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MojoMax writes "The advent of Windows 8 is drawing ever nearer and recently we have learned that ARM devices installed with Windows 8 will not be able to disable the UEFI secure boot feature that many of us are deeply concerned about. However, UEFI is still a very real danger to Linux and the freedom to use whichever OS you chose. Regardless of information for OEMs to enable customers to install their own keys, such as that published by the Linux Foundation, there are still very serious and as yet unresolved issues with using secure boot and Linux. These issues are best summarized quoting Matthew Garrett: 'Signing the kernel isn't enough. Signed Linux kernels must refuse to load any unsigned kernel modules. Virtualbox on Linux? Dead. Nvidia binary driver on Linux? Dead. All out of tree kernel modules? Utterly, utterly dead. Building an updated driver locally? Not going to happen. That's going to make some people fairly unhappy.'"

I was in Las Vegas last week to see the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. (Officially, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show, but no one calls it "ICES.") I've been to CES just a few times before, but usually as the finish line of a marathon drive from Seattle, rather than a plane flight from Tennessee as it was this time around. I've also never arrived with an armload of video equipment, which brings its own hassles. (Did you notice our videos?) Following are a few thoughts about the experience.

I started my trip with a friendly rubdown from a TSA functionary in Knoxville, whose carefully narrated prodding ("Now I'm going to be touching the inside of your waistband ...") failed to scan the recesses of my brain for what evil may there lurk, or take much notice of the should-be-suspicious bundle of batteries and radio-equipped mics in an evil-looking hard-shelled case that smells of gun oil, but did take a while to poke through ("check out") my bag of unremarkable clothing, paper, and sundries. It is a nice bag, after all, and one must have priorities: I could have had cupcakes.

Rooms are typically cheap in Vegas; the city is still America's gambling mecca, but gambling has become so widespread elsewhere that the draw is weaker -- and there are all those hotel rooms looking for occupants. But because CES is the biggest event of the year, even overbuilt Vegas fills up and prices are high that week. So I stayed at the Sin City Hostel, which has a friendly staff, an eclectic clientele (of young international travelers, mostly), and some of the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept on. On the other hand, it was a thousand bucks cheaper than I was quoted for a room that week at a decent mid-range hotel on the strip, and I have a high tolerance for unusual accommodation. Unless you're actually going to CES, and would rather have a reasonable, luxurious room than a hammock-shaped lump of foam, any other week is probably a smarter time to visit.

Things to note about CES:

It's huge.

CES takes up not just an enormous convention center, but spills over into hotels both nearby and not-especially nearby. Just to touch every booth, suite, and temporary meeting corral would probably take a full-time effort for the whole run of the show, and it might not even be possible (that would make an interesting video game!), especially since some of the dealers are in town for CES, but not officially part of the show as exhibitors. When I met with Steven Isaac of TouchFire, for instance, it was in the lobby of an adjacent hotel. "Nearby" in this case still means a walk of 20 minutes or more just to cross the convention center grounds; it can take nearly that long, too, to walk entrance-to-wall in any of the several large halls at the convention center.

And you'd want to walk all the way back, too. The flashy kiosks operated by companies like Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola tend to be right near the front of the exhibit halls ("them as has, gets"), but back in the low(er) rent districts toward the back of each hall is where a lot of the most interesting stuff collects. Some of these booths might not be that interesting in themselves, but it's fascinating to see the modest public face of companies that sell the bits (LEDs, copper wire, blank circuit boards) and services (custom molding, circuit board layout, high-end fabric embroidery) that underlie even seemingly simple goods. This is also the place to find interesting devices like a ring-mounted mouse, helmet- and google-mounted video cameras in great profusion, and a wireless silicone keyboard cleverly molded to fold into what looks almost like a translucent billfold.

For pure technological art, it's hard to beat the industrial sculpture of the High End audio world. But the show is too big: I didn't get a chance this year to see the biggest trove of that, which is at the Venetian rather than the convention center. $50,000 speakers, and amplifiers in the same range, aren't in my budget (see above re. Sin City Hostel), but if you want to see where Monster Cable and Best Buy get their ideas of how to price electronics, it's enlightening to ogle some of the beautiful components and then their price tags.

It's not just electronics.

In fact, it's not just "consumer" electronics, either, as that term is generally used. No mistake, the consumer end of things isn't neglected: there are plenty of TVs (one of the crowd draws this year was LG's super-thin OLED panel (video), which I didn't have time to properly appreciate), plenty of computers and accessories, and a fair number of white goods -- stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines, all of which are ever more "electronics" in their own right. And Yes, there are shipping containers' worth of MP3 players, cameras of all descriptions, blinking and hovering toys for all ages, robots, headphones, cell phones from the mundane to the exotic, and stacks of tablets from familiar names as well as unknowns (most of them Android, and a surprising number running Android 4.0). But much of the stuff on offer is aimed squarely at institutional buyers or business users. Fancy your own collapsible walk-through metal-detector, or some high-end eye-tracking technology? A $1300 pointing device? (Or, arguably more consumer-friendly, a $900 skateboard perfect for getting around a factory floor?) This is the show for you.

And lots of the goods on display are meant for end-users, but aren't electronics themselves. There are easily thousands, probably tens of thousands, of phone cases, not to mention USB drive casings, computer bags, tripods for cameras, stands for tablets, and other accoutrements. (You can even buy the world's fanciest piece of string.) I overheard a confident claim that there were more than a hundred vendors selling computer bags; I don't doubt it, but I haven't tried to count, and it's probably a fool's errand: not every company's entry in the massive show directory gives much of a clue just what they sell.

Speaking of selling: show rules (and, I was later told, Nevada tax rules) prohibit sales of goods on the show floor itself, but they go on just the same, ranging from furtive (sideways glances and handshake-with-money) to blatant (large, handwritten sign: "Show special! $499!"). For vendors who've made the trip to CES to show off their wares to potential buyers from companies like Fry's and Best Buy as well as smaller dealers, the inventory they've brought as samples can drop in value as soon as that chance is gone; I ended up with a few iPhone 4 cases that the vendor was trying to foist on anyone not bold enough to refuse. (I don't own an iPhone, and have no plans to. Anyone want a few cases with geometric designs in red and grey?)

Besides vendors, there are organizations on hand, too. I ran short of time, or I would have have a chance to ask the folks at the EFF what a nice bunch like them was doing at a place like this.

It lasts too long.

There are a few days of special events prior to CES proper, and then four days of crowded show floor. By the end of the show, vendors are drooping in the most popular booths, and looking a bit forlorn in the lonelier ones. Elevator pitches are down to the length of a short escalator ride, and grazing show-goers are weighed down by their masses of brochures, business cards and tchotchkes. The hub-bub is impossible to avoid even on the last day, and the crowd is crushing. Even with shoes that seemed comfortable going in, I developed blisters to impress the Devil on three toes and both heels, wore out a few pens, and considered commandeering a massage chair for an hour to beat down the ache in my shoulder from hauling around my camera bag and bulky laptop.

It goes too fast.

Even though seeing it all is an impossible task, and even with inevitably sore feet, the lure of novelty is strong. I saw hundreds of exhibitors I would have liked to return to at least briefly. I had just a few minutes to play with the very attractive Mirasol screens at the Qualcomm booth, for instance (shown off in a handful of small tablets that they insist are "e-readers that play music, display video and can browse the web" rather than "tablets"), and missed out on the chance to see the new OLPC tablet.

Being a newbie with the video camera and operating without a trusty servant, I lost some time fumbling with mics, batteries, cables, and a small tripod that I bought mostly as a grip. (Why bother with external mics? Because the roar of the crowd is overwhelming to the camera's built-in mics, and only partly defeated with a shotgun mic mounted on the camera.) By the final day of the show, I had the routine down a little better, but still caught on tape — or rather, in flash memory — only a fraction of the things that caught my eye. I'm lucky that my video conspirator Roblimo has a knack for finding and assembling the most watchable bits. Good news, if hardly impressive these days: my laptop running Linux Mint had no complaints importing files from my Panasonic HD camera for sending off to him a few thousand miles away in Florida for editing.

I stayed two more nights, foam-hammock and all, sorting through marketing goo and enjoying the neon and buffet offerings along the Las Vegas strip. Because I lucked out and reached a line at the Las Vegas airport that lets the miscreants through easily (no puffer machine or full-body scanner to refuse), my trip home didn't even offer a rub-down, only the chance to catch up on a few hours of sleep.

I was in Las Vegas last week to see the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. (Officially, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show, but no one calls it "ICES.") I've been to CES just a few times before, but usually as the finish line of a marathon drive from Seattle, rather than a plane flight from Tennessee as it was this time around. I've also never arrived with an armload of video equipment, which brings its own hassles. (Did you notice our videos?) Following are a few thoughts about the experience.

I started my trip with a friendly rubdown from a TSA functionary in Knoxville, whose carefully narrated prodding ("Now I'm going to be touching the inside of your waistband ...") failed to scan the recesses of my brain for what evil may there lurk, or take much notice of the should-be-suspicious bundle of batteries and radio-equipped mics in an evil-looking hard-shelled case that smells of gun oil, but did take a while to poke through ("check out") my bag of unremarkable clothing, paper, and sundries. It is a nice bag, after all, and one must have priorities: I could have had cupcakes.

Rooms are typically cheap in Vegas; the city is still America's gambling mecca, but gambling has become so widespread elsewhere that the draw is weaker -- and there are all those hotel rooms looking for occupants. But because CES is the biggest event of the year, even overbuilt Vegas fills up and prices are high that week. So I stayed at the Sin City Hostel, which has a friendly staff, an eclectic clientele (of young international travelers, mostly), and some of the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept on. On the other hand, it was a thousand bucks cheaper than I was quoted for a room that week at a decent mid-range hotel on the strip, and I have a high tolerance for unusual accommodation. Unless you're actually going to CES, and would rather have a reasonable, luxurious room than a hammock-shaped lump of foam, any other week is probably a smarter time to visit.

Things to note about CES:

It's huge.

CES takes up not just an enormous convention center, but spills over into hotels both nearby and not-especially nearby. Just to touch every booth, suite, and temporary meeting corral would probably take a full-time effort for the whole run of the show, and it might not even be possible (that would make an interesting video game!), especially since some of the dealers are in town for CES, but not officially part of the show as exhibitors. When I met with Steven Isaac of TouchFire, for instance, it was in the lobby of an adjacent hotel. "Nearby" in this case still means a walk of 20 minutes or more just to cross the convention center grounds; it can take nearly that long, too, to walk entrance-to-wall in any of the several large halls at the convention center.

And you'd want to walk all the way back, too. The flashy kiosks operated by companies like Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola tend to be right near the front of the exhibit halls ("them as has, gets"), but back in the low(er) rent districts toward the back of each hall is where a lot of the most interesting stuff collects. Some of these booths might not be that interesting in themselves, but it's fascinating to see the modest public face of companies that sell the bits (LEDs, copper wire, blank circuit boards) and services (custom molding, circuit board layout, high-end fabric embroidery) that underlie even seemingly simple goods. This is also the place to find interesting devices like a ring-mounted mouse, helmet- and google-mounted video cameras in great profusion, and a wireless silicone keyboard cleverly molded to fold into what looks almost like a translucent billfold.

For pure technological art, it's hard to beat the industrial sculpture of the High End audio world. But the show is too big: I didn't get a chance this year to see the biggest trove of that, which is at the Venetian rather than the convention center. $50,000 speakers, and amplifiers in the same range, aren't in my budget (see above re. Sin City Hostel), but if you want to see where Monster Cable and Best Buy get their ideas of how to price electronics, it's enlightening to ogle some of the beautiful components and then their price tags.

It's not just electronics.

In fact, it's not just "consumer" electronics, either, as that term is generally used. No mistake, the consumer end of things isn't neglected: there are plenty of TVs (one of the crowd draws this year was LG's super-thin OLED panel (video), which I didn't have time to properly appreciate), plenty of computers and accessories, and a fair number of white goods -- stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines, all of which are ever more "electronics" in their own right. And Yes, there are shipping containers' worth of MP3 players, cameras of all descriptions, blinking and hovering toys for all ages, robots, headphones, cell phones from the mundane to the exotic, and stacks of tablets from familiar names as well as unknowns (most of them Android, and a surprising number running Android 4.0). But much of the stuff on offer is aimed squarely at institutional buyers or business users. Fancy your own collapsible walk-through metal-detector, or some high-end eye-tracking technology? A $1300 pointing device? (Or, arguably more consumer-friendly, a $900 skateboard perfect for getting around a factory floor?) This is the show for you.

And lots of the goods on display are meant for end-users, but aren't electronics themselves. There are easily thousands, probably tens of thousands, of phone cases, not to mention USB drive casings, computer bags, tripods for cameras, stands for tablets, and other accoutrements. (You can even buy the world's fanciest piece of string.) I overheard a confident claim that there were more than a hundred vendors selling computer bags; I don't doubt it, but I haven't tried to count, and it's probably a fool's errand: not every company's entry in the massive show directory gives much of a clue just what they sell.

Speaking of selling: show rules (and, I was later told, Nevada tax rules) prohibit sales of goods on the show floor itself, but they go on just the same, ranging from furtive (sideways glances and handshake-with-money) to blatant (large, handwritten sign: "Show special! $499!"). For vendors who've made the trip to CES to show off their wares to potential buyers from companies like Fry's and Best Buy as well as smaller dealers, the inventory they've brought as samples can drop in value as soon as that chance is gone; I ended up with a few iPhone 4 cases that the vendor was trying to foist on anyone not bold enough to refuse. (I don't own an iPhone, and have no plans to. Anyone want a few cases with geometric designs in red and grey?)

Besides vendors, there are organizations on hand, too. I ran short of time, or I would have have a chance to ask the folks at the EFF what a nice bunch like them was doing at a place like this.

It lasts too long.

There are a few days of special events prior to CES proper, and then four days of crowded show floor. By the end of the show, vendors are drooping in the most popular booths, and looking a bit forlorn in the lonelier ones. Elevator pitches are down to the length of a short escalator ride, and grazing show-goers are weighed down by their masses of brochures, business cards and tchotchkes. The hub-bub is impossible to avoid even on the last day, and the crowd is crushing. Even with shoes that seemed comfortable going in, I developed blisters to impress the Devil on three toes and both heels, wore out a few pens, and considered commandeering a massage chair for an hour to beat down the ache in my shoulder from hauling around my camera bag and bulky laptop.

It goes too fast.

Even though seeing it all is an impossible task, and even with inevitably sore feet, the lure of novelty is strong. I saw hundreds of exhibitors I would have liked to return to at least briefly. I had just a few minutes to play with the very attractive Mirasol screens at the Qualcomm booth, for instance (shown off in a handful of small tablets that they insist are "e-readers that play music, display video and can browse the web" rather than "tablets"), and missed out on the chance to see the new OLPC tablet.

Being a newbie with the video camera and operating without a trusty servant, I lost some time fumbling with mics, batteries, cables, and a small tripod that I bought mostly as a grip. (Why bother with external mics? Because the roar of the crowd is overwhelming to the camera's built-in mics, and only partly defeated with a shotgun mic mounted on the camera.) By the final day of the show, I had the routine down a little better, but still caught on tape — or rather, in flash memory — only a fraction of the things that caught my eye. I'm lucky that my video conspirator Roblimo has a knack for finding and assembling the most watchable bits. Good news, if hardly impressive these days: my laptop running Linux Mint had no complaints importing files from my Panasonic HD camera for sending off to him a few thousand miles away in Florida for editing.

I stayed two more nights, foam-hammock and all, sorting through marketing goo and enjoying the neon and buffet offerings along the Las Vegas strip. Because I lucked out and reached a line at the Las Vegas airport that lets the miscreants through easily (no puffer machine or full-body scanner to refuse), my trip home didn't even offer a rub-down, only the chance to catch up on a few hours of sleep.

I was in Las Vegas last week to see the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. (Officially, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show, but no one calls it "ICES.") I've been to CES just a few times before, but usually as the finish line of a marathon drive from Seattle, rather than a plane flight from Tennessee as it was this time around. I've also never arrived with an armload of video equipment, which brings its own hassles. (Did you notice our videos?) Following are a few thoughts about the experience.

I started my trip with a friendly rubdown from a TSA functionary in Knoxville, whose carefully narrated prodding ("Now I'm going to be touching the inside of your waistband ...") failed to scan the recesses of my brain for what evil may there lurk, or take much notice of the should-be-suspicious bundle of batteries and radio-equipped mics in an evil-looking hard-shelled case that smells of gun oil, but did take a while to poke through ("check out") my bag of unremarkable clothing, paper, and sundries. It is a nice bag, after all, and one must have priorities: I could have had cupcakes.

Rooms are typically cheap in Vegas; the city is still America's gambling mecca, but gambling has become so widespread elsewhere that the draw is weaker -- and there are all those hotel rooms looking for occupants. But because CES is the biggest event of the year, even overbuilt Vegas fills up and prices are high that week. So I stayed at the Sin City Hostel, which has a friendly staff, an eclectic clientele (of young international travelers, mostly), and some of the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept on. On the other hand, it was a thousand bucks cheaper than I was quoted for a room that week at a decent mid-range hotel on the strip, and I have a high tolerance for unusual accommodation. Unless you're actually going to CES, and would rather have a reasonable, luxurious room than a hammock-shaped lump of foam, any other week is probably a smarter time to visit.

Things to note about CES:

It's huge.

CES takes up not just an enormous convention center, but spills over into hotels both nearby and not-especially nearby. Just to touch every booth, suite, and temporary meeting corral would probably take a full-time effort for the whole run of the show, and it might not even be possible (that would make an interesting video game!), especially since some of the dealers are in town for CES, but not officially part of the show as exhibitors. When I met with Steven Isaac of TouchFire, for instance, it was in the lobby of an adjacent hotel. "Nearby" in this case still means a walk of 20 minutes or more just to cross the convention center grounds; it can take nearly that long, too, to walk entrance-to-wall in any of the several large halls at the convention center.

And you'd want to walk all the way back, too. The flashy kiosks operated by companies like Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola tend to be right near the front of the exhibit halls ("them as has, gets"), but back in the low(er) rent districts toward the back of each hall is where a lot of the most interesting stuff collects. Some of these booths might not be that interesting in themselves, but it's fascinating to see the modest public face of companies that sell the bits (LEDs, copper wire, blank circuit boards) and services (custom molding, circuit board layout, high-end fabric embroidery) that underlie even seemingly simple goods. This is also the place to find interesting devices like a ring-mounted mouse, helmet- and google-mounted video cameras in great profusion, and a wireless silicone keyboard cleverly molded to fold into what looks almost like a translucent billfold.

For pure technological art, it's hard to beat the industrial sculpture of the High End audio world. But the show is too big: I didn't get a chance this year to see the biggest trove of that, which is at the Venetian rather than the convention center. $50,000 speakers, and amplifiers in the same range, aren't in my budget (see above re. Sin City Hostel), but if you want to see where Monster Cable and Best Buy get their ideas of how to price electronics, it's enlightening to ogle some of the beautiful components and then their price tags.

It's not just electronics.

In fact, it's not just "consumer" electronics, either, as that term is generally used. No mistake, the consumer end of things isn't neglected: there are plenty of TVs (one of the crowd draws this year was LG's super-thin OLED panel (video), which I didn't have time to properly appreciate), plenty of computers and accessories, and a fair number of white goods -- stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines, all of which are ever more "electronics" in their own right. And Yes, there are shipping containers' worth of MP3 players, cameras of all descriptions, blinking and hovering toys for all ages, robots, headphones, cell phones from the mundane to the exotic, and stacks of tablets from familiar names as well as unknowns (most of them Android, and a surprising number running Android 4.0). But much of the stuff on offer is aimed squarely at institutional buyers or business users. Fancy your own collapsible walk-through metal-detector, or some high-end eye-tracking technology? A $1300 pointing device? (Or, arguably more consumer-friendly, a $900 skateboard perfect for getting around a factory floor?) This is the show for you.

And lots of the goods on display are meant for end-users, but aren't electronics themselves. There are easily thousands, probably tens of thousands, of phone cases, not to mention USB drive casings, computer bags, tripods for cameras, stands for tablets, and other accoutrements. (You can even buy the world's fanciest piece of string.) I overheard a confident claim that there were more than a hundred vendors selling computer bags; I don't doubt it, but I haven't tried to count, and it's probably a fool's errand: not every company's entry in the massive show directory gives much of a clue just what they sell.

Speaking of selling: show rules (and, I was later told, Nevada tax rules) prohibit sales of goods on the show floor itself, but they go on just the same, ranging from furtive (sideways glances and handshake-with-money) to blatant (large, handwritten sign: "Show special! $499!"). For vendors who've made the trip to CES to show off their wares to potential buyers from companies like Fry's and Best Buy as well as smaller dealers, the inventory they've brought as samples can drop in value as soon as that chance is gone; I ended up with a few iPhone 4 cases that the vendor was trying to foist on anyone not bold enough to refuse. (I don't own an iPhone, and have no plans to. Anyone want a few cases with geometric designs in red and grey?)

Besides vendors, there are organizations on hand, too. I ran short of time, or I would have have a chance to ask the folks at the EFF what a nice bunch like them was doing at a place like this.

It lasts too long.

There are a few days of special events prior to CES proper, and then four days of crowded show floor. By the end of the show, vendors are drooping in the most popular booths, and looking a bit forlorn in the lonelier ones. Elevator pitches are down to the length of a short escalator ride, and grazing show-goers are weighed down by their masses of brochures, business cards and tchotchkes. The hub-bub is impossible to avoid even on the last day, and the crowd is crushing. Even with shoes that seemed comfortable going in, I developed blisters to impress the Devil on three toes and both heels, wore out a few pens, and considered commandeering a massage chair for an hour to beat down the ache in my shoulder from hauling around my camera bag and bulky laptop.

It goes too fast.

Even though seeing it all is an impossible task, and even with inevitably sore feet, the lure of novelty is strong. I saw hundreds of exhibitors I would have liked to return to at least briefly. I had just a few minutes to play with the very attractive Mirasol screens at the Qualcomm booth, for instance (shown off in a handful of small tablets that they insist are "e-readers that play music, display video and can browse the web" rather than "tablets"), and missed out on the chance to see the new OLPC tablet.

Being a newbie with the video camera and operating without a trusty servant, I lost some time fumbling with mics, batteries, cables, and a small tripod that I bought mostly as a grip. (Why bother with external mics? Because the roar of the crowd is overwhelming to the camera's built-in mics, and only partly defeated with a shotgun mic mounted on the camera.) By the final day of the show, I had the routine down a little better, but still caught on tape — or rather, in flash memory — only a fraction of the things that caught my eye. I'm lucky that my video conspirator Roblimo has a knack for finding and assembling the most watchable bits. Good news, if hardly impressive these days: my laptop running Linux Mint had no complaints importing files from my Panasonic HD camera for sending off to him a few thousand miles away in Florida for editing.

I stayed two more nights, foam-hammock and all, sorting through marketing goo and enjoying the neon and buffet offerings along the Las Vegas strip. Because I lucked out and reached a line at the Las Vegas airport that lets the miscreants through easily (no puffer machine or full-body scanner to refuse), my trip home didn't even offer a rub-down, only the chance to catch up on a few hours of sleep.

I was in Las Vegas last week to see the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. (Officially, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show, but no one calls it "ICES.") I've been to CES just a few times before, but usually as the finish line of a marathon drive from Seattle, rather than a plane flight from Tennessee as it was this time around. I've also never arrived with an armload of video equipment, which brings its own hassles. (Did you notice our videos?) Following are a few thoughts about the experience.

I started my trip with a friendly rubdown from a TSA functionary in Knoxville, whose carefully narrated prodding ("Now I'm going to be touching the inside of your waistband ...") failed to scan the recesses of my brain for what evil may there lurk, or take much notice of the should-be-suspicious bundle of batteries and radio-equipped mics in an evil-looking hard-shelled case that smells of gun oil, but did take a while to poke through ("check out") my bag of unremarkable clothing, paper, and sundries. It is a nice bag, after all, and one must have priorities: I could have had cupcakes.

Rooms are typically cheap in Vegas; the city is still America's gambling mecca, but gambling has become so widespread elsewhere that the draw is weaker -- and there are all those hotel rooms looking for occupants. But because CES is the biggest event of the year, even overbuilt Vegas fills up and prices are high that week. So I stayed at the Sin City Hostel, which has a friendly staff, an eclectic clientele (of young international travelers, mostly), and some of the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept on. On the other hand, it was a thousand bucks cheaper than I was quoted for a room that week at a decent mid-range hotel on the strip, and I have a high tolerance for unusual accommodation. Unless you're actually going to CES, and would rather have a reasonable, luxurious room than a hammock-shaped lump of foam, any other week is probably a smarter time to visit.

Things to note about CES:

It's huge.

CES takes up not just an enormous convention center, but spills over into hotels both nearby and not-especially nearby. Just to touch every booth, suite, and temporary meeting corral would probably take a full-time effort for the whole run of the show, and it might not even be possible (that would make an interesting video game!), especially since some of the dealers are in town for CES, but not officially part of the show as exhibitors. When I met with Steven Isaac of TouchFire, for instance, it was in the lobby of an adjacent hotel. "Nearby" in this case still means a walk of 20 minutes or more just to cross the convention center grounds; it can take nearly that long, too, to walk entrance-to-wall in any of the several large halls at the convention center.

And you'd want to walk all the way back, too. The flashy kiosks operated by companies like Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola tend to be right near the front of the exhibit halls ("them as has, gets"), but back in the low(er) rent districts toward the back of each hall is where a lot of the most interesting stuff collects. Some of these booths might not be that interesting in themselves, but it's fascinating to see the modest public face of companies that sell the bits (LEDs, copper wire, blank circuit boards) and services (custom molding, circuit board layout, high-end fabric embroidery) that underlie even seemingly simple goods. This is also the place to find interesting devices like a ring-mounted mouse, helmet- and google-mounted video cameras in great profusion, and a wireless silicone keyboard cleverly molded to fold into what looks almost like a translucent billfold.

For pure technological art, it's hard to beat the industrial sculpture of the High End audio world. But the show is too big: I didn't get a chance this year to see the biggest trove of that, which is at the Venetian rather than the convention center. $50,000 speakers, and amplifiers in the same range, aren't in my budget (see above re. Sin City Hostel), but if you want to see where Monster Cable and Best Buy get their ideas of how to price electronics, it's enlightening to ogle some of the beautiful components and then their price tags.

It's not just electronics.

In fact, it's not just "consumer" electronics, either, as that term is generally used. No mistake, the consumer end of things isn't neglected: there are plenty of TVs (one of the crowd draws this year was LG's super-thin OLED panel (video), which I didn't have time to properly appreciate), plenty of computers and accessories, and a fair number of white goods -- stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines, all of which are ever more "electronics" in their own right. And Yes, there are shipping containers' worth of MP3 players, cameras of all descriptions, blinking and hovering toys for all ages, robots, headphones, cell phones from the mundane to the exotic, and stacks of tablets from familiar names as well as unknowns (most of them Android, and a surprising number running Android 4.0). But much of the stuff on offer is aimed squarely at institutional buyers or business users. Fancy your own collapsible walk-through metal-detector, or some high-end eye-tracking technology? A $1300 pointing device? (Or, arguably more consumer-friendly, a $900 skateboard perfect for getting around a factory floor?) This is the show for you.

And lots of the goods on display are meant for end-users, but aren't electronics themselves. There are easily thousands, probably tens of thousands, of phone cases, not to mention USB drive casings, computer bags, tripods for cameras, stands for tablets, and other accoutrements. (You can even buy the world's fanciest piece of string.) I overheard a confident claim that there were more than a hundred vendors selling computer bags; I don't doubt it, but I haven't tried to count, and it's probably a fool's errand: not every company's entry in the massive show directory gives much of a clue just what they sell.

Speaking of selling: show rules (and, I was later told, Nevada tax rules) prohibit sales of goods on the show floor itself, but they go on just the same, ranging from furtive (sideways glances and handshake-with-money) to blatant (large, handwritten sign: "Show special! $499!"). For vendors who've made the trip to CES to show off their wares to potential buyers from companies like Fry's and Best Buy as well as smaller dealers, the inventory they've brought as samples can drop in value as soon as that chance is gone; I ended up with a few iPhone 4 cases that the vendor was trying to foist on anyone not bold enough to refuse. (I don't own an iPhone, and have no plans to. Anyone want a few cases with geometric designs in red and grey?)

Besides vendors, there are organizations on hand, too. I ran short of time, or I would have have a chance to ask the folks at the EFF what a nice bunch like them was doing at a place like this.

It lasts too long.

There are a few days of special events prior to CES proper, and then four days of crowded show floor. By the end of the show, vendors are drooping in the most popular booths, and looking a bit forlorn in the lonelier ones. Elevator pitches are down to the length of a short escalator ride, and grazing show-goers are weighed down by their masses of brochures, business cards and tchotchkes. The hub-bub is impossible to avoid even on the last day, and the crowd is crushing. Even with shoes that seemed comfortable going in, I developed blisters to impress the Devil on three toes and both heels, wore out a few pens, and considered commandeering a massage chair for an hour to beat down the ache in my shoulder from hauling around my camera bag and bulky laptop.

It goes too fast.

Even though seeing it all is an impossible task, and even with inevitably sore feet, the lure of novelty is strong. I saw hundreds of exhibitors I would have liked to return to at least briefly. I had just a few minutes to play with the very attractive Mirasol screens at the Qualcomm booth, for instance (shown off in a handful of small tablets that they insist are "e-readers that play music, display video and can browse the web" rather than "tablets"), and missed out on the chance to see the new OLPC tablet.

Being a newbie with the video camera and operating without a trusty servant, I lost some time fumbling with mics, batteries, cables, and a small tripod that I bought mostly as a grip. (Why bother with external mics? Because the roar of the crowd is overwhelming to the camera's built-in mics, and only partly defeated with a shotgun mic mounted on the camera.) By the final day of the show, I had the routine down a little better, but still caught on tape — or rather, in flash memory — only a fraction of the things that caught my eye. I'm lucky that my video conspirator Roblimo has a knack for finding and assembling the most watchable bits. Good news, if hardly impressive these days: my laptop running Linux Mint had no complaints importing files from my Panasonic HD camera for sending off to him a few thousand miles away in Florida for editing.

I stayed two more nights, foam-hammock and all, sorting through marketing goo and enjoying the neon and buffet offerings along the Las Vegas strip. Because I lucked out and reached a line at the Las Vegas airport that lets the miscreants through easily (no puffer machine or full-body scanner to refuse), my trip home didn't even offer a rub-down, only the chance to catch up on a few hours of sleep.

I was in Las Vegas last week to see the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. (Officially, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show, but no one calls it "ICES.") I've been to CES just a few times before, but usually as the finish line of a marathon drive from Seattle, rather than a plane flight from Tennessee as it was this time around. I've also never arrived with an armload of video equipment, which brings its own hassles. (Did you notice our videos?) Following are a few thoughts about the experience.

I started my trip with a friendly rubdown from a TSA functionary in Knoxville, whose carefully narrated prodding ("Now I'm going to be touching the inside of your waistband ...") failed to scan the recesses of my brain for what evil may there lurk, or take much notice of the should-be-suspicious bundle of batteries and radio-equipped mics in an evil-looking hard-shelled case that smells of gun oil, but did take a while to poke through ("check out") my bag of unremarkable clothing, paper, and sundries. It is a nice bag, after all, and one must have priorities: I could have had cupcakes.

Rooms are typically cheap in Vegas; the city is still America's gambling mecca, but gambling has become so widespread elsewhere that the draw is weaker -- and there are all those hotel rooms looking for occupants. But because CES is the biggest event of the year, even overbuilt Vegas fills up and prices are high that week. So I stayed at the Sin City Hostel, which has a friendly staff, an eclectic clientele (of young international travelers, mostly), and some of the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept on. On the other hand, it was a thousand bucks cheaper than I was quoted for a room that week at a decent mid-range hotel on the strip, and I have a high tolerance for unusual accommodation. Unless you're actually going to CES, and would rather have a reasonable, luxurious room than a hammock-shaped lump of foam, any other week is probably a smarter time to visit.

Things to note about CES:

It's huge.

CES takes up not just an enormous convention center, but spills over into hotels both nearby and not-especially nearby. Just to touch every booth, suite, and temporary meeting corral would probably take a full-time effort for the whole run of the show, and it might not even be possible (that would make an interesting video game!), especially since some of the dealers are in town for CES, but not officially part of the show as exhibitors. When I met with Steven Isaac of TouchFire, for instance, it was in the lobby of an adjacent hotel. "Nearby" in this case still means a walk of 20 minutes or more just to cross the convention center grounds; it can take nearly that long, too, to walk entrance-to-wall in any of the several large halls at the convention center.

And you'd want to walk all the way back, too. The flashy kiosks operated by companies like Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola tend to be right near the front of the exhibit halls ("them as has, gets"), but back in the low(er) rent districts toward the back of each hall is where a lot of the most interesting stuff collects. Some of these booths might not be that interesting in themselves, but it's fascinating to see the modest public face of companies that sell the bits (LEDs, copper wire, blank circuit boards) and services (custom molding, circuit board layout, high-end fabric embroidery) that underlie even seemingly simple goods. This is also the place to find interesting devices like a ring-mounted mouse, helmet- and google-mounted video cameras in great profusion, and a wireless silicone keyboard cleverly molded to fold into what looks almost like a translucent billfold.

For pure technological art, it's hard to beat the industrial sculpture of the High End audio world. But the show is too big: I didn't get a chance this year to see the biggest trove of that, which is at the Venetian rather than the convention center. $50,000 speakers, and amplifiers in the same range, aren't in my budget (see above re. Sin City Hostel), but if you want to see where Monster Cable and Best Buy get their ideas of how to price electronics, it's enlightening to ogle some of the beautiful components and then their price tags.

It's not just electronics.

In fact, it's not just "consumer" electronics, either, as that term is generally used. No mistake, the consumer end of things isn't neglected: there are plenty of TVs (one of the crowd draws this year was LG's super-thin OLED panel (video), which I didn't have time to properly appreciate), plenty of computers and accessories, and a fair number of white goods -- stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines, all of which are ever more "electronics" in their own right. And Yes, there are shipping containers' worth of MP3 players, cameras of all descriptions, blinking and hovering toys for all ages, robots, headphones, cell phones from the mundane to the exotic, and stacks of tablets from familiar names as well as unknowns (most of them Android, and a surprising number running Android 4.0). But much of the stuff on offer is aimed squarely at institutional buyers or business users. Fancy your own collapsible walk-through metal-detector, or some high-end eye-tracking technology? A $1300 pointing device? (Or, arguably more consumer-friendly, a $900 skateboard perfect for getting around a factory floor?) This is the show for you.

And lots of the goods on display are meant for end-users, but aren't electronics themselves. There are easily thousands, probably tens of thousands, of phone cases, not to mention USB drive casings, computer bags, tripods for cameras, stands for tablets, and other accoutrements. (You can even buy the world's fanciest piece of string.) I overheard a confident claim that there were more than a hundred vendors selling computer bags; I don't doubt it, but I haven't tried to count, and it's probably a fool's errand: not every company's entry in the massive show directory gives much of a clue just what they sell.

Speaking of selling: show rules (and, I was later told, Nevada tax rules) prohibit sales of goods on the show floor itself, but they go on just the same, ranging from furtive (sideways glances and handshake-with-money) to blatant (large, handwritten sign: "Show special! $499!"). For vendors who've made the trip to CES to show off their wares to potential buyers from companies like Fry's and Best Buy as well as smaller dealers, the inventory they've brought as samples can drop in value as soon as that chance is gone; I ended up with a few iPhone 4 cases that the vendor was trying to foist on anyone not bold enough to refuse. (I don't own an iPhone, and have no plans to. Anyone want a few cases with geometric designs in red and grey?)

Besides vendors, there are organizations on hand, too. I ran short of time, or I would have have a chance to ask the folks at the EFF what a nice bunch like them was doing at a place like this.

It lasts too long.

There are a few days of special events prior to CES proper, and then four days of crowded show floor. By the end of the show, vendors are drooping in the most popular booths, and looking a bit forlorn in the lonelier ones. Elevator pitches are down to the length of a short escalator ride, and grazing show-goers are weighed down by their masses of brochures, business cards and tchotchkes. The hub-bub is impossible to avoid even on the last day, and the crowd is crushing. Even with shoes that seemed comfortable going in, I developed blisters to impress the Devil on three toes and both heels, wore out a few pens, and considered commandeering a massage chair for an hour to beat down the ache in my shoulder from hauling around my camera bag and bulky laptop.

It goes too fast.

Even though seeing it all is an impossible task, and even with inevitably sore feet, the lure of novelty is strong. I saw hundreds of exhibitors I would have liked to return to at least briefly. I had just a few minutes to play with the very attractive Mirasol screens at the Qualcomm booth, for instance (shown off in a handful of small tablets that they insist are "e-readers that play music, display video and can browse the web" rather than "tablets"), and missed out on the chance to see the new OLPC tablet.

Being a newbie with the video camera and operating without a trusty servant, I lost some time fumbling with mics, batteries, cables, and a small tripod that I bought mostly as a grip. (Why bother with external mics? Because the roar of the crowd is overwhelming to the camera's built-in mics, and only partly defeated with a shotgun mic mounted on the camera.) By the final day of the show, I had the routine down a little better, but still caught on tape — or rather, in flash memory — only a fraction of the things that caught my eye. I'm lucky that my video conspirator Roblimo has a knack for finding and assembling the most watchable bits. Good news, if hardly impressive these days: my laptop running Linux Mint had no complaints importing files from my Panasonic HD camera for sending off to him a few thousand miles away in Florida for editing.

I stayed two more nights, foam-hammock and all, sorting through marketing goo and enjoying the neon and buffet offerings along the Las Vegas strip. Because I lucked out and reached a line at the Las Vegas airport that lets the miscreants through easily (no puffer machine or full-body scanner to refuse), my trip home didn't even offer a rub-down, only the chance to catch up on a few hours of sleep.

I was in Las Vegas last week to see the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. (Officially, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show, but no one calls it "ICES.") I've been to CES just a few times before, but usually as the finish line of a marathon drive from Seattle, rather than a plane flight from Tennessee as it was this time around. I've also never arrived with an armload of video equipment, which brings its own hassles. (Did you notice our videos?) Following are a few thoughts about the experience.

I started my trip with a friendly rubdown from a TSA functionary in Knoxville, whose carefully narrated prodding ("Now I'm going to be touching the inside of your waistband ...") failed to scan the recesses of my brain for what evil may there lurk, or take much notice of the should-be-suspicious bundle of batteries and radio-equipped mics in an evil-looking hard-shelled case that smells of gun oil, but did take a while to poke through ("check out") my bag of unremarkable clothing, paper, and sundries. It is a nice bag, after all, and one must have priorities: I could have had cupcakes.

Rooms are typically cheap in Vegas; the city is still America's gambling mecca, but gambling has become so widespread elsewhere that the draw is weaker -- and there are all those hotel rooms looking for occupants. But because CES is the biggest event of the year, even overbuilt Vegas fills up and prices are high that week. So I stayed at the Sin City Hostel, which has a friendly staff, an eclectic clientele (of young international travelers, mostly), and some of the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept on. On the other hand, it was a thousand bucks cheaper than I was quoted for a room that week at a decent mid-range hotel on the strip, and I have a high tolerance for unusual accommodation. Unless you're actually going to CES, and would rather have a reasonable, luxurious room than a hammock-shaped lump of foam, any other week is probably a smarter time to visit.

Things to note about CES:

It's huge.

CES takes up not just an enormous convention center, but spills over into hotels both nearby and not-especially nearby. Just to touch every booth, suite, and temporary meeting corral would probably take a full-time effort for the whole run of the show, and it might not even be possible (that would make an interesting video game!), especially since some of the dealers are in town for CES, but not officially part of the show as exhibitors. When I met with Steven Isaac of TouchFire, for instance, it was in the lobby of an adjacent hotel. "Nearby" in this case still means a walk of 20 minutes or more just to cross the convention center grounds; it can take nearly that long, too, to walk entrance-to-wall in any of the several large halls at the convention center.

And you'd want to walk all the way back, too. The flashy kiosks operated by companies like Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola tend to be right near the front of the exhibit halls ("them as has, gets"), but back in the low(er) rent districts toward the back of each hall is where a lot of the most interesting stuff collects. Some of these booths might not be that interesting in themselves, but it's fascinating to see the modest public face of companies that sell the bits (LEDs, copper wire, blank circuit boards) and services (custom molding, circuit board layout, high-end fabric embroidery) that underlie even seemingly simple goods. This is also the place to find interesting devices like a ring-mounted mouse, helmet- and google-mounted video cameras in great profusion, and a wireless silicone keyboard cleverly molded to fold into what looks almost like a translucent billfold.

For pure technological art, it's hard to beat the industrial sculpture of the High End audio world. But the show is too big: I didn't get a chance this year to see the biggest trove of that, which is at the Venetian rather than the convention center. $50,000 speakers, and amplifiers in the same range, aren't in my budget (see above re. Sin City Hostel), but if you want to see where Monster Cable and Best Buy get their ideas of how to price electronics, it's enlightening to ogle some of the beautiful components and then their price tags.

It's not just electronics.

In fact, it's not just "consumer" electronics, either, as that term is generally used. No mistake, the consumer end of things isn't neglected: there are plenty of TVs (one of the crowd draws this year was LG's super-thin OLED panel (video), which I didn't have time to properly appreciate), plenty of computers and accessories, and a fair number of white goods -- stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines, all of which are ever more "electronics" in their own right. And Yes, there are shipping containers' worth of MP3 players, cameras of all descriptions, blinking and hovering toys for all ages, robots, headphones, cell phones from the mundane to the exotic, and stacks of tablets from familiar names as well as unknowns (most of them Android, and a surprising number running Android 4.0). But much of the stuff on offer is aimed squarely at institutional buyers or business users. Fancy your own collapsible walk-through metal-detector, or some high-end eye-tracking technology? A $1300 pointing device? (Or, arguably more consumer-friendly, a $900 skateboard perfect for getting around a factory floor?) This is the show for you.

And lots of the goods on display are meant for end-users, but aren't electronics themselves. There are easily thousands, probably tens of thousands, of phone cases, not to mention USB drive casings, computer bags, tripods for cameras, stands for tablets, and other accoutrements. (You can even buy the world's fanciest piece of string.) I overheard a confident claim that there were more than a hundred vendors selling computer bags; I don't doubt it, but I haven't tried to count, and it's probably a fool's errand: not every company's entry in the massive show directory gives much of a clue just what they sell.

Speaking of selling: show rules (and, I was later told, Nevada tax rules) prohibit sales of goods on the show floor itself, but they go on just the same, ranging from furtive (sideways glances and handshake-with-money) to blatant (large, handwritten sign: "Show special! $499!"). For vendors who've made the trip to CES to show off their wares to potential buyers from companies like Fry's and Best Buy as well as smaller dealers, the inventory they've brought as samples can drop in value as soon as that chance is gone; I ended up with a few iPhone 4 cases that the vendor was trying to foist on anyone not bold enough to refuse. (I don't own an iPhone, and have no plans to. Anyone want a few cases with geometric designs in red and grey?)

Besides vendors, there are organizations on hand, too. I ran short of time, or I would have have a chance to ask the folks at the EFF what a nice bunch like them was doing at a place like this.

It lasts too long.

There are a few days of special events prior to CES proper, and then four days of crowded show floor. By the end of the show, vendors are drooping in the most popular booths, and looking a bit forlorn in the lonelier ones. Elevator pitches are down to the length of a short escalator ride, and grazing show-goers are weighed down by their masses of brochures, business cards and tchotchkes. The hub-bub is impossible to avoid even on the last day, and the crowd is crushing. Even with shoes that seemed comfortable going in, I developed blisters to impress the Devil on three toes and both heels, wore out a few pens, and considered commandeering a massage chair for an hour to beat down the ache in my shoulder from hauling around my camera bag and bulky laptop.

It goes too fast.

Even though seeing it all is an impossible task, and even with inevitably sore feet, the lure of novelty is strong. I saw hundreds of exhibitors I would have liked to return to at least briefly. I had just a few minutes to play with the very attractive Mirasol screens at the Qualcomm booth, for instance (shown off in a handful of small tablets that they insist are "e-readers that play music, display video and can browse the web" rather than "tablets"), and missed out on the chance to see the new OLPC tablet.

Being a newbie with the video camera and operating without a trusty servant, I lost some time fumbling with mics, batteries, cables, and a small tripod that I bought mostly as a grip. (Why bother with external mics? Because the roar of the crowd is overwhelming to the camera's built-in mics, and only partly defeated with a shotgun mic mounted on the camera.) By the final day of the show, I had the routine down a little better, but still caught on tape — or rather, in flash memory — only a fraction of the things that caught my eye. I'm lucky that my video conspirator Roblimo has a knack for finding and assembling the most watchable bits. Good news, if hardly impressive these days: my laptop running Linux Mint had no complaints importing files from my Panasonic HD camera for sending off to him a few thousand miles away in Florida for editing.

I stayed two more nights, foam-hammock and all, sorting through marketing goo and enjoying the neon and buffet offerings along the Las Vegas strip. Because I lucked out and reached a line at the Las Vegas airport that lets the miscreants through easily (no puffer machine or full-body scanner to refuse), my trip home didn't even offer a rub-down, only the chance to catch up on a few hours of sleep.

Wednesday is here, and with it sites around the internet are going under temporary blackout to protest two pieces of legislation currently making their way through the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia, reddit, the Free Software Foundation, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, imgur, Mozilla, and many others have all made major changes to their sites or shut down altogether in protest. These sites, as well as technology experts (PDF) around the world and everyone here at Slashdot, think SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech and the uncensored nature of the internet. The purpose of the protests is to educate people — to let them know this legislation will damage websites you use and enjoy every day, despite being unrelated to the stated purpose of both bills. So, we ask you: what can you do to stop SOPA and PIPA? You may have heard the House has shelved SOPA, and that President Obama has pledged not to pass it as-is, but the MPAA and SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) are trying to brush off the protests as a stunt, and Smith has announced markup for the bill will resume in February. Meanwhile, PIPA is still present in the Senate, and it remains a threat. Read on for more about why these bills are bad news, and how to contact your representative to let them know it.

Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA. Why is it bad?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968.

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale, and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.

But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin. Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.

Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never, ever be abused). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.

This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.

What can we do?

So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:

Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents.
Here is the Senate contact list and the House contact list.
You can also use the EFF's form-letter, the Stop American Censorship form-letter, or sign Google's petition.
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department. (And yes, you have a dog in this fight.)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest, and this crowd-sourced Google Doc tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.

Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA and PIPA pages up. The EFF has a series of articles explaining in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups, law professors, and internet companies.

Go forth and educate.

Wednesday is here, and with it sites around the internet are going under temporary blackout to protest two pieces of legislation currently making their way through the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia, reddit, the Free Software Foundation, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, imgur, Mozilla, and many others have all made major changes to their sites or shut down altogether in protest. These sites, as well as technology experts (PDF) around the world and everyone here at Slashdot, think SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech and the uncensored nature of the internet. The purpose of the protests is to educate people — to let them know this legislation will damage websites you use and enjoy every day, despite being unrelated to the stated purpose of both bills. So, we ask you: what can you do to stop SOPA and PIPA? You may have heard the House has shelved SOPA, and that President Obama has pledged not to pass it as-is, but the MPAA and SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) are trying to brush off the protests as a stunt, and Smith has announced markup for the bill will resume in February. Meanwhile, PIPA is still present in the Senate, and it remains a threat. Read on for more about why these bills are bad news, and how to contact your representative to let them know it.

Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA. Why is it bad?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968.

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale, and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.

But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin. Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.

Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never, ever be abused). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.

This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.

What can we do?

So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:

Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents.
Here is the Senate contact list and the House contact list.
You can also use the EFF's form-letter, the Stop American Censorship form-letter, or sign Google's petition.
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department. (And yes, you have a dog in this fight.)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest, and this crowd-sourced Google Doc tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.

Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA and PIPA pages up. The EFF has a series of articles explaining in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups, law professors, and internet companies.

Go forth and educate.

Wednesday is here, and with it sites around the internet are going under temporary blackout to protest two pieces of legislation currently making their way through the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia, reddit, the Free Software Foundation, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, imgur, Mozilla, and many others have all made major changes to their sites or shut down altogether in protest. These sites, as well as technology experts (PDF) around the world and everyone here at Slashdot, think SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech and the uncensored nature of the internet. The purpose of the protests is to educate people — to let them know this legislation will damage websites you use and enjoy every day, despite being unrelated to the stated purpose of both bills. So, we ask you: what can you do to stop SOPA and PIPA? You may have heard the House has shelved SOPA, and that President Obama has pledged not to pass it as-is, but the MPAA and SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) are trying to brush off the protests as a stunt, and Smith has announced markup for the bill will resume in February. Meanwhile, PIPA is still present in the Senate, and it remains a threat. Read on for more about why these bills are bad news, and how to contact your representative to let them know it.

Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA. Why is it bad?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968.

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale, and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.

But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin. Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.

Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never, ever be abused). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.

This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.

What can we do?

So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:

Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents.
Here is the Senate contact list and the House contact list.
You can also use the EFF's form-letter, the Stop American Censorship form-letter, or sign Google's petition.
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department. (And yes, you have a dog in this fight.)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest, and this crowd-sourced Google Doc tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.

Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA and PIPA pages up. The EFF has a series of articles explaining in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups, law professors, and internet companies.

Go forth and educate.

Wednesday is here, and with it sites around the internet are going under temporary blackout to protest two pieces of legislation currently making their way through the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia, reddit, the Free Software Foundation, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, imgur, Mozilla, and many others have all made major changes to their sites or shut down altogether in protest. These sites, as well as technology experts (PDF) around the world and everyone here at Slashdot, think SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech and the uncensored nature of the internet. The purpose of the protests is to educate people — to let them know this legislation will damage websites you use and enjoy every day, despite being unrelated to the stated purpose of both bills. So, we ask you: what can you do to stop SOPA and PIPA? You may have heard the House has shelved SOPA, and that President Obama has pledged not to pass it as-is, but the MPAA and SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) are trying to brush off the protests as a stunt, and Smith has announced markup for the bill will resume in February. Meanwhile, PIPA is still present in the Senate, and it remains a threat. Read on for more about why these bills are bad news, and how to contact your representative to let them know it.

Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA. Why is it bad?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968.

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale, and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.

But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin. Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.

Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never, ever be abused). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.

This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.

What can we do?

So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:

Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents.
Here is the Senate contact list and the House contact list.
You can also use the EFF's form-letter, the Stop American Censorship form-letter, or sign Google's petition.
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department. (And yes, you have a dog in this fight.)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest, and this crowd-sourced Google Doc tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.

Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA and PIPA pages up. The EFF has a series of articles explaining in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups, law professors, and internet companies.

Go forth and educate.

Wednesday is here, and with it sites around the internet are going under temporary blackout to protest two pieces of legislation currently making their way through the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia, reddit, the Free Software Foundation, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, imgur, Mozilla, and many others have all made major changes to their sites or shut down altogether in protest. These sites, as well as technology experts (PDF) around the world and everyone here at Slashdot, think SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech and the uncensored nature of the internet. The purpose of the protests is to educate people — to let them know this legislation will damage websites you use and enjoy every day, despite being unrelated to the stated purpose of both bills. So, we ask you: what can you do to stop SOPA and PIPA? You may have heard the House has shelved SOPA, and that President Obama has pledged not to pass it as-is, but the MPAA and SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) are trying to brush off the protests as a stunt, and Smith has announced markup for the bill will resume in February. Meanwhile, PIPA is still present in the Senate, and it remains a threat. Read on for more about why these bills are bad news, and how to contact your representative to let them know it.

Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA. Why is it bad?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968.

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale, and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.

But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin. Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.

Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never, ever be abused). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.

This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.

What can we do?

So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:

Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents.
Here is the Senate contact list and the House contact list.
You can also use the EFF's form-letter, the Stop American Censorship form-letter, or sign Google's petition.
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department. (And yes, you have a dog in this fight.)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest, and this crowd-sourced Google Doc tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.

Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA and PIPA pages up. The EFF has a series of articles explaining in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups, law professors, and internet companies.

Go forth and educate.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

Since their inception SOPA and PIPA have raised concerns about blacklisting from online freedom advocates, and tech industry giants. Law professors worry that they could stifle growth and innovation. Other's have warned that the legislation would hurt scientific debate and open discourse on the internet. SOPA and PIPA are not without support however. In fact a wide variety of companies have backed the proposed laws, bringing together an eclectic group. After months of debate, the removal of one of the more controversial provisions, and The White House expressing its own concerns over the law in its current form, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced that he was shelving SOPA. PIPA however remains, and it is likely that a re-worked version of the House bill will be brought up soon.

New submitter ve6ay writes "The talk of the tech world over the past day is that RIM, struggling mightily in these last months, was in talks to be bought either partially or wholly by Samsung. Sources at the Boy Genius Report indicate that while RIM may be trying to sell, it is asking way too much for itself."

An anonymous reader writes "On 8 June 2011 many companies (big and small) enabled IPv6 to their main web sites by published AAAA records; 24 hours later, almost all of them disabled it after the test was done. This year, on June 6th, many of those same companies (Google, Bing, Facebook) will be enabling IPv6 again, but this time there won't be any going back. In addition to content providers, several ISPs are also participating: Comcast, AT&T, XS4ALL, KDDI, and others. CDNs Akamai and Limelight are on board, as well as network equipment manufacturers Cisco and D-Link. Is the chicken-and-egg problem of IPv6 finally, slowly coming to an end?"

donniebaseball23 writes "As a follow-up to his piece on Xbox 720, veteran games journalist Chris Morris has put together some thoughtful advice on what Sony needs to do (and needs to avoid) to ensure that the next generation PlayStation is a success. In particular, Morris notes that Sony must 'look beyond games' to create a fully fledged entertainment hub: 'Nintendo has been pretty adamant that it has little interest in content beyond games. Microsoft seems to be rushing to embrace the set top box world. Sony, though, seems a bit confused about what it wants.'"

New submitter 9re9 writes "The NY Times describes what may be the beginning of an actual cyberwar between a pro-Palestinian group and Israeli companies, specifically El Al and the Tel Aviv stock exchange. From the article: 'A hacker identifying himself as oxOmar, already notorious for posting the details of more than 20,000 Israeli credit cards, sent an overnight warning to Israel's Ynet news outlet that a group of pro-Palestinian cyberattackers called Nightmare planned to bring down the sites in the morning.' Though the article is skimpy on technical details, the group appears to have engaged merely in a DDOS attack. Hamas praised the attack as opening 'a new resistance front against Israel.' Is this the first acknowledged cyberwar?"

An anonymous reader writes "Following reports of misconduct by Google employees in Kenya and India, It has been found that Google IP addresses have been responsible for deliberate vandalism of OpenStreetMap data. While it is unlikely that this was a deliberate or coordinated attack by Google HQ on the competition, multiple such reports does raise the question of whether or not Google has become too big to effectively enforce its 'Don't be evil' philosophy across its massive organization."

symbolset writes "Jimmy Wales confirms that the entire English language Wikipedia will be on blackout January 18th from midnight to midnight, Eastern Standard Time. The site's 25 million daily users will redirected to an education page with a call to action. Votes are still being taken on the exact implementation." Despite a small victory against SOPA in the House, Wikipedia still feels the blackout is necessary due to the looming Senate vote on PROTECT IP, and as a deterrent to future attempts to revive a similar law under a new name.

Timothy Lord caught up with Raspberry Pi product leader Eben Upton at CES. The long-awaited $25 Linux single-board computers are finally being shipped from the Chinese factory where they're being assembled and will be available for sale in just a few weeks. Eben talks not only about the Raspberry Pi boards and the add-on Gertboard, but about the eBay auction that helped finance Raspberry Pi. Timothy says he considers Eben Upton one of his "personal tech-world heroes." After watching this video, maybe he'll be one of yours, too. Read on below to watch.

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook and Google told the Delhi High Court today they cannot block offensive content that appears on their services. The two Internet giants are among 21 companies that have been asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material in India, and the Indian government has given the green light for their prosecution. Although India is democratic (in fact, it's the world's largest democracy), many fear the country will resort to censorship."

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook and Google told the Delhi High Court today they cannot block offensive content that appears on their services. The two Internet giants are among 21 companies that have been asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material in India, and the Indian government has given the green light for their prosecution. Although India is democratic (in fact, it's the world's largest democracy), many fear the country will resort to censorship."

SpuriousLogic writes with a preliminary ruling in the ITC case between Apple and Motorola. Quoting eWeek: "Motorola is celebrating an initial triumph over Apple, after a U.S. International Trade Commission administrative law judge issued an initial determination (PDF) finding that Motorola Mobility has not violated any of the three patents listed in an October 2010 lawsuit Apple filed against the Droid maker. ... The determination isn't the final say ... in March, the ruling will be reviewed by a six-member ITC panel that will announce the ultimate ruling. However, according to Zacks Equity Research, it's unusual for the ITC panel, which has the power to block device imports, to contradict a judge's determination."

alphadogg writes "Last year's industry-shaking RSA Security breach has resulted in customers' CEOs and CIOs engaging much more closely with the vendor to improve their organizations' security, according to the head of RSA. Discussing the details of the attack that compromised its SecurID tokens has made RSA sought after by companies that want to prevent something similar from happening to them, Executive Chairman Art Coviello said in an interview with Network World. 'If there's a silver lining to the cloud that was over us from April through over the summer it is the fact that we've been engaged with customers at a strategic level as never before,' Coviello says, 'and they want to know in detail what happened to us, how we responded, what tools we used, what was effective and what was not.'"

theodp writes "Google remembers Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. not only with its Doodles, but also with its patents. 'Right around the Martin Luther King Holiday,' explained Google in its application for a recently-granted patent on Discovery of Short-Term and Emerging Trends in Computer Network Traffic, 'there may be many searches about "Martin Luther King"...Thus, it would be useful to have better methods of detecting short term trends for the purposes of caching search results to making them more readily available to users.' You may call the invention of detecting and caching 'MLK Day Sale' search results patently obvious, but the USPTO calls it U.S. Patent No. 8,082,342. Hey, at least it's arguably better than the patents issued to Microsoft and Google for avoiding walking or driving down Martin Luther King Boulevard!"

Apple TV is a little device you hook to your television. Ubuntu TV (motto: "TV for human beings") is going to be inside your TV, says Peter Goodall, Canonical's Product Manage for Ubuntu TV. At CES, he described Ubuntu TV to Timothy Lord in detail. Join them via Slashdot Video to see what's up with this Ubuntu venture, which has lots of competition; "Smart TV" was a major CES catchphrase this year.

OverTheGeicoE writes "CNET has a story on DHS' whole car X-ray scanners and their potential cancer risks. The story focuses on the Z Portal scanner, which appears to be a stationary version of the older Z Backscatter Vans. The story provides interesting pictures of the device and the images it produces, but it also raises important questions about the devices' cancer risks. The average energy of the X-ray beam used is three times that used in a CT scan, which could be big trouble for vehicle passengers and drivers should a vehicle stop in mid-scan. Some studies show the risk for cancer from CT scans can be quite high. Worse still, the DHS estimates of the Z Portal's radiation dosage are likely to be several orders of magnitude too low. 'Society will pay a huge price in cancer because of this,' according to one scientist."

PuceBaboon writes "It's worth noting that, in addition to the main FreeBSD release covered here recently, PC-BSD has also released their 'Isotope' edition, based on FreeBSD 9.0. Why would you be interested? Well, PC-BSD, while not the first, is certainly the most current version of FreeBSD aimed squarely at the desktop user. Pre-configured for the desktop and using a graphical installer, the 9.0 release includes KDE, GNOME, XFCE and LXDE desktop environments, an update manager, WiFi 'quick connect,' BootCamp support and auto-configuration for most common hardware. Live-CD, VirtualBox and VMware release images for 32- and 64-bit architectures also make it easier than ever for users to test the release before committing to a full install. Check out the torrents (scroll down), main download page and the PC-BSD 9.0 manual pages."

New submitter smithz writes "Bloomberg is reporting that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expanding its antitrust probe of Google Inc. to include scrutiny of its new Google+ social networking service. Google this week introduced changes to its search engine so that results feature photos, news and comments from Google+. The changes sparked a backlash from bloggers, privacy groups and competitors who said the inclusion of Google+ results unfairly promotes the company's products over other information on the Web. Before expanding the probe, FTC was already investigating Google for giving preference to its own services in search results and whether that practice violates antitrust laws. The agency is also examining whether the company is using its control of the Android mobile operating system to discourage smartphone makers from using rivals' applications. Google is facing similar investigations in Europe and South Korea."

New submitter smithz writes "Bloomberg is reporting that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expanding its antitrust probe of Google Inc. to include scrutiny of its new Google+ social networking service. Google this week introduced changes to its search engine so that results feature photos, news and comments from Google+. The changes sparked a backlash from bloggers, privacy groups and competitors who said the inclusion of Google+ results unfairly promotes the company's products over other information on the Web. Before expanding the probe, FTC was already investigating Google for giving preference to its own services in search results and whether that practice violates antitrust laws. The agency is also examining whether the company is using its control of the Android mobile operating system to discourage smartphone makers from using rivals' applications. Google is facing similar investigations in Europe and South Korea."

New submitter smithz writes "Bloomberg is reporting that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expanding its antitrust probe of Google Inc. to include scrutiny of its new Google+ social networking service. Google this week introduced changes to its search engine so that results feature photos, news and comments from Google+. The changes sparked a backlash from bloggers, privacy groups and competitors who said the inclusion of Google+ results unfairly promotes the company's products over other information on the Web. Before expanding the probe, FTC was already investigating Google for giving preference to its own services in search results and whether that practice violates antitrust laws. The agency is also examining whether the company is using its control of the Android mobile operating system to discourage smartphone makers from using rivals' applications. Google is facing similar investigations in Europe and South Korea."

An anonymous reader writes "An Indian court given the green light for the prosecution of '21 social networking sites.' The list features 10 foreign-based companies, and could affect websites provided by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and YouTube. The recent development is part of an ongoing argument between the companies and India over whether content should be regulated (read: censored) in the country. The approval was actually made on December 23, 2011, but was only revealed yesterday. India warned these websites it can block them just like China can."

joabj writes "The ISC is seeking some open source magic for the next version of the widely used BIND. Although the BIND is already open source, most of the work thus far done on the DNS server software has come from contractors, the government and Unix vendors. 'The goal is to move away from having BIND a heavily sponsored corporate product,' said BIND 10 manager Shane Kerr. Kerr is hoping that more eyes will equal fewer bugs, and that more users will go ahead and implement the features they've been requesting themselves. BIND 10, due by the end of the year, features a new modular architecture, one designed to circumvent many of the security woes that have bedeviled BIND 9."

mikejuk writes with an interesting look at what coders can get around to after a few years of creating a free office suite: dealing with many thousands of lines of deprecated code: "Thanks to the efforts of its volunteer taskforce, over half the unused code in LibreOffice has been removed over the past six months. It's good to see this clean-up operation but it does raise questions about the amount of dead code lurking out there in the wild. The scale of the dead code in LibreOffice is shocking, and it probably isn't because the code base is especially bad. Can you imagine this in any other engineering discipline? Oh yes, we built the bridge but there are a few hundred unnecessary iron girders that we forgot to remove... Oh yes, we implemented the new chip but that area over there is just a few thousand transistors we no longer use... and so on." Well, that last one doesn't sound too surprising at all. Exciting to think that LibreOffice (which has worked well for me over the past several years, including under the OpenOffice.org name) has quite so much room for improvement.

An anonymous reader writes with the recent news that, in line with its goal to provide secure phones to government employees in various domains, "The NSA has released a set of security enhancements to Android. These appear to be based on SELinux, which was also originally created by the NSA."

symbolset writes "The trial in which Oracle is suing Google over Android has been put on indefinite hold by the trial judge, until Oracle comes up with a credible methodology for figuring alleged damages. The trial was planned to start on or after March 19."

New submitter isoloisti writes "Hot on the heels of IBM's 'no more passwords' prediction, Wired has an article about provocative research saying that passwords are here to stay. Researchers from Microsoft and Carleton U. take a harsh view of research on authentication (PDF), saying, 'no progress has been made in the last twenty years.' They dismiss biometrics, PKI, OpenID, and single-signon: 'Not only have proposed alternatives failed, but we have learnt little from the failures.' Because the computer industry so thoroughly wrote off passwords about a decade ago, not enough serious research has gone into improving passwords and understanding how they get compromised in the real world. 'It is time to admit that passwords will be with us for some time, and moreover, that in many instances they are the best-fit among currently known solutions.'"

msmoriarty writes "We knew Windows Server 8 was going to be a departure for Microsoft, including an 'optional' GUI, but in a blog post made earlier this week, the Windows Server team said that working without the GUI will be the 'recommended' method, and is telling developers not to assume a GUI will be present. According to Windows consultant and author Don Jones, this is a big hint to Windows admins that they better get used to not having a GUI in future releases. From the article: 'I'm well aware that many Windows admins out there aren't looking forward to a GUI-less server operating system from Microsoft. ... I'm sure Microsoft has, too.They're proceeding anyway. We have two choices: adapt or die.'"

Zothecula writes "We may be closer to the day when United States Marines will, within a matter of minutes, use a handheld app to summon robotic helicopters to deliver battlefield supplies. On Tuesday, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) announced its five-year, US$98 million Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System (AACUS) program, with the specific aim of developing 'sensors and control technologies for robotic vertical take-off and landing aircraft.'" Last month we covered NATO's robotic helicopter, the K-MAX.

Back in May, we heard about Qualcomm's plans to hammer out details for an X PRIZE competition to invent a Star Trek-style tricorder. Now, reader Sven-Erik sends word that the requirements have been finalized and the competition has launched. "As envisioned for this competition, the device will be a tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases. Metrics for health could include such elements as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature. Ultimately, this tool will collect large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements. Given that each team will take its own approach to design and functionality, the device's physical appearance and functionality may vary immensely from team to team. Indeed, the only stated limit on form is that the mass of its components together must be no greater than five pounds."

Back in November, Russia launched the Phobos-Grunt probe on a mission to return a soil sample from Mars' largest moon. Sadly, the probe malfunctioned, and never left orbit. It's due to crash into the Indian Ocean this weekend. An anonymous reader points out some interesting comments from a Russian official, Vladimir Popovkin, who obliquely suggested that interference from other countries was a possible cause of the failure. Quoting: "Mr. Popovkin’s remarks to the newspaper Izvestia were the first high-level suggestion of nefarious interference. A retired commander of Russia’s missile warning system had speculated in November that strong radar signals from installations in Alaska might have damaged the spacecraft. 'We don’t want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now,' Mr. Popovkin said in the interview. 'The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out.' ... Mr. Popovkin did not directly implicate the United States in the interview. But he said 'the frequent failure of our space launches, which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us,' an apparent reference to the Americas."

Slashdot's Timothy Lord is at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. There is no way any one person can take in the whole show. It's just too big for that. But on Timothy's first day, he spotted an overlay keyboard for the iPad that's been mentioned on Slashdot before, an invisible keyboard for your smartphone or tablet, and a crazy-interesting all-in-one computing device with a built-in projector and built-in virtual keyboard. Watch the video and join Timothy as he learns about these three devices. (Before you ask: Yes, we'll have more videos from CES over the next few days.)"