Slashdot Mirror

Masem writes: "Articles at CNET and CNN say that Judge Patel has ordered Napster to remain offline until they can offer 100% blockage of copyrighted songs by the plaintiff record companies. Napster officials said that they can guarentee 99% complience, but Patel says this is not good enough. Napster is arguing that this order violated the appeals court's ruling, and are appealling it."

Masem writes "Senator John Edwards (NC) is introducing a strong privacy bill to Congress, as reported by CNN. While CNN's details are sketchy, the bill would require commercial web sites to ask permission from the user before a cookie can be set or personal information collected. Needless to say, this is an ideal time to snail-mail your representative or senator and ask them to vote in favor of this bill. Of interest that I cannot locate is if this allows 'grandfather' protection of existing data, or will all commercial sites have to start anew by erasing their databases and recollecting the information."

Masem writes: "The NYTimes (free reg req) has a story on work that is being done to determine whether animals dream. The evidence for brain activity and REM is there, but researchers have now found that with 4 test mice which have run a maze several times, their brain activity while they sleep strongly mimiced that of when they are running that particular maze, as opposed to brain patterns when doing other tasks including running a different type of maze. It suggests that the biological function that controls dreaming is related to memory somehow."

Masem sent in a link to a NYTimes story (free blah blah required. Why is the Times so lame that they don't realize that hundreds of people are registered with my address?) on self adaptive websites. It talks about us, Everything2 (which IMHO is among the best examples of the genre out there, but since I helped create it, I'm biased ;) and of course the recently announced (and Slashcode Based) suck/feed Slashclone, Plastic. I found at least one mistake, but besides that, its not a bad piece, although it probably isn't saying anything that a regular Slashdot reader doesn't know already.

Masem writes "According to this CNET article, an interesting case is working it's way through the courts. A pilot for Hawaiian Airlines had set up a private web site, sufficiently secured for only those that he wanted to allow access to (in this case, coworkers), on which he reported gripes and complaints about the company. The airline used a fellow pilot's name and information to gain access to the site at least 20 times to find out what he was doing (though the article does not say if the pilot had been punished in anyway). The pilot's lawyers argued that secured communication that the web site provided was considered to be the same level as phone calls, and thus the activities of the airline were akin to wiretapping. The initial judical decision rejected this arguement, but a federal circuit court reversed it and found in favor of the pilot. It's unknown where this will go, but this decision could set several favorable precidents regarding private communications on the net."

Masem writes: "Yahoo news is reporting that a legal challege to ICANN's control on the DNS system is going to be pushed by Atlantic Root, a group that has been controlling the .biz domain (as given to them by the Open Root Server Confederation) since May. When ICANN issued the 7 new TLDs, they did recognize that there were alternative DNS systems out there and tried to avoid obvious conflicts (one reason why .web wasn't granted). However, Atlantic Root argues that ICANN willing knew about the alternate .biz when they made their ruling, and are only representing big businesses in their practices."

Masem writes "NYTimes has summary (CT:El Lamo free registration required) of how on-line advertizing is going to change in the near future. Banner ads have been found to be effectively ignored, so the next step is to visibly replace the content with ads for a brief period of time, as is currently done on radio and tv. The three methods described are pop up windows, redirect links that take you to an ad with the link to the final destination (aka "interstitials"), and a new technology that downloads the ad while you read the content, then displays the ad when you leave the page (aka "superstitials"). Unless you're running an ad blocker proxy, it's going to get really hard to ignore ads on the web soon."