Slashdot Mirror

spike1 writes "The Register has a story about BTG (British Technology Group) acquiring a patent on software downloads ... If this is one area of tech that's not covered by prior art, I don't know what is. Although, the Reg doesn't include a link to the actual patents, out-law.com is also carrying the story and contains links to the patents, and looking at some of their patent synopses, it looks like it's a pretty broad brush."

syrinje writes "The Times of India reported that Indian high-school seniors who took the exams conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education sent more than a Million SMS messages within a 11 hour period to query the result database and receive detailed examination results. In addition making the results available to cellphone users, the CBSE has also published the results online at a dedicated web-site . Since the results were announced on the weekend, students would otherwise have had to wait for Monday to get their results from their schools. A spokesperson for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited , one of the operators involved in setting up the SMS result system estimated that they handled 100,000 messages per hour during the day on Sunday and said that "There was no problem in the network due to the heavy SMS traffic and we were able to give subjectwise marks to the students"."

Geminus writes "There's a really cool fanmade Star Wars video called 'Duality' in the wild. The homemade video used only three props and apparently the quality was good enough that the makers were hired on by Lucas Films. The film was 90% made with Electric Image Universe, Adobe After Effects, FinalcutPro, and Commotion Pro. Of course the rest was the blood sweat and tears of the crew. I have to admit it is a very good example of what software can do today without million dollar render farms and special effects equipment." And as a followup to the Fanimatrix story the other day, the movie is now available: LarsBT writes "It's out. Get the full movie. Here's the torrents: normal mpeg version torrent (170 MB); Normal Divx version torrent (73 MB); and finally the High quality DivX torrent (135 MB)."

mcneight writes: "In yet another battle for our rights online, the ACLU and 9 other plaintiffs have recently won a permanent injunction against enforcement of Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999 (The Child Online Protection Act). As the name suggests, it is net censorship with a pro-child happy face plastered on the front of it. Fortunately, the courts found it violated both the First and Fourteenth Amendments (protection of interstate commerce, in case you were wondering). Much greater detail is offered by the lead plaintiff in this case, Cyberspace Communications, Inc."

mcneight writes: "In yet another battle for our rights online, the ACLU and 9 other plaintiffs have recently won a permanent injunction against enforcement of Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999 (The Child Online Protection Act). As the name suggests, it is net censorship with a pro-child happy face plastered on the front of it. Fortunately, the courts found it violated both the First and Fourteenth Amendments (protection of interstate commerce, in case you were wondering). Much greater detail is offered by the lead plaintiff in this case, Cyberspace Communications, Inc."

Prodigal yo-yo writes "Cyberspace Communications, Inc., and several other plaintiffs won a favorable ruling in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently in the Cyberspace v. Engler lawsuit to overturn an unconstitutionally broad Internet censorship law. The 2 page ruling affirms an injunction against enforcement of the law while the case is tried." It is good to keep in mind that besides Federal censorship laws, many states have passed such laws as well.

Prodigal yo-yo writes "Cyberspace Communications, Inc., and several other plaintiffs won a favorable ruling in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently in the Cyberspace v. Engler lawsuit to overturn an unconstitutionally broad Internet censorship law. The 2 page ruling affirms an injunction against enforcement of the law while the case is tried." It is good to keep in mind that besides Federal censorship laws, many states have passed such laws as well.

Prodigal yo-yo writes "Cyberspace Communications, Inc., and several other plaintiffs won a favorable ruling in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently in the Cyberspace v. Engler lawsuit to overturn an unconstitutionally broad Internet censorship law. The 2 page ruling affirms an injunction against enforcement of the law while the case is tried." It is good to keep in mind that besides Federal censorship laws, many states have passed such laws as well.

ThesQuid writes "I just caught this article about China possibly using nuclear blasts to help build a hydro project in Tibet. I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects, if (and this is a BIG if) the blasts can be made reasonably radiologically clean." Several U.S. nuclear tests were devoted to exploring the feasibility of this; obviously we decided it wasn't such a great idea.

ThesQuid writes: "I caught this article in The Economist the other week. If practical, the electrolytic process described could make the production of titanium as cheap as aluminum. Ridiculous? Just remember, aluminum used to be refined by a process somewhat similar to how titanium is refined nowadays, and when a practical electrolytic refining process was discovered the price of it went from more precious than gold to something, well, as cheap as aluminum is nowadays."

LRU wrote in to send us a link to netscan.org. This nifty site will check to see if a subnet is smurfable. Might actually useful for some of us.

LRU writes "Phrack 54 is out. Surf on over here for the Christmas Cheer. " Articles on NT Web Vulnerabilities, Remote OS Detection, and all srts of other stuff that is appropriate for Phrack *grin*

the secret asian man sent us an image that could only have been inspired by the iMac. GRR wrote in to tell us that Symantec is retireing it's Norton Utilities in favor of it's new Bigman Utilities. I found that one extremely amusing. Lastly Jaro wrote in to announce yet another Unix GUI project. This one is called the Unix Desktop Project.

John Lazzaro sent us a link to This Techweb Article about reverse engineering future Intel CPUs. Brian Dial sent us a link to a A Security Site that some of you might like. Anthony David sent us A piece he wrote discussing software development and the like. René Fichter wants to know if there is any demand for an Open Source Graphical MUD. He's been working on one called Daenor that he's considerring opening the source to. Henrik Abelsson sent us a link to Denounce, a hilarious site that runs fake Press Releases. Very cool. An anonymous read submitted Realaroma. Its moderately entertaining. Finally Darren Ginter sent us an article about Signing Bonus's and the computer industry for those of us who thought that only Sports stars get such things.