Slashdot Mirror

tricaric writes "Another asteroid passed, last March 31st, close to the Earth. This time it was only about 2 Earth radii from the Earth. The observation have been published only a few days ago, because 'Although the observed arc is only 44 minutes, the orbit is quite determinate and, given the exceptional nature of this close approach, the object is now receiving a designation.' Check out the ORSA animation!"

mpawlo writes "I have just published another one of those Greplaw interviews. This time, John Gilmore had the courtesy of answering a wide range of questions on various subjects such as terrorism and security, spam blocking, censorship, secret laws in airports and of course - sarongs. Gilmore starts: 'I'm a civil libertarian millionaire eccentric.' Enjoy!"

mpawlo writes "I have just published another one of those Greplaw interviews. This time, John Gilmore had the courtesy of answering a wide range of questions on various subjects such as terrorism and security, spam blocking, censorship, secret laws in airports and of course - sarongs. Gilmore starts: 'I'm a civil libertarian millionaire eccentric.' Enjoy!"

scubacuda writes "Greplaw has interviewed Katie Jones (of the real Katie.com). In addition to the details of the dispute regarding Penguin's 'branding' of the book Katie.com (which many /.ers 'reviewed'), she shares the details of her conversation with cyberlawyer Parry Aftab, how she believes Penguin's title change suggests that it thought it could steamroll her without recourse, and the tremendous amount of support the geek community has shown her." Ms. Aftab has several blogs. Ms. Aftab, if you contact us with a response to these allegations, Slashdot will publish your response (we've also written to your email address). Another reader notes: "Yesterday /. ran an article about the book Katie.com. Out of curiosity I just visited the Amazon.com website to see how many more reviews were on the website. Yesterday when I first checked there were over 300 reviews, most of them negative and the book scored only 2 stars total. Today, the book has 81 reviews with an average rating of 3 1/2 stars."

declan writes "My News.com colleague Evan Hansen just got his hands on an internal email thread revealing that Google is planning to embrace RSS. Evan's co-authored News.com article quotes from the email (sent to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt) confirming that Google is rethinking only supporting Atom. Slashdot covered Google's purchase of Pyra Labs and Blogger.com/Blogspot.com last year that made it a fan of the Atom standard. Does this news mean that RSS is now viewed as out of Dave Winer's control? Will RSS and Atom finally converge?"

neelm writes "If you even needed to know the names of the roads Homer Simpson takes to work, you can find out at Guide to Springfield, USA. On the site you'll find a complete map and guide to all springfield location. The map was put together mostly by watching (and rewatching) Simpson's episodes. The map is even listed in Harvard Map Collection!"

starannihilator writes "The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided new evidence supporting the existence of dark energy, the force causing the acceleration of universal expansion. The new findings support the theory that the universe will expand forever, provided there is enough dark matter. CNN and Newsday are running the story, originally reported by NASA. Chandra's site has some good images and information on the three galaxies clusters studied (Abell 2029, MS2137.3-2353, and MS1137.5+6625)."

starannihilator writes "The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided new evidence supporting the existence of dark energy, the force causing the acceleration of universal expansion. The new findings support the theory that the universe will expand forever, provided there is enough dark matter. CNN and Newsday are running the story, originally reported by NASA. Chandra's site has some good images and information on the three galaxies clusters studied (Abell 2029, MS2137.3-2353, and MS1137.5+6625)."

starannihilator writes "The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided new evidence supporting the existence of dark energy, the force causing the acceleration of universal expansion. The new findings support the theory that the universe will expand forever, provided there is enough dark matter. CNN and Newsday are running the story, originally reported by NASA. Chandra's site has some good images and information on the three galaxies clusters studied (Abell 2029, MS2137.3-2353, and MS1137.5+6625)."

starannihilator writes "The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided new evidence supporting the existence of dark energy, the force causing the acceleration of universal expansion. The new findings support the theory that the universe will expand forever, provided there is enough dark matter. CNN and Newsday are running the story, originally reported by NASA. Chandra's site has some good images and information on the three galaxies clusters studied (Abell 2029, MS2137.3-2353, and MS1137.5+6625)."

starannihilator writes "The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided new evidence supporting the existence of dark energy, the force causing the acceleration of universal expansion. The new findings support the theory that the universe will expand forever, provided there is enough dark matter. CNN and Newsday are running the story, originally reported by NASA. Chandra's site has some good images and information on the three galaxies clusters studied (Abell 2029, MS2137.3-2353, and MS1137.5+6625)."

starannihilator writes "The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided new evidence supporting the existence of dark energy, the force causing the acceleration of universal expansion. The new findings support the theory that the universe will expand forever, provided there is enough dark matter. CNN and Newsday are running the story, originally reported by NASA. Chandra's site has some good images and information on the three galaxies clusters studied (Abell 2029, MS2137.3-2353, and MS1137.5+6625)."

JoshuaDFranklin writes "When confronted with the reality of Open Source, academics often ask what processes allow it to happen. In his new book The Success of Open Source, Berkeley professor Steven Weber answers that question. He presents a clear, logical picture of how Open Source development works in a variety of projects, and comes to the intriguing conclusion that the process may be generalizable to other areas of production. The results, he argues, would 'make the consequences of the first-generation Internet seem quaint.'" Read on for the rest of Franklin's review. The Success of Open Source author Steven Weber pages 320 pages, 5 line illustrations publisher Harvard University Press rating 9 reviewer Joshua Daniel Franklin ISBN 0674012925 summary Weber argues that the success of Open Source is due to a production process than may be generalizable to other arenas.

Weber is an academic and makes no apologies for it. He is not presenting an exciting new business plan, advocating a particular method of software development, or calling hackers to revolution. He is simply describing his findings after extensive research of the Open Source development process and drawing conclusions from them. As such, this book may not appeal to everyone in the Open Source community. However, Weber's ideas are timely and informative for anyone who wants to explain or advocate Open Source. He likens his work to The Machine that Changed the World, the story of Toyota's production method (224):

That book made two simple and profound points: The Toyota "system" was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. The parallels are obvious. Open source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers.

The first part of The Success of Open Source is a historical case study that examines the origins and social development of the Open Source community. It begins with Unix and hacker culture. For those who have read Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Peter Salus' A Quarter Century of UNIX, there is little new material here, but Weber offers a new and interesting perspective on the events. For example, he offers the insight that "hacker culture" existed before widespread network connectivity, drawing into question whether cheap bandwidth is really essential.

From there, he covers the development of the BSDs, Apache, and Linux, focusing again on social structures. He describes diverse events such as the messy expulsion of Theo de Raadt from the NetBSD core, the creation of Apache by an informal group of interested developers, and the establishment of Alan Cox as de facto Linux networking lieutenant. Weber draws from an impressive array of firsthand accounts, including mailing lists, websites, conference speeches, and personal interviews.

I get some interesting trivia out of this, such as Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll (98). Unfortunately, since Weber's narrative is mainly topical, it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles. Other claims are close to flamebait, such as suggesting that Richard Stallman is an example of a "failed leader." (168)

For the second half of the book, Weber moves on to Explaining Open Source in the terms of his discipline, political economy. He sees two broad categories of principles to the Open Source process: Microfoundations, including individual motivations and the economic logic of the collective good; and Macro-Organization, solving the problems of coordination and complexity. (133) While I doubt each reader will catch every academic nuance in these chapters, Weber is thankfully sparing in his use of specialized vocabulary and writes his overall argument in clear, easy-to-follow logic.

This section also contains the most insightful observations in The Success of Open Source. While there are too many to list here, one is the concept of Open Source Software as antirival. As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.

Though Weber does not mention this in the text, one can see part of this principle in proprietary vendors' providing free downloads or turning their backs on rampant piracy. It also does not take a great leap of logic to see application of the antirival model to other fields such as music or academic research.

As is customary in social science literature, Weber uses his conclusion to both recap his argument and to raise questions for future direction of research. What is the best organization method for property distribution, as opposed to the current methods based on exclusion? How can the Open Source production process be used effectively to improve prospects for the developing world? What is the best way for closed, hierarchical systems to interact with open, network-based ones? While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book, hopefully future work will examine these questions in depth.

Though Open Source has been mentioned in many recent works, The Success of Open Source is the first academic book that focuses on the Open Source community as its object of study. It gives a readable, thought-provoking, and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means, making it an extremely valuable resource for those who want to engage and discuss these issues on an intellectual level. As Weber states, his positive, constructive outlook "may not be fully satisfying, but it's not a bad place to start." (272)

Joshua Daniel Franklin is a graduate student at the University of Washington's Information School. This review may be redistributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. You can read the table of contents, preface, and an excerpt of the first chapter of The Success of Open Source at the Harvard University Press website. The reviewer's website has an list of errata. You can purchase the The Success of Open Source from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

scubacuda writes "Dr. Eugene 'Spaf' Spafford, security expert and professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, talks with Greplaw about what drove him to the computer security field, what it's like to testify before the White House and Congressional committees on information security and public policy, and how legislating technology is 'bad law.' For you budding legal geeks interested in forensics, technology, law, and ethics, Spaf has provided a reading list."

In anonymous reader writes "RMS will be moving his office to the new William H. Gates building at MIT's Stata Center starting today. This marks the end of MIT's use of building NE43, which housed the LCS and AI labs (now combined into CSAIL). On a strangely unrelated note, shortly after Harvard, in a laudable attempt to retain solidarity with the Open Source community, dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building (named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively), Gates' credit card was hacked. After all, they did have his mother's maiden name... "

apropos asks: "An interesting question came up recently when discussing (yet again) starting an open-source based consulting company: 'How would you design the ultimate virtual office with open source software?' With things like fax, VoIP, web, email, security and office suites all available as open source products, what kind of useful things could be done? One idea that came to mind was emailing answering machine recordings. What would you put into your ultimate virtual office solution?"

look over yonder writes "A new computer model created by astronomers from the Smithsonian Center and Astrophysics and the University of Utah predicts that systems which harbour Earth-sized planets will have a fingerprint of a ring of dust orbiting the star. This model will make it much easier for astronomers to locate stars and predict the size of planets orbiting it by simply measuring how bright the star system is at infrared (IR) wavelengths of light. Stars with dusty disks are brighter in the IR than stars without disks. The more dust a star system holds, the brighter it is in the IR."

beeplet writes "Nasa just sent out this press release titled about an exciting Chandra observation. It states: "Thanks to two orbiting X-ray observatories, astronomers have the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star and consuming a portion of it. The event, captured by NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray Observatories, had long been predicted by theory, but never confirmed." There is more information on the Chandra home page, including the x-ray and optical observations that were involved in the discovery." Note that the star-ripping pictured on the front page is labeled an illustration, rather than an recorded image.

unassimilatible writes "The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports 'to impress your favorite lady this Valentine's Day, get her the galaxy's largest diamond.' A newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros. A cheesy, unrealistic simulation is also available. AP has a story as well."

unassimilatible writes "The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports 'to impress your favorite lady this Valentine's Day, get her the galaxy's largest diamond.' A newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros. A cheesy, unrealistic simulation is also available. AP has a story as well."

scubacuda links to this Infoworld article, which reads in part "TVI charges Microsoft's autoplay feature infringes on four of its U.S. patents. TV Interactive Data Corp. (TVI) of Los Gatos, California, claims that Microsoft infringes on four of its U.S. patents, three entitled 'host device equipped with means for starting a process in response to detecting insertion of a storage media' and one entitled 'method for starting up a process automatically on insertion of a storage media into a host device.", writing "I hope no one has a patent on the shift key, because that's what I hit when I insert a CD. (That is, when I haven't already edited the registry)" Wouldn't automount / autofs fall under the same shadow?

understyled writes "According to this article, researchers from Fukui Prefectural University in Obama, Japan, and the National Human Genome Research Institute have produced genetically modified zebrafish using sperm cells grown "in vitro." "The secret to our success was the idea of placing a layer of special 'feeder cells' under the spermatagonia in the laboratory dish. These feeder cells, derived from zebrafish testicular cancer cell lines, promote the growth of spermatagonia and stimulate them to mature into functional sperm," said Dr. Sakai, the study's senior author and a reproductive biologist."

OctaneZ writes "New research out of the Harvard School of Public Health indicates that coffee may lower your risk of Type II Diabetes. Men who drank 6 cups of coffee a day lowered their risk by 50%, while womens risk dropped 30%. The release also includes audio discussions about the suprising findings."

OctaneZ writes "New research out of the Harvard School of Public Health indicates that coffee may lower your risk of Type II Diabetes. Men who drank 6 cups of coffee a day lowered their risk by 50%, while womens risk dropped 30%. The release also includes audio discussions about the suprising findings."

code_rage writes "Everett Ehrlich (capsule biography) writes an article in the Washington Post that examines Howard Dean's effective use of the internet to create a political organization. He says that Dean has created a 'virtual' party that has taken over the only remaining asset of value, the brand name of the Democratic party. His analysis refers to the theory of Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase: that the size of an organization is determined by the cost of gathering information. Ehrlich's article makes some predictions about the effect that Dean's strategy will have on the political system." In a related story, there's an mp3 interview with Dick Morris, along with a couple of (appropriately) blog posts about it.

thrasymachus writes "Buzz Aldrin has an editorial in the New York Times (free reg req) advocating a spaceport at a Lagrange point between the Earth and the moon over simply more moon missions. He emphasizes the cost and practicality of such a station, as well its potential as a 'bridge to the heavens.'"

John Valenti writes "Philip Greenspun's Blog had an interesting entry for December 1: 'It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India...'"

mpawlo writes "I just finished a Greplaw interview with Jim Griffin. Griffin, of Pholist fame, gives his thoughts on copyright and digital distribution of music. Learn also why copyright should be renamed copy risk. Griffin was once - at Geffen - behind the online release of a full-length song by Aerosmith. In 1994! He is, however, not a John Perry Barlow School of Thought devotee."

penciling_in writes "A new study has been released on CircleID where Benjamin Edelman of Berkman Center for Internet & Society explains: "In the past, most measurements of registrar market share have tracked overall registrar shares -- number of domains registered by a registrar divided by number of domains registered by all registrars. In this article, I propose some alternatives -- particular subsets of domains in which to measure registrar market shares, providing a basis for comparison with overall market shares. Results vary dramatically across these subsets, with implications on the future customer retention rates of the corresponding registrars." Related articles include: Registrar Market Share: An Alternative Perspective and Report on Survey of Domain Registration Services"

penciling_in writes "A new study has been released on CircleID where Benjamin Edelman of Berkman Center for Internet & Society explains: "In the past, most measurements of registrar market share have tracked overall registrar shares -- number of domains registered by a registrar divided by number of domains registered by all registrars. In this article, I propose some alternatives -- particular subsets of domains in which to measure registrar market shares, providing a basis for comparison with overall market shares. Results vary dramatically across these subsets, with implications on the future customer retention rates of the corresponding registrars." Related articles include: Registrar Market Share: An Alternative Perspective and Report on Survey of Domain Registration Services"

Michael Yuan writes "Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) is one of the most widely used technologies in enterprise Java. It is designed to be a scalable and flexible distributed framework. In EJB, almost everything can be done in several different ways and it offers the developer the maximum flexibility to choose the right approach for the project in hand." Yuan provides a review, below, of Bitter EJB, to guide programmers interested in large-scale Java development. Update: 10/27 18:27 GMT by T : Peter Wayner provides a somewhat deeper look at the book as well, also below. Bitter EJB author Bruce Tate, Mike Clark, Bob Lee, Patrick Linskey pages 412 publisher Manning rating 9 reviewer Michael Yuan, Peter Wayner ISBN 1930110952 summary Anti-patterns in Enterprise JavaBean development

However, every coin has two sides: the other side of "freedom of choice" is "complexity". Although EJB is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of experience architects, it is subject to a lot of misuse by novice developers who do not make sound choices. For example, some developers might use a BMP entity bean to map each database table in the system; or access entity beans directly from a distributed layer; or store large amount of data in session objects ... The list goes on. Although those approaches are technically possible, they are hardly the most efficient ways in most cases. Such problems have not only caused many projects to fail but also tarnished EJB's reputation. In fact, the complexity of EJB is often quoted as an argument for other enterprise platforms.

For EJB developers, it is crucial to learn from other people's experiences and follow proven best practices. That helps to reduce the complexity of the platform. Manning's "Bitter EJB" is a very timely book written by well-known experts in the EJB field: Bruce Tate, Mike Clark, Bob Lee and Patrick Linskey. Unlike other "architectural" books, Bitter EJB teaches best practices through common mistakes (anti-patterns). It focuses on "what not to do" but still encourages developers to come up with liberal (everything not forbidden is OK) and innovative solutions. After all, EJB is about flexibility and freedom of choices.

Part I of the book is an overview of anti-patterns in the EJB specification. The EJB specification itself has several major design problems when it first came out in March 1998. EJB v1.1 and v2.0 have gone great length to fix the anti-patterns in the specification. But early adopters may have already developed some anti-patterns in their applications. For new developers, the history also serves as a valuable lesson on what EJB is really for and how different components in the specification fall into their current places. In this part, the authors also provide an excellent recount on what went wrong in the high profile TSS Java PetStore benchmark.

Part II is about session and message-driven beans. Those beans are mainly used in the integration layers. Topics covered in this part include how to deal with large database results, whether to maintain session states, the limitations of XML and much more.

Part III covers EJB persistence. Entity EJBs are probably the most confusing types of components. Many experts have advocated to abolish entity EJBs altogether in favor of other simpler persistence frameworks such as the JDO or even simple JDBC facades. The authors discuss the pros and cons of entity EJBs and covers most leading alternatives. For those who must use entity EJBs, this book also offers useful advices on a range of topics including how to reduce round trips, shorten primary keys and handle expensive database joins etc.

Part IV covers broader topics including performance tuning, testing, building and packaging. One big problem that even EJB developer can recognize the complex deployment descriptors. One chapter of the book is dedicated to reduce code duplication, automate the deployment process and avoid the "integration hell". The last chapter of the book provides an overview of "what's next" in the EJB space.

Overall, it is an excellent book for all EJB developers and other enterprise developers who want to learn from the successes and failures of EJBs."

Peter Wayner's review:

Although there may be as many 36 plots in all of literature, the compartively new world of computer books has really had only one: this new technology is simple, very simple, and it will make your life better and your teeth whiter. Bruce Tate opened up a second plot in his book Bitter Java by exploring just how even the best programming ideas have dark sides. Now he's back with three other authors exploring the world of Bitter EJB.

This book is more fruit from the same tree. Or, to hack the Java MemeStream even more, more beans for the same mill. If you use Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), or think about using them, you should read this book to see what can go wrong. The title shows how naming schemes can be misleading because either the authors aren't really that bitter, or because they're focused entirely on EJBs. This book does not belong in the same camp with the Java==SUV crowd. These authors are really admirers who just want to warn people how to avoid problems with Java and EJB.

Tate and his new co-authors, Mike Clark, Bob Lee, and Patrick Linskey are all consultants who seem to use Java a lot, at least when they're not cheating death. One of the cuter grace notes in the book is a collection of war stories from extreme sports that are mixed in as an allegorical taste of what's to come. Before exploring the problems with a Java concept known as enterprise beans, they tell a kayaking story that ends with the sentence, "Then we hear a loud crunch and look up to see Eric's stern stationary at the top of the drop, revealing the sitaution that every kayaker dreads the most -- the vertical pin."

After stories like this, the book goes on to explore just how the very fancy enterprise beans toolkit can produce an application that moves slower than a stream filled with honey. Each chapter is filled with antipatterns, or lessons about the software learned the hard way. They're sort of like points on the map that say, "There be dragons here."

The book is divided into four parts. The first section, termed "The Basics," explores the simple ways that EJB technology goes bad. The toolkit was heavily hyped as the perfect solution for building business websites that interface seamlessly with large databases. As the business grew, new servers could be added without grief. Alas, as this section points out, there are many reasons why an elephant gun can be the wrong weapon for getting rid of mice in your house.

The next section on "Networks and Messages" describes how good ideas can turn into slow code when people misuse the fancy tools for scaling EJBs. In theory, the EJB toolkit will split up processes simply across multiple machines to handle more customers, but in practice all of the communication can slow things down considerably.
The section on "EJB Persistence" describes how the much-hyped system for seamlessly storing away enterprise beans in databases can weigh down a system. My only beef is that they left out much information on Prevayler, a much-maligned and misunderstood ultra-light toolkit that is like an anti-EJB persistence layer in every possible way. I'm enamored with it, if only because it's such a radical move away from the monolithic APIs like EJBs. While they liken using EJBs to snowboarding in fresh powder with a 100lb pack on your back, Prevayler is sort of like boots-only hiking.


The last section isn't about EJBs per se, but similar toolkits and projects that often get used with EJB. There are antipatterns to avoid with JUnitPref and Ant, too. Some of these suggestions, like some in the rest of the book, aren't terribly new or brillant, but it can't hurt to get another lecture on the importance of testing your code.

The book shines when it's exploring what goes on behind the slick facade of the API. Sure, the EJB toolkit will dutifully load up data from any object on any server in your farm, but you better be careful invoking some of these these methods because the network is slow. The book often points out how invoking that one simple method from the sales literature can start up dozens of sluggish threads. Peeling away the layers helps understand and explain why the system fails.

Many of these lessons aren't limited to Java or EJB. I wouldn't be surprised if the group of authors was busy rewriting the book with examples from .NET. Unfortunately, some programming problems are very hard, and building a toolkit with a simple API won't make them go away. In fact, the simple appearance can cause more trouble when the programmer can't understand what the secret mechanism inside is doing. Almost all of the problems in this book arise from programmers who believe the sales literature when it tells them not to pay attention to what that little bot behind the curtain is doing. If you're working in the world of EJB consulting on big iron, then you've got no choice but to start thinking about what's behind that curtain.

You can purchase the Bitter EJB from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. Peter Wayner is the author of 13 books including Java RAMBO Manifesto and Translucent Databases.

mzuckerm asks: "I am currently a law student doing some work with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Specifically I am working on a project called the Collaborator's Clinic, which provides resources for the open source community. I am currently trying to gather sample legal documents (including linking agreements, patent licenses, software development agreements, etc., you can look at the work in progress here) in order to annotate them with common sense descriptions of what the legalese means. This is very much like what the Berkman Center has done with the Chilling Effects web site (which deals with legal issues involved in cease-and-desist letters). Has this been done anywhere before? I have done a google search to try to find other sites including this information, but none I've found have included the information for free or directed it towards the Open Source community. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you are aware of any relevant licenses or legal agreements to which we could obtain the right to post and annotate, that would also be totally rad."

mzuckerm asks: "I am currently a law student doing some work with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Specifically I am working on a project called the Collaborator's Clinic, which provides resources for the open source community. I am currently trying to gather sample legal documents (including linking agreements, patent licenses, software development agreements, etc., you can look at the work in progress here) in order to annotate them with common sense descriptions of what the legalese means. This is very much like what the Berkman Center has done with the Chilling Effects web site (which deals with legal issues involved in cease-and-desist letters). Has this been done anywhere before? I have done a google search to try to find other sites including this information, but none I've found have included the information for free or directed it towards the Open Source community. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you are aware of any relevant licenses or legal agreements to which we could obtain the right to post and annotate, that would also be totally rad."

mzuckerm asks: "I am currently a law student doing some work with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Specifically I am working on a project called the Collaborator's Clinic, which provides resources for the open source community. I am currently trying to gather sample legal documents (including linking agreements, patent licenses, software development agreements, etc., you can look at the work in progress here) in order to annotate them with common sense descriptions of what the legalese means. This is very much like what the Berkman Center has done with the Chilling Effects web site (which deals with legal issues involved in cease-and-desist letters). Has this been done anywhere before? I have done a google search to try to find other sites including this information, but none I've found have included the information for free or directed it towards the Open Source community. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you are aware of any relevant licenses or legal agreements to which we could obtain the right to post and annotate, that would also be totally rad."

mzuckerm asks: "I am currently a law student doing some work with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Specifically I am working on a project called the Collaborator's Clinic, which provides resources for the open source community. I am currently trying to gather sample legal documents (including linking agreements, patent licenses, software development agreements, etc., you can look at the work in progress here) in order to annotate them with common sense descriptions of what the legalese means. This is very much like what the Berkman Center has done with the Chilling Effects web site (which deals with legal issues involved in cease-and-desist letters). Has this been done anywhere before? I have done a google search to try to find other sites including this information, but none I've found have included the information for free or directed it towards the Open Source community. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you are aware of any relevant licenses or legal agreements to which we could obtain the right to post and annotate, that would also be totally rad."

penciling_in writes "During the 2+ weeks for which Site Finder was operational, a number of ISPs took steps to disable the service. A study just released reveals the details and analysis, including specific networks disabling Site Finder during its operational period. For example, the study reports China blocked the traffic at its backbone, and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom and Korea's DACOM also disabled the service. US ISPs have been slower to act, but US ISP Adelphia disabled the service September 20-22 before re-enabling it on September 23." That link is a summary; or cut straight to the study itself.

Roland Piquepaille writes "In "Lasers operate inside single cells," Nature writes that nanosurgery can be achieved by vaporizing some components of living cells without killing the cells themselves. "With pulses of intense laser light a millionth of a billionth of a second long, US researchers are vaporizing tiny structures inside living cells without killing them. The technique could help probe how cells work, and perform super-precise surgery." This was developed by Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues. This summary contains more details and references about the process and these microexplosions. Please note that it's a very different technique from the one described six months ago in a previous Slashdot reference, Surgery with Femtosecond Lasers."

lateralus writes "In his blog, Philip Greenspun re tells of his epiphany that Java is the SUV of programming languages. An interesting point brought forth in his typical extreme style."

lateralus writes "In his blog, Philip Greenspun re tells of his epiphany that Java is the SUV of programming languages. An interesting point brought forth in his typical extreme style."

Slashback tonight brings you more on the recent cracking of GSM encryption,the odds of file sharers escaping industry scrutiny in Canada, the recently found (and stomped) OpenSSH bug, installation-time ads in Mandrake, and more. Read on below for the details.

Art of the Saber Jagaast writes "As a counterpoint to all the hype about the Star Wars kid, here's a Star Wars fan film that's actually very well done. Art of the Saber is 'a light saber fight sequence with the flavor of a Hong Kong martial arts action movie.' Well worth watching." Update by J : I've made torrents available.

Vote early, often, and reversably. An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to a previous story here on Slashdot on electronic voting, Excite has a story on the same subject with a bit more information including this amazing quote from Deborah Seiler, Diebold's West Coast sales representative: '"These activists don't understand what they're looking at," Seiler said.'"

GSM-crack paper online morcheeba writes "Copies of the GSM-crack paper described in last week's Slashdot article are now available online (PDF) thanks to John Young's Cryptome"

Mandrake ads...take 2 *no comment* writes "Apparently there has been some controversy over the ads in the upcoming Mandrake 9.2. I thought it was pretty cut & dried, but apparently Mandrake thought it was enough of a controversy to to release a written statement about it. I wonder how many flames were posted in the slashdot forum using the download version of Opera."

Blaster Worm still alive and well on MIT campus fwc writes "MIT still has 900 network drops disabled due to the Blaster worm infection. Of particular interest is that MIT network security requires users to reformat their hard drive and re-install their operating system before they get back on the network. Sounds like a good excuse to reinstall something other than a Microsoft operating system."

A big AWOOOGAH for Canadian file sharers. Rumor writes in response to a recent story suggesting that Canadian users could swap files scot-free: "Listen, Canadians, don't go using your p2p apps and thinking you are immune from lawsuit, you are liable for copyright infringement if you share files on p2p apps.

To wit: a fellow law student and I have written an analysis of s. 80 of the Copyright Act and we've concluded that one can download music safely under the Private Copying provision, but no one can share or upload files without infringing on copyright.

In a nutshell, Private Copying allows anyone to make a copy of a song purely for their own use. As you probably know, when you share files and someone downloads from you, what actually happens is that their computer makes a request and your computer actually sends the file to them. Thus, you're copying for someone else's use and infringing. It doesn't matter if you didn't realize that's what happens, either... intent is not required for infringement.

The upside is that you can accept copies from other people (ie. download) all you want. Although there might be an issue of contributory infringement to worry about... I won't go into analyzing that, since so far the record companies are only suing uploaders.

The article can be found on greplaw.

I've recently confirmed this analysis with an IP law professor at my university, so I'm pretty damn sure of it. So, please, be aware of this danger. Downloading cool, uploading/sharing not. I guess the situation still better than nothing."

Why not ask for your money back? zaaj writes "There are several articles out about a newly found/fixed(openssh.org) buffer management bug in OpenSSH and some derivatives. Cisco's Advisory only mentions DoS attacks against certain of their SSH-enabled devices, but ZDNet's article hints at rumors of long-existing root exploits. Regardless, RedHat's got their typical list of updated packages with the patch back-ported. A few other distro's have info in the vendor section of Cert's advisory CA-2003-24"

whovian writes "Chandra, the x-ray observatory launched by NASA in 1999, is being used to study the composition of Earth's moon, perhaps putting an end to the age-old question, "Is the moon really made out of cheese?" 'Nuff said. The original press release is starting to get noticed here(1), here(2) and here(3). A neat idea, if you ask me, but will this postpone any manned lunar missions?"

whovian writes "Chandra, the x-ray observatory launched by NASA in 1999, is being used to study the composition of Earth's moon, perhaps putting an end to the age-old question, "Is the moon really made out of cheese?" 'Nuff said. The original press release is starting to get noticed here(1), here(2) and here(3). A neat idea, if you ask me, but will this postpone any manned lunar missions?"

Snags writes "Astronomers have used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe the deepest, lowest-frequency sound waves ever observed. By my calculations, the 'B-Flat 57 octaves below middle-C' has a period of 9.8 million years. Despite arguments that explosions in space movies should be silent, it is legitimate to call these sound waves because at that frequency, particles of space dust can 'see' each other through gravity. These notes are 'over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing', so to call it infra-sound would be a bit of an understatement."

Snags writes "Astronomers have used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe the deepest, lowest-frequency sound waves ever observed. By my calculations, the 'B-Flat 57 octaves below middle-C' has a period of 9.8 million years. Despite arguments that explosions in space movies should be silent, it is legitimate to call these sound waves because at that frequency, particles of space dust can 'see' each other through gravity. These notes are 'over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing', so to call it infra-sound would be a bit of an understatement."

mpawlo writes "I am still pursuing my new pastime, interviewing interesting Internet policy individuals for Greplaw. Fresh catches include Freenet creator Ian Clarke on his decision to leave the USA, free speech and Freenet and former Lawmeme editor-in-chief Ernest Miller on DRM and privacy, copyright and the First Amendment... and, of course, why blogs matter. Maybe this will provide some food for thought."

mpawlo writes "I am still pursuing my new pastime, interviewing interesting Internet policy individuals for Greplaw. Fresh catches include Freenet creator Ian Clarke on his decision to leave the USA, free speech and Freenet and former Lawmeme editor-in-chief Ernest Miller on DRM and privacy, copyright and the First Amendment... and, of course, why blogs matter. Maybe this will provide some food for thought."

mpawlo writes "I am still pursuing my new pastime, interviewing interesting Internet policy individuals for Greplaw. Fresh catches include Freenet creator Ian Clarke on his decision to leave the USA, free speech and Freenet and former Lawmeme editor-in-chief Ernest Miller on DRM and privacy, copyright and the First Amendment... and, of course, why blogs matter. Maybe this will provide some food for thought."

Uosdwis writes "It's just Day 10 for the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, and it is producing data! This is only a calibration image, but look at this data set. "We're extremely pleased, because these first images have exceeded our expectations," said Dr. Michael Werner. This data is from IRAC at the shorter wavelengths as the telescope is still cooling. The official press release here."

mpawlo writes "Wendy Seltzer was recently appointed staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Seltzer is also a fellow with the Berkman Center. Greplaw has picked Seltzer's brain on her new position with the EFF, Chilling Effects and the greatest opera tunes."

mpawlo writes "Wendy Seltzer was recently appointed staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Seltzer is also a fellow with the Berkman Center. Greplaw has picked Seltzer's brain on her new position with the EFF, Chilling Effects and the greatest opera tunes."