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Following up on the "sexting" case we've discussed in recent days, oliphaunt sends word from the Times-Tribune that a New Jersey federal judge has ordered the prosecutor not to file charges in the cases of three teenage girls whose cell phones were confiscated. "Wyoming [NJ] County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. cannot charge three teenage girls who appeared in photographs seminude traded by classmates last year, a judge ruled Monday. US District Judge James M. Munley granted a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to temporarily stop Mr. Skumanick from filing felony charges against the Tunkhannock Area School District students."

Thelasko writes "A NYTimes blog reports that the volume of spam has returned to its previous levels, as seen before the McColo was shut down. Here is the report on Google's enterprise blog. Adam Swidler, of Postini Services, says: 'It's unlikely we are going to see another event like McColo where taking out an ISP has that kind of dramatic impact on global spam volumes,' because the spammers' control systems are evolving. This is sad news for us all."

Dr_Barnowl writes "Electronic Arts has posted a SecuROM de-authorization management tool. Once downloaded, the tool will search your drives for EA games infested with the draconian online DRM system, and help you download their respective individual de-activation tools. This isn't a perfect solution, since it's still possible to run out of activations in the event of hardware failure or other source of data loss, but since the announcement that this particular DRM system will be dropped for The Sims 3 , it would seem that EA has had a minor epiphany about DRM." I'm sure EA's hand was forced in part by the FTC's recent warning against deceptive DRM practices. Hal Halpin of the Entertainment Consumers Association commented further on the issue, suggesting to developers that such measures need to be displayed on game boxes, and that standardization of EULAs could be next on the list.

Dr_Barnowl writes "Electronic Arts has posted a SecuROM de-authorization management tool. Once downloaded, the tool will search your drives for EA games infested with the draconian online DRM system, and help you download their respective individual de-activation tools. This isn't a perfect solution, since it's still possible to run out of activations in the event of hardware failure or other source of data loss, but since the announcement that this particular DRM system will be dropped for The Sims 3 , it would seem that EA has had a minor epiphany about DRM." I'm sure EA's hand was forced in part by the FTC's recent warning against deceptive DRM practices. Hal Halpin of the Entertainment Consumers Association commented further on the issue, suggesting to developers that such measures need to be displayed on game boxes, and that standardization of EULAs could be next on the list.

Harry writes "Microsoft's new Windows ad, with shopper Lauren buying a cheap 17-inch HP laptop instead of a $2,800 MacBook Pro, has unleashed the whole 'Are Macs Expensive?' debate again. I'm diving in with a pretty exhaustive comparison of the MacBook Pro against machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Sony that were as comparably configured as I could manage. The conclusion: High-end laptops tend to carry high-end prices, whether their operating system hails from Cupertino or Redmond. And the MacBook Pro wasn't the priciest of the systems I compared." We looked at this question, not in as much depth, a couple of years back.

ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."

ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."

N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: "NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer." They're still working on the parachute.

We've discussed the fallout from Google's settlement with the Authors Guild a few times already. Now the issue is made pointed again by a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming that the settlement will ruin a functioning copyright system if it is finally ratified, as expected, in June by a federal court. Reader daretoeatapeach writes: "In the US this will establish a Book Rights Registry where authors can opt-in to 63% of the revenues of each book, the rest going to Google. While previously Amazon had cornered the market on e-books, Google's partnership with Sony will create a serious dent: 500,000 books to Amazon's 250,000. Though Google is currently only releasing the books that are in the public domain, they ultimately plan to sell the 7 million e-books they've scanned (and counting). This raises a lot of questions about the future of publishing: Do we want only one company (e.g. Google) controlling access to information? Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned? Will broader access to trade journals affect their relationship and reliance on libraries? If, in the future, more authors opt out of the traditional publishing model, when will this hit the 'recession-proof' book industry? And has the publishing industry learned any lessons from MP3s?"

We've discussed the fallout from Google's settlement with the Authors Guild a few times already. Now the issue is made pointed again by a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming that the settlement will ruin a functioning copyright system if it is finally ratified, as expected, in June by a federal court. Reader daretoeatapeach writes: "In the US this will establish a Book Rights Registry where authors can opt-in to 63% of the revenues of each book, the rest going to Google. While previously Amazon had cornered the market on e-books, Google's partnership with Sony will create a serious dent: 500,000 books to Amazon's 250,000. Though Google is currently only releasing the books that are in the public domain, they ultimately plan to sell the 7 million e-books they've scanned (and counting). This raises a lot of questions about the future of publishing: Do we want only one company (e.g. Google) controlling access to information? Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned? Will broader access to trade journals affect their relationship and reliance on libraries? If, in the future, more authors opt out of the traditional publishing model, when will this hit the 'recession-proof' book industry? And has the publishing industry learned any lessons from MP3s?"

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the proliferation of free or low-cost games on the Web and for phones limits how high the major game publishers can set prices, so makers are sometimes unable to charge enough to cover the cost of producing titles. The cost of making a game for the previous generation of machines was about $10 million, not including marketing. The cost of a game for the latest consoles is over twice that — $25 million is typical, and it can be much more. Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer for Nintendo of America, says publishers of games for its Wii console need to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit, but the majority of games, analysts said, sell no more than 150,000 copies. Developers would like to raise prices to cover development costs, but Mike McGarvey, former chief executive of Eidos and now an executive with OnLive, says that consumers have been looking at console games and saying, 'This is too expensive and there are too many choices.' Since makers cannot charge enough or sell enough games to cover the cost of producing most titles, video game makers have to hope for a blockbuster. 'The model as it exists is dying,' says McGarvey." As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.

KingofGnG writes "While waiting for the opening of Legends of Zork's game world, old and new adventurers can pick up the daily build of ScummVM, which, starting from March 7, added support for the MADE engine. The engine has been used by Activision to create four point-and-click adventure games from the '90s, among which is the venerable Return to Zork."

Attendees of this year's GDC were given an early look at Wolfenstein, the new shooter in development by id and Raven. We've previously discussed the "Veil" ability that protagonist BJ Blazkowicz uses to hide himself, and much of the coverage relates to how it affects gameplay. "Early on, Blazkowicz stumbles upon an experiment and manages to blow it up, releasing waves of ethereal blue material. The Veil seems to turn gravity on and off as Blazkowicz tries to escape the area, making for some very original gunplay. ... The folks on hand told me that the Veil would be incorporated into game's multiplayer, but wouldn't go into details." A trailer for the game is available at Joystiq, and they had this to say: "Wolfenstein's look and gameplay is dated — and not in a retro chic way. Without the Veil, the game could be mistaken for a last-gen title, so the game's success rests on how compelling this feature will be throughout an entire playthrough."

Raul654 writes "In December, we discussed the German Federal Archive's agreement, at the urging of Wikimedia Deutschland, to donate 100,000 pictures to Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. At the time that was the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and thought to be largest in the history of the free culture movement. Now Wikimedia Deutschland has reached a similar agreement with the Saxon State and University Library, which will donate 250,000 pictures to Wikipedia under CCA-ShareAlike. On a not-unrelated note: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia."

Kylar writes "For those of you who have already discovered Michael 'Rands' Lopp's blog Rands In Repose, I congratulate you, as you are clearly an intelligent audience. For those of you who haven't, or for the less discerning (or, perhaps less blog-oriented), this book provides an excellent entry into the writings of Rands. Containing edited selections from his blog as well as new material, Rands uses many anecdotes and stories to convey a startling amount of deep wisdom into the facets of the Silicon Valley programmer, and a bevy of tools that are helpful in attempting to herd, er, manage them." Read below for Tom's review. Managing Humans author Michael Lopp pages 209 publisher Apress rating 8/10 reviewer Tom Byrne ISBN 978-1590598443 summary 34 Anecdotes that give insight into silicon valley management and programmers. I've read most of this book 3 times, the first when I discovered Rands' blog, (and, like few others, captivated me enough to start at the beginning and read his entire oeuvre), Once upon purchase of the book, and again, recently over the course of a few weeks, taking the stories out of order, and enjoying each for it's viewpoint, humor, and insight. The book is broken down into 3 major sections, 34 chapters, and each chapter is a small chunk, easily readable in a few minutes. It really feels like a blog, you can dip into it for a few minutes here and there and pick up a good point or two from each entry.

Know how many people I manage? Over a dozen, on a weekly basis. Know how many people report to me? None. So, why did I read it? Because I sit in a lot of meetings. I have to manage expectations. I have to write specs and reports for other people. Unless you work in almost complete isolation, receiving uber-detailed software specs and churning out code to match those exact specifications, the likelyhood is that you have to deal with other people. A lot. Every time you deal with someone else in a technical workplace, you run into other people. Their motives are not the same as yours, nor do they communicate the same way. In the first section of the book, "The Management Quiver", Lopp recounts 12 anecdotes, and two specific ones stood out. 'Agenda Detection' gives some points on how to figure out who the important people are in a meeting, and 3 tips on when to bail. 'Avoiding The Fez' points the spotlight on the guy who wrote that one system that no-one understands, but also calls out that too many people (and I find myself in this group) let their knowledge stagnate, instead of constantly learning and expanding.

The second section of the book, "The Process Is The Product", is, in my opinion where the book really starts to shine. "1.0" will be a familiar story for anyone who's ever tried to ship a product, as well as Rands' view on the 4 key things that it will take. "Taking Time To Think" and "The Soak" talk about absorbing ideas and planning, and he touches on ways to convey and disseminate information in "Capturing Context". This last one was another that I found informative — by getting a closer understanding of what kind of information the other party was expecting, and in what way they will be receptive to it.

In the third section, "Versions Of You", you'll see the people you work with, and Rands divides them out in lots of different ways (it struck me very much as almost a myers-briggs Nerd Scale). Are they Incrementalists or Completionist? Organic or Mechanic? Inward or Outwards? (For the record, I'm an OIC, An organic inward completionist.) And once you've identified someone, it makes communicating with them and identifying their motivations and reactions much better.

So, who should read this book? Managers. Technical Managers. Technical Peons. Programmers who are managed. Anyone who works with someone technical. Anyone named Fez. Odds are, if you're reading this review, you're in the target audience. Even when you look at a book like this and think "I don't need this, I'm not a manager." Odds are that you're being managed, and managing others, even if they don't report to you.

So, ultimately, why should you read this? I think that this book has a fair amount to offer just about anyone in a role in or dealing with technical talent. Does it answer everything? Of course not — but there are a lot of little nuggets hiding here, and above all, it is entertaining. More entertaining than The Mythical Man Month, and more applicable to my daily job than "SOA Is Dead, An Anthology".

This book has several Pros: I found it very relevant, and I was able to identify ways to improve my own communication, by understanding what the other person was expecting, and how to present it. Cons: Most of it is available free on Rands' blog.

You can purchase Managing Humans from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Kylar writes "For those of you who have already discovered Michael 'Rands' Lopp's blog Rands In Repose, I congratulate you, as you are clearly an intelligent audience. For those of you who haven't, or for the less discerning (or, perhaps less blog-oriented), this book provides an excellent entry into the writings of Rands. Containing edited selections from his blog as well as new material, Rands uses many anecdotes and stories to convey a startling amount of deep wisdom into the facets of the Silicon Valley programmer, and a bevy of tools that are helpful in attempting to herd, er, manage them." Read below for Tom's review. Managing Humans author Michael Lopp pages 209 publisher Apress rating 8/10 reviewer Tom Byrne ISBN 978-1590598443 summary 34 Anecdotes that give insight into silicon valley management and programmers. I've read most of this book 3 times, the first when I discovered Rands' blog, (and, like few others, captivated me enough to start at the beginning and read his entire oeuvre), Once upon purchase of the book, and again, recently over the course of a few weeks, taking the stories out of order, and enjoying each for it's viewpoint, humor, and insight. The book is broken down into 3 major sections, 34 chapters, and each chapter is a small chunk, easily readable in a few minutes. It really feels like a blog, you can dip into it for a few minutes here and there and pick up a good point or two from each entry.

Know how many people I manage? Over a dozen, on a weekly basis. Know how many people report to me? None. So, why did I read it? Because I sit in a lot of meetings. I have to manage expectations. I have to write specs and reports for other people. Unless you work in almost complete isolation, receiving uber-detailed software specs and churning out code to match those exact specifications, the likelyhood is that you have to deal with other people. A lot. Every time you deal with someone else in a technical workplace, you run into other people. Their motives are not the same as yours, nor do they communicate the same way. In the first section of the book, "The Management Quiver", Lopp recounts 12 anecdotes, and two specific ones stood out. 'Agenda Detection' gives some points on how to figure out who the important people are in a meeting, and 3 tips on when to bail. 'Avoiding The Fez' points the spotlight on the guy who wrote that one system that no-one understands, but also calls out that too many people (and I find myself in this group) let their knowledge stagnate, instead of constantly learning and expanding.

The second section of the book, "The Process Is The Product", is, in my opinion where the book really starts to shine. "1.0" will be a familiar story for anyone who's ever tried to ship a product, as well as Rands' view on the 4 key things that it will take. "Taking Time To Think" and "The Soak" talk about absorbing ideas and planning, and he touches on ways to convey and disseminate information in "Capturing Context". This last one was another that I found informative — by getting a closer understanding of what kind of information the other party was expecting, and in what way they will be receptive to it.

In the third section, "Versions Of You", you'll see the people you work with, and Rands divides them out in lots of different ways (it struck me very much as almost a myers-briggs Nerd Scale). Are they Incrementalists or Completionist? Organic or Mechanic? Inward or Outwards? (For the record, I'm an OIC, An organic inward completionist.) And once you've identified someone, it makes communicating with them and identifying their motivations and reactions much better.

So, who should read this book? Managers. Technical Managers. Technical Peons. Programmers who are managed. Anyone who works with someone technical. Anyone named Fez. Odds are, if you're reading this review, you're in the target audience. Even when you look at a book like this and think "I don't need this, I'm not a manager." Odds are that you're being managed, and managing others, even if they don't report to you.

So, ultimately, why should you read this? I think that this book has a fair amount to offer just about anyone in a role in or dealing with technical talent. Does it answer everything? Of course not — but there are a lot of little nuggets hiding here, and above all, it is entertaining. More entertaining than The Mythical Man Month, and more applicable to my daily job than "SOA Is Dead, An Anthology".

This book has several Pros: I found it very relevant, and I was able to identify ways to improve my own communication, by understanding what the other person was expecting, and how to present it. Cons: Most of it is available free on Rands' blog.

You can purchase Managing Humans from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

We've been working hard on the new dynamic Slashdot project (logged in users can enable this by enabling the beta index in their user preferences). I just wanted to quickly mention that there are keybindings on the index. The WASD and VI movement keys do stuff that we like, and the faq has the complete list. Also, if you are using Firefox or have Index2 beta enabled, you can click 'More' in the footer at the end of the page to load the next block of stories in-line without a page refresh. We're experimenting now with page sizes to balance load times against the likelihood that you'll click. More features will be coming soon, but the main thing on our agenda now is optimization. The beta index2 is sloooow and that's gotta change. We're aiming for 2 major optimizations this week (CSS Sprites, and removing an old YUI library) that I'm hoping will put the beta page render time into the "Sane" time frame (which, in case you are wondering, is several seconds faster than that "Insane" time frame we're currently seeing).

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes " Amid the latest 'sexting' controversy, here is a proposal for a scientifically objective method to determine whether a picture constitutes child pornography. This is a harder problem than it seems, but not for the reasons you'd think. And it raises questions about how the same scientific principles could be applied to other matters of law." Hit the link below to read the sextiest story on Slashdot today.

A county district attorney in Pennsylvania has threatened to file felony child pornography charges against three teenage girls for pictures that they took of themselves, even though the girls' lawyers say the pictures are clearly not sexually explicit and do not meet the legal definition of child porn. The American Civil Liberties Union has countered by asking a federal judge to block District Attorney George Skumanick from filing charges.

Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers, but according to the reported descriptions, one picture shows two of the girls flashing the peace sign in their bras, and the other picture shows a girl wrapped in a towel with her breasts exposed after stepping out of the shower. Unless there's something very significant being deliberately left out of those descriptions, it sounds pretty obvious that the pictures do not meet the definition of child pornography, which requires sexual explicitness, not just nudity.

Skumanick may even sound like a buffoon for threatening to prosecute the girls over those pictures, but his overreaching is probably an example of the "context syndrome" that I referred to in writing about a Wikipedia article about a CD showing a naked underage girl on the cover. In that article, I wrote:

Suppose you read a news article about a man who was arrested for possession of child pornography, and you happened to see a sample of the images (never mind how) that he was arrested for. And suppose the Virgin Killer album cover photo had been mixed in with those images. Would it have jumped out at you as an obvious case of over-reaching by the police?

In other words, even an obviously legal photo might seem illegal when it's mixed in with a group of photos that constitute actual child porn. According to the AP, Skumanick's office first found the photos in question after confiscating students' cell phones and rounding up 20 students accused of making or distributing the images found on the phones. Some of those other photos were presumably racy enough to meet the definition of child pornography, and Skumanick probably just lumped in the bra and towel pictures into that category without thinking too much about it. Giving him credit, if someone had come to his office and shown him the picture of the towel girl by itself and asked him to prosecute the girl for creating child pornography, he might have said that it didn't meet the legal definition.

But the "context syndrome" only excuses the initial mistake, and only partly. By now, he's had time to think about those particular pictures, and he knows that non-sexually-explicit photos do not constitute child pornography, so what is he doing? He claims that the girls in their bras were posed "provocatively", but that's not the same as sexual explicitness, and he hasn't even made that claim about the towel picture, so unless there's some bombshell piece of information about the photos that he's still keeping secret (and why would he?), there's no excuse for him not to drop the threats of prosecution right away.

But could even the initial mistake have been avoided? I think it could have, if you designed a scientific procedure for deciding, objectively, whether an image meets the legal definition of "child pornography", by borrowing some of the principles used in police lineups.

Now, obviously one big difference between deciding if the right suspect has been identified in a lineup, and deciding whether an image constitutes child pornography, is that the question of a suspect's identity in a lineup is a question about objective reality, while the question of whether an image is "child pornography" is a matter of opinion and consensus about an imprecisely defined English phrase, so it may sound odd to try and find a "scientifically objective" answer. But by "objective", I mean that the procedure should eliminate the influence of factors that are not relevant to the legal definition of child pornography (for example, if asking someone to decide if they think a picture meets the definition, don't tell them whether the photo was found in a pedophile's basement or in a parent's photo album, because under the strict legal definition, that shouldn't matter). And by "scientific", I mean that the Yes/No answers returned by the procedure should be repeatable as far as possible, so that different defendants aren't being tried under wildly different standards, where Bob is convicted of possessing an innocuous photo while Alice is acquitted even though she possessed a racier one.

A naive solution, from a scientific point of view, would be to poll a random sample of lawyers or other professionals in a police go-to database, and ask them to evaluate whether the picture is child pornography, without any information about where the picture came from. These results would be objective (if the respondents didn't know the source of the picture), and would generally be repeatable, if the sample size is large enough. The problem with this method is that while all defendants would be held to the same standard, all citizens would not be. Suppose the lawyers in the go-to list start to decide, as many of them probably would, that anybody who is being prosecuted for possessing a picture of a topless underage girl is probably a pedophile creep anyway, and would start voting "child pornography" for all but the most obviously legal pictures. The prosecutor would realize this, and would know that they could threaten to ruin people's lives by charging them with possession of child pornography because of pictures found in their possession -- even while other members of society possessed similar pictures without ever being charged.

Here's where the analogy to a police lineup comes in. Police lineups are supposed to include "known innocent" candidates in order to test the credibility of the eyewitness; if the eyewitness selects a candidate who could not have possibly committed the crime (because, for example, they were in jail), then the police know the eyewitness is not reliable. (This was one guideline notoriously violated by District Attorney Mike Nifong in the Duke lacrosse team rape trial; he assembled a lineup consisting only of lacrosse team members from the party, so that whomever the eyewitness identified was guaranteed to fall under a cloud of suspicion.) In the same vein, the lawyers or other experts being consulted by the police could be shown a "lineup" of photos, consisting of several photos that were determined in advance to be legal (either because of a prior court ruling, or perhaps just because the D.A. had declined to prosecute the photos on previous occasions), along with the photo whose legality was in question. Ask the experts to pick which photo they think is closest to the definition of child pornography. Unless most of them pick the photo that's on trial, then that photo can't be said to be worse than any of the other photos that had already been deemed legal.

This is closer to a fair solution, but there's still a big loophole. When police assemble candidates for a lineup, they are supposed to pick candidates who match the general physical description given by the eyewitness. If the eyewitness said they were attacked by a redhead, the police can't fill out the lineup with one redheaded suspect that they want to railroad, and 10 blondes. Because attributes like "Caucasian" and "redhead" are pretty straightforward, if the rules for lineups are being enforced properly, the police don't have a lot of wiggle room to fill out the lineup with candidates who blatantly don't match the description. Unfortunately, it would be a lot easier to cheat when creating a "lineup" of photos to compare against a photo whose owner was on trial for possessing child pornography. If the photo at issue is probably legal but still provocative, then the police could fill out the rest of the lineup with completely non-sexual but perhaps eyebrow-raising photos, like a naked teenage girl watering some houseplants. Then when the police ask, "Which of these does not belong?", everybody would pick the provocative one, and the police would take that as "vindication".

The only way I can think of to guard against this, would be to let the defense counsel pick the other photos in the lineup, and then they could pick the most "provocative" ones that were still legal! For any photos that have been declared legal in the past, the defense ought to be able to argue that if an independent panel of experts doesn't think their client's pictures are any worse than those, then their client should not be prosecuted either. (If the defense lawyer decided their client was a child molester and wanted to throw them to the wolves, they could deliberately pick non-sexual photos for the lineup, so that their client's photo gets pegged as the odd one out -- but when the defense lawyer decides to railroad their own client, it's almost impossible for the system to guard against that anyway. Also, it's probably not a good idea to make this an option for child pornography defendants who decide to represent themselves, so that they can rifle through thousands of photographs of naked children, even legal ones, to find the pictures that they think are the "sexiest" to use for their defense.)

Perhaps someone can think of a better method that is still roughly scientific, in the sense of trying everyone according to the same standard and giving repeatable results. The irony is that despite the potential of child pornography charges to destroy a person's life, it is in possible in principle to try child pornography cases more objectively than almost any other type of crime, because you can separate out the alleged criminal act from everything else about the defendant, and let people examine the evidence of criminality in isolation. If someone shoots a person and claims it was self-defense, it's hard to imagine how you could distill out only the relevant facts of the case, and pass along just those facts to some third-party observer who then renders a judgment without knowing anything else. Half the courtroom battle is over what facts are "relevant" in the first place. But in the case of a child pornography charge, you can give the photo -- and no other information -- to an expert, and ask them to make a judgment.

I know, I know. The police and prosecutors are not actually doing to do this. But that in itself says something. Even if it's not possible to try most crimes in a truly objective fashion, why don't the courts and the police do this when it is possible? Many first-year psychology students that have an intuitive grasp of the principles of sound double-blind testing, could probably come up with a procedure better than the one I've described. When you've spent long enough thinking about how to design experiments objectively, you can't even hear about lawyers arguing over whether a photo constitutes child pornography, without the thought popping into your head: "Have a group of experts look at the photo and rate it, independently of each other. Compare the results to a 'control' result where the experts look at a photo that is not child pornography." And so on. Why don't those suggestions ever come from within the legal profession itself?

And on the flip side, what about using scientific methods to examine facts about the legal system? When considering that judges are tasked with evaluating parties' claims in an objective and fair manner, one could ask: Are they really being objective? What are different ways that we could test this? Perhaps by having two actors in different courtrooms on the same day, charged with exactly the same crime under the same circumstances, except one is black and the other is white, and repeat the experiment many times to see if they receive different average sentences. For a scientist, the idea is the most natural thing in the world. Forget the fact that the legal system doesn't do this -- why is virtually nobody in the legal profession even suggesting it?

Probably because most people who think in terms of objective experimental design are drawn towards the hard sciences, not toward law. That's probably a good thing; such people can likely do more good as physicists and research psychologists than they could as lawyers and policemen. But they can still speak out for the principles of science to be applied wherever possible, in any area where objectivity is important -- especially the law.

All true scientists at heart should keep telling the world that "science" is not just a label that encompasses nerd subjects like biology, physics, and chemistry, with other subjects like art and law being "outside the domain of science". While the statements made within the framework of those subjects are not scientific ("This painting is pretty", "The court finds the defendant not liable", etc.), science can make statements about the people in those professions and the patterns in the conclusions that they reach. If art experts are evaluating paintings differently depending on whether they think the paintings come from an art gallery or a 4-year-old's kitchen table, you could find that out through a scientific experiment. If judges are giving an easier time to lawyers than they are to parties who represent themselves, even when they make exactly identical arguments, you could test that hypothesis with an experiment, too. And scientific principles could be used to draw up procedures for trying cases more objectively, as in the procedure for deciding the legality of sexting photographs. We just need to get over the idea that "scientists" should limit themselves to the forensic CSI stuff and then stay away from the legal arena because that's a "separate domain". Science could tell us quite a lot about how fairly justice is dispensed in the courtroom, and sometimes even how to fix the problems.

Dan Kaminsky writes "We may not know what the Conficker authors have in store for us on April 1st, but I doubt many network administrators want to find out. Maybe they don't have to: I've been working with the Honeynet Project'sTillmann Werner and Felix Leder, who have been digging into Conficker's profile on the network. What we've found is pretty cool: Conficker actually changes what Windows looks like on the network, and this change can be detected remotely, anonymously, and very, very quickly. You can literally ask a server if it's infected with Conficker, and it will give you an honest answer. Tillmann and Felix have their own proof of concept scanner, and with the help of Securosis' Rich Mogull and the multivendor Conficker Working Group, enterprise-class scanners should already be out from Tenable (Nessus), McAfee/Foundstone, nmap, ncircle, and Qualys. We figured this out on Friday, and got code put together for Monday. It's been one heck of a weekend."

The Texas Board of Education — as discussed here last week — has voted on the guidelines for textbooks in that state, which represents a large enough market to have influence nationwide. The good news is that the board dropped a 20-year-old requirement that both "strengths and weaknesses" of all scientific theories be taught; score one for the teaching of evolution. The not-so-good news is that in a "compromise," the board also voted to require that students "in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations ... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Score one for the Discovery Institute. A Republican board member explained that the words "strengths and weaknesses" have become "code for creationism and [the similar theory of] intelligent design. So by being more clear in the language and using words that aren't seen as code words, we were able to get all of the 15 board members to agree that this is how we'll teach all sides of scientific explanation, using scientific evidence." Reporting on the Texas vote is all over the map, as a US Today blog summarizes. Some reports claim that an amendment was passed that preserves a requirement that students study the "sufficiency or insufficiency" of common ancestry and natural selection. Other reports claim that the board also adopted language that would have students study the "different views on the existence of global warming."

RobGoldsmith writes in with news of the further adventures of Charles Simonyi, whose first trip to the ISS we discussed a couple of years ago. The Russian Soyuz vehicle carrying Simonyi and two others docked a day after the US space shuttle Discovery landed in Florida. "Space Adventures, Ltd. ... announced today that its orbital client Charles Simonyi and his crew successfully arrived at the International Space Station after launching on-board the Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 26. The spacecraft docked to the ISS at 9:05 am (EDT) with Dr. Simonyi and Expedition 19 crew members Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and NASA astronaut Michael Barratt. They were greeted at approximately 12:30 p.m. (EDT) by the Expedition 18 crew..."

TechCrunch is running a story about three possible security issues with Google Docs recently uncovered by researcher Ade Barkah. It turns out that an image embedded into a protected document is given a URL which is not protected, allowing anyone who knows or guesses it to see the image regardless of permissions or even the existence of the document. Barkah also pointed out that once you've shared a document with another person, that person can see diagram revisions from any point before they gained access, forcing you to create a new document if you need to redact something. The last issue, the mechanics of which he disclosed only to Google, affects the document-sharing invitation forwarding system, which can allow somebody access to your documents after you've removed their permissions. Google made a blog post to respond to these concerns, saying that they "do not pose a significant security risk," but are being investigated. We previously discussed a sharing bug in Google Docs that was fixed earlier this month.

On Wednesday, we discussed news that AT&T had begun sending takedown notices to users whom the RIAA has accused of illegally downloading copyrighted works. Cox and Comcast are both cooperating with the RIAA in that regard as well. However, while Cox seems willing to shut off service in the case of repeat offenders, Comcast denied that it was considering a similar penalty, and AT&T said they'll flat out refuse to terminate service on the RIAA's word alone; it will take a court order. They seem satisfied with the effect letters have had on inhibiting such downloads: "'It's a standard part of everybody's terms of service,' [AT&T senior executive vice president Jim Cicconi] said. 'If somebody is engaging in illegal activity, it basically gives us the right to do it ... We're not a finder of fact and under no circumstances would we ever suspend or terminate service based on an allegation from a third party. We're just simply reminding people that they can't engage in illegal activity.' Cicconi said the company began testing this kind of 'forward noticing' late last year and even experimented with sending certified letters. Cicconi said the notices worked. The company saw very few repeat offenders."

newsblaze writes "The UN Human Rights Council assaulted free expression today, in a 23-11 vote that urges member states to adopt laws outlawing criticism of religions. The proposal came to the UN from Pakistan on behalf of the Organization for the Islamic Conference. There were 13 abstentions. South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico and Brazil, all strong democracies, allowed this to pass by abrogating their responsibility. While the resolution doesn't mention the online world, where does this subject get mentioned most, if not online?" The coverage is from NewsBlaze, which says its mission is to carry important news that other media are not paying attention to. There does not seem to be any other coverage of this vote.
Update: 03/29 00:48 GMT by KD : Reader kshade wrote in: "Actually this is covered by conventional media, even FOX news (Google News links). The absentees weren't there because they boycotted the proposal."

N!NJA writes in with a Register story on a lawsuit filed against Acer for selling Windows Vista on an underpowered notebook. Of course anybody can sue for anything; it will be interesting to see if this action goes forward in the courts. "With a lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco, California, two residents of Fostoria, Ohio seek damages and relief from the world's third-largest computer maker after purchasing a sub-$600 Aspire notebook that included Windows Vista Premium and a gigabyte of shared system and graphics memory. In its official "recommended system requirements," Microsoft recommends that an additional 128MB is required to run the Premium incarnation of its latest desktop operating system. ... Microsoft says that the Premium, Business, and Ultimate editions of Vista will run on 512MB systems — with certain OS features disabled. In the beginning, Redmond called these 'Vista Capable' machines, and it's facing a separate lawsuit over this potentially misleading moniker."

theodp writes "In The Civil Heretic, the NYT Magazine takes a look at how world-renowned scientist Freeman Dyson wound up opposing those who care most about global warming. Since coming out of the closet on global warming, Dyson has found himself described as 'a pompous twit,' 'a blowhard,' and 'a mad scientist.' He argues that climate change has become an obsession for 'a worldwide secular religion' known as environmentalism. Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, calling him climate change's chief propagandist and accusing him of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models and promoting 'lousy science' that's distracting attention from more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet." Dyson himself wrote about the need for heretics in science not long ago.

Constantine the Less writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 3.0.8 to fix a pair of code execution holes that put users of the browser at risk of drive-by download attacks. It includes a fix for one of the flaws exploited during this year's CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacker contest. The update also fixes a separate zero-day flaw disclosed earlier this week on a public exploit site. Both issues are rated 'critical,' Mozilla's highest severity rating."

After taking heavy criticism for the use of SecuROM in Spore and other games, EA has made the decision to go back to simple serial code authentication for The Sims 3. EA's Rod Humble said simply, "We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future."

head_dunce writes "It seems that this economy has inspired a lot of businesses to move to Linux, with Red Hat posting profits that beat everyone's expectations. There's a dark side to being a highly profitable company in a down economy, though — now there are talks of Citigroup and Oracle wanting to buy Red Hat. For a while now, we've been watching Yahoo fend off Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer so that they could stay independent, but the fight seems to be a huge distraction for Yahoo, with lots of energy (and money) invested. Will Red Hat stay independent? What potential buyer would make for a good parent company?"

Jane Q. Public writes "At the Federal Trade Commission's Seattle conference on DRM, FTC Director Mary Engle started off by referencing the Sony rootkit debacle, and said that companies are going to have to get serious about disclosing DRM that may affect the usability of products. She also said that disclosure via the fine print in a EULA is not good enough, and 'If your advertising giveth and your EULA taketh away, don't be surprised if the FTC comes calling.' Transcripts and webcasts are available from the FTC website." Update 18:13 GMT by SM: as Jane Q. Public was nice enough to diplomatically point out, the webcasts are no longer functioning, but transcripts are still available.

MojoKid writes "After Intel filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA late last month, alleging that a four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed did not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with 'integrated memory controllers' (like Nehalem), NVIDIA decided to fight with fire. Today, NVIDIA filed a countersuit in the Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware against Intel Corporation for breach of contract. Furthermore, the action also seeks to terminate Intel's license to NVIDIA's valuable patent portfolio, which no doubt is reverberating with some level of intensity in the halls of Intel."

Death Metal writes "Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that's typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals. Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on." (This is the same team that was able to pick up the electromagnetic signals emitted by PS/2 keyboards.)

An IBM-Sun merger is a tantalyzing possibility; snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that an IBM/Sun merger could crown Big Blue king of enterprise software development. 'Acquiring Sun would make IBM the clear leader in Java, as it would become the caretaker of the open source reference implementation of the JRE,' which, along with GlassFish, would become entry-level gateways to IBM's WebSphere stack. Moreover, MySQL would give IBM's database division a significant entry-level hook, and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM's front against Visual Studio. 'All in all, this move would solidify IBM's role as "the developer company,"' McAllister writes. 'In other words, if this merger goes through and you're an enterprise developer and you're not an IBM customer now, get ready — because you soon will be. Better bring your wallet.'" And blackbearnh writes with a short interview with Brian Aker (who came to Sun as MySQL's director of architecture, and is now the lead for MySQL fork Drizzle) about what life would be like under Big Blue's control.

An IBM-Sun merger is a tantalyzing possibility; snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that an IBM/Sun merger could crown Big Blue king of enterprise software development. 'Acquiring Sun would make IBM the clear leader in Java, as it would become the caretaker of the open source reference implementation of the JRE,' which, along with GlassFish, would become entry-level gateways to IBM's WebSphere stack. Moreover, MySQL would give IBM's database division a significant entry-level hook, and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM's front against Visual Studio. 'All in all, this move would solidify IBM's role as "the developer company,"' McAllister writes. 'In other words, if this merger goes through and you're an enterprise developer and you're not an IBM customer now, get ready — because you soon will be. Better bring your wallet.'" And blackbearnh writes with a short interview with Brian Aker (who came to Sun as MySQL's director of architecture, and is now the lead for MySQL fork Drizzle) about what life would be like under Big Blue's control.

Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."

Island Dog sends news that shortly after Valve showed off their new anti-piracy methods in Steamworks, Microsoft and Stardock were quick to demonstrate their new, similar technologies as well. All three companies are bending over backwards to say that this is not traditional DRM. Stardock (the company behind the Gamer's Bill of Rights) calls their system Game Object Obfuscation (Goo), "a tool that allows developers to encapsulate their game executable into a container that includes the original executable plus Impulse Reactor, Stardock's virtual platform, into a single encrypted file. When a player runs the game for the first time, the Goo'd program lets the user enter in their email address and serial number which associates their game to that person as opposed to a piece of hardware like most activation systems do. Once validated, the game never needs to connect to the Internet again." Microsoft's update to Games for Windows Live has similar protections. "You can sign in and play your game on as many systems as possible, but you have to have a license attached to your account. Of course, this only works for online games."

Island Dog sends news that shortly after Valve showed off their new anti-piracy methods in Steamworks, Microsoft and Stardock were quick to demonstrate their new, similar technologies as well. All three companies are bending over backwards to say that this is not traditional DRM. Stardock (the company behind the Gamer's Bill of Rights) calls their system Game Object Obfuscation (Goo), "a tool that allows developers to encapsulate their game executable into a container that includes the original executable plus Impulse Reactor, Stardock's virtual platform, into a single encrypted file. When a player runs the game for the first time, the Goo'd program lets the user enter in their email address and serial number which associates their game to that person as opposed to a piece of hardware like most activation systems do. Once validated, the game never needs to connect to the Internet again." Microsoft's update to Games for Windows Live has similar protections. "You can sign in and play your game on as many systems as possible, but you have to have a license attached to your account. Of course, this only works for online games."

An anonymous reader sent in a video clip showing Sun experimenting with shoving a data center through a simulated 6.7 Earthquake. Everything stays running, but some power cords came out and some screws worked loose. It's still kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid.

Not long ago we discussed news that the Utah Senate and House had both passed legislation worked on by Jack Thompson that would add restrictions on how game advertising interacted with the rating system. The bill itself was poorly amended, and many questioned whether it would have the effect its sponsors desired. GamePolitics asked a First Amendment rights expert for his opinion on the matter, and the National Coalition Against Censorship spoke out against the bill, urging Governor Jon Huntsman to strike it down. Fortunately, it appears he took their advice (or that of many lobbying retailers), as the bill has now been vetoed. Huntsman said, "The industries most affected by this new requirement indicated that rather than risk being held liable under this bill, they would likely choose to no longer issue age-appropriate labels on goods and services."

snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, US organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."

crazipper writes "Tom's Hardware interviewed Charlie Miller, winner of this year's Pwn2Own contest and formerly with the NSA. He discusses the effort it took before the contest to be able to take down a MacBook within seconds, sandboxing, and the effectiveness of the NX bit and ASLR. His outlook on end-users protecting themselves against attacks? 'Users are at the mercy of the products they buy.'"

1sockchuck writes "Making changes to Google's search infrastructure is akin to 'changing the tires on a car while you're going at 60 down the freeway,' according to Urs Holzle, who oversees the company's massive data center operations. In a Q-and-A with Data Center Knowledge, Holzle discusses Google's infrastructure, how it has engineered its system to route around hardware failures, and how it responds when something goes awry. These updates usually go unnoticed, but during system maintenance last month a software bug triggered an outage for Gmail."

Lorin Ricker writes "Computing in the Cloud — Free Apps — Outsource It! Yippee! Automation TCO nirvana at last! You can hear the non-technical managers and home-users unite in grateful song and dance! If we can just offload our office applications and data to the Cloud Known As Google, that apparently bottomless source of storage, search and now other useful capabilities, our office automation problems will be solved! Hooray! 'Well, just y'all hold up there a minit, lil' cowboy. Thar's a few thangs y'all oughta know 'bout afore ya go rushin' off...' If John Wayne didn't say exactly that, well, he should'a." Keep reading for the rest of Lorin's review. Google Apps Deciphered -- Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop author Scott Granneman pages 552 publisher Prentice Hall rating 7 reviewer Lorin Ricker ISBN 0-13-700470-2 summary A practical, comprehensive and useful guide to Google Apps Scott Granneman's new book Google Apps Deciphered — Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop is a very useful technical overview about deploying Google Apps. It promotes a contagiously positive "we're gonna be saved" view of Google's ambitious initiative to provide our user communities with the perfect environment to counterbalance the Microsoft-centric archipelago of computing workstations. Good on Google, and good for Mr. Granneman for providing this practical overview, a comprehensive how-to for deploying Google Apps in any workplace.

And yet, to dampen our somewhat overly enthusiastic spirits, along comes none other than RMS himself in the role of the cowboy philosopher, with words of warning regarding the collective wisdom of committing all our eggs to the Google/Cloud basket: "Hold on there, pilgrim." The present book review is not the place to engage in this particular debate (see Ben Rothke's illuminating review of Greg Conti's recent book, Googling Security) — suffice it to say that Google Apps Deciphered pays no attention whatsoever to the issues of data security, privacy, and ownership.

The business wisdom of committing proprietary information, trade secrets, sensitive data, competitive analysis, private reports, personal/identity and non-public customer data is not even acknowledged as Granneman launches enthusiastically, without reservation, into his topics. Readers seeking any guidance on the legal, statutory, ethical and practical issues regarding data security in the Cloud will come up empty-handed in Google Apps Deciphered — start with Conti's book instead. In fairness, however, the whole concept of Cloud data storage is in the formative stages of discussion and understanding by many of us; still, I find myself wishing that Granneman's book had at least given a nod to and perhaps delineated the issues at hand, rather than jumping uncritically into the presumed virtues of total Cloud commitment.

That said, it was my only real gripe about Google Apps Deciphered. Taking it at face value, this book is a sure-footed guide to deploying Google Apps at its current state of development and fitness for duty.

The author starts out with an Introductory chapter which lays out the benefits (but without the down-side) of Cloud computing, and extols the general virtues of Google Apps itself — that's the cheerleading part of the book. Where appropriate, several of the chapters are neatly tied off with a list of supporting references, nearly all of which are websites or online articles cited by title, author (where relevant and available), and full URL.

The meat of the book is a comprehensive how-to for Google Apps, in six parts of a few chapters each: Part I "Getting Started with Google Apps" covers the selection of the appropriate "edition" of Apps, and then goes on to discuss migration issues for existing user data (email, contacts and calendars), concluding with advice on managing Apps services.

Part II covers email — not from an individual 's "I've got a gmail account of my own" perspective, but from the corporate or organizational "let's convert from Exchange Server" ambition. Part III similarly covers Google Calendar.

Part IV addresses Google Docs, Google's answer to Microsoft's Office Suite. Part V is about Google Sites, while Part VI picks up various miscellanea, including Google Talk, the Start Page, Message Security and Recovery (no, not exactly about data security), and finally, Google Video.

Park VII consists of three Appendices, one addressing "Backing Up Google Apps" (sic! — but why? Doesn't adopting the Cloud forgive us of this responsibility?); the next covers "Dealing with Multiple Accounts" (apparently, the existence of certain pre-existing Google accounts can complicate a new deployment); and finally, an appendix which touts "Google Chrome: A Browser Built for Cloud Computing."

For the most part, each of the Parts is similarly constructed, with chapters covering "Setting Up...", "Things to Know About Using..." and "Integrating ... with Other Software and Services" for gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites and the rest. And herein lies the strength of the book as a how-to deployment guide. Scott Granneman is a well-regarded author, educator and consultant to the free and open source software community, having previously written good books about Linux, Knoppix, Firefox and more. He brings this expertise and experience directly to bear on the practical problems of deployment and committing an organization's computing resources and users (or at least a part of them) to Google's Cloud resources.

These how-to chapters are comprehensive; they anticipate and resolve many of the practical problems one would encounter during deployment with directions and advice which is obviously hard-won, based on the real-world expertise of the author. He's clearly done the Apps deal himself, and writes from actual experience, not from the hypothetical.

As examples of these comprehensive deployment recipes, the chapter on gmail includes consideration of: folder structures and limitations; live cutover considerations; IMAP and POP; migration tools; issues special to Exchange Server; mbox and Maildir stores; techniques and tools for actually moving bulk messages (and having them land correctly); specific issues with Outlook, Hotmail, Thunderbird, Macs, web-based email, and more; and solving common problems. With this thoroughness, it's likely that most problems and issues of deployment are anticipated and covered — the rare thing that's not can probably be figured out by analogy with what Scott does address. And so on for the other Google Apps as well.

The author also comes clean about the various limits and restrictions imposed on Google Apps accounts and deployments, and delineates these according to the five Editions of Apps: Standard, Premiere, Team, Education, and Partner (free and paid modes). For example, Google Docs imposes strict limits on document file sizes, and "at most a limit of 5,000 documents and presentations and 5,000 images." (Really. Is this adequate for even the average office worker over the long-term? What about prolific Sally the tech-writer, or John "the tool" over in proposals? Are such limits practical for an enterprise?) There are more such things scattered throughout the book, as well as existing problems (such as the previously mentioned "multiple accounts" issue) which, honestly, only serve to bolster the common impression that many Google products are in a perpetual state of beta.

This book belongs in the hands of every technical staff who gets charged by their employer with the responsibility for a Google Apps deployment. If that's where your company is going, then Scott Granneman's book will no doubt save countless hours of experimentation, false starts and problem solving — it's a serious practical, technical leg up on what will be a non-trivial data and environment migration effort.

Given his target — the why/benefits of adopting the Google Apps/Cloud approach, and how to get it done — Google Apps Deciphered scores well for hitting its mark. I gave it slightly lower marks for its lack of coverage of the "should you even do this?" data security and privacy issues, and because it only hints at some of the pre-planning, project costing considerations that must be considered by any enterprise which is contemplating this commitment.

I opened this book thinking that I'd likely try or do some of the deployment exercises for myself — but I closed it with the conviction that, for me and my own SOHO business needs, Google Apps is not yet ready for my own prime time. Helping me come to that conclusion made the book very worthwhile; for others, your mileage will of course vary. I am convinced that, as awareness of the data security and privacy issues matures, and approaches to these evolve and improve, Cloud Computing will become ubiquitous to various degrees and needs — as if it's not already — and probably sooner than we suspect. In that event, Google Apps Deciphered and its future editions will be among the most useful of guides.

You can purchase Google Apps Deciphered -- Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Lorin Ricker writes "Computing in the Cloud — Free Apps — Outsource It! Yippee! Automation TCO nirvana at last! You can hear the non-technical managers and home-users unite in grateful song and dance! If we can just offload our office applications and data to the Cloud Known As Google, that apparently bottomless source of storage, search and now other useful capabilities, our office automation problems will be solved! Hooray! 'Well, just y'all hold up there a minit, lil' cowboy. Thar's a few thangs y'all oughta know 'bout afore ya go rushin' off...' If John Wayne didn't say exactly that, well, he should'a." Keep reading for the rest of Lorin's review. Google Apps Deciphered -- Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop author Scott Granneman pages 552 publisher Prentice Hall rating 7 reviewer Lorin Ricker ISBN 0-13-700470-2 summary A practical, comprehensive and useful guide to Google Apps Scott Granneman's new book Google Apps Deciphered — Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop is a very useful technical overview about deploying Google Apps. It promotes a contagiously positive "we're gonna be saved" view of Google's ambitious initiative to provide our user communities with the perfect environment to counterbalance the Microsoft-centric archipelago of computing workstations. Good on Google, and good for Mr. Granneman for providing this practical overview, a comprehensive how-to for deploying Google Apps in any workplace.

And yet, to dampen our somewhat overly enthusiastic spirits, along comes none other than RMS himself in the role of the cowboy philosopher, with words of warning regarding the collective wisdom of committing all our eggs to the Google/Cloud basket: "Hold on there, pilgrim." The present book review is not the place to engage in this particular debate (see Ben Rothke's illuminating review of Greg Conti's recent book, Googling Security) — suffice it to say that Google Apps Deciphered pays no attention whatsoever to the issues of data security, privacy, and ownership.

The business wisdom of committing proprietary information, trade secrets, sensitive data, competitive analysis, private reports, personal/identity and non-public customer data is not even acknowledged as Granneman launches enthusiastically, without reservation, into his topics. Readers seeking any guidance on the legal, statutory, ethical and practical issues regarding data security in the Cloud will come up empty-handed in Google Apps Deciphered — start with Conti's book instead. In fairness, however, the whole concept of Cloud data storage is in the formative stages of discussion and understanding by many of us; still, I find myself wishing that Granneman's book had at least given a nod to and perhaps delineated the issues at hand, rather than jumping uncritically into the presumed virtues of total Cloud commitment.

That said, it was my only real gripe about Google Apps Deciphered. Taking it at face value, this book is a sure-footed guide to deploying Google Apps at its current state of development and fitness for duty.

The author starts out with an Introductory chapter which lays out the benefits (but without the down-side) of Cloud computing, and extols the general virtues of Google Apps itself — that's the cheerleading part of the book. Where appropriate, several of the chapters are neatly tied off with a list of supporting references, nearly all of which are websites or online articles cited by title, author (where relevant and available), and full URL.

The meat of the book is a comprehensive how-to for Google Apps, in six parts of a few chapters each: Part I "Getting Started with Google Apps" covers the selection of the appropriate "edition" of Apps, and then goes on to discuss migration issues for existing user data (email, contacts and calendars), concluding with advice on managing Apps services.

Part II covers email — not from an individual 's "I've got a gmail account of my own" perspective, but from the corporate or organizational "let's convert from Exchange Server" ambition. Part III similarly covers Google Calendar.

Part IV addresses Google Docs, Google's answer to Microsoft's Office Suite. Part V is about Google Sites, while Part VI picks up various miscellanea, including Google Talk, the Start Page, Message Security and Recovery (no, not exactly about data security), and finally, Google Video.

Park VII consists of three Appendices, one addressing "Backing Up Google Apps" (sic! — but why? Doesn't adopting the Cloud forgive us of this responsibility?); the next covers "Dealing with Multiple Accounts" (apparently, the existence of certain pre-existing Google accounts can complicate a new deployment); and finally, an appendix which touts "Google Chrome: A Browser Built for Cloud Computing."

For the most part, each of the Parts is similarly constructed, with chapters covering "Setting Up...", "Things to Know About Using..." and "Integrating ... with Other Software and Services" for gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites and the rest. And herein lies the strength of the book as a how-to deployment guide. Scott Granneman is a well-regarded author, educator and consultant to the free and open source software community, having previously written good books about Linux, Knoppix, Firefox and more. He brings this expertise and experience directly to bear on the practical problems of deployment and committing an organization's computing resources and users (or at least a part of them) to Google's Cloud resources.

These how-to chapters are comprehensive; they anticipate and resolve many of the practical problems one would encounter during deployment with directions and advice which is obviously hard-won, based on the real-world expertise of the author. He's clearly done the Apps deal himself, and writes from actual experience, not from the hypothetical.

As examples of these comprehensive deployment recipes, the chapter on gmail includes consideration of: folder structures and limitations; live cutover considerations; IMAP and POP; migration tools; issues special to Exchange Server; mbox and Maildir stores; techniques and tools for actually moving bulk messages (and having them land correctly); specific issues with Outlook, Hotmail, Thunderbird, Macs, web-based email, and more; and solving common problems. With this thoroughness, it's likely that most problems and issues of deployment are anticipated and covered — the rare thing that's not can probably be figured out by analogy with what Scott does address. And so on for the other Google Apps as well.

The author also comes clean about the various limits and restrictions imposed on Google Apps accounts and deployments, and delineates these according to the five Editions of Apps: Standard, Premiere, Team, Education, and Partner (free and paid modes). For example, Google Docs imposes strict limits on document file sizes, and "at most a limit of 5,000 documents and presentations and 5,000 images." (Really. Is this adequate for even the average office worker over the long-term? What about prolific Sally the tech-writer, or John "the tool" over in proposals? Are such limits practical for an enterprise?) There are more such things scattered throughout the book, as well as existing problems (such as the previously mentioned "multiple accounts" issue) which, honestly, only serve to bolster the common impression that many Google products are in a perpetual state of beta.

This book belongs in the hands of every technical staff who gets charged by their employer with the responsibility for a Google Apps deployment. If that's where your company is going, then Scott Granneman's book will no doubt save countless hours of experimentation, false starts and problem solving — it's a serious practical, technical leg up on what will be a non-trivial data and environment migration effort.

Given his target — the why/benefits of adopting the Google Apps/Cloud approach, and how to get it done — Google Apps Deciphered scores well for hitting its mark. I gave it slightly lower marks for its lack of coverage of the "should you even do this?" data security and privacy issues, and because it only hints at some of the pre-planning, project costing considerations that must be considered by any enterprise which is contemplating this commitment.

I opened this book thinking that I'd likely try or do some of the deployment exercises for myself — but I closed it with the conviction that, for me and my own SOHO business needs, Google Apps is not yet ready for my own prime time. Helping me come to that conclusion made the book very worthwhile; for others, your mileage will of course vary. I am convinced that, as awareness of the data security and privacy issues matures, and approaches to these evolve and improve, Cloud Computing will become ubiquitous to various degrees and needs — as if it's not already — and probably sooner than we suspect. In that event, Google Apps Deciphered and its future editions will be among the most useful of guides.

You can purchase Google Apps Deciphered -- Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Lorin Ricker writes "Computing in the Cloud — Free Apps — Outsource It! Yippee! Automation TCO nirvana at last! You can hear the non-technical managers and home-users unite in grateful song and dance! If we can just offload our office applications and data to the Cloud Known As Google, that apparently bottomless source of storage, search and now other useful capabilities, our office automation problems will be solved! Hooray! 'Well, just y'all hold up there a minit, lil' cowboy. Thar's a few thangs y'all oughta know 'bout afore ya go rushin' off...' If John Wayne didn't say exactly that, well, he should'a." Keep reading for the rest of Lorin's review. Google Apps Deciphered -- Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop author Scott Granneman pages 552 publisher Prentice Hall rating 7 reviewer Lorin Ricker ISBN 0-13-700470-2 summary A practical, comprehensive and useful guide to Google Apps Scott Granneman's new book Google Apps Deciphered — Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop is a very useful technical overview about deploying Google Apps. It promotes a contagiously positive "we're gonna be saved" view of Google's ambitious initiative to provide our user communities with the perfect environment to counterbalance the Microsoft-centric archipelago of computing workstations. Good on Google, and good for Mr. Granneman for providing this practical overview, a comprehensive how-to for deploying Google Apps in any workplace.

And yet, to dampen our somewhat overly enthusiastic spirits, along comes none other than RMS himself in the role of the cowboy philosopher, with words of warning regarding the collective wisdom of committing all our eggs to the Google/Cloud basket: "Hold on there, pilgrim." The present book review is not the place to engage in this particular debate (see Ben Rothke's illuminating review of Greg Conti's recent book, Googling Security) — suffice it to say that Google Apps Deciphered pays no attention whatsoever to the issues of data security, privacy, and ownership.

The business wisdom of committing proprietary information, trade secrets, sensitive data, competitive analysis, private reports, personal/identity and non-public customer data is not even acknowledged as Granneman launches enthusiastically, without reservation, into his topics. Readers seeking any guidance on the legal, statutory, ethical and practical issues regarding data security in the Cloud will come up empty-handed in Google Apps Deciphered — start with Conti's book instead. In fairness, however, the whole concept of Cloud data storage is in the formative stages of discussion and understanding by many of us; still, I find myself wishing that Granneman's book had at least given a nod to and perhaps delineated the issues at hand, rather than jumping uncritically into the presumed virtues of total Cloud commitment.

That said, it was my only real gripe about Google Apps Deciphered. Taking it at face value, this book is a sure-footed guide to deploying Google Apps at its current state of development and fitness for duty.

The author starts out with an Introductory chapter which lays out the benefits (but without the down-side) of Cloud computing, and extols the general virtues of Google Apps itself — that's the cheerleading part of the book. Where appropriate, several of the chapters are neatly tied off with a list of supporting references, nearly all of which are websites or online articles cited by title, author (where relevant and available), and full URL.

The meat of the book is a comprehensive how-to for Google Apps, in six parts of a few chapters each: Part I "Getting Started with Google Apps" covers the selection of the appropriate "edition" of Apps, and then goes on to discuss migration issues for existing user data (email, contacts and calendars), concluding with advice on managing Apps services.

Part II covers email — not from an individual 's "I've got a gmail account of my own" perspective, but from the corporate or organizational "let's convert from Exchange Server" ambition. Part III similarly covers Google Calendar.

Part IV addresses Google Docs, Google's answer to Microsoft's Office Suite. Part V is about Google Sites, while Part VI picks up various miscellanea, including Google Talk, the Start Page, Message Security and Recovery (no, not exactly about data security), and finally, Google Video.

Park VII consists of three Appendices, one addressing "Backing Up Google Apps" (sic! — but why? Doesn't adopting the Cloud forgive us of this responsibility?); the next covers "Dealing with Multiple Accounts" (apparently, the existence of certain pre-existing Google accounts can complicate a new deployment); and finally, an appendix which touts "Google Chrome: A Browser Built for Cloud Computing."

For the most part, each of the Parts is similarly constructed, with chapters covering "Setting Up...", "Things to Know About Using..." and "Integrating ... with Other Software and Services" for gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites and the rest. And herein lies the strength of the book as a how-to deployment guide. Scott Granneman is a well-regarded author, educator and consultant to the free and open source software community, having previously written good books about Linux, Knoppix, Firefox and more. He brings this expertise and experience directly to bear on the practical problems of deployment and committing an organization's computing resources and users (or at least a part of them) to Google's Cloud resources.

These how-to chapters are comprehensive; they anticipate and resolve many of the practical problems one would encounter during deployment with directions and advice which is obviously hard-won, based on the real-world expertise of the author. He's clearly done the Apps deal himself, and writes from actual experience, not from the hypothetical.

As examples of these comprehensive deployment recipes, the chapter on gmail includes consideration of: folder structures and limitations; live cutover considerations; IMAP and POP; migration tools; issues special to Exchange Server; mbox and Maildir stores; techniques and tools for actually moving bulk messages (and having them land correctly); specific issues with Outlook, Hotmail, Thunderbird, Macs, web-based email, and more; and solving common problems. With this thoroughness, it's likely that most problems and issues of deployment are anticipated and covered — the rare thing that's not can probably be figured out by analogy with what Scott does address. And so on for the other Google Apps as well.

The author also comes clean about the various limits and restrictions imposed on Google Apps accounts and deployments, and delineates these according to the five Editions of Apps: Standard, Premiere, Team, Education, and Partner (free and paid modes). For example, Google Docs imposes strict limits on document file sizes, and "at most a limit of 5,000 documents and presentations and 5,000 images." (Really. Is this adequate for even the average office worker over the long-term? What about prolific Sally the tech-writer, or John "the tool" over in proposals? Are such limits practical for an enterprise?) There are more such things scattered throughout the book, as well as existing problems (such as the previously mentioned "multiple accounts" issue) which, honestly, only serve to bolster the common impression that many Google products are in a perpetual state of beta.

This book belongs in the hands of every technical staff who gets charged by their employer with the responsibility for a Google Apps deployment. If that's where your company is going, then Scott Granneman's book will no doubt save countless hours of experimentation, false starts and problem solving — it's a serious practical, technical leg up on what will be a non-trivial data and environment migration effort.

Given his target — the why/benefits of adopting the Google Apps/Cloud approach, and how to get it done — Google Apps Deciphered scores well for hitting its mark. I gave it slightly lower marks for its lack of coverage of the "should you even do this?" data security and privacy issues, and because it only hints at some of the pre-planning, project costing considerations that must be considered by any enterprise which is contemplating this commitment.

I opened this book thinking that I'd likely try or do some of the deployment exercises for myself — but I closed it with the conviction that, for me and my own SOHO business needs, Google Apps is not yet ready for my own prime time. Helping me come to that conclusion made the book very worthwhile; for others, your mileage will of course vary. I am convinced that, as awareness of the data security and privacy issues matures, and approaches to these evolve and improve, Cloud Computing will become ubiquitous to various degrees and needs — as if it's not already — and probably sooner than we suspect. In that event, Google Apps Deciphered and its future editions will be among the most useful of guides.

You can purchase Google Apps Deciphered -- Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "After receiving a Rule 11 Sanctions Motion (PDF) in a Houston, Texas, case, UMG Recordings v. Lanzoni, the RIAA lawyers thought better of proceeding with the case, and agreed to voluntarily dismiss the case 'with prejudice', which means it is over and cannot be brought again. The defendant's motion papers detailed some of the RIAA's litigation history against innocent individuals, such as Capitol Records v. Foster and Atlantic Recording v. Andersen, and argued that the awarding of attorneys fees in those cases has not sufficiently deterred repetition of the misconduct, so that a stronger remedy — Rule 11 sanctions — is now called for."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "After receiving a Rule 11 Sanctions Motion (PDF) in a Houston, Texas, case, UMG Recordings v. Lanzoni, the RIAA lawyers thought better of proceeding with the case, and agreed to voluntarily dismiss the case 'with prejudice', which means it is over and cannot be brought again. The defendant's motion papers detailed some of the RIAA's litigation history against innocent individuals, such as Capitol Records v. Foster and Atlantic Recording v. Andersen, and argued that the awarding of attorneys fees in those cases has not sufficiently deterred repetition of the misconduct, so that a stronger remedy — Rule 11 sanctions — is now called for."

snydeq writes "Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC. 'First of all, I don't know how to make money on it,' Whitehurst said, adding that he was uncertain how relevant the desktop itself will be in five years given advances in cloud-based and smartphone computing, as well as VDI. 'The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age. I'd rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.' Despite increasing awareness that desktop Linux is ready for widespread mainstream adoption, fellow panelists questioned the practicality of switching to Linux, noting that even some Linux developers prefer Macs to Linux. 'There's a desire [to use desktop Linux],' one panelist said, 'but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'"

cryfreedomlove brings news that YouTube has once again been blocked in China. The Google-owned video site was censored in China last year because of videos about the protests in Tibet, and that may be the impetus behind this latest restriction. According to a New York Times report, "'The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,' said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley... Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable."

Last year, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) proposed a plan to legalize the file sharing of copyrighted songs, which involved a small monthly fee to people using an internet connection. Critics of the plan complained that it amounted to another tax, and the Canadian recording industry said it violated copyright law. Now, as an anonymous reader writes, "The SAC has renewed its bid to legalize peer-to-peer file sharing in return for a levy on Internet service. The SAC is now calling for the plan to be voluntary, with both consumers and creators having the right to opt-out. ACTRA, the leading performer group in Canada, now says it is also supportive of a legalized approach with the prospect of extending the plan to video sharing."