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Leave it to Microsoft.

I don't think we need Utah legislators dictating technology to us. Maybe I'm cynical after looking at other tech-laws. Do we really want laws written by someone who needs an assistant to write an email? I think everyone in my office has a computer that operates about 20-30% too slow due to spyware/adware. Maybe people should increase security on their browsers and watch what they download. While a law against spyware sounds cool, I just believe it's going to backfire on us somehow. Anyway this law wouldn't even protect against Gator (or whatever they're called) anyway :)

Companies like Claria and WhenU, for example, are legal adware providers, although each has been involved in high-profile lawsuits over their software. Both companies still face pending legal action.

What are they smoking? Claria is spyware.

The result, after some negotiation and input from Net companies, is a bill that bars companies from installing software that reports its users' online actions, sends any personal data to other companies, or pops up advertisements without permission. It contains some loopholes: Advertisements served by ordinary HTML or JavaScript are exempted, as are the ordinary "cookies" often used to help personalize Web pages.

I still don't see how this is bad. Sure it has 'enforcement' issues, but it carries a $10,000 fine, it might serve as a good deterrent.

Judge calls Microsoft a "monopoly"As part of his findings of fact, Judge Jackson stated, "In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market." Who am I to argue with a Judge?

Judge calls Microsoft a "monopoly"As part of his findings of fact, Judge Jackson stated, "In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market." Who am I to argue with a Judge?

• "Not true at all. Depending on who you talk to, the problem with the RIAA/MPAA isn't that they are trying to protect copyrights. The problems include:"

Of course, you just did exactly what I'm talking about, flow the dialog into the same old anti-RIAA thing.

Look, I agree that P2P tech itself should not be held accountable. And I agreed with the EFF when that was their position. And note also that the EFF used to suggest that the RIAA should be suing infringers.

But the EFF has come to adapt a pro file-sharing-even-when-it's-copyrighted schtick, and that's when they got off track.

CNET News reported five days ago on the 10th that both Yukon and Whidbey would be delayed and their final names. They need that time if they are going to clean up the shit HTML and JS outputed by VS. Not that they will, that would allow people to use Firefox.

The company said Wednesday that it has decided to push out to the first half of 2005 the delivery of the next major edition of SQL Server, code-named Yukon, and a closely related update to Visual Studio.Net, called Whidbey. Until recently, the company had said that both products would ship by the end of this year.

The final product names for Yukon and Whidbey will be SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server.

I think I gave up on Hotmail in early 1999. At that time it was sluggish and unreliable despite the ample internet connection at the university through which I was connecting. At least I didn't regularly experience slow performance on other Internet sites.

I'm not sure where the Spammers were getting my address; I've never received any appreciable volume of spam (more than one or two per week) in any other email account I've held. Apparently however, this sort of experience is all too common. Of course other spam problems have existed with Hotmail, such as this, and this, and this.

But what really finally pushed me over the edge to dump Hotmail was when the company (as far as I could tell) randomly disabled my account for a violation of the terms of service. Which struck me as odd, since I hadn't done anything with the account besides delete spam from it, read one or two messages a day, and even less frequently send someone a message. It took five futile days of emailing and aggravating telephone calls before I was finally able to talk to a human being (now it might be harder; I really don't know, but I'm also fortunately never going to have to find out). Hotmail never did tell me what I had done to violate the ToS, but nonetheless reinstated my account. Still, given the other debilitating problems with the service, and given that I had no idea what I had done or allegedly done to violate my user agreement (and thus had no way of knowing how not to violate it again) I decided it was time to dump Hotmail.

Broadly speaking, the Hotmail service left me with the impression that it was not being carefully managed and maintained, that Microsoft hadn't effectively managed the transition to a MS owned subsidiary, or that the service was growing faster than the systems serving it. There were also rumors that the transition from Sun to Windows servers wasn't too smooth and might have resulted in poor performance during the transition period, but I'm not sure how true those rumors were. Plus, by 1999 there were a lot of other free web-based email services opening up. I eventually settled on an australia.edu account. That service wasn't always really fast, but it was reliable, didn't fill my inbox with spam, I was never accused of violating the terms of service, and it gave me a more unique and memorable email address.

Today I suspect Hotmail works better -- otherwise its downtime wouldn't have made front page news on Slashdot -- but its improvements were too late for me. I was driven away from Hotmail long ago.

Sorry your little goatse redirect link doesn't work because goatse.cx has been offline for 4 MONTHS you idiot.

That was the most pathetic troll i've seen in a while. In fact, CNET posted an article about how dumb you are here.

and please mod this person up. (S)He is correct in stating that the AMD model numbers are derived NOT from the Pentium 4, the Athlon classic, the Centrino, Celeron, PIII, Crusoe, 8088, or any other God-forsaken chip, but from the Thunderbird core Athlon CPUs.

Are the CRIA making sure to go only after the P2P users who have uploaded?

I ask since...possesing copies of music you dont own, including P2P downloading is TOTALLY LEGAL here in canada. (first link is to the govt site explaining fair use, explaining you can copy any music, even music you dont own, as long as YOU are the one making the copy)

Fair use covers the fact that I can 100% legally borrow my friends cd's and copy them. He, on the other hand, CAN NOT make a copy for me.

So I guess Canada is not totally regressing into the USA :)

However, he is mistaken that "GPL type licence agreements push the liablity to the users." The GPL specifically puts the patent onus on the code contributor.

As far as end-user liability goes, I fail to see the difference between the GPL and the EULAs of closed software. While GPL projects are certainly vulnerable, there have already been significant successful patent infringement claims against closed software that may affect the end-users of that software.

For example, Timeline recently won a patent infringement suit against Microsoft that potentially could require licencing royalties from developers and even end-users of SQL Server.

There is also Eolas' successful suit against Microsoft for Internet Explorer, which Anderer refers to.

BTW, when Anderer says that MSFT has 50 patent lawsuits waiting in the queue, I read that as saying Microsoft will be the defendant in those suits.

So it seems the jury is still out on what the hell paypal is. But the Feds made it very clear that paypal very well might fall under state bank regulation.

I think there should be a great deal of concern of new search engines in China. The major customer in China is the state and a number of companies including Cisco, Yahoo, and Microsoft have been catering their software to permit Chinese censorship. The Chinese government has also been active in removing certain keywords from use in popular search engines, like google.
If I type in 'Falun Gong' or 'VIP Reference' (page 30-31)' in any of these new search engines, I recieve no content. Sure these my offer new commerical opportunities, like MP3 searching. Both they are part of state control in China. Companies back in 2000 had to agree to self-censorship. These new sites represent a growing trend of corporate complicity in Chinese censorship. And if common search engines are actively controlling what is 'found' on the Internet, there is great concern that average citizens will become acostumed to a regulated Internet.

fenn

Typical Slashdot drone again. The .doc file format and .xls file format (the two most popular) did not change from Office 97 to Office XP (2002). Five years and three version of Office, no changes. The only reason the file format has changed in Office 2003 is to take advantage of XML. Of course, if they hadn't updated it to use XML you would be bitching about that also, saying how they don't "support new technologies" or innovate in new version. You should really try doing some research about these things before you blindly bash them. Microsoft also makes the schema available for FREE and offers Royalty-Free licensing of their specific implementations!

Will we now see Photorealistic Renderman come out for OSX and the G5? Hopefully?

Actually around last SIGGRAPH they mentioned that if you were interested on that to email them. If there was enough interest they would probably start a beta test program. Not sure what came of it though. They have already benchmarked PRMan on G5, actually they had them running it at their booth last SIGGRAPH.

PRMan on a G5

Will the rendering farm also be switching to the G5 in the future, ala Virginia Tech?

Well they just switched to Linux RackSaver servers last year.

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel

The rendar farm however still uses a mixture of SUNs and SGI

Well maybe. Pixar switched to RackSaver Linux blade servers for their renderfarm about a year ago. Their website still lists them as clients though that could have changed.

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel
RackSaver Customers

Cnet is reporting that Texas-based Symbiot plans to release a corporate defense system that fights back against distributed denial-of-service and hacker attacks by launching counterstrikes. See the press report and white paper for more.

...picks up where Forbes fails, the truth.
here

Yes, this article is both misleading and old news. You can find this from CA on Newsforge:

CA senior VP of product development Mark Barrenechea says that Bench's claim is nonsense. CA has not paid SCO any Linux taxes, he said.

Drawing up short of calling SCO a liar, Barrenechea claims that SCO has twisted a $40 million breach-of-contract settlement that CA paid last summer to the Canopy Group, SCO's biggest stockholder, and Center 7, another Canopy company, and has turned it into a purported Linux license.

As a "small part" of that settlement, Barrenechea said, CA got a bunch of UnixWare licenses that it needed to support its UnixWare customers. SCO, he said, had just attached a transparent Linux indemnification to all UnixWare licenses and that is how SCO comes off calling CA a Linux licensee.

You'll also find this on news.com.com.com.com:

Computer Associates, which has begun making its management software available on Linux, acknowledged it had the license, but took pains to distance itself from SCO's methods.

"CA disagrees with SCO's tactics, which are intended to intimidate and threaten customers. CA's license for Linux technology is part of a larger settlement with the Canopy Group. It has nothing to do with SCO's strategy of intimidation," said a statement from Sam Greenblatt, senior vice president and chief architect of CA's Linux Technology Group.

Greenblatt has been an outspoken Linux fan. "The whole world is going to unite around a single operating system, and it's going to be Linux," he said in a keynote address at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in January.

Basically Canopy threw in the licenses as part of a settlement with Canopy's Center7 company. I wonder if SCO broke any confidentiality agreements regarding the settlement by announcing that CA was a Linux IP Licensee. ;)

Pretty hard to find a notebook with no OS on it. And in many cases, Linux supports only a subset of the functionality of Windows on notebook hardware.

PETA actually was involved in similar disputes on both sides of the issue, since they themselves registered ringlingbrothers.com for a protest site.

Lexmark is winning this case although I think appeals are still going on.

A few years back, during the eFront Fiasco, someone got a hold of ICQ Chat Logs off of the machine of Sam Jain, the CEO of eFront. I was an administrator of one of the sites that got hit hard by the scandal, and if my memory serves the chat logs (which included a lot of very embarassing things being said by Sam and other higher-ups at eFront) were one of the big things that resulted in eFront's eventual destruction.

I can only imagine how much worse it will get when ICQ expands its services.

http://zdnet.com.com/1200-1110-5083063.html

spybot is my favourite and seems to find more than adaware

http://security.kolla.de/
(downish..)

or get it here:

http://download.com.com/3000-2144-10194058.html?ta g=lst-0-1

Ad-Aware is great, especially when run along with Spybot Search and Destroy. (Also Here - Spybot's site is a little slow already...) Run both, and they cover for each other's misses.

instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith.

My old P1 used to take ~15 minutes to render a video composite, while today it happens real-time... but I guess that Bill also counts on his marketshare not changing

A feature in the word-processing software tracks changes to documents, who made those changes, and when they were made. These notations typically are invisible to someone reading a Word document. But as some lawyers, businesspeople and politicians have learned the hard way, Word can also display so-called metadata in the document--including the original version and all subsequent changes. This information is available by viewing the document under "original showing markup" or "final showing markup."

http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-1009127.html

I find this zdnet news article to be velly intellesting.

This article is more interesting:
http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5170181.html?tag=n efd_top

I doubt their damage control is very credible, as clearly Microsoft is involved:

SCO's blanket dismissal of the leaked memo as the mistaken assumptions of an independent contractor doesn't explain several parts of the letter which seem to indicate knowledge of Microsoft's involvement in SCO's investment search, however.

For example, the memo states that Microsoft apparently wanted to use private investments in public companies to help fund SCO.

Yes, ESR gets the math wrong.

Stowell of course is just trying to spin it favourable for SCO. Stowell and McBride are well known liars in my opinion, so why would we trust them?

But forget that, here's another and possibly better SCO story:

"That's what pushed EV1Servers, one of SCO's first Linux licensees, to pay up. At a press conference announcing the deal, reporters asked chief Robert Marsh whether he'll demand a refund should SCO lose its Linux cases.

McBride jumped in: "You don't call up your auto insurance company and say, 'Hey, I didn't get in a car wreck.'" -- Yahoo

Note the word 'insurance'. McBride basically is admitting to racketeering!

I'll bet this will come back to haunt him in court filings in the future.

News.com has an article saying it was all "a misunderstanding". Just released minutes ago, there you go, now you know! :)

News.com has an article saying it was all "a misunderstanding". Just released minutes ago, there you go, now you know! :)

I think they are hoping to tie up the courts to the point where they are too busy to throw the book at the SCO executives while at the same time counting on their legal carpet-bombing strategy nets them some settlement profits.

They have a few more tricks up their sleeve...from another news(.com)^2 article:

Linux, which runs well on inexpensive Intel processor-based servers, has become increasingly popular despite SCO's actions. Linux has even spread to the Web site of the U.S. District Court in Nevada, where SCO filed its suit against AutoZone, according to site monitoring firm NetCraft.

Soooo...if the courts threaten to dismiss SCOs case and/or charge them with fraud, they can just sue the court system itself!

Well, IANAL as well, but have some thoughts. It has been the case that deleted files on a hard drive are sought in investigations (a quick search, for example, found an article about Enron files) and are, presumably, admissible in court. An article on Law.com specifically discusses comparison of deleted files with current versions to reveal a change history. If that is the case, then I would assume that the same applies to previous revisions included in a file that still exists, and they would be admissible.

This was removed by SCO from the final court filing against Daimler:

"(C)ertain of plaintiff's copyrighted software code has been materially or exactly copied by Linus Torvalds and/or others for inclusion into one or more distributions of Linux with the copyright management information intentionally removed." -- news.com.com

CHICKEN!

The document was originally written by Microsoft's Vinod Valloppillil, an engineer who analyzes industry trends, said Edmund Muth, the company's enterprise marketing group manager.

Note that this is the argument that the EFF themselves used to make when they suggested that the RIAA should be suing the infringers rather than suing the technology.

But then the EFF logic fell apart when they moved on to justifying the infringers too.

Well, let's see...

• DaimlerChrysler is testing the Nokia Communicator, which "runs on an operating system from Nokia-controlled Symbian, a rival to Microsoft's Windows Mobile" ... " also promoting it as an alternative for companies that do not want to use only Microsoft software."
• DaimlerChrysler Corp. is working on a Linux-based management and navigation system for its cars.
• Related company: DaimlerChrysler Services used Unix and IBM software to merge its financial systems.
• Reporters say that DaimlerChrysler did not like Microsoft's annuity licensing plan and was examining Linux.
• DC using IBM Linux for car crash simulations.
• DC is a German/US merger, as is Novell/SuSe. Affecting DC may affect SuSe in its home market
• "IBM and the German government are getting together to implement Linux as the government's computing platform of choice."
• June 17, 1999, the Financial Post, Canada, Business Group Makes Push for Software Competition (pdf)

  The Canada Europe Round Table, launched yesterday, wants governments to take the lead in using operating systems such as Linux instead of Microsoft's proprietary Windows. The group of 28 companies -- which includes Bombardier Inc., Nortel Networks Corp., Corel Corp., DaimlerChrysler AG and Ericsson AG of Sweden -- suggests "competitive systems" such as Linux should be endorsed at the next round of World Trade Organization (WTO) talks. ... "CERT member Corel" ...

• "Ferrari, Volvo and DaimlerChrysler's Chrysler Group are among the companies that have turned to IBM for systems built around Linux."
• DaimlerChrysler Services Management Awarded 'Best Service' for Progress-Based Application With SonicMQ Integration: Award-winner Uses Progress(R) OpenEdge(TM) (Both Progress and SonicMQ can run on Unix/Linux)
• MySQL has acquired full commercial rights to develop and market future releases of SAP DB, of which there are roughly 5,000 customer installations. SAP DB users include Intel, DaimlerChrysler, Braun, Bayer, Colgate, Yamaha and Toyota South Africa. MySQL and SAP are also developing a future MySQL enterprise database that uses both MySQL and MaxDB.
• DC has been a user of MS products (2003)

AutoZone...

• SCO had claimed that IBM interfered with a contract (which SCO has not provided) and helped AutoZone migrate from SCO software to Linux. But there already is evidence that AutoZone used no SCO software after the change and its own employees did the change. The same statement also indicates that SCO drove AutoZone away, not that IBM interfered. The Red Hat distribution and support was chosen.
• AutoZone is using Wincor Nixdorf Linux store/POS tools.
  Wincor Nixdorf customers:

  * AutoZone * Books-

Has a story on this as well.

The court ruled on the issue of "whether the FCC had the authority to allow states to decide when the Baby Bells must allow competitors access to their voice switching networks". The court decided the FCC did not, and thus "it gave the FCC 60 days to come up with its own rules for each individual market throughout the United States."

CNET News.com has good coverage on the ruling. So far the feedback on the decision is that it is so unfounded and ridiculous, that it is almost certain to be overturned by the Supreme Court (they are appealing after all!).

If we remember our history from way back in Y2K, the original Napster was ordered to install a technology that would block copyrighted songs or shut down. Simply doing filename-based blocking didn't fly, users simply used phonetic spellings. Napster did actually come up with a blocking system that's much like what's being proposed by Audible Magic, but it was too little, too late. See, with good blocking employed on the network, the Napster network lost all of its value. The users fled, and it was game over.

So, you could say such technology, or at least some way to stop users from sharing illegal-to-share songs is already required for any service that operates in the USA. It was found out that nearly 100% of Napster's traffic was illegal, because once they actually blocked the illegal stuff there wasn't much if any traffic left.

Of course, the Kazza's of the world are never going to comply with that, but they already exist in a semi-outlawed state by being forced to incorperate in outside-of-US-reach locations just like online gambling sites do. They're already doing their best to avoid US laws of any kind. Since the barn door's already open on this type of program, I'm not sure there's anything US law can do to truely stop illegal music sharing.

So, this piece of technology might be a great technical discovery, but it's got no use in the real world. It's been tried before. The people who want their copyrighted music for free will just go to systems US laws have a hard time controling... and this system is no solution to that problem.

She ordered IBM to produce memos from IBM Chief Executive Sam Palmisano and from Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a top Linux executive.

Browser Lockout
link to MSN 3rd party Browser issue
Disrespecting Privacy
link to Bad MSN Bot
Now building a search engine that removes our ability to choose?
I seem to remember a few years ago jokes about what would happen if M$ provided searches....

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/pdf/ne/2004/AutoZoneFin alComplaint.pdf

Truly a classic interview on news.com. McBride compares his situation to OJ simpson, implying if the people they are sueing win and get off. Another interesting point was when Farber asks "what about the secure specialized versions of linux that people like the FBI and CIA use, will you be suing them to?" McBride: "No, we dont plan on having them named in the lawsuit tomarrow". McBrides interviews always seem to go in circles. http://news.com.com/2100-1014-5168921.html?tag=nl