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Just because today's evolutionary pressures are harder to define, it doesn't mean they are not there. For instance, natural selection will favor people with fast reflexes and better depth perception because most of us drive cars. College graduates are favored because they typically get higher paying jobs and therefore better healthcare.

Keep looking. Evolution isn't done with us yet.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that Autism/Aspergers is partially a function of evolutionary response to a technological lifestyle rather than an agricultural one. Name another genetic disease that occasionally provides benefits. I'll betcha Autism spectrum disorders are nothing more than Mother Nature trying out new ideas for human brain version X+1, currently in beta and still a little buggy.

Sprint doesn't have a data cap.

Which is why I said "virtually all".

However this new found religion at sprint is merely a marketing ploy and nothing to rely on. Remember they tried data caps in the past..

Also, roam outside their network, and things can get nasty very quickly:

Voice/Data Usage Limitation: Sprint reserves the right, without notice, to limit throughput speeds, and to deny, terminate, modify, disconnect or suspend service if off-network usage in a month exceeds: (1) voice: 800 min. or a majority of minutes; or (2) data: 300 megabytes or a majority of kilobytes. Prohibited network use rules apply. See in-store materials or sprint.com/termsandconditions for specific prohibited uses.

Also THIS Story seems to suggest that Sprint has made no long term commitment to having no data caps.

It may be one of the ways. The majority of their outage is via modified bgp entries (border gateway protocol) so that the routes themselves are gone.

http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telecommunications/how-egypt-pulled-its-internet-plug
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/01/28/how-egypt-cut-itself-off-from-the-net/

DNS alternative would be easier to fix (alternative dns server, distributed hosts files, whatever)

The FTC sued Intel alleging Intel had violated Section 5 of the FTC Act.

A little more digging brings us

The FTC filed its complaints against Intel on Dec. 16, 2009. It charged the chip maker with illegally using its dominant position to stifle competition for decades. The complaint was filed just a month after Intel had settled antitrust and patent disputes with Advanced Micro Devices for US$1.25 billion.

The FTC site adds that

").(1) Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits "unfair methods of competition," and was amended in 1938 also to prohibit "unfair or deceptive acts or practices.

Seems to have been part of a broader move against Intel at the time, I admit I don't remember it very clearly, but Reuters adds

A wide range of antitrust enforcers have gone up against Intel for its controversial pricing incentives. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo accused Intel in November of threatening computer makers and paying billions of dollars of kickbacks to maintain market supremacy. The European Commission has fined Intel 1.06 billion euros ($1.44 billion) for illegally shutting out AMD. In June 2008, South Korea fined Intel some $26 million, finding it offered rebates to PC makers in return for not buying microprocessors made by AMD. Japan's trade commission concluded in 2005 that Intel had violated the country's anti-monopoly act. The case before the FTC is "In the Matter of Intel Corporation," docket number 9341.

Oh and that case can be found here

Maybe he should have watched what you said in Revolution OS.

I agree that compared to you and others, he was terribly late to the party. Still, by the time he did his keynote to fose in 2006, he seemed to be starting to 'get it'.

After Psystar got badly slapped in U.S. courts, sellers of OS X clones are also moving overseas in search of more-favorable (to them) software licensing laws http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/72205DF8C160BD83CC2575590070386E.

Hopefully by then software patents will be invalidated.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/thumbs-down-for-software-patents-in-nz

From the article:

Someone has uploaded a PDF to a Google Group that is claimed to be the proposal for Internet copyright enforcement that the USA has put forward for ACTA, the secret copyright treaty whose seventh round of negotiations just concluded in Guadalajara, Mexico.

I wonder who that someone is who leaked it. It could be part of a strategy to scare the crap out of people so that when they come out with something no more than an international DMCA people will breath a sigh of relief instead of getting all up in arms. What they've leaked is so bad as to almost seem not credible.

From the computerworld.co.nz article:

The chapter on the internet from the draft treaty was shown to the IDG News Service by a source close to people directly involved in the talks, who asked to remain anonymous. Although it was drawn up last October, it is the most recent negotiating text available, according to the source.

So is this a real leak, or something they want disseminated? /paranoia

Why? Because they had different priorities. Probably cheap development, since .NET people are everywhere. Once a system like that starts running, you forget about startup costs and look at maintenance. Considering there was a 7 hour downtime on the market's best day, and they never approached the desired < 10 ms response time, the system was obviously not designed with uptime as the goal.

If it had been designed with lower runtime cost instead of lower development cost, I bet a different technology would have been in order.

Also, Clara Furse who decided to use the Windows solution had been replaced, and the new CEO made it a priority to replace the system, article dated 1 June
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/59A7846C896BEA95CC2575E5007D8F33

Typical slashdot discussion immediately turns to Linux, FOSS and if Linux us ready for the desktop and if it works well with Walmart printers.None of which is very relevant.

This article gives a better information:
    http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/tech/813B5F0E4A319412CC2575C0006F561A

As I read it, the state services commission - the type of government body that supervises other govt departments, has since at least 2000, rolled over government wide contracts for Microsoft every 3 years. Basically since most govt depts were running MS software, then negotiating one government wide agreement covering 10,000+ desktops got bulk discounts from MS. Makes sense.

This year (they started negotiating 2008), MS pretty much didn't bother to discount for the bulk deal; they acted like a monopoly & thought the (smallish) NZ govt would roll over and accept it anyway. Whoops.

With the recession the government was really looking at ways of saving money; and rolling out more MS software with no discount was no discount. So I suspect a lot of departments will just stick with XP/Office2003 or Vista/O2007 (the last deal covered them buying cheap MS products 2006-2009) and not buy as much MS software over the next few years, until MS have an attitude change.

The MS team negotiating this contract will be feeling a little sick right now.. which is good .

I am a New Zealand based developer, and had have sold software to the NZ govt. Previously we sold a Windows desktop app but now (2009) switched to selling a replacement product which is SaaS on a LAMP stack - which tells a story in itself. I think this deal is a good thing as a whole; instead of the department looking at using using some unholy (but cheap) combination of Excel, Access and Sharepoint, they could buy my home-grown solution... which I think is better, but I do have to compete with MS at some level; some potential clients would rather burn hundreds of hours using Excel to crunch data manually than buy our software that does it automatically.

My experience is that government departments are getting a little smarter about purchasing; they all need things like document management systems, so tend to buy Java platform independent solutions and instead of all rolling their own, tend to talk to each other more about sharing solutions. One smallish department I dealt with was proud of having pretty much no printers; every document entering the system got scanned & handled electronically until a letter had to be printed and sent; even then the department mostly replied with emails and txt messages. NZ does do e-govt reasonably well; I can do most interactions with the government online; things like setting up a limited liability company take a few minutes and few bucks online, which does not seem to be common world-wide. I can't think of any government interactions in which I have had to actually go physically to a government office.. the last time was probably 20 years ago, applying for a grant after I left university.

With the move to SaaS suddenly needing MS and assuming there is no important looks less important; which is why this news is news.

What would put another nail in MS's coffin would be them calling the bluff and forcing NZ to take on quite a bit of Open source software. Once past the "OMG it's different then what we have always used" stage, it might be more then enough to the government agencies and lead to more OSS adoption.

I think that's exactly what has already happened! That seems to me to be exactly the reason why the State Services Commission has taken the position they have.

As the summary points out, the SSC has won one award already from the NZ Open Source Awards; in addition, they've been using SUSE (both server and desktop) since at least 2005, and in 2006 they published a guide on using open source software in government departments. (An early version of the guide, prepared for them by a legal firm that also worked for Microsoft, was discussed on Slashdot and received a lot of flak -- so much that the SSC rewrote the guide themselves as a result.)

So yes, I think this is the nail.

I think what they are driving at is all this high tech mumbo jumbo don't mean squat if you ain't got ears on the ground. The problem is during the cold war we got used to dealing with these large governments, like the Russians and the Chinese, that like all large bodies have lots of bureaucracy and a set way of doing things. With these terrorists you are talking about tiny cells, from a few hundred down to just a couple of guys, who basically don't have any infrastructure or preset anything.

Now more than ever we need snitches, informants, and operatives that can blend in and report back to us. Sadly all the good will we had from 9/11 got burnt by Dubya with Iraq and his "yay torture!" crap. This has added to the hatred against the USA at what couldn't be a worse time. Trying to blanket record the whole smash when we create something like 300 exabytes per year on the Net alone just means they are going to be buried in mounds of useless crap while eroding our rights. Same thing with cell phones since everybody and their kids have the things now and bounce from plan to plan all over the place.

So IMHO we need the current administration to disavow the torture and other crap and to try to clean up the messes Dubya left. The sooner we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan the better, and if we stop propping up unpopular "el presidente" types with American aid because they are nice to our corps that would be of the good also. The only way we are going to make any headway against these guys is by having good folks in the regions willing to help us.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't target their communications precisely when we get our sights on one of them, it just means that with the super-connected world we have today there is simply no way to do a blanket job on one form of communication or another, not without destroying the very same freedoms the terrorists want to take from us. But all of this will take time and hard work rebuilding our reputation and doesn't make for catchy soundbytes. So whether we will actually do the work or just try to keep everybody under the "electric eye" remains to be seen.

I think you are confusing actual research with ...

Then sit back down and shut up while you think about it. While you're sitting there, ostensibly thinking, here is some material to consider:

• Real-time cone-beam CT image reconstruction using a mercury's dual cell-based system (DCBS) and a Sony's Playstation 3 (PS3) cluster
• Playstation 3 Consoles Tackle Black Hole Vibrations
• PS3 boosts protein research plan
• Building Supercomputer Using Playstation 3
• PlayStation Cell Speeds Docking Programs
• Researchers Use PlayStation Cluster to Forge a Web Skeleton Key
• Playstation cluster creates cheap supercomputer
• and so on..

Garbage products like xbox have gone down in flames (pun intended) and MS has to make smoke (no pun intended) and noise to distract from the situation. Same crowd is going on attack against OpenOffice.org and other key products. The universal office format, OpenDocument Format, is getting specialized attackers. Repeat lies often enough that people believe them seems to be an ongoing theme from MS.

Whether 1-, 8-. 16, or 32-node clusters, PS3s are useful in computationally intensive tasks. I'd like to see an add-on for Blender or other 3D software that allows adding a PS3 as a single node cluster. If it's there and you're working with a desktop, why not also use the processors of the otherwise idle gaming machine

The objections you rise are valid. Thankfully the smartcard industry knows how to handle them.

Yeah, because they've been doing a great job so far...

Richard Stallman has a few things to say about copyright issues in condensed form here. The bits about helping your neighbors by sharing and how the law should never forbid verbatim, non commercial copy are core to the spirit and purpose of the GPL.

It is fair for Mozilla to guard their trademark, but they should not bother end users with it. EULA's endorse publisher control over users. It can create doubt over people's freedom to modify and share Firefox. Why bother? The vast majority of Firefox users will never compile a line of code, much less become popular distributors of a better/debased version that dilutes trademark and Mozilla's reputation. Imagine if every project decided to be this annoying. GNU/Linux desktops would be as distracting a billboard as Windows.

I'm sure we'll soon have an article about all the Linux admins running around in circles at one of the many forums.

A friend emailed me about this just this morning. Here is what he wrote and my reply:

> I'm going to chalk this up (tentatively) to the increasing popularity of
> Linux, which means that a subset of users will be those who don't actually
> know what they're doing, and how to protect a box-- something long the norm
> in the Windows world:
>
> http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/scrt/CD0B9D97EE6FE411CC25736A000E4723
>
> While there, he noticed an unusual trend when taking down phishing sites.
>> "The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes,
>> which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes," he said.

I am not surprised in the least that this was their conclusion. I don't chalk it up to the increasing popularity of Linux at all. I have never (not once) run across a Linux box operating in a botnet. Nor can anyone name a botnet software that infects Linux boxes. In the last 5 years I have found only one Linux box that had a security issue and that was because of PHP (*spit*) which had an XML-RPC exploit a while back and allowed someone to make the box host a fishing website that looked like some bank website. It seems very rare that a Linux desktop (not a webserver) would fall victim to this. I have never seen a security incident such as a botnet on a Linux desktop. I have seen that phishing page on the Linux server that hosted the bogus PHP install. That's it.

And I suspect that they are using terminology incorrectly. A Linux box hosting a fishing site is not part of a botnet. I can understand how Linux boxes would be more popular for fishing websites. PHP is popular and is a pox on Linux as PHP released a bunch of absolute garbage which only happens to run on Linux. It can run on Windows also but that is the expensive and less reliable way to do it so few people do. If people make a conscious decision to install software on Linux that lets just about anyone use the box for whatever they want such as PHP often does I don't think counts against Linux security.

Glancing over the article I immediately spotted this:

"eBay recently did an in-depth analysis of its threat situation, and while the company is not releasing the results of this analysis, it did uncover a huge number of hacked, botnet computers, said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University."

I challenge anyone to find a single MS sponsored paper or symposium which DOESN'T come to a conclusion favorable to MS and unfavorable to Linux. Just one. And they won't release the raw data. How much is a large botnet? 10? 100? Among millions of infected MS machines. I would also like to know what this alleged Linux botnet software is called.

I am positive that Linux will not be nearly so adversely affected by users who do not know what they are doing. Linux is very different from Windows and is architected for performance, security, and utility instead of being architected to make someone a boatload of money and maintaining monopoly lock-in. (See the fine the EU just imposed on MS.)

Some technical features which help ensure that even if Linux becomes popular on the desktop it won't suffer the same fate as Windows:

* Linux users don't run as admin/root.

* Email programs do not automatically execute attachments.

* Does not depend on filename extensions for anything.

* Does not auto-run anything from inserted media (Worth a laugh: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,299155,00.html )

* System of mandatory access controls (SE Linux) which really locks things down (some people still turn that off but it is improving rapidly, I use it on my desktop).

* Linux also takes advantage of NX (non-executable memory) which is a recent feature of x86 cpu's

A bricked iPhone can be returned for a full switch... Correct me if I am wrong, but its not like they can tell the phone has been "unlocked", as I have not opened this phone in any way, and as such have not voided any warrenty on the hardware.

I haven't added any unauthorized software and the phone is still unusable. Apple is sending me a box it put it in so they can check if I hacked it for themselves. How sweet. 5 days from now I better get a working fun.

Also seems to be the very same guy who won a laptop from the website publishing this story only last year. http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/E2D91FD29 42D4382CC25724400106374

Care to back that up with an actual reference for those of us in the uninformed masses?

Absolutely! The most important reference is the Halloween Documents. Especially interesting (if you don't want to read the actual documents) is the following bit from Microsoft's Official Response to the Halloween documents. I refer specifically to this bit:

"Q: The first document talked about extending standard protocols as a way to "deny OSS projects entry into the market." What does this mean?"
"A: To better serve customers, Microsoft needs to innovate above standard protocols. By innovating above the base protocol, we are able to deliver advanced functionality to users. An example of this is adding transactional support for DTC over HTTP. This would be a value-add and would in no way break the standard or undermine the concept of standards, of which Microsoft is a significant supporter. Yet it would allow us to solve a class of problems in value chain integration for our Web-based customers that are not solved by any public standard today. Microsoft recognizes that customers are not served by implementations that are different without adding value; we therefore support standards as the foundation on which further innovation can be based."

You don't see Microsoft own up to Embrace-and-Extend very often (although they did it in marketspeak...)

Also interesting, right from my first wikipedia link, "Document X
An e-mail from consultant Mike Anderer to SCO's Chris Sontag, also known as Halloween X: Follow The Money. Among other points, describes Microsoft's channeling of US$ 86 million to SCO."

So right they're they were funding the assault on Linux. Although we all see how that has been working out; it's mostly cost IBM a lot of money and provided a lot of entertainment.

You might also read Ballmer: 'Open source is not free'.

You could go back in time and read a commentary on Ballmer's assertion that Linux is like cancer, although that was just an idiot repeating something someone told him about the GPL once.

And ahhhh, here we go, this is one of the articles I've been looking for all this time. Google really needs to deprecate the blogosphere in pagerank, it makes it quite impossible to find old articles because most bloggers are too stupid to cite properly. Ballmer sees free software as Microsoft's enemy No. 1. And keep in mind that Microsoft signed the Novell deal in order to attack Linux: "Ballmer said in a question and answer session at a technology conference that Microsoft signed the deal because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and it wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation"."

Firefox 3 should offer apps access to an offline cache. Were Google to add some code for this, Google Apps could run offline. Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan in an interview indicated: "If Google, for example, were to implement it, Google Docs & Spreadsheets would be available offline."

I was impressed too when I read about it several years ago. Really, this is very old news. The P2P VPN tool Hamachi uses the same system.

AFAIK Skype uses a fallback system when the technique described doesn't work (where UDP traffic is blocked). In those cases it uses a well connected peer (yes, that could be your Skype client) to relay the voice data to the other party. Your PC becomes a Supernode without your knowledge and consent. Well, not really, coz this is in the Skype EULA:

4.1 Permission to utilise your computer. In order to receive the benefits provided by the Skype Software, you hereby grant permission for the Skype Software to utilise the processor and bandwidth of your computer for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between Skype Software users.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/7AB67323D 6305E49CC2570A1001698C0

What was it again? All your base belong to us?

X.

Isn't that interesting... a website called "crime research" that doesn't know the meaning of the word "copyright" or even "just quote the intro and link to the original story ya munters"...

original story here:

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/FD9D3F1F2 E04EC92CC2570FE0025DF44

because its patent (on XML in this instance) was soundly thrashed about and it had to re-word it thus reducing its impact.

Story on it here: http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/E6D44C460 0041E39CC2571D4007DF1C8

snip
The patent will no longer cover the XML file formats that Microsoft is using and therefore anyone is free to interoperate with Microsoft file formats without fear of patent litigation from this particular patent
snip

The prior art around AbiWord's handling of XML basically did for the original patent Microsoft was after. The new one doesn't really have the same issues for the industry at large.

Yes, exactly.

Open Source is totally unprofitable

Some "good" news, however - SP2 seems to prevent this music from playing in the background.

but some more comment here:

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/EE511308E E9AA6A7CC257170006C0371

I suppose it's possible that some users reviewed the expired certficate and made an informed judgment that the site was still safe, but I bet many didn't even look. Phishers know this and regularly construct spoofs using invalid SSL certificates, betting that customers will trust the "gold key" and ignore the browser warning.

microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2006/01/20 /515606.aspx cannot find the AOL thing in orginal, but the same statement given on several websites for example: http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/7597E 58808CE8391CC2570FE0026880E

I think it's likely to be because skype can use huge amounts of bandwidth if you become a Supernode. Since univeristies have fat pipes, this is likely to happen. In fact, according to Wikipedia Skype is blocked across all of Janet (Although it works for me at my .ac.uk research institue).

whole building? pfft! Whole cities were recently cut off in New Zealand
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/F45502DE4 48D9635CC2570260002CF04>
Fibre cut severs North-South communications

ALL third party and more importantly operating system based DRM puts the user at greater risk. If the DRM code itself is not exploited then there are always new vulnerabilities being discovered in the media players and browsers used to play and display encoded content.

August 02, 2005 "Remote Attestation" and content access monopolies

Remote Attestation" and content access monopolies

The Trusted Platform Module provides the hardware functionality for digital rights software to provide effective remote attestation and digital key withholding.

Both Microsoft and Apple have plans for media-digital-content-viewers that, at the request of a digital content provider, will not allow the user to view or access specific digital content if the operating system has been modified in certain ways.

Because, for the foreseeable future, it is impossible for the digital rights management software to detect if an individual modification to a particular subsystem is hostile to the goals of the demanded digital rights, all software and subsystems relating to the operating system with storage and input to display will have to be digitally signed by Microsoft or Apple before it can be accepted by the DRM subsystem. Microsoft and Apple are effectively locking the user out from changing parts of the operating environment.

Because it is possible for hackers to read digital keys used to encrypt content direct from the computer's memory, the operating system has to be built with the ability to lock the user from being able to access pages of memory used by the mediaplayer and digital rights management system.

OS based Digital Right Management systems are based on the principle of locking the owner of the computer out of the ability to access sections of memory and disk space used by the DRM mediaplayer systems.

Locking the owner out of parts of the computer has become a major security issue.

Microsoft's Mediaplayer, Active-X ( still used with some DRM ), Real's realplayer, Adobe's PDF viewers, Apple's Quicktime and even Microsoft's and Sun's Java JVMs, have in the past had remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.

OS based DRM combined with TPM based encryption along with enviable future vulnerability holes in media access offers the malware/virus/worm creator the ability to hide a virus from any antivirus tool or live forensic analysis. Existing stealth viruses already have ability to hide the modifications it has made to files, going undetected by antivirus programs. DRM encryption offers the ability for the malware to store content, and without the keys to decode the content, keep it hidden from any forensic analysis.

Crackers and hackers always find ways to exploit the code to access or share protected content. There is not a DRM system that has not been cracked within months of widespread release. The focus on the code use d in such systems also comes to the attention of malware/virus creators. The same holes discovered by those who just want to freely access content may possibly also be abused by those wanting to crack into your computer. Similar holes in other types media viewers, the webbrowser and email programs, are increasingly being used for criminal gain by phishers and spyware makers.

Some vendors reportedly have in the past purposely left backdoors in the source code to allow access by US intelligence agencies. This has not only become a major issue for other countries who fear spying, since discovered backdoors quickly become the criminal's frontdoor i

Here at Computerworld New Zealand we have both a paper edition (weekly) and a daily online service http://www.computerworld.co.nz/ and I like to think they serve different readers in different ways.

Take a breaking news story (HP buys Compaq is my favourite example). We ran a BREAKING NEWS thing on the site immediately. We ran a follow-up story later that day with industry reaction (such as it was) also online. The next morning we had the customer comments/expectations story online, while most daily newspapers here were only just running the equivalent of our first story.

By the time our weekly print edition came out we had a full round-up of comment locally plus international expectations etc for a more rounded view.

That's the best approach I feel. Break news online (with attendant email alerts, SMS alerts or whatever you've got going) with more detailed relfective stuff in print.

This isn't new - print had to cope with radio beating it to news and TV (film at eleven!) doing what we couldn't do. What print does well is take a step back and offer a critical analytical assessment. In depth stuff. Well, that's what print SHOULD do well.

The two aren't mutually exclusive - print and online can co-exist quite nicely thank you. You add immediacy to your print edition with online. You add depth to your online edition through print. Different readers are served in different ways.

not sure if I should post a story I wrote but what the hey, it's /.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/8515A04BC 338B24BCC2570A5000C063D

with "hints" on how to circumvent the Aussie only rule. I'm sure you've already cottoned on to that.

Apple NZ head said he doesn't know if/when Apple will even launch in NZ.

New Zealanders who feel left out are apparently lying to Apple and getting songs anyway...

Slight bit of disinformation here - TelstraClear was the one which did the depeering, not Telecom. Reference here.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/NL/FC31E734EFD D0739CC2570290016D8F1

Telecom is an American owned company.

The local loop they use to fleece NZ residents who use their sub-standard "broadband" (Telecom once tried to market 128k plans as broadband..) is in fact publically owned. As the NZ Commerce Commision has no balls Telecom remains in control of this and thus continue to be a greedy monopoly.

The above article should remove any doubt of this.

Crackers and hackers always find ways to exploit the code to access or share protected content. There is not a DRM system that has not been cracked within months of widespread release.

Read the rest of the linked post and discover why DRM technology is a potential risk to end users.

If someone's hacking in from outside you want as good a password as possible... That's my fear, not someone sitting at my desk and logging on as me.

Peter Gutmann said the same thing: you fear the hacker, not the guy stealing your PC.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/nl/3F25D67E479 80786CC256E6C007EE7D2

This shareware spam filter made Nick Bolton $3.5 million in 2003 and now he employs 28.

Yahoo! cleared in Nazi case (Wednesday February 12, 2003)
Then in a separate legal attack, three different French Jewish groups launched a second action, accusing Yahoo!'s former president Tim Koogle of justifying war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The court ruled yesterday that justifying war crimes meant glorifying, praising, or at least presenting the crimes in question favourably, and that Yahoo! manifestly did not fit that description.

US court overturns Yahoo Nazi memorabilia ruling (Thursday, August 26, 2004)
A United States appeals court has ruled that a lower tribunal had no right to decide on a case brought against US Internet giant Yahoo by two French groups trying to halt online sales of Nazi memorabilia.
...
Yahoo must wait for LICRA and UEJF to come to the United States to enforce the French judgment before it is able to raise its First Amendment claim. However it was not wrongful of the French organisations to place Yahoo in this position, wrote Judge Warren Ferguson.

Yahoo's legal battle over Nazi items continues (Thursday, 26 August, 2004)
At stake is Yahoo's claim that enforcement of the French court's judgment in the US violates Yahoo's First Amendment rights. This claim can be reviewed by any US court able to assert jurisdiction over French plaintiffs the UEJF and LICRA, he wrote. Jurisdiction can be obtained if LICRA and the UEJF ask a US district court to enforce the French judgment, but they have not yet done so, Ferguson wrote.

By some of the logic I see here, the Internet should operate according to the lowest common denominator of law - if it's legal *somewhere* it should be legal on everywhere the Internet. I just don't see how There should be no restrictions on international trade over the Internet + All software should be free can be reconciled with People in India shouldn't be allowed to do my job.

Attack ad version of this post: MarkTAW says if it's legal *somewhere* it should be legal on everywhere. Is this the kind of man you want posting to /. ?

Riiiiight.... but aren't they supposed to actively enforce these patents, or is that copyright?

Java is just an emulator for a processor that never actually existed....

Thus ALL emulators violate this patent - and depending on how you read it, all software that calls other software, including shell scripts, binaries, operating systems which call the BIOS, any BIOS that calls the BIOS on another board - eg SCSI controller, about the only things that don't infringe are self-contained firmware that can't have third party add-ons.

But back to emulators - when was the first emulator released? surely a long time back - I remember something called "executor" that emulated a Mac on a PC back about '96 or so... and there must have been well established game console emulators around at the time.

A bit of googling reveals emulators for things like Z80 processors and CP/M that were last developed in the late '80s - meaning there is an easily established prior art against a patent filed in 1993

According to This Page. (scroll down to 1962/1965) IBM are fools for licensing emulation from anybody...

By 1986, everybody was emulating all sorts of things.

Emulation was well documented since before I was born, and yet Sun thinks a 1993 patent by Kodak is valid to the tune of 90+ million? Something STINKS!

Other concepts in the patent date back to the 1960s! (from This article)

Other interesting points:
Java applets don't ask for help - they simply are there - it is the web browser or operating system that figures out that help is required, and loads up Java to help it. As such, a java applet is a document, in the same way a Shockwave/Flash file is a document, and so are most other file formats. One wonders where this leaves Micro$oft's patent on embedding code in a document.

China is a much more important trade partner at this stage, but they have already started negotiating with the US I believe.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/C9D099B97 7363DF6CC256EFC0029C894?OpenDocument

Well, IBM isn't recommending that anyone deploy it at all just yet.

You work with idiots. Seriously, they are the kind of people who get executed in Texas.

http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/13684D9D 4D9F73ABCC256EA50068857E?OpenDocument

In addition, calls to the helpdesk by end users who had forgotten their passwords were costing the USPS millions of dollars per year in operating costs.

http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/13684D9D 4D9F73ABCC256EA50068857E?OpenDocument

"An average end user had five to 10 different log-on IDs and passwords, and they wrote them down on little pieces of paper and stuck them under their mouse pads [or] under keyboards," Otto says. "They hid them everywhere because they couldn't remember them. That was a big security issue."

In addition, calls to the helpdesk by end users who had forgotten their passwords were costing the USPS millions of dollars per year in operating costs, according to Otto.

Looks like this time economics is on the people's side, not on a security paranoids' one...

here's the link, without which my comment is a nonsense (of for a preview butto...)

Microsoft has really been acting a lot nicer towards FOSS folks about security lapses.

Nice MS, yes, so nice.

I can't believe I see more than a hundred comments here but no one who realizes what's happening here.

"Government seeks discount deal with Microsoft". Headline sound familiar?

No, not the American government, the New Zealand government, where the patent was filed. New Zealand government and business have already started moving to OpenOffice. Just ask google. For Microsoft, this is a crapshoot, but if they can stall OpenOffice adoption, then they get to keep large government contracts. Besides, nothing stops them from adding an OOo file reader if it becomes an issue in the future.

In this article SCO is already getting the finger from a couple of big New Zealand Linux users.

Massey University has deployed a 132 CPU Helix supercomputer running RedHat Linux 7.3 at its Albany campus in Auckland and would be expected to pay $NZ171,192.61 for the right to continue using its operating system. The director of parallel computing, Chris Messon, says that's not going to happen. "We have no plans to pay off SCO."

And Weta Digital...

Operations manager Milton Ngan says any move to pay the licence would be seen as capitulation and Weta isn't about to start down that road. "We won't make any moves till we see what the rest of the industry does. We're a small company a long way from SCO so we'll try to stay here out of sight."