Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes with a press release on the App Inventor Weblog. From the release: "MIT announced the launch of the new Center for Mobile Learning, with a first activity being to take over and refine App Inventor for Android. The center will be led by App Inventor mastermind Hal Abelson, Mitch Resnick of Lego Mindstorms and Scratch fame, and Eric Klopfer, the director of teacher education at MIT and an expert in games and simulation. This news boomerangs the negativity surrounding Google's discontinuation announcement last week. To the many teachers whose curriculums have been energized by App inventor, and to the thousands of newly empowered app builders: Rejoice! The fun has just begun!" Personally I see this as a great thing. By axing App Inventor as a Google Project and releasing the source there is finally a real world example of using Scheme to write Android applications that others can inspect.

johanneswilm writes "Over more than 3 years I have been writing my PhD thesis on the politics of Nicaragua. Being the most professional system for PDF generation, I went with LaTeX, and, to make the text accessible for the editors, I used the LyX editor. Now that the publication date comes near, I found I had to spend considerable time creating a script to convert the manuscript to formats such as Epub as none of the available tools were quite ready to do it automatically. Is LaTeX only good for writers in the natural sciences? Is the open source community boycotting ebook formats, as Richard Stallman has proposed? Are there better tools to do the same?"

Digana writes "Emacs, one of GNU's flagship products and the most famous software creation of Richard Stallman, has been discovered to be violating the GPL since 2009-09-28 by distributing binaries that were missing source. The CEDET package, a set of contributed files for giving certain IDE functionality related to static code analysis, has distributed files generated from bison grammars without distributing the grammar itself. This happened for Emacs versions 23.2 and 23.3, released during late 2009, and has just been discovered."

sfcrazy writes "Debian now has concrete plans to bring GNU Hurd to the larger community. GNU Hurd is expected to be released with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy towards the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013. Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download."

ciaran_o_riordan writes "FSF have put together their license recommendations, beyond just their own licenses, for software, documentation, and other works: 'People often ask us what license we recommend they use for their project. We've written about this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to make it easier for people to follow and refer back to. The recommendations below are focused on licensing a work that you create — whether that's a modification of an existing work, or a new original work.'"

kthreadd writes "GNU GRUB has been updated to version 1.99. Among the many improvements are support for two new filesystems, BtrFS and ZFS. For Linux users this means that it's now possible to move to BtrFS entirely and not use it only for non-bootable volumes."

Randyll writes "On the 25th, in Madrid, Spain, the ISO C++ committee approved a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) for the C++ programming language. This means that the proposed changes to the new standard so far known as C++0x are now final. The finalization of the standard itself, i.e. updating the working draft and transmitting the final draft to ITTF, is due to be completed during the summer, after which the standard is going to be published, to be known as C++ 2011. With the previous ISO C++ standard dating back to 2003 and C++0x having been for over eight years in development, the implementation of the standard is already well underway in the GCC and Visual C++ compilers. Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, maintains a handy FAQ of the new standard."

Aldenissin writes "Trisquel 4.5 Slaine comes with a new boot manager for the live images, an improved installer which showcases the project highlights, and new programs like the Remmina remote desktop client, the social network client Gwibber or the backup tool Deja-dup. The web browser received several changes to improve attributes like speed by enabling http pipelining and other methods, privacy with blocking third party cookies and moving to Duck Duck Go search engine — both as default, and usability with the preinstalled FlashVideoReplacer plugin that allows watching videos from YouTube, Vimeo and many others. The main packages include: Linux-libre 2.6.35, Xorg 7.5, GNOME 2.32, Mozilla based web browser 3.6.15 and OpenOffice.org 3.2. Slaine is based on Ubuntu 10.10, and as always with Trisquel, it contains just free software. Available are 32 and 64 bit flavors, and being an STS release it will be supported for a year. This release will be the "live" operating system included in the Free Software Foundation member cards from now on, in replacement of Trisquel 4.0."

andrea.sartori sent in the "development plan for GNU Free Call, an open source VoIP service based on the SIP protocol. According to the announcement, it 'aims to be as ubiquitous and usable as the proprietary Skype VOIP service.'"

theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"

rtfa-troll writes "Beef Taco is a Firefox extension that allows a mass opt-out from tracking and targeted advertising by many ad networks. The Register reports that the original system, TACO, has become proprietary, and has added new 'features' best described as bloatware. I guess this should serve as a warning for users to always prefer software under a copyleft license where possible. If Google had chosen a license with better protection, such as the GPL, when it released its own opt-out tool, this problem would have been much less likely. This also shows why forks are so important when software development begins to get messy."

An anonymous reader writes "CodeSourcery's Mark Mitchell wrote to the GCC mailing list yesterday reporting that 'the GCC Steering Committee and the FSF have approved the use of C++ in GCC itself. Of course, there's no reason for us to use C++ features just because we can. The goal is a better compiler for users, not a C++ code base for its own sake.' Still undecided is what subset of C++ to use, as many contributors are experts in C, but novices in C++; there is a call for a volunteer to develop the C++ coding standards."

mandelbr0t writes "The Canadian Conservative government is preparing to reintroduce amended copyright legislation on Thursday (we discussed the rumor some weeks ago). Most sources say that the proposed legislation is very similar to Bill C-61, generally dubbed the 'Canadian DMCA.' It still includes definitions of 'technological protections' and criminalizes 'circumvention' of those protections. Bill C-61 died in the summer of 2008, facing massive opposition from the Canadian public. Once again, it's time for Canadians to get politically active; ORC ran a large campaign with the last attempt, and will likely be updated soon with the new proposed legislation." Read below for more of the submitter's thoughts on the coming battle.
As with Bill C-61, the Conservative government has launched a campaign of misinformation to attempt to force the law down our throat. Industry Minister Tony Clement is trying to convince people that "format shifting" is currently illegal. Of course, it is not actually criminal, and enforcement of private infringement, as always, is prevented by the fact that massive invasion of privacy would have to occur. Second, Mr. Clement is claiming that this law is necessary to bring Canada into line with the WIPO Treaty. The above readings discredit WIPO altogether. Furthermore, the two articles that are being referred to are Articles 11 and 12. Note the use of the phrase "effective technological measure" and the absence of any criminality requirement. This legislation is not necessary to provide amended copyright law that is consistent with the WIPO treaty, and will hopefully die an uneventful death, to be buried for eternity.

An anonymous reader writes "MATLAB, an important package of mathematical software heavily used in industry and academia, has had support for 64-bit machines for several years now. However, the MATLAB developers still haven't gotten around to implementing even basic arithmetic operations for 64-bit integers. Attempting to add, divide, subtract, or multiply two 64-bit integers will result in an error message saying that the corresponding method does not exist. As one commentator put it, 'What is the point of having numerical data types that can't be manipulated?'" The post notes that the free MATLAB clone GNU Octave deals with 64-bit integers just fine.

kfogel writes "GNU Emacs, one of the oldest continuously developed free software projects around, has switched from CVS to Bazaar. Emacs's first recorded version-control commits date from August, 1985. Eight years later, in 1993, it moved to CVS. Sixteen years later, it is switching to Bazaar, its first time in a decentralized version control system. If this pattern holds, GNU Emacs will be in Bazaar for at least thirty-two years ..."

kfogel writes "GNU Emacs, one of the oldest continuously developed free software projects around, has switched from CVS to Bazaar. Emacs's first recorded version-control commits date from August, 1985. Eight years later, in 1993, it moved to CVS. Sixteen years later, it is switching to Bazaar, its first time in a decentralized version control system. If this pattern holds, GNU Emacs will be in Bazaar for at least thirty-two years ..."

An anonymous reader writes 'I'm a college professor who is putting together an open-source textbook. I'm trying to decide between using the GNU Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. I don't really understand the difference between these, though it seems with the Free Documentation License I need to include a copy of the license in my text. Which do you advise using?'

Glyn Moody writes "Microsoft is at it again: trying to redefine what 'open' means. This time it wants open standards to be 'balanced' — for them to include patent-encumbered technologies under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. Which just happens to be incompatible with free software licensed under the GNU GPL."

djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."

djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."

bonch writes "Richard Stallman has written an article on the GNU Web site describing the effect the Swedish Pirate Party's platform would have on the free software movement. While he supports general changes to copyright law, he makes a point that many anti-copyright proponents don't realize — the GPL itself is a copyright license that relies on copyright law to protect access to source code. According to Stallman, the Pirate Party's proposal of a five-year limit on copyright would remove the freedom users have to gain access to source code by eventually allowing its inclusion in proprietary products. Stallman suggests requiring proprietary software to also release its code within five years to even the balance of power."

kfogel writes "Canonical has just fully open-sourced the code to Launchpad. Although we'd said earlier that a couple of components would be held back, we changed our mind. All the code has been released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. 'Canonical will continue to run the Launchpad servers, taking care of production and deployment issues; opening up the code doesn't mean burdening the users with all of that stuff. At the same time, we'll institute processes to shepherd community-contributed code into the system, so that people who have ideas for how to improve Launchpad can quickly turn these ideas into reality.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Google has recently added FFMpeg to Chrome to better support HTML5's video element. FFMpeg is licensed under LGPL 2.1, which states that 'if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Library by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Library.' Google admits to having obtained a patent license for their use, but still claims they are not violating LGPL. Among the confused we find Håkon Wium Lie and Miguel de Icaza, who wonders what FSF might say. Google doesn't feel like asking FSF for clarification."

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman has published an article which warns about the 'Javascript trap' posed by non-free AJAX-based applications. The article calls for a mechanism which would enable browsers to identify freely-licensed Javascript applications and run modified version thereof. 'It is possible to release a Javascript program as free software,' Stallman writes. 'But even if the program's source is available, there is no easy way to run your modified version instead of the original ... The effect is comparable to tivoization, although not quite so hard to overcome.'"

mithro writes "As everyone should already know, Google is running the Summer of Code again this year. For those who don't know, GSoC is where Google funds student's to participate in Open Source projects and has been running for 5 years, bringing together over 2600 students and 2500 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide. Google has just announced the projects which will be mentor organizations this year. It includes a great list of Open Source projects from a wide range of different genres, include content management systems, compilers, many programming languages and even a bunch of games!"

An anonymous reader writes "The widely used Bourne-Again Shell (BASH) version 4.0 is out. The new major release fixes several remaining bugs in the 3.x releases, and introduces a bunch of new features. The most notable new features are associative arrays, improvements to the programmable completion functionality, case-modifying word expansions, co-processes, support for the `**' special glob pattern, and additions to the shell syntax and redirections. The shell has been changed to be more rigorous about parsing commands inside command substitutions, fixing one piece of POSIX non-compliance. Most of us will probably wait for the distros to test the new version and upgrade gradually, but you always have the option of grabbing the source and compiling it yourself. Enjoy."

VonGuard writes "This year marks the 25th anniversary of the GNU Operating System. A major part of that system has always been the GNU Compiler Collection. This year, some of the earliest bits of GCC also turn 25, and yet some of the collection's most interesting years of growth may still be ahead. The GCC team announced today that the long-standing discussion over how to allow plug-ins to be written for GCC has been settled. The FSF and the GCC team have decided to apply the GPL to plug-ins. That means all that's left is to build a framework for plug-ins; no small task to be sure. But building this framework should make it easier for people to contribute to the GCC project, and some universities are already working on building windows into the compilation process, with the intent of releasing plug-ins."

jammag writes "Ever since the GNewSense team pointed out that the Linux kernel contains proprietary firmware blobs, the question of whether a given distro is truly free software has gotten messier, notes Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. The FSF changed the definition of a free distribution, and a search for how to respond to this new definition is now well underway. Who wins and what solutions are implemented could have a major effect on the future of free and open source software. Debian has its own solution (by allowing users to choose their download), as do Ubuntu and Fedora (they include the offending firmware by default but make it possible to remove it). Meanwhile, the debate over firmware rages on. What resolves this issue?"

Count Fenring writes "Since the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular, let's hear from the other end of the spectrum. What are your favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for any of the various Emacs? Myself, I like 'M-x dunnet' ;-)"

David Gerard writes "Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License is out (FAQ). This license is little-used, except on the #8 site in the world: Wikipedia. And this version includes special provisions to re-license wiki-based content from GFDL to the much simpler Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0, as requested by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia plans to hold a public consultation process to decide whether and how to migrate to CC-BY-SA. The discussion is already running hot and heavy."

Robert writes "Along with many other techies, I share an interest in the world of finance (bubble-era stock options pulled me in). Unfortunately, as someone with a strong preference for GNU/Linux as my operating system of choice, I have found that software in this area seems quite sparse. For awhile I have made do with Python, R, Gnumeric, Gnucash and a telephone, along with some small utilities I have written myself. What I would like to know is: what FOSS software do you use for financial analysis, trading, system development, and testing in a Un*x environment? Are there programs you would like to see written or ported? Do any brokerages, data providers, or other services provide good support for we the few? And finally, what commercial entities do you know of that are using FOSS software in their operation?"

Virgil Tibbs writes "The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing 'Happy Birthday to GNU,' a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry. In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to 'good science' and contrasts it with the 'kind of tyranny' imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense and free software generally, for freedom's sake."

Virgil Tibbs writes "The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing 'Happy Birthday to GNU,' a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry. In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to 'good science' and contrasts it with the 'kind of tyranny' imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense and free software generally, for freedom's sake."

Virgil Tibbs writes "The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing 'Happy Birthday to GNU,' a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry. In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to 'good science' and contrasts it with the 'kind of tyranny' imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense and free software generally, for freedom's sake."

An anonymous reader writes "gNewSense, the fully-free GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by the FSF, has released a 2.1 live CD (torrent). Since the last release, more non-free binary blobs have been removed, new artwork has been added and lots of other improvements have been made. It's also two years since the first edition of gNewSense, and in that time an impressive ten live CDs have been released! gNewSense 2.1 DeltaH is based on Ubuntu Hardy, and removes non-free software that other distributions don't." I wonder if gNewSense can be easily installed on an OLPC XO the way several other distros can.

An anonymous reader writes "gNewSense, the fully-free GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by the FSF, has released a 2.1 live CD (torrent). Since the last release, more non-free binary blobs have been removed, new artwork has been added and lots of other improvements have been made. It's also two years since the first edition of gNewSense, and in that time an impressive ten live CDs have been released! gNewSense 2.1 DeltaH is based on Ubuntu Hardy, and removes non-free software that other distributions don't." I wonder if gNewSense can be easily installed on an OLPC XO the way several other distros can.

emyar writes "At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology. [...] This week the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone — The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation — in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform."

mollyhackit writes "Hackaday reports that the GPL vs Skype case is going back to court today. This as an appeal to the court's decision Slashdot reported last July. The original case was brought against Skype for the Linux based SMC Skype WiFi phone. The court upheld the GPLv2 and decided that Skype had not gone far enough in meeting section 3 which details how to provide the original source. This time around Skype is apparently trying to argue that the GPL violates anti-trust regulations."

An anonymous reader writes "gNewSense DeltaH (2.0), a second major release of a GNU/Linux distribution with focus on freedom, has just been released. It is based on Ubuntu 8.04 which was released less than week ago. gNewSense is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions listed as free by the GNU Project."

kookjr writes "Are you planning to develop software for the iPhone? If you want to develop Free Software, Linux.com (Shares corp overlord w/ Slashdot) has a good review of the conflicts between Apple's Registered iPhone Developer Agreement and licenses like the GPL. This is important for people who may not read all the agreements they click Agree to."

ohxten sends news from earlier this month that GCC 4.3.0's new behavior of not clearing the direction flag before a string operation on x86 systems poses problems with kernels — such as Linux and BSD — that do not clear the direction flag before a signal handler is called, despite the ABI specification.

Sortova writes "For many years now I've been maintaining OpenNMS, a free and open source network management framework published under the GPL. A couple of years ago it came to our attention that a company called Cittio was using OpenNMS as part of their proprietary and commercial network management application. I talked with Jamie Lerner, the Cittio founder, and he assured me that Cittio was abiding by the GPL. However, we were recently contacted by a potential client who was also considering Cittio's Watchtower, and it appears that they are not disclosing that they are using GPL'd code or at least not in the clear and concise fashion required by the GPL, including the offer of source code for all of the code they are including and any changes being made to that code. Since the copyright for OpenNMS is held by a number of commercial companies, the Software Freedom Law Center is not able to help us defend or even investigate a potential violation. I was curious if anyone here on Slashdot had experienced anything similar or has any advice?"

sigzero writes "Short but sweet: RMS is stepping down as Emacs Maintainer: 'From: Richard Stallman, Subject: Re: Looking for a new Emacs maintainer or team, Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:57:22 -0500 Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand over Emacs development to them."

An anonymous reader writes "MIT recently open-sourced some really cool hardware designs, including an H.264 video decoder and an OFDM transceiver, under MIT's open source license (a.k.a. the X11 license). Now, the OpenCores FAQ recommends that people use either the GPL, LGPL, or modified BSD license; they do not mention the MIT license at all. And, according to the Free Software Foundation the GPL license can be used for hardware, but they do not list the LPGL, modified BSD, or MIT licenses as suitable for non-software. Would you or your company use hardware source-released under the MIT license? What's the best license to use for releasing hardware?"

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes in today with a nerd-oriented review of "Untraceable," which opened in theaters last Friday. Read on for Bennett's take on what the movie gets right — a surprising amount as these movies usually go — but be warned, his review contains spoilers.

I went into the theater planning to come out with notes for an article like "Everything that 'Untraceable' gets wrong" (feeling pessimistic after "Swordfish" and "Firewall"), but it actually doesn't do that bad. Oh, it gets stuff wrong -- I don't think the FBI can "blackhole" an IP address by clicking a button -- but the errors are for dramatic license, not technical howlers, and the plot holes fall more in the category of things that could have been accomplished more easily some other way. In fact the dialog goes out of its way in several spots to make sure we know they know what they're talking about; screenwriters can't win with these movies, because they'll get grief for getting too much stuff wrong, but if they explain things correctly, it breaks the reality when we can feel the writers telegraphing their knowledge to the geeks in the audience. But it is mostly accurate, and the movie throws you just enough softballs for you to impress your movie-mates as well as the patrons two rows in front and back of you.

The movie takes its first stab at geek realism right at the top, when Diane Lane tells Colin Hanks that his Internet date is never going to see him again because she's more attractive in person than he is. (So far, the only thing wrong with this is that Colin Hanks has exactly the kind of adorable-nerd face that appeals to girls who like to think they don't care about looks.) Then Diane Lane explains how she's ensnaring the cyber-criminal on her screen, in a set piece that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, like the pre-title action sequence in a Bond movie. First, in a horde of pop-ups covers her monitor, and a site tries to entice her into downloading and running a program that contains a trojan horse. She runs the trojan horse on a virtual machine, where she watches it steal a file full of passwords and financial records, but she inserts her own trojan into the data that's uploaded back to the criminal's computer. In a few moments they find the user's IP address and realize that it must be a neighbor stealing that person's wireless service.

Batter up! I think that an FBI cyber crime expert would have a pop-up blocker installed, but moving on. If a criminal wanted to gain access to your machine to steal your financial records, tricking you into downloading and installing a trojan horse as part of another program, is probably exactly how they'd do it. (However, a trojan wouldn't automatically and instantly find a file full of passwords, even if she did named it "passwords.txt" as bait.) The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie. And a criminal that smart would probably be running the operation from the compromised PC of someone in another city, not stealing a neighbor's wireless access. (In any case, while having the criminal's IP address would allow you to go to someone's ISP and ask them to turn over the records of where that person lived, the characters should not have been able to narrow an IP address down to a person's house without that extra step.) Also, if I heard right, the FBI figures out who the guilty neighbor is even though he has no priors, based on the fact that he has two registered handguns. That will offend a certain portion of the audience, so viewers of "27 Dresses" in some cinemas may hear angry gunfire coming from the next theater.

However, most of these errors were probably necessary to show what the main character does in as short a time as possible and to end the set piece with the villain actually getting caught, so this is probably the best the movie could have done. Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll be more impressed by knowledgeable sneering, especially if everyone in the seats around you can hear what a smart guy she's with.

Then the main villain's site is introduced, and the movie has to handle the question of how a site with its own top-level domain like KillWithMe.com would be able to remain online despite showing real-time streaming video of a murder victim being killed. (The hook in the movie is that the more people visit the site, the faster some automated murder contraption kills the victim.) Diane Lane explains how, in a virtuoso sentence designed to silence the nerds who would otherwise say afterwards that there's no way that could ever happen. You'll know the line; it's the one right before her boss says, "I didn't understand anything you said; something about 'Russia'?" Apparently the domain is registered in Russia, and the DNS servers use a low TTL (yes, Diane Lane actually says "low TTL" -- sexy!) to switch the hostname between thousands of different IP addresses, each belonging to some compromised machine.

If you had to come up with a way to do this in a film, and if you assumed that Russian authorities could not be persuaded to go after the domain registrar (something nobody tries in the movie), this would probably be the simplest way that was semi-plausible. You need the site to resolve to thousands of possible IP addresses so that it can't be made to disappear by simply taking one machine offline. The way the movie demonstrates this, though, is for Diane Lane to make one of the site's many IP addresses go dark by clicking a button on her screen and causing it to be blackholed, before the hostname switches to the next IP. The only people who can actually do this in real life are backbone operators with an axe to grind, not the FBI (something the movie actually acknowledges with a passing reference to Net Neutrality legislation!). Ah, but here's where you can knock one out of the park: If you assume, as the movie does, that the FBI has the ability to blackhole individual IP addresses, then they could shut the site down not by blocking the site's IP addresses but by blocking the primary and secondary DNS servers for the killwithme.com domain in Russia, so that if people's computers couldn't communicate with the DNS servers, they'd have no way of resolving the hostname.

By now, the surrounding theatergoers should be threatening to jam your USB thumb drive keychain into your nostril, but you're not done yet. At one point a character targets an IP address beginning with "10.*", and everybody knows those are reserved for intranets, not the public Internet, so you can point out that that's like the 555 prefix for a movie phone number. Later, the heroine finds that a Trojan horse installed on her daughter's machine, has access to all files on all PCs in the house. That could work if (a) the other PCs were set to share out files to other PCs on the same local network, or (b) if the traffic between the other PCs and the wireless router were unencrypted, although it's unlikely the main character would make either of these mistakes.

But you don't want fellow viewers getting the idea you're too Net-savvy; one suspect is later described: "He blogged, he built web sites, he practically lived online," which sets the bar a little low for qualifying as a sociopathic online loner.

With regard to the non-Internet technical details, I have no idea if OnStar can actually help you get through a traffic jam the way they do in this movie, but I'm sure they paid a lot of money to have it appear that they could (although maybe they got a discount since the movie later shows the villain hacking into Diane Lane's car's system, during which the brand name "OnStar" is definitely not mentioned). Speaking of product placement, several in the audience snickered when the movie twice showed the heroine conspicuously logging into the Windows Live interface. But Microsoft may have gotten an even better deal: while the villain's operating system of choice is never mentioned, during closeups of his screen at the end, you can clearly see the word "GNU".

Or maybe it just fits with his overachieving character. After he ties his victims to a bedframe, he likes to elevate it into the path of the camera using a remote-controlled motorized winch evocative of a medieval torture device. Unless I'm mistaken, though, that happens before the site is actually streaming, which means he could have just as easily walked over and lifted up the bedframe. With that kind of fetish for doing simple things the horrendously hard way for no reason, why didn't he just go ahead and wear a "Got Linux?" t-shirt?

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "PJ of Groklaw has written in more detail about the lawyer trying to get a servicemark on the term 'cyberlaw'. (We discussed this here a few days back.) First, she notes that it's only a trademark application at this point. Furthermore, 'cyberlaw' is a generic term with 300,000+ hits on Google and an entry in some dictionaries and reference sites. In other words, while it's silly for a law firm that should know better to file a trademark application, it shouldn't and probably won't be granted if the law is followed. The article is interesting because it spells out the difference between trademarks and servicemarks, as well as explaining the law surrounding them — a law that differs significantly from copyright law."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "With all the pieces floating around on OOXML, it's been hard to get a good sense of where it is in the standardization process. Fortunately, IBM's Rob Weir has a provided us a road map. Today Microsoft is due to submit its set of proposals for resolving the 3,522 comments to JTC1, which controls OOXML. Tomorrow or soon after, we can expect a media blitz heralding these 'changes,' as numerous reporters are, reportedly, being flown to Redmond. But all those recommendations are non-binding, because only JTC1 can change the standard and that happens during the Ballot Resolution Meeting. And even if all of the recommendations are adopted, no one has to change their vote. The BRM, where all the real work will happen, isn't until February 25-29. Within the 30 days after that, everyone will be able to reconsider their vote. That's when we can expect the real fireworks."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Microsoft has patented a frustration-detection help system that would monitor your computer use and biometrics to figure out when you were frustrated. It could then offer to pair you up with someone else doing exactly the same thing who might be able to help you out. Interestingly, they don't appear to use speech recognition to detect abnormal levels of swear words, but that could be due to their past difficulties with speech recognition. 'Physical responses aren't the only things that could trigger this event--taking an abnormally long time to complete a task would do so also--but the biometric aspect is certainly the most unusual. Is this patent a harbinger of a dystopian future where computer users' biorhythms will be monitored to increase efficiency? Unlikely. The idea, which was birthed at Microsoft Research, is simply a more advanced version of user focus group testing that Microsoft (and most other software companies) have been doing for years now.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The European Commission is trying to encourage a standard licensing and DRM scheme for all of Europe, as well as 'cooperation procedures' and 'codes of conduct' for ISPs, copyright holders, and customers. No legislation has been proposed yet, but the 'cooperation procedures' sound like a push for an EU version of the DMCA Takedown Notices, which are already routinely sent to people outside the US. While simplified licensing might be nice, it's interesting that they don't appear to understand the inherent tension between standardization, interoperability and DRM — break once, copy everywhere."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "On February 4th, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers. With this transition, it will finally be possible for two internet hosts to communicate without using IPv4 at all. Certain obsolete software may face compatibility problems due to the change, but those issues are addressed in an ICANN report (pdf)."