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eldavojohn writes "Yesterday, Moblin, the joint OS project between Novell and Intel, was released as V2.0 Beta for netbooks with the image available for download. We've talked about Moblin before, but Computer World has an article speculating this is Intel's direct affront to Microsoft's Windows 7 by pointing out that Moblin is designed to optimally use Intel's Atom Processor and smaller screens so popular with netbooks. Windows 7's netbook competition doesn't stop there, as GoodOS's gOS3 Gadgets and Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix are being designed to also take advantage of Intel's Atom, especially from a UI perspective. Ars has a look at Moblin's rich new UI as well. Back in April, Intel said it would support Windows 7 on the Atom later this year, and Intel also says Windows 7 is a good choice for Intel's netbooks, so it doesn't look like they're intentionally burning any bridges between them and Redmond."

An anonymous reader writes "Not content to simply follow the 'anything to protect American lives' mantra, freshman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has introduced a bill to prohibit mandatory full body scans at airports. Chaffetz states, 'The images offer a disturbingly accurate view of a person's body underneath clothing ... Americans should not be required to expose their bodies in this manner in order to fly.' He goes on to note that the ACLU has expressed support for the bill. Maybe we don't need tin-foil sports coats to go with our tin-foil hats. For reference, the Daily Herald has a story featuring images from the millimeter wavelength imager, and we've talked about the scanners before."

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a recent court decision about the rights of online commenters. "Although a court has ruled that the police can subpoena the identities of users who posted comments in a newspaper's blog, I think this is not as big of a threat to journalistic integrity as it might seem. And in any case when the judge ruled against the privacy rights of 'bloggers,' he didn't actually mean 'bloggers." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

After writing that a Virginia court made an error in saying that spoofing an IP address in e-mail headers was analogous to using a "pseudonym," and that an Ontario court was wrong in saying that an IP address could be subpoenaed by a court because it was no more secret than personal information like a "home address," I think that the latest court ruling against online anonymity — an Illinois judge ordering a newspaper to reveal the identities of people who posted comments on its blog — is not as big of a threat to online privacy, and is not apparently based on any misconceptions about how the Internet works. However, the ruling has the potential to frighten bloggers more than necessary (as well as possibly set a bad precedent for future courts if they don't read the decision closely enough) because the ruling uses the word "bloggers" repeatedly to refer to what everyone else calls "blog commenters."

Police had asked the Alton Telegraph to reveal the identities of five people who had posted comments in the newspaper's blog which indicated they might have knowledge relevant to an ongoing murder investigation. The newspaper sued to avoid being forced to hand over the commenters' identities, saying that they were "news sources" protected under Illinois's newspaper shield law. Judge Richard Tognarelli ruled that blog commenters did not count as "sources" under the shield law, and allowed the police to go forward in obtaining the identity of two of the commenters, but denied the request to unmask three others, on the grounds that those commenters did not appear to have information relevant to the case.

To consider the relevant questions separately:

Is this legally correct?

Every time I raise a question like this, it provokes the ire of law students and lawyers who say that judges are the real experts on what is legally correct, and it's not appropriate for lay people to comment. As I never tire of saying, if judges are really "experts" in a sense that lay people are not, then it should be possible to put 10 judges in separate rooms, present them with the same facts of the same case, and have most of them independently come to the same conclusion about the correct answer, with a higher degree of accuracy than lay people would be able to reach the same conclusion. If this is not the case, then the judges are not playing the role of "experts" so much as "designated decision-makers," and it's perfectly fair for lay people to analyze whether the judges' reasoning appears correct.

In this case, the judge simply said that blog commenters are not news "sources" in the sense described by the law. The text of the shield law (735 ILCS 5/8-901) defines a "source" as "the person or means from or through which the news or information was obtained." Now, if you were to parse this super-literally, then the blog commenters could be considered "sources" because they are posting "information" which can be "obtained" by the reporters who later go back and read through the blog comments. But if you were to be that literal about it, then anybody who publishes "information" anywhere at all, including someone who posts a timetable of train departure times on their Web page, could be considered a "source" for information used by a reporter. Clearly the legislature did not intend for the term "source" to include all people who publish information anywhere under the sun (just because that information is technically available to reporters just like it's available to everyone else), or they would have said so. So it seems reasonable to assume that when the law refers to sources from whom reporters "obtain information," it refers to the way in which reporters normally obtain information in their role as reporters obtaining information from sources — that is, the source privately communicating with a reporter with some expectation of anonymity, hoping the reporter can use the information provided for research on a future story. Blog commenters do not fit that definition since (a) they are posting publicly, and (b) they are responding to a story that has already been written.

The judge also noted that the shield law is not absolute, and even for individuals who are considered "sources" under the law, their interest in maintaining anonymity has to be weighed against the importance of the information being sought. Judge Tognarelli wrote, "The Telegraph has an interest in protecting its online blogger's identities while the State has an interest in prosecuting someone who has allegedly murdered a child." That sounded to me like sarcasm on first reading, but actually I think he's just being logically rigorous.

So in this case, I think that you really could probably put 10 different judges in separate rooms and present them with the same facts and arguments, and have most of them (although probably not an overwhelming majority) come to the same conclusion. On the other hand, I would bet that you could ask 10 reasonably smart lay people to analyze the case, and about the same proportion of them would come to the same conclusion as well.

Is this logically correct?

By that I mean, could the arguments made in this ruling be extended to a conclusion that is clearly absurd?

Sometimes a ruling can be apparently in line with the law, but would have implications that would be absurd if carried only one step further. For example, in one of my spam cases in Small Claims court where I brought a case on behalf of Peacefire as a Washington corporation that I owned, a judge ruled that I couldn't represent Peacefire because the corporation was a separate legal entity. This would seem to be in line with the legal principle that only lawyers who are licensed to practice law are allowed to represent entities other than themselves; non-lawyers can only represent themselves. But carried one step further, the same principle leads to a conclusion that makes no sense: If corporations cannot be represented in Small Claims court by their owners, then since lawyers are not allowed in Small Claims court either, the logical conclusion would be that corporations cannot be represented by anybody in Small Claims court. By that logic, I (as an individual) could sue a corporation for any reason, and since nobody would be allowed to defend the case, I would have to win by default! Since that conclusion is obviously absurd, at least one of those two rules (the rule against lawyers in Small Claims, or the rule against people in Small Claims representing entities other than themselves) would have to be relaxed, and in the interests of keeping costs down, it makes more sense to let individuals represent corporations that they own. This is probably why every other judge so far has made the opposite ruling, that I am allowed to represent a corporation in Small Claims court if I'm the owner.

Does Judge Tognarelli's ruling lead to any absurd conclusions? I don't think so. In fact, the opposite conclusion could have led to an absurd result, if the judge had ruled that commenters posting on the newspaper's blog could seek protection as "news sources." If blog commenters were protected for comments they posted on the newspaper's blog, why shouldn't they be protected for comments they post on their own Web site somewhere else, since the two situations are logically equivalent? In both cases, you're speaking to the entire world, not providing information privately to a reporter. By extension, anybody who says anything, anywhere, at any time, would be protected as a "news source" if a reporter could later find a record of what that person said. While there are possibly merits to that idea — that all anonymous speakers should be protected from being unmasked — it's clearly not what the legislature meant, since they were legislating protection for "sources," not "everybody."

When the judge said "bloggers," did he mean "bloggers"?

No. This is the biggest flaw in what otherwise appears to be a logically and technically literate ruling: The court repeatedly used "bloggers" to refer to blog commenters:

"The subpoena seeks identifying information for bloggers who voluntarily left comments on the website..."

"Here, it is clear that the 'reporter' did not use any information from the bloggers..."

"The Telegraph has an interest in protecting its online blogger's identities..."

That's fine as long as everybody understands what the judge really meant. However, if an actual blogger — one who publishes quasi-news articles on a blog and could be considered a reporter in the traditional sense — ever has to use the court system to protect their identity from being unmasked, there is a danger that a court could cite the current case as precedent and say that "bloggers don't count as news sources." I would hope that a future court would read the current decision carefully enough to realize that it refers to blog commenters and not actual bloggers, but there's no guarantee.

Is this bad for civil liberties?

It depends. I think that all the court really said was that while bona fide news sources are protected under the shield law, the shield law does not apply to all people who post public information that might potentially be used for a news story someday. That was already the de facto legal situation that most of us were in — if you post something in a public forum that makes the police think you have information that could be relevant to the prosecution of a crime, they can probably get a court to unmask your identity with a subpoena.

It may be tempting to think that courts should interpret the shield law more broadly, but be careful what you wish for — if the shield law got diluted to the point where it applied to everybody, then that increases the chances that courts would carve out more exceptions to it or the legislature would rescind it, since neither the courts nor the legislature generally think that everybody deserves legally guaranteed anonymity all of the time.

If you do think that everybody — or, at least, you — deserves guaranteed anonymity for online postings, you can use tools like Tor to make your identity completely untraceable. I would guess that none of the blog commenters in this case went to that trouble.

In fact, one of the two commenters whose identity was ordered unmasked by the court, used the handle "mrssully." What if that turns out to be a woman whose last name is Sully, and who could have been trivially identified if the police had called the murder defendants' friends and acquaintances and asked, "Hey, who do you think 'Mrs. Sully' is?" The court ruling said that "the Sheriff's Office contacted 117 different individuals regarding the incident" and that "it would be a very expensive and a 'monumental task' to re-interview all of those witnesses." To re-interview all of them, yes. But it would not be a monumental task to have a junior member of the police force call up each of the 117 phone numbers for the witnesses and leave a message saying, "Hey, do you know a 'Mrs. Sully' who is connected to the defendant?" If someone calls back and says Yes, then maybe you've found who you're looking for; if not, then you've only wasted about two hours trying (at sixty seconds per phone number), so go ahead with the subpoena. If it turns out that "Mrs. Sully" is someone who could have been found in this way, then as a taxpayer and as someone who supports law enforcement at least insofar as they're conducting murder investigations, I might reasonably ask why the police didn't do that first.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a recent court decision about the rights of online commenters. "Although a court has ruled that the police can subpoena the identities of users who posted comments in a newspaper's blog, I think this is not as big of a threat to journalistic integrity as it might seem. And in any case when the judge ruled against the privacy rights of 'bloggers,' he didn't actually mean 'bloggers." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

After writing that a Virginia court made an error in saying that spoofing an IP address in e-mail headers was analogous to using a "pseudonym," and that an Ontario court was wrong in saying that an IP address could be subpoenaed by a court because it was no more secret than personal information like a "home address," I think that the latest court ruling against online anonymity — an Illinois judge ordering a newspaper to reveal the identities of people who posted comments on its blog — is not as big of a threat to online privacy, and is not apparently based on any misconceptions about how the Internet works. However, the ruling has the potential to frighten bloggers more than necessary (as well as possibly set a bad precedent for future courts if they don't read the decision closely enough) because the ruling uses the word "bloggers" repeatedly to refer to what everyone else calls "blog commenters."

Police had asked the Alton Telegraph to reveal the identities of five people who had posted comments in the newspaper's blog which indicated they might have knowledge relevant to an ongoing murder investigation. The newspaper sued to avoid being forced to hand over the commenters' identities, saying that they were "news sources" protected under Illinois's newspaper shield law. Judge Richard Tognarelli ruled that blog commenters did not count as "sources" under the shield law, and allowed the police to go forward in obtaining the identity of two of the commenters, but denied the request to unmask three others, on the grounds that those commenters did not appear to have information relevant to the case.

To consider the relevant questions separately:

Is this legally correct?

Every time I raise a question like this, it provokes the ire of law students and lawyers who say that judges are the real experts on what is legally correct, and it's not appropriate for lay people to comment. As I never tire of saying, if judges are really "experts" in a sense that lay people are not, then it should be possible to put 10 judges in separate rooms, present them with the same facts of the same case, and have most of them independently come to the same conclusion about the correct answer, with a higher degree of accuracy than lay people would be able to reach the same conclusion. If this is not the case, then the judges are not playing the role of "experts" so much as "designated decision-makers," and it's perfectly fair for lay people to analyze whether the judges' reasoning appears correct.

In this case, the judge simply said that blog commenters are not news "sources" in the sense described by the law. The text of the shield law (735 ILCS 5/8-901) defines a "source" as "the person or means from or through which the news or information was obtained." Now, if you were to parse this super-literally, then the blog commenters could be considered "sources" because they are posting "information" which can be "obtained" by the reporters who later go back and read through the blog comments. But if you were to be that literal about it, then anybody who publishes "information" anywhere at all, including someone who posts a timetable of train departure times on their Web page, could be considered a "source" for information used by a reporter. Clearly the legislature did not intend for the term "source" to include all people who publish information anywhere under the sun (just because that information is technically available to reporters just like it's available to everyone else), or they would have said so. So it seems reasonable to assume that when the law refers to sources from whom reporters "obtain information," it refers to the way in which reporters normally obtain information in their role as reporters obtaining information from sources — that is, the source privately communicating with a reporter with some expectation of anonymity, hoping the reporter can use the information provided for research on a future story. Blog commenters do not fit that definition since (a) they are posting publicly, and (b) they are responding to a story that has already been written.

The judge also noted that the shield law is not absolute, and even for individuals who are considered "sources" under the law, their interest in maintaining anonymity has to be weighed against the importance of the information being sought. Judge Tognarelli wrote, "The Telegraph has an interest in protecting its online blogger's identities while the State has an interest in prosecuting someone who has allegedly murdered a child." That sounded to me like sarcasm on first reading, but actually I think he's just being logically rigorous.

So in this case, I think that you really could probably put 10 different judges in separate rooms and present them with the same facts and arguments, and have most of them (although probably not an overwhelming majority) come to the same conclusion. On the other hand, I would bet that you could ask 10 reasonably smart lay people to analyze the case, and about the same proportion of them would come to the same conclusion as well.

Is this logically correct?

By that I mean, could the arguments made in this ruling be extended to a conclusion that is clearly absurd?

Sometimes a ruling can be apparently in line with the law, but would have implications that would be absurd if carried only one step further. For example, in one of my spam cases in Small Claims court where I brought a case on behalf of Peacefire as a Washington corporation that I owned, a judge ruled that I couldn't represent Peacefire because the corporation was a separate legal entity. This would seem to be in line with the legal principle that only lawyers who are licensed to practice law are allowed to represent entities other than themselves; non-lawyers can only represent themselves. But carried one step further, the same principle leads to a conclusion that makes no sense: If corporations cannot be represented in Small Claims court by their owners, then since lawyers are not allowed in Small Claims court either, the logical conclusion would be that corporations cannot be represented by anybody in Small Claims court. By that logic, I (as an individual) could sue a corporation for any reason, and since nobody would be allowed to defend the case, I would have to win by default! Since that conclusion is obviously absurd, at least one of those two rules (the rule against lawyers in Small Claims, or the rule against people in Small Claims representing entities other than themselves) would have to be relaxed, and in the interests of keeping costs down, it makes more sense to let individuals represent corporations that they own. This is probably why every other judge so far has made the opposite ruling, that I am allowed to represent a corporation in Small Claims court if I'm the owner.

Does Judge Tognarelli's ruling lead to any absurd conclusions? I don't think so. In fact, the opposite conclusion could have led to an absurd result, if the judge had ruled that commenters posting on the newspaper's blog could seek protection as "news sources." If blog commenters were protected for comments they posted on the newspaper's blog, why shouldn't they be protected for comments they post on their own Web site somewhere else, since the two situations are logically equivalent? In both cases, you're speaking to the entire world, not providing information privately to a reporter. By extension, anybody who says anything, anywhere, at any time, would be protected as a "news source" if a reporter could later find a record of what that person said. While there are possibly merits to that idea — that all anonymous speakers should be protected from being unmasked — it's clearly not what the legislature meant, since they were legislating protection for "sources," not "everybody."

When the judge said "bloggers," did he mean "bloggers"?

No. This is the biggest flaw in what otherwise appears to be a logically and technically literate ruling: The court repeatedly used "bloggers" to refer to blog commenters:

"The subpoena seeks identifying information for bloggers who voluntarily left comments on the website..."

"Here, it is clear that the 'reporter' did not use any information from the bloggers..."

"The Telegraph has an interest in protecting its online blogger's identities..."

That's fine as long as everybody understands what the judge really meant. However, if an actual blogger — one who publishes quasi-news articles on a blog and could be considered a reporter in the traditional sense — ever has to use the court system to protect their identity from being unmasked, there is a danger that a court could cite the current case as precedent and say that "bloggers don't count as news sources." I would hope that a future court would read the current decision carefully enough to realize that it refers to blog commenters and not actual bloggers, but there's no guarantee.

Is this bad for civil liberties?

It depends. I think that all the court really said was that while bona fide news sources are protected under the shield law, the shield law does not apply to all people who post public information that might potentially be used for a news story someday. That was already the de facto legal situation that most of us were in — if you post something in a public forum that makes the police think you have information that could be relevant to the prosecution of a crime, they can probably get a court to unmask your identity with a subpoena.

It may be tempting to think that courts should interpret the shield law more broadly, but be careful what you wish for — if the shield law got diluted to the point where it applied to everybody, then that increases the chances that courts would carve out more exceptions to it or the legislature would rescind it, since neither the courts nor the legislature generally think that everybody deserves legally guaranteed anonymity all of the time.

If you do think that everybody — or, at least, you — deserves guaranteed anonymity for online postings, you can use tools like Tor to make your identity completely untraceable. I would guess that none of the blog commenters in this case went to that trouble.

In fact, one of the two commenters whose identity was ordered unmasked by the court, used the handle "mrssully." What if that turns out to be a woman whose last name is Sully, and who could have been trivially identified if the police had called the murder defendants' friends and acquaintances and asked, "Hey, who do you think 'Mrs. Sully' is?" The court ruling said that "the Sheriff's Office contacted 117 different individuals regarding the incident" and that "it would be a very expensive and a 'monumental task' to re-interview all of those witnesses." To re-interview all of them, yes. But it would not be a monumental task to have a junior member of the police force call up each of the 117 phone numbers for the witnesses and leave a message saying, "Hey, do you know a 'Mrs. Sully' who is connected to the defendant?" If someone calls back and says Yes, then maybe you've found who you're looking for; if not, then you've only wasted about two hours trying (at sixty seconds per phone number), so go ahead with the subpoena. If it turns out that "Mrs. Sully" is someone who could have been found in this way, then as a taxpayer and as someone who supports law enforcement at least insofar as they're conducting murder investigations, I might reasonably ask why the police didn't do that first.

langelgjm sends in an update to a story we discussed over the weekend about an extremely well-preserved fossil of an ancient primate, Darwinius masillae, that sheds light on an important area of evolution. The 47 million-year-old specimen has now been officially unveiled, and while many media outlets are stumbling over themselves with phrases like "missing link" and "holy grail," it's clearly a very impressive find. "Discovered two years ago, the exquisitely preserved specimen is not a direct ancestor of monkeys and humans, but hints at what such an ancestor might have looked like. According to researchers, 'The specimen has an unusual history: it was privately collected and sold in two parts, with only the lesser part previously known. The second part, which has just come to light, shows the skeleton to be the most complete primate known in the fossil record.' The scientific article describing the find was published yesterday in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal PLoS ONE. Google's home page is also celebrating the find with a unique image." Science blogger Brian Switek offers some criticism of the academic paper and the media swarm, saying, "I would have hoped that this fossil would receive the care and attention it deserves, but for now it looks like a cash cow for the History Channel. Indeed, this association may not have only presented overblown claims to the public, but hindered good science, as well."

newtley writes "Only days after Brian Toder, her previous legal representative, had decided discretion was the better part of valour, leaving her fend for herself against the RIAA, Jammie Thomas says another lawyer has come forward with an offer of pro bono help. He's K.A.D. Camara from Camara & Sibley in Houston, Texas, says Jammie. And, 'He's the youngest person in history to graduate from Harvard Law school with honors,' she points out. Nor will her retrial be delayed, as was expected. It'll now go forward in June 15, as slated. 'I'm so happy!' Jammie said."

In addition to the piracy troubles that plagued Demigod's launch (and partly exacerbated by them), Stardock and Gas Powered Games ran into severe networking issues that hampered their ability to accommodate players with a legitimately purchased copy of the game. Brad Wardell has now posted a frank, detailed explanation of what happened and how they dealt with it. Quoting: "Demigod's connectivity problems have basically boiled down to 1 bad design decision and 1 architectural limitation. The bad design decision was made in December of 2008 when it was decided to have the network library hand off sockets to Demigod proper. In most games, the connection between players is handled purely by one source. ... So in Demigod, on launch day, Alice would host a game. Tom would be connected to Alice by the network library and then that socket would be handed to Demigod. Then, Alice and Tom would open a new socket to listen for more players to join in. As a result, a user might end up using a half dozen ports and sockets which some routers didn't like and it just made things incredibly complex to connect people and put a lot of strain on the servers to manage all those connections.

eldavojohn writes "Wired has a piece on the new City of Heroes content that is created by players — or rather the severe abuse of it. Namely, creating missions for the characters. The problem is that gamers game this system, even though Paragon City has tried to maintain a good risk/reward ratio for experience in these missions. Making the situation even worse is that people who architect highly-rated missions get architect awards, which are redeemable for prizes — almost ensuring experience farming missions. Eric Heimburg (lead engineer and producer of Asheron's Call and the upcoming Star Trek MMO) comments on this: 'It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player's overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that's the truth. Once you reached that top of the hill, if there's nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on. Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.' Matt Miller (lead designer of CoH), addressed the community on this very topic. This is resulting in an unexplained ban/loss of experience if you are determined to be abusing the mission architect, causing an uproar in the community. Is user-generated content a dead end for an MMORPG?" Update: 05/20 20:27 GMT by T : Rather than lead engineer of Asheron's Call or the Star Trek MMO, a correction at Wired says rather that "Heimburg worked as Star Trek Online's systems designer at Perpetual Entertainment, prior to the game's transfer to Cryptic Studio."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that a few weeks ago the Court rendered a detailed decision providing for safeguards in connection with the RIAA's proposed inspection of the defendant's hard drive in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The decision instructed the RIAA to submit a proposed protective order consistent with the Court's decision. The RIAA submitted a proposed protective order yesterday, which attracted some thoughtful commentary by readers of my blog, but today the Court rejected the RIAA's suggested order, explicitly rejecting many of the 'enhancements' included by the RIAA, including production of 'videos' and 'playlists' which might be found on the hard drive. Instead the Court entered an order the Court itself had drafted. The Court explained that 'the purpose of compelling inspection is to identify information reasonably calculated to provide evidence of any file-sharing of Plaintiffs' copyrighted music sound files conducted on the Defendant's computer. Once this data is identified by the computer forensic expert... any disclosure shall flow through the Defendant subject to his assertion of privilege and the Court's authority to compel production, just as disclosure would occur in any other pre-trial discovery setting... (1) As should have been clear from the Court's May 6, 2009 Order, although the Plaintiffs may select experts of their choosing, these individuals are not to be employees of the Plaintiffs or their counsel, but must be third-parties held to the strictest standards of confidentiality; (2) the inspection is limited to music sound files, metadata associated with music sound files, and information related to the file-sharing of music sound files — it shall not include music "playlists" or any other type of media file (e.g., video); (3) the Examining Expert shall be required to disclose both the methods employed to inspect the hard drive and any instruction or guidance received from the Plaintiffs.'"

eldavojohn notes that Groklaw is highlighting the unexpected Wolfram|Alpha ToS — unexpected, that is, for those of us accustomed to Google's "just don't use it to break the law, please" terms. Nothing wrong with Wolfram setting any terms they like, of course. Just be aware. "We've seen people comparing Wolfram's Alpha to Google's Search from a technical standpoint but Groklaw outlined the legal differences in a post yesterday. Wolfram|Alpha's terms of use are completely different in that it is not a search engine; it's a computational service. The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution. So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move. There's more: if you build a service that uses their service or deep-links to it, you may be facilitating your users to break their terms of use, and you may be held liable."

vivian writes "Ever since 1996, when I first set eyes on a Sony GlassTron head-mounted display in Japan, I have been awaiting a lightweight, head-mounted display that actually has decent resolution and doesn't look like a brick tied to your face. The closest contender to date seems to be the WRAP 920AV from Vuzix, and they are partially transparent too, which is great, but as with every other unit I have found, they only offer video quality — 640x480. Given that there have been a number of other discussions on Slashdot, I can't be the only one here who is eagerly awaiting something that could actually be a viable alternative to a PC monitor — especially for gaming or 3d graphics work. Perhaps we could petition a manufacturer to make what we actually want? Something with a minimum of 1024x768 @30-60hz refresh, say, and capable of stereo vision. Extra karma if they incorporate head tracking."

vivian writes "Ever since 1996, when I first set eyes on a Sony GlassTron head-mounted display in Japan, I have been awaiting a lightweight, head-mounted display that actually has decent resolution and doesn't look like a brick tied to your face. The closest contender to date seems to be the WRAP 920AV from Vuzix, and they are partially transparent too, which is great, but as with every other unit I have found, they only offer video quality — 640x480. Given that there have been a number of other discussions on Slashdot, I can't be the only one here who is eagerly awaiting something that could actually be a viable alternative to a PC monitor — especially for gaming or 3d graphics work. Perhaps we could petition a manufacturer to make what we actually want? Something with a minimum of 1024x768 @30-60hz refresh, say, and capable of stereo vision. Extra karma if they incorporate head tracking."

vivian writes "Ever since 1996, when I first set eyes on a Sony GlassTron head-mounted display in Japan, I have been awaiting a lightweight, head-mounted display that actually has decent resolution and doesn't look like a brick tied to your face. The closest contender to date seems to be the WRAP 920AV from Vuzix, and they are partially transparent too, which is great, but as with every other unit I have found, they only offer video quality — 640x480. Given that there have been a number of other discussions on Slashdot, I can't be the only one here who is eagerly awaiting something that could actually be a viable alternative to a PC monitor — especially for gaming or 3d graphics work. Perhaps we could petition a manufacturer to make what we actually want? Something with a minimum of 1024x768 @30-60hz refresh, say, and capable of stereo vision. Extra karma if they incorporate head tracking."

Not to be outdone by the raccoon guy, two Russian tourists decided to have a good time with a porcupine. The pair were vacationing in Florida when they got a hold of a book about weird US laws. After a few hours of reading and drinking, they found a Florida law that prohibited sex with porcupines. The two had quills removed from their manhoods the following morning and both underwent lengthy procedures upon their return home to treat the inflammation caused by their tryst.

alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"

wjousts writes "Several high-profile break-ins have resulted from hackers guessing the answers to secret questions (the hijacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account was one). This week, research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, will show how woefully insecure secret questions actually are. As reported in Technology Review: 'In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.'" Schneier pointed out years ago how weird it is to have a password-recovery mechanism that is less secure than the password.

eldavojohn writes "It's a simple model — you buy used games for a third of the price of a new one from patrons. Then you turn around and sell the game for two-thirds the normal price to other patrons that have not yet enjoyed the title. Such has been the model for stores like GameStop. The great part about that business is a recession can sometimes help their market, as gamers look to save a few bucks any way possible. Well, today Wal-Mart launched kiosks in 77 of its stores that vend used video games. Looking like a RedBox DVD kiosk, these automated machines are full of bugs, but spell trouble for businesses like GameStop. This should also pique the interest of used-game opponents and provide a bigger target for them to go after if they get the politicians on their side."

eldavojohn writes "It's a simple model — you buy used games for a third of the price of a new one from patrons. Then you turn around and sell the game for two-thirds the normal price to other patrons that have not yet enjoyed the title. Such has been the model for stores like GameStop. The great part about that business is a recession can sometimes help their market, as gamers look to save a few bucks any way possible. Well, today Wal-Mart launched kiosks in 77 of its stores that vend used video games. Looking like a RedBox DVD kiosk, these automated machines are full of bugs, but spell trouble for businesses like GameStop. This should also pique the interest of used-game opponents and provide a bigger target for them to go after if they get the politicians on their side."

Michael J. Ross writes "Content management systems (CMSs) are created largely by Web developers using back-end programming languages (such as PHP, by far the most common choice). The free CMSs are built as open source projects, by volunteers who have many demands on their time. As a result of both of these competing factors, far less time is devoted to the front-end aspects of these CMSs. In turn, the "themes" that define the appearance of a CMS-based website are typically substandard, in the eyes of many Web designers and, most likely, countless users of those sites. This criticism has been leveled even against Drupal, although the situation is improving. A new book, Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, is intended to help Drupal designers everywhere speed up that process of improvement." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting author Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer pages 456 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0137136698 summary A comprehensive guide to creating Drupal themes. The book was written by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer, and published by Prentice Hall on 15 April 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137136698. As suggested by its title, Front End Drupal "is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works," to quote from the book's foreword, written by Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead. He notes that creating a Drupal theme requires knowledge of "XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, all within the context of Drupal." These are some of the key technologies addressed in the book's eleven chapters, and it assumes that the reader is at least familiar with all four of them. The first of the two appendices explains: how to install Drupal and contributed modules on the three different platforms supported (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X); basic configuration and administration; and installation troubleshooting tips. The second appendix comprises some of the more important example code used in the book, and brief overviews thereof. At the end of the book's 456 pages, there is a coupon code for a 45-day free subscription to read the online edition in the Safari Books Online library

All of the sample source code and themes can be downloaded from the authors' book website. The site also has the author biographies, as well as reported errata, of which there are two, as of this writing. What is most striking about the site is its styling — or lack thereof. One would think that the authors of a book on Drupal theming would have put a commensurate amount of effort into crafting an attractive custom theme for their own website — one that demonstrates their own theming skills and, more importantly to the reader, what is possible using the principles taught in the book. Remarkably, the authors appear to have done nothing more than take the Drupal 6 default theme, Garland, and change the color scheme from shades of blue to shades of brown (matching the book cover); only the blue Drupal icon is unchanged, and its color clashes with the rest of the site.

Prentice Hall makes available their own Web page for the book, where visitors will find a description, two Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter ("The Drupal Page") as a PDF file. The entire book is also available in electronic form.

In the book's preface, the authors briefly summarize the chapters and appendices, and define the target audience and technologies with which the reader should be knowledgeable (noted above). Readers should also be familiar with how Drupal works, have some experience administering a Drupal site, and ideally possess some knowledge of website design and development; but that last one is not a hard requirement, since the authors promise to explain the basic concepts as needed.

Any reader who begins the book by skimming the table of contents or the preface's summary of Chapter 1, may be tempted to skip that chapter, especially since it discusses team workflow — something freelancers generally ignore, and employees leave to management. Yet the earlier material is worth reading, if only that it begins to establish a baseline of terminology used throughout the rest of the book. It also provides some basic information on content structure, layout, and naming on a Drupal page. For illustrating the ideas under discussion, the authors use a number of existing websites. In fact, too many different sites: Readers probably would have found it more useful for each idea to be presented in the context of a single neutral subject area, and without distractions such as toilet birthdays (no kidding). Even better, the ideas could have been illustrated through example pages — each page illustrating one or several ideas — built from the ground up. By focusing on pages that a reader could quickly create on his own, the authors could have eliminated the screenshots of those various websites. One example is Figure 1.1, which combines two images, with the topmost one largely obscuring the one below. Most of the topics are covered at a very high level — possibly higher in some cases than readers will find valuable. Nonetheless, there is much solid advice, including some recommended theme resources later in the chapter. In the earlier section on "Topical Organization," there is a brief but excellent discussion on the relative merits of limited versus unlimited tag vocabularies.

The second chapter continues to lay the groundwork, by introducing basic Drupal theme strategies and terminology, three major modules that veteran Drupal developers use frequently (CCK, Views, and Devel), and some valuable browser-based development tools. The definitions of Drupal terms are useful — especially for newbies confused by the Drupal handbooks. One exception is the authors' alternative metaphor for "weight," which proves more confusing than the original. Readers then begin learning how to use the aforesaid modules and tools. However, several of the authors' statements are misleading: On page 43, they are instructed to install the CCK module, and then given a list of additional modules needed; the first one on the list is... CCK. On the next page, the authors state that the FileField module requires the Token module, but it apparently does not. On the page after that, the "manage fields" link is given as the "add field" link. Those last two discrepancies suggest that the book is based on outdated versions of Drupal and/or the contributed modules under discussion, even though its publication date is just a few weeks prior to this writing. Any version differences are likely impossible to confirm, since the authors fail to mention which versions they are using, or provide any guidance to the reader as to which versions to use — unusual for a programming book. At the beginning of the chapter, the reader is told he "will learn step-by-step how to create a mini portfolio Web site," but the process peters out not long after a new content type is created, and the reader finishes the chapter with no such portfolio site.

Chapters 3 and 4 move the reader one step closer toward the ultimate goal of being able to create a new theme with confidence. The first one explains how to find, install, and configure prebuilt themes — also, how to create a very basic theme from scratch, and a subtheme using the Zen starter theme. This material comprises a generally thorough introduction to the topics, compared to most documentation, with plenty of step-by-step explanation. An exception is the Zen section, in which the reader is instructed to place the directory into the themes folder; but it is not made clear whether this is the primary Drupal themes folder, or sites/all/themes (as advised several pages earlier). Secondly, in step 3, readers can only guess as to what is meant by "the main CSS file," as there are several. On the next page, the authors mention "configure" links next to the Zen and Zen Classic themes, but no such links exist for those starter themes. The fourth chapter discusses page template files, site-wide variables, menus and navigation, regions and blocks, search results, templating different sections of a site, aliased URLs, taxonomy templates, and styling for output to printers, PDF files, and mobile devices.

The fifth chapter explores the details of how to modify existing node templates, or create new ones, for all content types. This is what makes it possible to develop highly customized page content, including summaries, embedded images, image galleries, and content based upon output from the Views module. The subsequent chapter focuses on one of the most problematic types of content — forms — and how they can be created using the CCK. The authors recommend TinyMCE as one's WYSIWYG editor module, but that has apparently been replaced by the Wysiwyg API. User editing of content is a key element in building an online community using a Drupal-based site, and it is the topic of Chapter 7, which discusses user profiles, permissions, access, comments, blogs, forums, wikis, spam, CAPTCHAs, and how to make content private for members only. The next chapter addresses the theming of the administrative interface, which the typical site user will never see, but can have a significant impact upon the productivity of the developers and maintainers of a site. Readers learn about RootCandy (a refreshingly different admin theme), and how to theme error pages.

The final three chapters focus on JavaScript and jQuery. Consequently, they compose a stand-alone resource of their own, and could even have been used as the basis for a separate book. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the language, while the other two chapters cover jQuery and how it can be used as part of a Drupal-based site.

Scattered throughout the manuscript are tips, each indicated with a pencil tip icon. These help to break up the text visually, and provide valuable guidance. The contrast between the black text and the dark gray background could certainly be improved; but most of the tips are fairly short, so this does not pose a major problem.

Every chapter ends with a summary, and not a single one of them is useful or needed. Any unique information conveyed in them should have been merged with the introductory paragraphs for the respective chapters, which is where readers would be looking anyway to see what each chapter addresses.

The book has numerous minor problems, including grammatical and stylistic errors, such as dashes incorrectly performing the duty of semicolons, some URLs missing the root directory slash, and excessive use of exclamation marks (more than a dozen before even reaching the second chapter). When stating the sequence of menu items to choose in order to reach a particular admin page, the authors should use ">" or ">>" to separate the menu choices, as is done in most computer books. Instead, the authors opted to use commas, which of course turns every sequential menu path into a list of menu items, which is nonstandard and disconcerting. As is typical in a first edition, the book contains several errata: "Partnership" in Figure 1.7 (page 10), "the GiMP" (page 14; should simply read "GIMP"; after all, this isn't Pulp Fiction), "only focus only" (page 26), "Modification / Date" in Figure 2.1 (page 37; should read "Modification date"), "Content Creation Kit" (throughout the book; should read "Content Construction Kit"), "of [the] view" (page 56), "http:jigsaw" (page 66), "INSTALL [is] present" (page 79), "of [a] page" (page 100), and "to to" (page 125) — in the first quarter of the book alone.

A lingering disappointment is that some of the promised examples are not finished in the narrative, such as the portfolio site mentioned earlier. Secondly, the downloadable source code is incomplete, apparently missing the example code in the first few chapters, such as the Bolg theme files. Furthermore, the downloadable code is not organized by chapter, making it difficult to even determine what example code is missing.

On the other hand, the book has much to offer. For the most part, the explanations and step-by-step instructions are clear, and the diagrams and screenshots are all neatly presented and helpful — though some sections of the book could have benefited from more such figures. With its extensive coverage of all the key technologies, and its wealth of valuable tips, Front End Drupal is an essential resource for learning how to create Drupal themes, and fills a long-standing gap in the Drupal literature, better than any other book currently available.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Content management systems (CMSs) are created largely by Web developers using back-end programming languages (such as PHP, by far the most common choice). The free CMSs are built as open source projects, by volunteers who have many demands on their time. As a result of both of these competing factors, far less time is devoted to the front-end aspects of these CMSs. In turn, the "themes" that define the appearance of a CMS-based website are typically substandard, in the eyes of many Web designers and, most likely, countless users of those sites. This criticism has been leveled even against Drupal, although the situation is improving. A new book, Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, is intended to help Drupal designers everywhere speed up that process of improvement." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting author Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer pages 456 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0137136698 summary A comprehensive guide to creating Drupal themes. The book was written by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer, and published by Prentice Hall on 15 April 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137136698. As suggested by its title, Front End Drupal "is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works," to quote from the book's foreword, written by Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead. He notes that creating a Drupal theme requires knowledge of "XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, all within the context of Drupal." These are some of the key technologies addressed in the book's eleven chapters, and it assumes that the reader is at least familiar with all four of them. The first of the two appendices explains: how to install Drupal and contributed modules on the three different platforms supported (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X); basic configuration and administration; and installation troubleshooting tips. The second appendix comprises some of the more important example code used in the book, and brief overviews thereof. At the end of the book's 456 pages, there is a coupon code for a 45-day free subscription to read the online edition in the Safari Books Online library

All of the sample source code and themes can be downloaded from the authors' book website. The site also has the author biographies, as well as reported errata, of which there are two, as of this writing. What is most striking about the site is its styling — or lack thereof. One would think that the authors of a book on Drupal theming would have put a commensurate amount of effort into crafting an attractive custom theme for their own website — one that demonstrates their own theming skills and, more importantly to the reader, what is possible using the principles taught in the book. Remarkably, the authors appear to have done nothing more than take the Drupal 6 default theme, Garland, and change the color scheme from shades of blue to shades of brown (matching the book cover); only the blue Drupal icon is unchanged, and its color clashes with the rest of the site.

Prentice Hall makes available their own Web page for the book, where visitors will find a description, two Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter ("The Drupal Page") as a PDF file. The entire book is also available in electronic form.

In the book's preface, the authors briefly summarize the chapters and appendices, and define the target audience and technologies with which the reader should be knowledgeable (noted above). Readers should also be familiar with how Drupal works, have some experience administering a Drupal site, and ideally possess some knowledge of website design and development; but that last one is not a hard requirement, since the authors promise to explain the basic concepts as needed.

Any reader who begins the book by skimming the table of contents or the preface's summary of Chapter 1, may be tempted to skip that chapter, especially since it discusses team workflow — something freelancers generally ignore, and employees leave to management. Yet the earlier material is worth reading, if only that it begins to establish a baseline of terminology used throughout the rest of the book. It also provides some basic information on content structure, layout, and naming on a Drupal page. For illustrating the ideas under discussion, the authors use a number of existing websites. In fact, too many different sites: Readers probably would have found it more useful for each idea to be presented in the context of a single neutral subject area, and without distractions such as toilet birthdays (no kidding). Even better, the ideas could have been illustrated through example pages — each page illustrating one or several ideas — built from the ground up. By focusing on pages that a reader could quickly create on his own, the authors could have eliminated the screenshots of those various websites. One example is Figure 1.1, which combines two images, with the topmost one largely obscuring the one below. Most of the topics are covered at a very high level — possibly higher in some cases than readers will find valuable. Nonetheless, there is much solid advice, including some recommended theme resources later in the chapter. In the earlier section on "Topical Organization," there is a brief but excellent discussion on the relative merits of limited versus unlimited tag vocabularies.

The second chapter continues to lay the groundwork, by introducing basic Drupal theme strategies and terminology, three major modules that veteran Drupal developers use frequently (CCK, Views, and Devel), and some valuable browser-based development tools. The definitions of Drupal terms are useful — especially for newbies confused by the Drupal handbooks. One exception is the authors' alternative metaphor for "weight," which proves more confusing than the original. Readers then begin learning how to use the aforesaid modules and tools. However, several of the authors' statements are misleading: On page 43, they are instructed to install the CCK module, and then given a list of additional modules needed; the first one on the list is... CCK. On the next page, the authors state that the FileField module requires the Token module, but it apparently does not. On the page after that, the "manage fields" link is given as the "add field" link. Those last two discrepancies suggest that the book is based on outdated versions of Drupal and/or the contributed modules under discussion, even though its publication date is just a few weeks prior to this writing. Any version differences are likely impossible to confirm, since the authors fail to mention which versions they are using, or provide any guidance to the reader as to which versions to use — unusual for a programming book. At the beginning of the chapter, the reader is told he "will learn step-by-step how to create a mini portfolio Web site," but the process peters out not long after a new content type is created, and the reader finishes the chapter with no such portfolio site.

Chapters 3 and 4 move the reader one step closer toward the ultimate goal of being able to create a new theme with confidence. The first one explains how to find, install, and configure prebuilt themes — also, how to create a very basic theme from scratch, and a subtheme using the Zen starter theme. This material comprises a generally thorough introduction to the topics, compared to most documentation, with plenty of step-by-step explanation. An exception is the Zen section, in which the reader is instructed to place the directory into the themes folder; but it is not made clear whether this is the primary Drupal themes folder, or sites/all/themes (as advised several pages earlier). Secondly, in step 3, readers can only guess as to what is meant by "the main CSS file," as there are several. On the next page, the authors mention "configure" links next to the Zen and Zen Classic themes, but no such links exist for those starter themes. The fourth chapter discusses page template files, site-wide variables, menus and navigation, regions and blocks, search results, templating different sections of a site, aliased URLs, taxonomy templates, and styling for output to printers, PDF files, and mobile devices.

The fifth chapter explores the details of how to modify existing node templates, or create new ones, for all content types. This is what makes it possible to develop highly customized page content, including summaries, embedded images, image galleries, and content based upon output from the Views module. The subsequent chapter focuses on one of the most problematic types of content — forms — and how they can be created using the CCK. The authors recommend TinyMCE as one's WYSIWYG editor module, but that has apparently been replaced by the Wysiwyg API. User editing of content is a key element in building an online community using a Drupal-based site, and it is the topic of Chapter 7, which discusses user profiles, permissions, access, comments, blogs, forums, wikis, spam, CAPTCHAs, and how to make content private for members only. The next chapter addresses the theming of the administrative interface, which the typical site user will never see, but can have a significant impact upon the productivity of the developers and maintainers of a site. Readers learn about RootCandy (a refreshingly different admin theme), and how to theme error pages.

The final three chapters focus on JavaScript and jQuery. Consequently, they compose a stand-alone resource of their own, and could even have been used as the basis for a separate book. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the language, while the other two chapters cover jQuery and how it can be used as part of a Drupal-based site.

Scattered throughout the manuscript are tips, each indicated with a pencil tip icon. These help to break up the text visually, and provide valuable guidance. The contrast between the black text and the dark gray background could certainly be improved; but most of the tips are fairly short, so this does not pose a major problem.

Every chapter ends with a summary, and not a single one of them is useful or needed. Any unique information conveyed in them should have been merged with the introductory paragraphs for the respective chapters, which is where readers would be looking anyway to see what each chapter addresses.

The book has numerous minor problems, including grammatical and stylistic errors, such as dashes incorrectly performing the duty of semicolons, some URLs missing the root directory slash, and excessive use of exclamation marks (more than a dozen before even reaching the second chapter). When stating the sequence of menu items to choose in order to reach a particular admin page, the authors should use ">" or ">>" to separate the menu choices, as is done in most computer books. Instead, the authors opted to use commas, which of course turns every sequential menu path into a list of menu items, which is nonstandard and disconcerting. As is typical in a first edition, the book contains several errata: "Partnership" in Figure 1.7 (page 10), "the GiMP" (page 14; should simply read "GIMP"; after all, this isn't Pulp Fiction), "only focus only" (page 26), "Modification / Date" in Figure 2.1 (page 37; should read "Modification date"), "Content Creation Kit" (throughout the book; should read "Content Construction Kit"), "of [the] view" (page 56), "http:jigsaw" (page 66), "INSTALL [is] present" (page 79), "of [a] page" (page 100), and "to to" (page 125) — in the first quarter of the book alone.

A lingering disappointment is that some of the promised examples are not finished in the narrative, such as the portfolio site mentioned earlier. Secondly, the downloadable source code is incomplete, apparently missing the example code in the first few chapters, such as the Bolg theme files. Furthermore, the downloadable code is not organized by chapter, making it difficult to even determine what example code is missing.

On the other hand, the book has much to offer. For the most part, the explanations and step-by-step instructions are clear, and the diagrams and screenshots are all neatly presented and helpful — though some sections of the book could have benefited from more such figures. With its extensive coverage of all the key technologies, and its wealth of valuable tips, Front End Drupal is an essential resource for learning how to create Drupal themes, and fills a long-standing gap in the Drupal literature, better than any other book currently available.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A woman sued Yahoo because they wouldn't remove a page created by her ex-boyfriend pretending to be her and soliciting strangers for sex. What would be an effective system for large companies like Yahoo to handle 'impostor' complaints, without getting bogged down by phony complaints and unrelated disputes? This is a harder problem than it seems because of the several possible cases that have to be considered. One possible solution is given here." Read on for Bennett's analysis.

When I first heard that Yahoo had been sued because they refused to remove a page created by the ex-boyfriend of a woman named Cecilia Barnes to impersonate her -- portraying her as a slut looking for sex with strangers (who obliged by hounding her office with phone calls and e-mails) -- I thought Yahoo's conduct was indefensible. Even though, as the court ruled, they may have been exempt from liability under the Communication Decency Act of 1996, what possible excuse could Yahoo have had for the way they handled the situation, exposing Barnes to months of harassment, when it would have taken them only seconds to review the page, see that it was obviously causing harm, and remove it?

Then I thought more about the consequences of the rule that I was implicitly advocating by making that argument. Obviously, if an ISP has a policy of removing a user's page if some third party merely complains that the page is impersonating them, then one of your enemies could get your page removed by filing a complaint saying that they were really "you", and that your page was impersonating them. But if the ISP has a policy of not acting on such complaints, then someone could create a user account pretending to be you, and you wouldn't be able to get it removed.

In both cases, there are two problems. One is the fact that the ISP has to have a way to figure out who is telling the truth. The second is that the solution has to scale well, even for a company like Yahoo that probably gets so many complaints about user conduct every day that it would be impossible to read them all. It should be possible for genuine complaints about impostors, to reach the attention of the right people and get an account closed, without accounts being shut down because of (a) people who file complaints about 'rude behavior' that get unintentionally mixed in with 'impostor' complaints by someone who is too overworked to read them all very carefully; or (b) people who file outright false complaints that a given account is an 'impostor', just to get it shut down; or (c) people who are really sneaky, and file complaints about things like rude behavior, but who craft the complaints in a way that is deliberately designed to get them mixed in with the 'impostor' reports, in order to get the account shut down (this way, if the complainer ever sued or otherwise confronted about the complaint that they filed, they can say that they "didn't lie"!).

It's hard to think of a solution that covers all of these bases. For example, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology explained how many ISPs use faxed driver's licenses to decide impersonation complaints:

In many cases involving real people, the challenged site (whether it is a legit site or a bogus site) contains one or more photographs of the person involved. What service providers do in this case is to get the person to submit a copy of their driver's license, and the provider decides whether the person submitting the license is the same person depicted in the photos. And if so, that person is the one who can control whether the site stays up or not. This works in lots of cases (because pictures are often, but certainly not always, involved).

The problem is that even this could be abused when used against a company like Yahoo that handles an extremely high volume of complaints. Suppose that Yahoo publishes a standard procedure for submitting complaints about impersonation, that includes the requirement of a faxed driver's license. Abusers of the system would figure this out, and they could start filing "complaints" against users and websites by faxing in complaint letters along with a copy of their driver's license, where the letters were not complaints about impersonation at all, but just bogus complaints about other things like "This guy was mean to me". Because the driver's license accompanying the letter is real and the statements in the letter are true (or at least a matter of opinion), the complainer can't be accused of lying or forging government documents. And if anyone ever challenged them and asked, "Why did you send your driver's license with the complaint letter? Weren't you trying to trick the ISP into thinking that this was an impersonation complaint so they would take it seriously?", the complainer could play dumb and say, "Well, I heard that if you file a complaint against someone, you're supposed to fax your driver's license with it." But if Yahoo is still getting too many messages to sort through them carefully, some of these crank complaints could still get users' accounts shut down.

So now you have an interesting, non-trivial problem. Before reading further, it's worth thinking about how you would solve this. What's a good policy that would honor legitimate complaints, without giving cranks a way to get their enemies' pages shut down for no reason, and that would scale well for large companies like Yahoo? There are really two questions here: (1) What would you do if you were drafting an ISP policy and trying to balance the interests of all parties? and (2) What would you do if you were drafting a law requiring ISPs to implement certain policies, also while balancing the interests of all parties? (The best solution may be no law at all, but I think you would have to argue that position, rather than taking the default libertarian stance and simply assuming that. After all, the "no law" status quo didn't do much good for people like Cecilia Barnes who had a legitimate grievance and couldn't get anybody to listen.)

The non-verifiability of complaints is the same problem that I've posed to hard-core anti-spam advocates who have said that ISPs should have a zero-tolerance policy towards spam and cancel any account that is generating spam complaints. The problem with that is that unless the ISP has logs of all mail sent out by a customer (and if the customer is leasing a dedicated server, this would usually not be the case), the ISP can't tell for sure if a spam complaint is real or not. If they adopt a policy of removing a site in response to a complaint (or three or ten complaints), then someone could easily get one of their enemies' sites shut down by filing phony spam complaints sent from multiple Hotmail or Gmail accounts. (You would have to forge some e-mail headers to make it look convincingly like the spam came from the site in question, but this is not very difficult.) If the hosting company has a policy of kicking customers off in response to some threshold number of spam complaints, then a dedicated adversary could just file that many complaints until the customer was terminated. On the other hand, if the hosting company won't kick off customers for any number of spam complaints, then they have no deterrent against their customers spamming. (This is mostly an academic question, because I tried filing complaints against all the dozens of spammers who spammed me in a given one-day period a few years ago, and none of the hosting companies terminated any of the sites I complained about. I wouldn't have expected any of them to terminate a customer based on one complaint, but I assume that some of the hosting companies were getting spam complaints about those customers from other people as well.)

The big difference between spam incidents and impersonation incidents, is that while there may be no reliable record of whether a piece of mail was sent in the past or not, the fact of whether the Yahoo user "bennetthaselton" really is Bennett Haselton is something that can be determined with evidence that still exists in the present day. Some kinds of evidence are more readily available than others. If I were drafting an internal policy for an ISP on when to remove pages in response to an impersonation complaint, I would take care of the low-hanging-fruit cases first:

• If the page directs people to contact the page owner at an e-mail address or phone number (as the page created by Barnes' ex-boyfriend did), and you e-mail the address or call the number and someone answers by saying, "No, I didn't create that page, it's a fake", then you don't need to do any checking of the real-world identities of the parties involved -- all you need to know is that the page purports to be created by the owner of that phone number, but it isn't, so it's a fake and should be removed. This would take care of the most vicious cases of goading visitors into harassing someone directly.

  (Although I'd make clear in the policy that this wouldn't apply to consumer pages about companies, telling visitors to call such-and-such a company to complain about their conduct. Encouraging people to air their grievances is legitimate as long as the page owner isn't claiming to actually represent the company. I'm ducking the question of whether this should apply to pages about individuals -- if I make a page saying, "My ex is a skank, call her at this number for a 'good time'," am I infringing on her rights? But since I'm not claiming to be her, the situation wouldn't be covered by a policy about impersonation pages.)

• If the page is created by a paid user, then you can check if the real name on file with their credit card information, matches the name on the site. If it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily mean the page is a fake (possibly one person paid for the account while another one created the content), but if it does match, the page owner is probably not guilty of impersonating anyone. (Here I'm ducking the question of what to do if someone shares their name with a celebrity -- for example, if your name really is Julia Roberts and you create a page saying "Hi, I'm Julia Roberts", that's probably not enough to count as impersonation. But what if you talk about your interest in film and your exploits as an actress in local community theater, how much are you allowed to let people think that you might be "the Julia Roberts?)

• If the page violates the hosting company's Terms of Service in other ways, then it can be removed without determining whether the page owner is guilty of impersonation or not. The Yahoo Terms of Service doesn't actually mention sexual content (they used to allow users to post "adult profiles" in their Yahoo Profiles accounts as long as the profile owner flagged them as such), but the document prohibits content that is "vulgar" or "...otherwise objectionable". I haven't seen the page created by Barnes's ex-boyfriend soliciting strangers for sex, but it probably violated the Terms of Service in itself.

And there may be other low-hanging-fruit options that I'm not thinking of. But what if there is no easy call, because none of these simplifying factors apply? A user creates a profile on a free site claiming to be Mr. X. A third party complains that they are the real Mr. X and that the profile is fake. What should the ISP do, if they don't want to spend money verifying the real-world identities of the parties involved, every time they get a crank complaint about any users on their system?

This is essentially an economics problem. Cecilia Barnes wasn't asking Yahoo to do anything that would have been too burdensome for them -- the "labor" required to look at a faxed copy of her driver's license probably wouldn't have cost more than $5, at which point Yahoo could have initiated the process of shutting the page down, which they already have built-in procedures for. The benefit to her of getting the page shut down could have been valued in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Normally, when you need someone else to do something that costs them $5 worth of effort and brings you $1,000 worth of benefit, the natural arrangement is to pay them, but Yahoo doesn't offer this as an option.

In fact, I assume the real cost to Yahoo here would not have been actually reviewing Barnes's complaint, but actually finding it buried among all the bogus complaints that they receive, and noticing that it had real merit. Again, including a $5 payment would be one way to ensure that your complaint gets taken more seriously than all the others. But while the $5 fee might have helped in this specific situation, it's easy to imagine how that could set a bad precedent -- ISPs charging exhorbitant fees for users to submit abuse complaints to them, or users not filing complaints because they didn't want to share their payment information or pay money at all.

So, rather than paying a small fee directly, a better approach might be to require complainants to post some sort of "bond" -- which may not be something financial, as some examples will show -- in order to get their complaint to the front of the queue. Recall the example of submitting your driver's license along with an impersonation complaint. It's important to understand the subtle reason why this procedure actually works. It's not because someone couldn't still file a bogus complaint with a phony ID. (While it's somewhat hard to create a fake driver's license that you can hold in your hand, creating a fake faxed driver's license would be easy.) It's because if the complainant is lying, now they can be prosecuting for forging government documents. Essentially the complainant is posting their freedom as a "bond", going out on a limb and saying: "I can't prove to you that I'm telling the truth. But now you know that if I'm lying, I'll go to jail. Bet you the other guy won't be willing to make a binding promise like that."

So naturally I'd put that in the ISP's policy as well: If someone sends in a complaint about our user impersonating them, and they're willing to fax in a copy of their government ID proving that they are who they say they are, and we can verify that the page owner is claiming to actually be that person (and not merely complaining about that person or their business), then we would remove the page unless the account owner can submit even more compelling evidence that they are who they say they are.

This addresses the problem of the impersonation complaints that are completely fake. However, you still have the problem of what to do about people who fax in their driver's license along with letters saying "This guy is a jerk", hoping to get someone's account closed down. If a company like Yahoo is too big to read through all the complaints carefully, then it becomes hard to sort through the complaints to see which ones are really about impersonation and which ones are about other behavior that doesn't violate their TOS.

What might be a solution would be to borrow some of the non-terrible aspects of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The two most controversial provision of the DMCA are (1) a ban on software that enables the user to circumvent copyright restrictions, and (2) a requirement that ISPs have to respond to copyright-violation "takedown" notices in a certain manner. As I've said before about the DMCA, I'm opposed to #1 in principle because I think software should be protected by the First Amendment; I'm not against #2 in principle, but just concerned about how it could be abused in practice.

But one thing the DMCA does is solve the "sorting problem" -- how to get complaints about copyright violations to the top of the pile. Service provides often have a procedure for handling DMCA complaints that is separate from the regular complaint channels. The DMCA also provides protection for users against phony complaints, by stipulating that anyone who files a false complaint can be sued for statutory damages and attorney's fees, as in a case where Diebold, Inc. agreed to pay $125,000 as a penalty for sending false "takedown" notices. In other words, the DMCA solves the "bonding" problem too -- by sending a DMCA complaint, a user is effectively saying, "I agree to pay big money if I'm lying. So, I'm probably telling the truth."

So, a law addressing how ISPs should handle "impersonation" pages, modeled after the DMCA to solve the "top of the pile" problem and the "binding promise" problem, might go something like this:

• For a user to file a complaint, the complaint should cite the name of the anti-impersonation law, as in, "This complaint is being filed under the Anti-Impersonation Act of 2009". This gives ISPs an easy way to sort these complaints to the top of the pile, the same way that they have specialized channels for handling DMCA complaints.
• In the complaint, the user has to assert unambiguously that the page they are complaining about is impersonating them, and is not merely posting gripes about them or their business.
• The complaint should include a copy of a government-issued ID. (Again, this is not because this is hard to forge, but because now the complainant is promising, "If this is fake, I'll go to jail.")
• If the impersonation page is directing visitors to call a phone number or e-mail an e-mail address, and the takedown notification to the ISP includes a request to call that number or e-mail that address to verify that it doesn't actually belong to the page owner, then the ISP should follow up on that within a given time period of receiving the complaint. (And once they call that number or e-mail that address and get a response saying, "No, that page is definitely not mine", then the ISP should shut the page down.)
• Anyone who files a phony complaint citing that statute, can be held liable for statutory damages and attorney's fees, and if they faxed a phony government ID, then they can be prosecuted for that as well.

The problem-solver in me says that this is one way to ensure that legitimate complaints will be acted on, while making phony complaints much harder and riskier. It also seems to me that this is a minimal solution, in the sense that if you remove any part of it, it no longer solves the problem. For example, if you remove the part about complaints having to cite the anti-impersonation law, then you no longer have an effective means for these complaints to get to the top of the pile. And if you remove the part about civil penalties for filing phony complaints, then you no longer have any disincentive for people to tie up the system with crank complaints trying to get their enemies' accounts cancelled. Perhaps others can come up with an alternative solution that meets the logical requirements of enabling real complaints while discouraging fake ones. Meanwhile, the civil libertarian in me doesn't get a queasy feeling from it right away. It seems that it could only be used to stop cases of actual impersonation, and even as a free speech advocate I don't think that you have the moral right to impersonate someone else in a non-satirical manner for the purpose of actually deceiving or harassing people.

But even the absence of such a law is hardly an excuse for what Yahoo did. All they had to do is go to the page, look at the phone number, call the number and hear her say, "Yes, this is me and no that's not my page", and shut it down. The fact that they couldn't do this, shows a contempt for the process of handling legitimate complaints. Apart from the harm caused to Cecilia Barnes directly, incidents such as these might lead to Congress narrowing the scope of the immunity given to providers for hosting content posted by their users. Of course I'm technically suggesting a law that would narrow the scope of that immunity too, but only in a very narrowly prescribed way. If, on the other hand, Congress or the courts ever adopt the vague principle that providers can be held "jointly responsible" for whatever their users say once they've been "made aware" of it, it's going to get a lot harder for people to find Web hosting who have anything controversial to say.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A woman sued Yahoo because they wouldn't remove a page created by her ex-boyfriend pretending to be her and soliciting strangers for sex. What would be an effective system for large companies like Yahoo to handle 'impostor' complaints, without getting bogged down by phony complaints and unrelated disputes? This is a harder problem than it seems because of the several possible cases that have to be considered. One possible solution is given here." Read on for Bennett's analysis.

When I first heard that Yahoo had been sued because they refused to remove a page created by the ex-boyfriend of a woman named Cecilia Barnes to impersonate her -- portraying her as a slut looking for sex with strangers (who obliged by hounding her office with phone calls and e-mails) -- I thought Yahoo's conduct was indefensible. Even though, as the court ruled, they may have been exempt from liability under the Communication Decency Act of 1996, what possible excuse could Yahoo have had for the way they handled the situation, exposing Barnes to months of harassment, when it would have taken them only seconds to review the page, see that it was obviously causing harm, and remove it?

Then I thought more about the consequences of the rule that I was implicitly advocating by making that argument. Obviously, if an ISP has a policy of removing a user's page if some third party merely complains that the page is impersonating them, then one of your enemies could get your page removed by filing a complaint saying that they were really "you", and that your page was impersonating them. But if the ISP has a policy of not acting on such complaints, then someone could create a user account pretending to be you, and you wouldn't be able to get it removed.

In both cases, there are two problems. One is the fact that the ISP has to have a way to figure out who is telling the truth. The second is that the solution has to scale well, even for a company like Yahoo that probably gets so many complaints about user conduct every day that it would be impossible to read them all. It should be possible for genuine complaints about impostors, to reach the attention of the right people and get an account closed, without accounts being shut down because of (a) people who file complaints about 'rude behavior' that get unintentionally mixed in with 'impostor' complaints by someone who is too overworked to read them all very carefully; or (b) people who file outright false complaints that a given account is an 'impostor', just to get it shut down; or (c) people who are really sneaky, and file complaints about things like rude behavior, but who craft the complaints in a way that is deliberately designed to get them mixed in with the 'impostor' reports, in order to get the account shut down (this way, if the complainer ever sued or otherwise confronted about the complaint that they filed, they can say that they "didn't lie"!).

It's hard to think of a solution that covers all of these bases. For example, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology explained how many ISPs use faxed driver's licenses to decide impersonation complaints:

In many cases involving real people, the challenged site (whether it is a legit site or a bogus site) contains one or more photographs of the person involved. What service providers do in this case is to get the person to submit a copy of their driver's license, and the provider decides whether the person submitting the license is the same person depicted in the photos. And if so, that person is the one who can control whether the site stays up or not. This works in lots of cases (because pictures are often, but certainly not always, involved).

The problem is that even this could be abused when used against a company like Yahoo that handles an extremely high volume of complaints. Suppose that Yahoo publishes a standard procedure for submitting complaints about impersonation, that includes the requirement of a faxed driver's license. Abusers of the system would figure this out, and they could start filing "complaints" against users and websites by faxing in complaint letters along with a copy of their driver's license, where the letters were not complaints about impersonation at all, but just bogus complaints about other things like "This guy was mean to me". Because the driver's license accompanying the letter is real and the statements in the letter are true (or at least a matter of opinion), the complainer can't be accused of lying or forging government documents. And if anyone ever challenged them and asked, "Why did you send your driver's license with the complaint letter? Weren't you trying to trick the ISP into thinking that this was an impersonation complaint so they would take it seriously?", the complainer could play dumb and say, "Well, I heard that if you file a complaint against someone, you're supposed to fax your driver's license with it." But if Yahoo is still getting too many messages to sort through them carefully, some of these crank complaints could still get users' accounts shut down.

So now you have an interesting, non-trivial problem. Before reading further, it's worth thinking about how you would solve this. What's a good policy that would honor legitimate complaints, without giving cranks a way to get their enemies' pages shut down for no reason, and that would scale well for large companies like Yahoo? There are really two questions here: (1) What would you do if you were drafting an ISP policy and trying to balance the interests of all parties? and (2) What would you do if you were drafting a law requiring ISPs to implement certain policies, also while balancing the interests of all parties? (The best solution may be no law at all, but I think you would have to argue that position, rather than taking the default libertarian stance and simply assuming that. After all, the "no law" status quo didn't do much good for people like Cecilia Barnes who had a legitimate grievance and couldn't get anybody to listen.)

The non-verifiability of complaints is the same problem that I've posed to hard-core anti-spam advocates who have said that ISPs should have a zero-tolerance policy towards spam and cancel any account that is generating spam complaints. The problem with that is that unless the ISP has logs of all mail sent out by a customer (and if the customer is leasing a dedicated server, this would usually not be the case), the ISP can't tell for sure if a spam complaint is real or not. If they adopt a policy of removing a site in response to a complaint (or three or ten complaints), then someone could easily get one of their enemies' sites shut down by filing phony spam complaints sent from multiple Hotmail or Gmail accounts. (You would have to forge some e-mail headers to make it look convincingly like the spam came from the site in question, but this is not very difficult.) If the hosting company has a policy of kicking customers off in response to some threshold number of spam complaints, then a dedicated adversary could just file that many complaints until the customer was terminated. On the other hand, if the hosting company won't kick off customers for any number of spam complaints, then they have no deterrent against their customers spamming. (This is mostly an academic question, because I tried filing complaints against all the dozens of spammers who spammed me in a given one-day period a few years ago, and none of the hosting companies terminated any of the sites I complained about. I wouldn't have expected any of them to terminate a customer based on one complaint, but I assume that some of the hosting companies were getting spam complaints about those customers from other people as well.)

The big difference between spam incidents and impersonation incidents, is that while there may be no reliable record of whether a piece of mail was sent in the past or not, the fact of whether the Yahoo user "bennetthaselton" really is Bennett Haselton is something that can be determined with evidence that still exists in the present day. Some kinds of evidence are more readily available than others. If I were drafting an internal policy for an ISP on when to remove pages in response to an impersonation complaint, I would take care of the low-hanging-fruit cases first:

• If the page directs people to contact the page owner at an e-mail address or phone number (as the page created by Barnes' ex-boyfriend did), and you e-mail the address or call the number and someone answers by saying, "No, I didn't create that page, it's a fake", then you don't need to do any checking of the real-world identities of the parties involved -- all you need to know is that the page purports to be created by the owner of that phone number, but it isn't, so it's a fake and should be removed. This would take care of the most vicious cases of goading visitors into harassing someone directly.

  (Although I'd make clear in the policy that this wouldn't apply to consumer pages about companies, telling visitors to call such-and-such a company to complain about their conduct. Encouraging people to air their grievances is legitimate as long as the page owner isn't claiming to actually represent the company. I'm ducking the question of whether this should apply to pages about individuals -- if I make a page saying, "My ex is a skank, call her at this number for a 'good time'," am I infringing on her rights? But since I'm not claiming to be her, the situation wouldn't be covered by a policy about impersonation pages.)

• If the page is created by a paid user, then you can check if the real name on file with their credit card information, matches the name on the site. If it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily mean the page is a fake (possibly one person paid for the account while another one created the content), but if it does match, the page owner is probably not guilty of impersonating anyone. (Here I'm ducking the question of what to do if someone shares their name with a celebrity -- for example, if your name really is Julia Roberts and you create a page saying "Hi, I'm Julia Roberts", that's probably not enough to count as impersonation. But what if you talk about your interest in film and your exploits as an actress in local community theater, how much are you allowed to let people think that you might be "the Julia Roberts?)

• If the page violates the hosting company's Terms of Service in other ways, then it can be removed without determining whether the page owner is guilty of impersonation or not. The Yahoo Terms of Service doesn't actually mention sexual content (they used to allow users to post "adult profiles" in their Yahoo Profiles accounts as long as the profile owner flagged them as such), but the document prohibits content that is "vulgar" or "...otherwise objectionable". I haven't seen the page created by Barnes's ex-boyfriend soliciting strangers for sex, but it probably violated the Terms of Service in itself.

And there may be other low-hanging-fruit options that I'm not thinking of. But what if there is no easy call, because none of these simplifying factors apply? A user creates a profile on a free site claiming to be Mr. X. A third party complains that they are the real Mr. X and that the profile is fake. What should the ISP do, if they don't want to spend money verifying the real-world identities of the parties involved, every time they get a crank complaint about any users on their system?

This is essentially an economics problem. Cecilia Barnes wasn't asking Yahoo to do anything that would have been too burdensome for them -- the "labor" required to look at a faxed copy of her driver's license probably wouldn't have cost more than $5, at which point Yahoo could have initiated the process of shutting the page down, which they already have built-in procedures for. The benefit to her of getting the page shut down could have been valued in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Normally, when you need someone else to do something that costs them $5 worth of effort and brings you $1,000 worth of benefit, the natural arrangement is to pay them, but Yahoo doesn't offer this as an option.

In fact, I assume the real cost to Yahoo here would not have been actually reviewing Barnes's complaint, but actually finding it buried among all the bogus complaints that they receive, and noticing that it had real merit. Again, including a $5 payment would be one way to ensure that your complaint gets taken more seriously than all the others. But while the $5 fee might have helped in this specific situation, it's easy to imagine how that could set a bad precedent -- ISPs charging exhorbitant fees for users to submit abuse complaints to them, or users not filing complaints because they didn't want to share their payment information or pay money at all.

So, rather than paying a small fee directly, a better approach might be to require complainants to post some sort of "bond" -- which may not be something financial, as some examples will show -- in order to get their complaint to the front of the queue. Recall the example of submitting your driver's license along with an impersonation complaint. It's important to understand the subtle reason why this procedure actually works. It's not because someone couldn't still file a bogus complaint with a phony ID. (While it's somewhat hard to create a fake driver's license that you can hold in your hand, creating a fake faxed driver's license would be easy.) It's because if the complainant is lying, now they can be prosecuting for forging government documents. Essentially the complainant is posting their freedom as a "bond", going out on a limb and saying: "I can't prove to you that I'm telling the truth. But now you know that if I'm lying, I'll go to jail. Bet you the other guy won't be willing to make a binding promise like that."

So naturally I'd put that in the ISP's policy as well: If someone sends in a complaint about our user impersonating them, and they're willing to fax in a copy of their government ID proving that they are who they say they are, and we can verify that the page owner is claiming to actually be that person (and not merely complaining about that person or their business), then we would remove the page unless the account owner can submit even more compelling evidence that they are who they say they are.

This addresses the problem of the impersonation complaints that are completely fake. However, you still have the problem of what to do about people who fax in their driver's license along with letters saying "This guy is a jerk", hoping to get someone's account closed down. If a company like Yahoo is too big to read through all the complaints carefully, then it becomes hard to sort through the complaints to see which ones are really about impersonation and which ones are about other behavior that doesn't violate their TOS.

What might be a solution would be to borrow some of the non-terrible aspects of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The two most controversial provision of the DMCA are (1) a ban on software that enables the user to circumvent copyright restrictions, and (2) a requirement that ISPs have to respond to copyright-violation "takedown" notices in a certain manner. As I've said before about the DMCA, I'm opposed to #1 in principle because I think software should be protected by the First Amendment; I'm not against #2 in principle, but just concerned about how it could be abused in practice.

But one thing the DMCA does is solve the "sorting problem" -- how to get complaints about copyright violations to the top of the pile. Service provides often have a procedure for handling DMCA complaints that is separate from the regular complaint channels. The DMCA also provides protection for users against phony complaints, by stipulating that anyone who files a false complaint can be sued for statutory damages and attorney's fees, as in a case where Diebold, Inc. agreed to pay $125,000 as a penalty for sending false "takedown" notices. In other words, the DMCA solves the "bonding" problem too -- by sending a DMCA complaint, a user is effectively saying, "I agree to pay big money if I'm lying. So, I'm probably telling the truth."

So, a law addressing how ISPs should handle "impersonation" pages, modeled after the DMCA to solve the "top of the pile" problem and the "binding promise" problem, might go something like this:

• For a user to file a complaint, the complaint should cite the name of the anti-impersonation law, as in, "This complaint is being filed under the Anti-Impersonation Act of 2009". This gives ISPs an easy way to sort these complaints to the top of the pile, the same way that they have specialized channels for handling DMCA complaints.
• In the complaint, the user has to assert unambiguously that the page they are complaining about is impersonating them, and is not merely posting gripes about them or their business.
• The complaint should include a copy of a government-issued ID. (Again, this is not because this is hard to forge, but because now the complainant is promising, "If this is fake, I'll go to jail.")
• If the impersonation page is directing visitors to call a phone number or e-mail an e-mail address, and the takedown notification to the ISP includes a request to call that number or e-mail that address to verify that it doesn't actually belong to the page owner, then the ISP should follow up on that within a given time period of receiving the complaint. (And once they call that number or e-mail that address and get a response saying, "No, that page is definitely not mine", then the ISP should shut the page down.)
• Anyone who files a phony complaint citing that statute, can be held liable for statutory damages and attorney's fees, and if they faxed a phony government ID, then they can be prosecuted for that as well.

The problem-solver in me says that this is one way to ensure that legitimate complaints will be acted on, while making phony complaints much harder and riskier. It also seems to me that this is a minimal solution, in the sense that if you remove any part of it, it no longer solves the problem. For example, if you remove the part about complaints having to cite the anti-impersonation law, then you no longer have an effective means for these complaints to get to the top of the pile. And if you remove the part about civil penalties for filing phony complaints, then you no longer have any disincentive for people to tie up the system with crank complaints trying to get their enemies' accounts cancelled. Perhaps others can come up with an alternative solution that meets the logical requirements of enabling real complaints while discouraging fake ones. Meanwhile, the civil libertarian in me doesn't get a queasy feeling from it right away. It seems that it could only be used to stop cases of actual impersonation, and even as a free speech advocate I don't think that you have the moral right to impersonate someone else in a non-satirical manner for the purpose of actually deceiving or harassing people.

But even the absence of such a law is hardly an excuse for what Yahoo did. All they had to do is go to the page, look at the phone number, call the number and hear her say, "Yes, this is me and no that's not my page", and shut it down. The fact that they couldn't do this, shows a contempt for the process of handling legitimate complaints. Apart from the harm caused to Cecilia Barnes directly, incidents such as these might lead to Congress narrowing the scope of the immunity given to providers for hosting content posted by their users. Of course I'm technically suggesting a law that would narrow the scope of that immunity too, but only in a very narrowly prescribed way. If, on the other hand, Congress or the courts ever adopt the vague principle that providers can be held "jointly responsible" for whatever their users say once they've been "made aware" of it, it's going to get a lot harder for people to find Web hosting who have anything controversial to say.

An anonymous reader writes "We've discussed (at length) functional MRI technology as it pertains to marketing and virtual reality, but now Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs has become the first person to go inside the controversial machine to test the science behind his sex drive. As in, he has fMRI experts read his mind as to whether he's actually more turned on by his young wife or Angelina Jolie. The results, unsurprisingly, are both geeky and hilarious. Would you subject yourself to this kind of reality check?"

An anonymous reader writes "We've discussed (at length) functional MRI technology as it pertains to marketing and virtual reality, but now Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs has become the first person to go inside the controversial machine to test the science behind his sex drive. As in, he has fMRI experts read his mind as to whether he's actually more turned on by his young wife or Angelina Jolie. The results, unsurprisingly, are both geeky and hilarious. Would you subject yourself to this kind of reality check?"

An anonymous reader writes "We've discussed (at length) functional MRI technology as it pertains to marketing and virtual reality, but now Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs has become the first person to go inside the controversial machine to test the science behind his sex drive. As in, he has fMRI experts read his mind as to whether he's actually more turned on by his young wife or Angelina Jolie. The results, unsurprisingly, are both geeky and hilarious. Would you subject yourself to this kind of reality check?"

An anonymous reader writes "The Business Software Alliance released their annual global piracy report earlier this week. In addition to the usual claims of software piracy (PDF) and the grudging acknowledgment of open source software, Michael Geist noted that the report ultimately undermined one of the BSA's core arguments — that countries which enact DMCA-style legislation experience significantly reduced piracy rates. Questions have also been raised over the BSA's methodology, as has happened in the past."

An anonymous reader writes "A Piezoelectric Sound Level Meter was demoed at MIT's Battle of the Bands last month, borrowing its display from the do-it-yourself USB LED marquee that was the subject of a previous Slashdot story. This video tutorial describes in detail both the analog electronics plus the C code that runs the system. If this is your first experience at the intersection of digital and analog systems, don't be scared!"

eldavojohn writes "With the Pirate Bay trial, it's been easy to overlook similar struggles in other nations. A Dutch Usenet community named FTD is going on the offensive and suing BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland). You may remember BREIN (along with the IFPI & BPI) as the people who raided and cut out the heart of eDonkey. This is turning into a pretty familiar scenario; the FTD group makes software that allows its 450k members to easily find copyrighted content for free on Usenet. The shocking part is that FTD isn't waiting for BREIN to sue them. FTD is refusing to take down their file location reports, and is actually suing BREIN. Why the preemptive attack? FTD wants the courts to show that the act of downloading is not illegal in the Netherlands. (Both articles have the five points in English that FTD wants the courts to settle.) OSNews has a few more details on the story."

An anonymous reader writes "DJ Danger Mouse famously fought with EMI over his Beatles/Jay-Z mashup, 'The Grey Album,' and now seems to be battling with the label again. Rather than release his latest album and face legal issues with EMI, Techdirt is reporting that Danger Mouse will be selling a blank CD-R along with lots of artwork, and buyers will be responsible for finding the music themselves (yes, it's findable on the internet) and burning the CD."

The cancellation of Six Days in Fallujah seems to have stirred up almost as much debate as its original announcement. Given the popularity of World War II games, it seems clear that the main concern about a game focusing on modern war events relates to how recently they happened. Kotaku takes a look at some of the obstacles such a game would need to overcome to achieve broad acceptance. "When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that's the wrong question to ask. 'We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don't even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience,' he said. Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts. As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation. 'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun — war is not fun — but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'"

eldavojohn writes "The BBC has more details about something we last discussed in 2008 — the showdown of open source versus proprietary software in Africa. When discussing the issue of cost, the piece quotes Microsoft's chairman on the scene, Dr. Cheikh Modibo Diarra, who alludes that open source continually costs you money by saying 'You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.' On the other end of the story is Ken Banks from Kiwanja.net who has spent 15 years developing open source applications in Africa. His logic is that 'Today we're seeing growing open-source programmer, developer communities in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries. Clearly, if you have this informal programming sector coming up, access to source code is almost critical if they are going to be able to take advantage of these new tools that are emerging.' Well, the battle rages on, hopefully the emerging African developers and users pick the tool(s) that suit their needs the best."

eldavojohn writes "Ars has a summary of the curious events surrounding the death of broadband over power lines (BPL). We've discussed BPL's trials and advances here many times. The Federal Communications Commission's go-ahead was halted last year by a federal court, after a suit by the American Radio Relay League over claims of unacceptable radio interference from BPL. The DC Court of Appeals judge noted, 'There is little doubt that the [FCC] deliberately attempted to exclude from the record evidence adverse to its position.' The ARRL's FOIA request to obtain non-redacted documents finally bore fruit under the Obama administrations more open FOIA guidelines. The ARRL's preliminary analysis of the released documents point out a few critical areas where the FCC redacted data that is clearly adverse to the claims of BPL proponents. By rights, this ought to lay BPL to rest once and for all." A story at Broadband Reports notes that BPL is dying on its own, as most of the vendors who had been testing it "have since moved on to promote smart electrical grid functionality."

eldavojohn writes "Ars has a summary of the curious events surrounding the death of broadband over power lines (BPL). We've discussed BPL's trials and advances here many times. The Federal Communications Commission's go-ahead was halted last year by a federal court, after a suit by the American Radio Relay League over claims of unacceptable radio interference from BPL. The DC Court of Appeals judge noted, 'There is little doubt that the [FCC] deliberately attempted to exclude from the record evidence adverse to its position.' The ARRL's FOIA request to obtain non-redacted documents finally bore fruit under the Obama administrations more open FOIA guidelines. The ARRL's preliminary analysis of the released documents point out a few critical areas where the FCC redacted data that is clearly adverse to the claims of BPL proponents. By rights, this ought to lay BPL to rest once and for all." A story at Broadband Reports notes that BPL is dying on its own, as most of the vendors who had been testing it "have since moved on to promote smart electrical grid functionality."

eldavojohn writes "Ars has a summary of the curious events surrounding the death of broadband over power lines (BPL). We've discussed BPL's trials and advances here many times. The Federal Communications Commission's go-ahead was halted last year by a federal court, after a suit by the American Radio Relay League over claims of unacceptable radio interference from BPL. The DC Court of Appeals judge noted, 'There is little doubt that the [FCC] deliberately attempted to exclude from the record evidence adverse to its position.' The ARRL's FOIA request to obtain non-redacted documents finally bore fruit under the Obama administrations more open FOIA guidelines. The ARRL's preliminary analysis of the released documents point out a few critical areas where the FCC redacted data that is clearly adverse to the claims of BPL proponents. By rights, this ought to lay BPL to rest once and for all." A story at Broadband Reports notes that BPL is dying on its own, as most of the vendors who had been testing it "have since moved on to promote smart electrical grid functionality."

Elektroschock writes "For 4 years MEP Marco Cappato tried to get access to the EU Council's 2005 open source migration study because he is a member of a responsible IT oversight committee in the European Parliament. His repeated requests for access were denied. Now they have finally been answered because the Council's study has escaped into the wild (PDF in French and English). Here is a quick look. It is embarrassing! Gartner, when asked if there were any mature public Linux installations in Europe, claimed that there were none. Michael Silver said, 'I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments.' Gartner spread patent and TCO FUD. Also, the European Patent Office participated in the project, although it is not an EU institution."

thefickler writes "Reading about Peter Wayner and his problems with book piracy reminded me of another writer, Thomas Crampton, who has the opposite problem — a lot of his work has been wiped from the Internet. Thomas Crampton has worked for the New York Times (NYT) and the International Herald Tribune (IHT) for about a decade, but when the websites of the two newspapers were merged two months ago, a lot of Crampton's work disappeared into the ether. Links to the old stories are simply hitting generic pages. Crampton wrote a letter to Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the NYT, pleading for his work to be put back online. The hilarious part: according to one analysis, the NYT is throwing away at least $100,000 for every month that the links remain broken."

Take-Two Interactive has now sued 3D Realms over the cancellation of Duke Nukem Forever . Take-Two did not provide continuous funding for the game, but they did pay $12 million for the publishing rights to the game. A Bloomberg report quotes Take-Two's complaint as saying that 3D Realms "continually delayed the completion date" and "repeatedly assured Take-Two and the video-gaming community that it was diligently working toward competing development of the PC Version" of the game. (The complaint refers to 3D Realms as part of Apogee Software, Ltd., not to be confused with Apogee Software, LLC, the publisher behind the still-forthcoming Duke Nukem Trilogy.)

GameSetWatch takes a look at the issues involved in creating an MMO that does not split its users among many different servers. They suggest that running a single "shard" is the next step in the evolution of MMOs, since it better allows player choices to have a meaningful impact on the game world; supporting different outcomes across multiple shards is a technical nightmare. They estimate, from the hip, that the cost to develop the technology required to support a massive amount of players (i.e. far more than EVE Online) on a single server to be roughly $100 million. Another recommendation is the strong reliance on procedural and user-generated content creation to fill a necessarily enormous game world.

el americano writes "Flight Simulator community website Avsim has experienced a total data loss after both of their online servers were hacked. The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, explained why 13 years of community developed terrains, skins, and mods will not be restored from backups: 'Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation.'"

Gary Pendergast writes "Monty Widenius, the 'father' of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun." Related to this, an anonymous reader writes that "MySQL has announced a project to refactor MySQL to be a more Drizzle-like database." Update: 05/14 20:50 GMT by T : Original headline implied that this was a project of Sun, but (thanks to the open source nature of MySQL) it's actually Monty Widenius — no longer with Sun — leading this effort.

Gary Pendergast writes "Monty Widenius, the 'father' of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun." Related to this, an anonymous reader writes that "MySQL has announced a project to refactor MySQL to be a more Drizzle-like database." Update: 05/14 20:50 GMT by T : Original headline implied that this was a project of Sun, but (thanks to the open source nature of MySQL) it's actually Monty Widenius — no longer with Sun — leading this effort.

eldavojohn writes "GamePolitics is writing about a proposal to tax things that make your kids fat. The logic from its author: 'Almost all experts agree that the primary reasons [for the obesity epidemic] are increased consumption of larger quantities of high calorie foods, snacks and sugar sweetened beverages... and lack of physical activity as vigorous play is replaced by sedentary activities such as watching more television, movies and videos and playing video games. This bill would raise revenues from modest surcharges on the very food products and sedentary activities that are linked to the lifestyle changes involved in the explosion of childhood obesity in the last 20-30 years.' Not as explicit as Japan's fat tax but we're getting there."

Craig writes "Gamepark have officially released the follow-up to its successful Linux handheld, the GP2X. The GP2X Wiz is a 533Mhz Linux-based handheld that's a similar size to the GBA Micro, with a touchscreen and 12 games preloaded into memory, many of which are demos of commercial games. The system comes with 1GB of flash memory, which can be expanded with SD cards. The Homebrew Community have already released ports of games such as Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, Warcraft and emulators for SNES, Genesis, Commodore 64 and the arcade emulator Mame."

Craig writes "Gamepark have officially released the follow-up to its successful Linux handheld, the GP2X. The GP2X Wiz is a 533Mhz Linux-based handheld that's a similar size to the GBA Micro, with a touchscreen and 12 games preloaded into memory, many of which are demos of commercial games. The system comes with 1GB of flash memory, which can be expanded with SD cards. The Homebrew Community have already released ports of games such as Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, Warcraft and emulators for SNES, Genesis, Commodore 64 and the arcade emulator Mame."

demishade writes "Peacekeeper, the browser benchmark from the makers of 3DMark, comes out of beta and shows an interesting (though perhaps not surprising) tidbit — the more popular a browser, the worse its performance. While it should not be surprising to anyone that IE slugs at the last place, the gap between Firefox and Chrome, is. Once IE's market share goes the way of the Dodo will web developers start cursing Firefox? How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function?"

eldavojohn writes "What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and — oddly enough — electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches."

KentuckyFC writes "Metamaterials are synthetic substances that can steer light in any way imaginable. Their most famous incarnation is in invisibility cloaks which work by steering light around a region of space making any object inside that region invisible. But invisibility is just the start. A team of physicists in Hong Kong (the same guys who recently worked out how to cloak objects at a distance) have worked out how to create a cloak that makes one object look like another. Instead of steering light to make a region of space look empty, the illusion cloak manipulates light in a way that makes a region of space look as if it contains a specific object. So any object within that region of space, a mouse say, takes on the appearance of an elephant."

basiles writes "Jacques Pitrat's new book Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness will be of interest to anyone who likes robotics, software, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and science-fiction. The book talks about artificial consciousness in a way that can be enjoyed by experts in the field or your average science fiction geek. I believe that people who enjoyed reading Dennet's or Hofstadter's books (like the famous Godel Escher Bach) will like reading Artificial Ethics." Keep reading for the rest of Basile's review. Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness author Jacques Pitrat pages 275 publisher Wileys rating 9/10 reviewer Basile Starynkevitch ISBN 97818482211018 summary Provides original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities The author J.Pitrat (one of France's oldest AI researcher, also AAAI and ECCAI fellow) talks about the usefulness of a conscious artificial being, currently specialized in solving very general constraint satisfaction or arithmetic problems. He describes in some details his implemented artificial researcher system CAIA, on which he has worked for about 20 years.

J.Pitrat claims that strong AI is an incredibly difficult, but still possible goal and task. He advocates the use of some bootstrapping techniques common for software developers. He contends that without a conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based system AI would be virtually impossible to create. Only an AI systems could build a true Star Trek style AI.

The meanings of Conscience and Consciousness is discussed in chapter 2. The author explains why it is useful for human and for artificial beings. Pitrat explains what 'Itself' means for an artificial being and discusses some aspects and some limitations of consciousness. Later chapters address why auto-observation is useful, and how to observer oneself. Conscience for humans, artificial beings or robots, including Asimov's laws, is then discussed, how to implement it, and enhance or change it. The final chapter discuss the future of CAIA (J.PItrat's system) and two appendixes give more scientific or technical details, both from a mathematical point of view, and from the software implementation point of view.

J.Pitrat is not a native english speaker (and neither am I), so the language of the book might be unnatural to native English speakers but the ideas are clear enough.

For software developers, this book give some interesting and original insights about how a big software system might attain consciousness, and continuously improve itself by experimentation and introspection. J.Pitrat's CAIA system actually had several long life's (months of CPU time) during which it explored new ideas, experimented new strategies, evaluated and improved its own performance, all this autonomously. This is done by a large amount of declarative knowledge and meta-knowledge. The declarative word is used by J.Pitrat in a much broader way than it is usually used in programming. A knowledge is declarative if it can be used in many different ways, and has to be transformed to many procedural chunks to be used. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and the transformation from declarative knowledge to procedural chunks is given declaratively by some meta-knowledge (a bit similar to the expertise of a software developer), and translated by itself into code chunks.

For people interested in robotics, ethics or science fiction, J.Pitrat's book give interesting food for thought by explaining how indeed artificial systems can be conscious, and why they should be, and what that would mean in the future.

This book gives very provocative and original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities. What makes this book stand out is that it explains an actual software system, the implementation meaning of consciousness, and the bootstrapping approach used to build such a system.

Disclaimer: I know Jacques Pitrat, and I actually proofread-ed the draft of this book. I even had access, some years ago, to some of J.Pitrat's not yet published software.

You can purchase Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

basiles writes "Jacques Pitrat's new book Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness will be of interest to anyone who likes robotics, software, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and science-fiction. The book talks about artificial consciousness in a way that can be enjoyed by experts in the field or your average science fiction geek. I believe that people who enjoyed reading Dennet's or Hofstadter's books (like the famous Godel Escher Bach) will like reading Artificial Ethics." Keep reading for the rest of Basile's review. Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness author Jacques Pitrat pages 275 publisher Wileys rating 9/10 reviewer Basile Starynkevitch ISBN 97818482211018 summary Provides original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities The author J.Pitrat (one of France's oldest AI researcher, also AAAI and ECCAI fellow) talks about the usefulness of a conscious artificial being, currently specialized in solving very general constraint satisfaction or arithmetic problems. He describes in some details his implemented artificial researcher system CAIA, on which he has worked for about 20 years.

J.Pitrat claims that strong AI is an incredibly difficult, but still possible goal and task. He advocates the use of some bootstrapping techniques common for software developers. He contends that without a conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based system AI would be virtually impossible to create. Only an AI systems could build a true Star Trek style AI.

The meanings of Conscience and Consciousness is discussed in chapter 2. The author explains why it is useful for human and for artificial beings. Pitrat explains what 'Itself' means for an artificial being and discusses some aspects and some limitations of consciousness. Later chapters address why auto-observation is useful, and how to observer oneself. Conscience for humans, artificial beings or robots, including Asimov's laws, is then discussed, how to implement it, and enhance or change it. The final chapter discuss the future of CAIA (J.PItrat's system) and two appendixes give more scientific or technical details, both from a mathematical point of view, and from the software implementation point of view.

J.Pitrat is not a native english speaker (and neither am I), so the language of the book might be unnatural to native English speakers but the ideas are clear enough.

For software developers, this book give some interesting and original insights about how a big software system might attain consciousness, and continuously improve itself by experimentation and introspection. J.Pitrat's CAIA system actually had several long life's (months of CPU time) during which it explored new ideas, experimented new strategies, evaluated and improved its own performance, all this autonomously. This is done by a large amount of declarative knowledge and meta-knowledge. The declarative word is used by J.Pitrat in a much broader way than it is usually used in programming. A knowledge is declarative if it can be used in many different ways, and has to be transformed to many procedural chunks to be used. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and the transformation from declarative knowledge to procedural chunks is given declaratively by some meta-knowledge (a bit similar to the expertise of a software developer), and translated by itself into code chunks.

For people interested in robotics, ethics or science fiction, J.Pitrat's book give interesting food for thought by explaining how indeed artificial systems can be conscious, and why they should be, and what that would mean in the future.

This book gives very provocative and original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities. What makes this book stand out is that it explains an actual software system, the implementation meaning of consciousness, and the bootstrapping approach used to build such a system.

Disclaimer: I know Jacques Pitrat, and I actually proofread-ed the draft of this book. I even had access, some years ago, to some of J.Pitrat's not yet published software.

You can purchase Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Brad Wardell of Stardock and Ron Carmel of 2D Boy recently spoke with Gamasutra about their efforts to move the games industry away from restrictive DRM. Despite the fact that both have had their own troubles with piracy, they contend that overall piracy rates aren't significantly affected by DRM — and that most companies know it. Instead, the two suggest that most DRM solutions are still around to hamper a few more specific situations. Quoting: "'Publishers aren't stupid. They know that DRM doesn't work against piracy,' Carmel explains. 'What they're trying to do is stop people from going to GameStop to buy $50 games for $35, none of which goes into the publishers' pockets. If DRM permits only a few installs, that minimizes the number of times a game can be resold.' ... 'I believe their argument is that while DRM doesn't work perfectly,' says Wardell, 'it does make it more difficult for someone to get the game for free in the first five or six days of its release. That's when a lot of the sales take place and that's when the royalties from the retailers are determined. Publishers would be very happy for a first week without "warez" copies circulating on the Web.'"