Slashdot Mirror

Can good money drive out bad at least sometimes? News for nerds writes "Following the earlier news about the arrest of the Winny P2P app creator, KANEKO Isamu, researcher at the U-Tokyo and well-known hacker in the 3-D physics simulation scene in Japan (His first public Winny demo by his anonymous alias '47' was the graphic simulation of the network topology), the group of software technicians separate from Kaneko's lawyers has raised over 10 million yen ($88,347) in 10 days for the lawyers. It claims "The situation of the activities that technicians usually carry out being deemed a crime all of a sudden and arrests being made is seriously shrinking software research and development.""

A minor setback to the oligarchy of lawyers. Ellis D. Tripp writes "The SCOTUS has refused to hear an appeal of a 5th circuit court decision declaring that building codes such as the National Electrical Code lose all copyright protection once they are adopted into municipal law. Under this ruling, such codes can be freely posted on the internet or otherwise distributed for free, rather than requiring contractors or other interested parties to purchase them at often exorbitant prices each time they are revised. The original defendant, Peter Veeck, was sued by Southern Building Code Congress International for making their "Intellectual Property" available on his website."

Why does it have to be snakes? ChrisHanel writes "A follow-up to a story ran on Slashdot last year: The legendary shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark is screening next month at the first ever large scale Fan Film convention in Worcester, Mass. Tons of fanfilms and filmmaking workshops, and to get past the legal snafus, the fanfilms themselves are free to the public. A rare chance to check out this gem of a film."

Speaking of unconventional media origins, koa writes "This may be an Internet first: a mainstream television show spawned from a genuine internet phenomenon. Odd Todd will be piloting his own animated series on Comedy Central sometime early 2005 based off of his hit website. Press release here. Are we noticing an emergence of a new trend of media to look for original plot ideas from wilds the 'net?"

There is power in a union, evidently. XopherMV writes with the upshot (via Yahoo! News) of last weekend's strike at SBC: "The union wanted access to positions in SBC's emerging sectors, including Internet support and wireless data service. That work is now handled largely by lesser-paid contract workers, many of them in India and the Philippines. The tentative contract calls for SBC and the union to work together to bring the technical support jobs back to the United States when the current contract expires in two years.""

Trust me, ma'am, I was hired to fool you. Cold Drink writes "Part two of a previously Slashdotted story tells the tale of how social engineer Isreal was thwarted. When employees follow proper procedures, social engineers can be stopped dead in their tracks. Read on to find out how one person protected tens of thousands of dollars."

IWILL try to get one of these. We mentioned a few days ago a small dual-Opteron system promised from IWILL; many readers expressed skepticism about its internal configuration, memory slot allocation, power requirements, etc. An anonymous reader writes "it appears a lot of the questions have been answered in regards to the board and cooling configuration over at Hexus. They appear to have snapped some pics of this little beast."

That's awfully enterprising of Claria. gbulmash writes "Nordstrom Corporate Communications has composed an official response to complaints about L.L. Bean's allegations and is e-mailing it to customers.

I received the following letter:

'Thank you for taking the time to email Nordstrom with your concerns. We were disappointed that L.L. Bean did not contact us and allow us the opportunity to investigate this matter before they filed a lawsuit against us.

I would like to address your inquiry about Claria specifically. Nordstrom currently has no relationship with Claria and hasn't had a relationship with them since late 2001 when we tested their services for a 4-month period and concluded we and Claria were not an acceptable fit. To our knowledge, Nordstrom does not engage in the form of advertising described by L.L. Bean in the press. We have worked very hard to earn our customers' trust. We understand how important privacy is to our customers and we do not look to partner with advertisers that violate their privacy in any way.

Marketing on the Internet is a complex process and if our ads are in fact appearing on L.L. Bean's website, it is without our knowledge or consent. Please know that we are looking into this and will take appropriate action if we find the practice is in fact occurring.

Please know that we appreciate you as a customer and hope we will have the opportunity to serve you and your wife in the future.

Thank you again for your feedback.

Sincerely,

Deniz Anders
Corporate Communications
Nordstrom, Inc.'"

This research could still lead to new and powerful sink cleansers. mrsalty writes "A topic of brief and skeptical discussion back in april, Sonoluminescence as a fusion catalyst seems to be circling the drain. According to this BBC News article, new research shows that the collapsing bubbles' temperatures fall a bit short of that needed for fusion. A bit in this case being a few million degrees."

Discretion is sometimes the better part of avoiding attention. stinky wizzleteats writes: "Looks like OddTodd got off on charges that he defrauded the State of New York by starting www.oddtodd.com (Laid Off Land) while receiving unemployment payments. I didn't know he was only getting 67% of the take (his provider was getting the rest, which sort of explains why the site didn't get /.ed when the first story about him was run."

Try explaining this one to your parents. Earlier this year, we posted about Project Dolphin, an effort to measure the number of keystrokes you make as you IRC, email, program, whatever. Now, Wes N. a.k.a c3 writes with a largish update from the project's homepage, excerpting:

To this end, Dolphin has found itself its own dedicated server that serves as a home that is now (finally) suitably equipped to handle the growth we want to see, and fully expect. Previous participants will notice that this site itself has been fully redesigned and revamped toward a more professional look, while remaining commercial free in the original spirit of the project.

At the very core, this is a research project for its designers. It's made by geeks and it's made for geeks. The positive feedback received over the last few months since its initial launch has ensured that it will continue along it's current path of growth in the spirit of fun and experimentation for the forseeable future. (end from website) The new version of project-dolphin's Pulse is due to come out any time now. The new version is supposed to have a few bug fixes and how loads of new features. to check how the progress is coming along check out The development website some of the new features include . Typing Activity tab, Keystroke Frequencies chart , and alot of other neat stuff check it out on the website or goto irc.project-dolphin.net #projectdolphin on IRC."

"Arch" is adjective, verb and noun in one. When it comes to replacing CVS, Subversion is not the only game in town. We posted in May about the even-more-ambitious arch revision control system. Now, bshanks writes: "Tom Lord, the author of the revolutionary arch revision control system (slashdot article here), needs some monetary help."