to me. I remember reading that AMD was delaying their 64-bit processors until next fall, the reason was apparently that they wanted to have a version of Windows to run on it.

It is therefore no surprise that Microsoft announces an appropriate version of Windows in the same time frame!

This is offtopic but I saw this story at CNET last week talking about JBOSS . The idea is basically creating the underpinnings for JAVA much the way .NET creates most of the underpinnings for .NET apps. Maybe this is reinventing the wheel but it sounded like a good idea to me.

Ummm....ok...you need to read the information that came out of Sun's analysist conference on throughput computing. If anything, the SPARC processor technology emerging could be a whole new lease on life for the processor and the architecture it lives in.

The judge disagreed, Uy said, ruling that Uy did not violate the state's harassment laws in part because he posted true information about Moore's business contact data on his site.

In this account B. Gates welcomes Chinese software theft publicly. 'Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."'
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html?legacy=c net

That could answer any questions about the motivation "the world's richest man" might have, wouldn't you think so?

Instead of worrying about a leaky Windows key, why don't you just use this to kill it?

"A utility to disable the Windows key and context menu key on newer 104-key Windows 95 keyboards. Great for preventing interruption of DOS or DirectX games."

I am reminded of an Arab proverb about not letting the camel's nose into the tent, as soon the rest of the camel will follow.

Once the critical market share is reached, then client support for non-DRM/Palladium encumbered platforms can then be dropped.

A further indication is that Office 2003 won't be available for systems prior to Windows 2000 SP3 and Windows XP, plus the failure to join all other industry members and participate in creating open formats for productivity software. Any doubts that DRM+Subscription is not the near term goal can be put to rest by comparing the EULAs for those with earlier EULAs. Or see the sudden departure from the Web services group.

Perhaps we should also extend our attention to Microsoft's other desperate lobbying efforts. Or even to their financial crisis.

I am reminded of an Arab proverb about not letting the camel's nose into the tent, as soon the rest of the camel will follow.

Once the critical market share is reached, then client support for non-DRM/Palladium encumbered platforms can then be dropped.

A further indication is that Office 2003 won't be available for systems prior to Windows 2000 SP3 and Windows XP, plus the failure to join all other industry members and participate in creating open formats for productivity software. Any doubts that DRM+Subscription is not the near term goal can be put to rest by comparing the EULAs for those with earlier EULAs. Or see the sudden departure from the Web services group.

Perhaps we should also extend our attention to Microsoft's other desperate lobbying efforts. Or even to their financial crisis.

1)ISO Buster to restore corrupted CD's. Isobuster

3)Restore lost data on hard disks Google and Download.com

I wonder if this is such a concern (and the court hasn't thrown it out already) because this person's "place of business" happens to be his home. I mean, would there be an issue here if all the spam, junk mail and boxes were being received at an office somewhere else?

Disregarding that question, I definitely have a hard time sympathizing with his case, least of all because he's a spammer. There's a lot of noise about "right to privacy" in many circles, the most notable being celebrity status and what constitutes "public information" about private citizens on the net. But what right to privacy of your home information do you expect if you're listing it in TLD registration information? If I allow my phone number to be published in a phone book (and nowadays, that I don't put it in a "do not call" registry), do I have a reasonable expectation that I will never receive calls selling vacuum cleaners and low low interest rates on home equity loans?

Someone else brought up the issue of the Nuremberg files, specifically how courts have found that simply listing this information incites people to commit actions against them. And while people who make threats and perform other illegal actions should definitely be prosecuted, I don't see how someone can be compelled to not display public information that is available elsewhere.

Spammers often use the defense that people who don't want their "offers" shouldn't put their addresses in the public domain (where the public domain means almost anywhere in public that spammers can conceivably connect to and harvest), and certainly that's the common wisdom today, not just among spammers but anyone looking to control their inbox. But if spammers are going to play by these rules, they must also be prepared to live by them, and if someone can get their contact information off a publicly connectable system, they must be ready to deal with the results. They certainly need no warning that making a living as a spammer is one of the more unpopular positions one can make for oneself.

Frankly, this whole thing reeks of someone exercising their right to free speech and then complaining when they find their views to be wildly unpopular with their audience. One has the right to spam, but one does not have the right to be free of, and immune from, the reaction of the spammed.

Graphic images appearing unbidden on PCs by way of e-mail in-boxes could qualify as evidence of a "hostile work environment," something that's prohibited by federal employment law.
Porn spam--legal minefield for employers

"Just as an employer has a duty to protect from patrons and other people--like the (delivery) guy who fondles a secretary--there's a good theory saying a company has a duty to filter (offensive e-mail) even if the employees are being harassed entirely from far outside the company walls," Volokh said. "If the employer is reasonably capable of filtering the material, and if it doesn't do that, it would be held liable."

Wow, interesting how spam could be the basis for a hostile work enviromnet lawsuit.

later,

And this is why Clear Channel and all the rest of them are kissing up to the current government. Michael Powell, Colin Powell's son head up the FCC. Now with this big bill coming up, and nepotism at it's extreme throughout the current government, everyone has to kiss ass.

I have no doubt what-so-ever that they will loosen the restrictions, and eventually the radio stations will come down to two different conglomerates owning 95% of all stations.

If you're thinking they're gonna realise this and do anything about it, remember that this is the administration that basically gave microsoft a slap on the wrist.

Verizon Introduces Wi-Fi Across Northeast

Verizon points Wi-Fi at small businesses

You might know the above but I betcha you don't know this:
You are not a nerd if you don't know this

(You have to read the link to Project for New American Century on this page

there is a vast and great difference between child porn, the majority of which feature children and pre-teens, and teenage girls.

biologically, teenage girls are sexually attractive.

Spam suits seek poetic justice

Here's a question that isn't flamebait:

We started to hear rumblings from SCO about Linux earlier this year (and, typically, ignored them). Specifically, the possibility of SCO charging users of Linux for using what SCO claimed was its IP. Therefore, my question is: does SCO plan to attack other companies or *users* at any point, regardless of what happens with IBM? For instance, would SCO bill Google $96 for each installation of Linux on that massive server farm? Or do you plan to seek licensing from actual Linux vendors like RedHat? The IBM lawsuit seems to simply cover damages.

Second question: on that note, what is the point to suing IBM? If you seriously believe that Linux infringes on SCO's IP in some way, how is suing the largest and wealthiest company working with Linux fundamental to your strategy? This seems like an uphill route to take, and not necessarily the best way to establish a basis for future settlements with other Linux vendors. (Unless, of course, SCO is so fucked already that you're hoping for some quick money from a buyout or one-in-a-million surprise win.)

Third question: aside from the obvious fact that you've crippled SCO's ability to ever compete in the Linux (-compatible) market and have ensured that no open-/free-software developers will ever work with you, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? This is IBM. Who once shook down Sun, just for the hell of it. Who made $1bn profit on $22bn revenues just last quarter, and whose revenues have gone up by more than 20% just this year when we're in an economic downturn. Oh, and they've got $96bn in assets. I bet they employ more lawyers than SCO has total employees. Do you expect SCO to have any cash reserves left by the time IBM's lawyers are done with you?'

Fourth question: if you're unable to secure a full injunction against IBM on Unix sales, will you continue the lawsuit? The way I see it, the only way you have any chance is if the judge grants the injunction, in which case IBM might panic and settle.

http://news.com.com/2100-1041-995549.html?tag=fd_t op

Please note that according to this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education that a lot of the colleges are surprised and upset that the RIAA did not contact them or try to work with them on this. My guess is that it's because the institutions have lawyers who can defend in court the fact that a search engine is not illegal. So skip the lawyers by skipping the college. Oh, and don't tell the students until after the lawsuits are filed.

who actually mixes them them the actual search results? NO ONE. no search engine of any size does this period. just because you say "they" do, and don't say who "they" are, doesnt make it true.

who actually mixes them them the actual search results? NO ONE. no search engine of any size does this period. just because you say "they" do, and don't say who "they" are, doesnt make it true.

The recording industry has stepped up its campaign against campus music swapping, filing suit against four university students who operated file-search services on their school's internal networks.

The lawsuits, filed against two students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and one each at Princeton University and Michigan Technological University, ratchet up the pressure that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently has been putting on universities to block campus file-trading. The trade group still has not filed suit against average file-swappers who use more common services such as Kazaa, however.

"The people who run these (campus) networks know full well what they are doing--operating a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music thievery," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "The lawsuits we've filed represent an appropriate step given the seriousness of the offense."

University students have been widely viewed as the core of the various file-swapping networks ever since the appearance of Napster on the digital scene in late 1999. Universities have seen half or more of their network bandwidth used by people uploading and downloading songs, software and movies over the past few years.

Schools have attempted to crack down on the practice of file swapping in various ways, ranging from blocking network traffic associated with Napster or Kazaa to confiscating computers used to trade files. In a recent congressional hearing, some lawmakers called for criminal prosecutions for campus file-swappers.

In its lawsuits, the RIAA compares the use of the campus search software--variously called "Phynd," "Flatlan" or "Direct Connect"--to the defunct Napster service, dubbing the services "local area Napster networks." The particular technology in these lawsuits in fact represents something different than the file-swapping techniques used by Napster or Kazaa, however.

"Phynd" and the other pieces of software set up servers--often on ordinary dorm room PCs--that search all the computers connected to a campus network that have Windows file-sharing turned on. Unlike Napster or Kazaa, which helped create a network of computers that would not have existed otherwise, "Phynd" and the others search a network that already exists.

"Dan," a university student who runs a similar server but has not been sued, said the RIAA is missing critical differences in the file-sharing technologies. He asked that his full name and university not be used.

"With or without these services, people would be able to share these files," the student said. "It's Microsoft that's allowing people to share these files; we're just accessing public information."

That difference in technology may or may not have any effect in court, attorneys said.

"It does seem like all it's doing is indexing resources that are available on a network that people are already a part of," said Fred Von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group that has defended file-swapping companies in court against the RIAA. "It doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with building a tool to do that. And it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with running that tool."

Where the students could run into shadier legal territory is when those indexes and search results come back loaded with MP3 files, Lohmann said. According to the RIAA lawsuits, several of the students also maintained archives of hundreds of songs on their own machines.

All four civil suits were filed in federal court near the universities.

Actually, they may have. Tivo holds 20-odd patents covering many aspects of its DVR technology... see this , this and this, for example. They've tried to enforce them, too.

And what Tivo hasn't patented, SonicBlue/Replay probably has. Granted, SonicBlue won't exist much longer, but someone is bound to buy the patent rights, and they'll probably try to enforce them.

I looked at news.com today and realised maybe Apache did "Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance" IIS dominance in the market of web server bugs: The Apache Software Foundation has released a patch for its Apache 2.0 HTTP Server to thwart a "significant" denial-of-service vulnerability. I have not heard about IIS vulnerabilities recently.

Tivo no longer subsidizes hardware. Series 1 hardware was subsidized, but Series 2 is not.

"With the Series2, we're out of the subsidy business," Ramsay said.

That's TiVo Chief Executive Mike Ramsay as quoted at news.com

Well, basically, yes. If they never existed, you never would have missed them. :) But really, they would have devised another way to accomplish what they're trying to do that doesn't infringe on Acacia's patent.

So you think they approve patents they don't even understand? The patent office is supposed to decide if the patent is okay or not, and if they don't know what the hell they're doing, then they have no purpose.

Well, that's the feeling I get considering how many broad patents are issued, espessially in the software area. It was my understanding they weren't supposed to issue broad patents.

Believe it or not, you can actually search for and read already issued patents.

Yes, you can. So why is RealNetworks a company? Why does Ogg exist? How does Fraunhofer have patents on MP3? Why did Microsoft create WMP? Apple has had QuickTime for years. I guess none of them bothered to search for patents?

Perhaps it's more along the lines of these patents being obscure and hard - if not impossible - to find, or the fact there's 6+ million. You can describe a patent on cookies without actually using the word 'cookie'. Now how exactly is anyone supposed to find that patent?

Want another example? SBC claims Web frames patent. Why didn't they try to enforce this patent when W3C added them to the HTML specifications in 1997? And Netscape, Microsoft and others had browers that could render them probably earlier than that.

I don't know where you're getting this entrapment stuff from.

Entrapment probably wasn't the right word. Perhaps extorsion would have been better.

Remember this? The makers of Spider-Man imposed advertisements for companies including Cingular Wireless ("can you see me now? Good!") over genuine Times Square ads for companies like NBC and Samsung. Constitutionally protected, mate!

Regardless of whether that's legal, dodgy, or whatever, it's entirely different from manipulating the news. Journalists seem to forget what journalism actually is these days, and instead desperately want to be thought of as intellectually-astute commentators, while this photographer apparently would prefer to be a starving artist rather than an unbiased "just the facts, ma'am" news photographer. Silly sods. I so loathe the media.

One of the Internet's most obscure technologies came to life last weekend: transmitting network information by carrier pigeon.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-257064.html

Actually, if they posted it again, it would be kinda funny again. I think the odd number of times something is posted, it's funny. Even number of times, it's just not as good to read.

Check the download.com april first joke.

was found here yesterday. I don't think it is a joke.

In rereading this, I realized not everyone would necessarily understand the context of a micromonopoly and I probably should have clarified it a bit in my original post. In a story on Slashdot about a month ago Lexmark wins injunction in DMCA case, this basically said no one but Lexmark can create refills for their printers. The claim is they break even on the printers, then make their profit on the toner & ink cartridges. Microsoft is in the same boat with their xBox because they take a hit of $125 for ever y one they sell, hoping to gain marketshare with that loss & sales of games in compensation. To me, this smacks of a "micromonopoly" because it's a vertical market per se. I guess technically speaking, it is bundling. And that's what Microsoft did for years - charging OEMs the price of Windows, even if people installed some other operating system on it without ever booting Windows. IBM got in trouble for bundling their OS software such that it would only run on their iron. Competing OS software would not run on their hardware. What happens if Microsoft decides to do the same thing with Lindows or with VMWare (such that their software doesn't run on either)? Microsoft has already purchased a competitor to VMWare. Perhaps I should be asking, "Should companies be permitted to choose their profit/business structure and if they choose it in a fashion such as has been explained, have an automatic vertical/micro/mini monopoly (but locking everyone else out) ?

Check out the review (Both Real/WMF format available) Here on CNet News.com.

According to what I've read here:
CNET Article

"The House passed a bill which makes it illegal for child pornographers to disseminate obscene, computer-generated images of children," Bush said. "It's an important piece of legislation."

Would this be illegal?:
Drunk Bottemless "dancing" Baby