Slashdot Mirror

Sri Lumpa writes "It will come as little surprise for those of you that followed the SCO stories and read their latest filing that an IP attorney, Douglas Steele, Esq., thinks that 'SCO is trying to get the judge to declare all works released under the GPL for the last 3 years put into the public domain.' Meanwhile, more lawyers give their opinions, with Eben Moglen saying 'It's just rubbish,' while another says of SCO's defense: 'From the outside, it appears so bizarre and so ridiculous that I fear their argument is being misstated,' while Blake Stowell of SCO believes Congress has drawn a boundary between proprietary and open source and still insists that IBM should indemnify its Linux users while refusing to indemnify SCO's Samba users against a potential MS lawsuit. More links to related news stories continue to appear in the comment section of the first link, thanks to the Groklaw readers." Read on for another handful of updates in SCO vs. The World.

Roblimo knows good, honest Constitutional argumentation when he sees it, and over on NewsForge amplifies SCO's claims that the GPL is unconstitutional.

Dopey Panda writes "Looks like SCO has become just a bit worried about their liabilities for distributing the Linux kernel. Starting November 1 you will have to be a registered SCO customer to be able to access their FTP site. So that leaves just a couple days for you to download your own genuine SCO-approved GPL code!"

And perhaps today's most interesting SCO submission: 1HandClapping writes "In alwayson-network.com, Mark F. Radcliffe (HIAL) writes about a little-reported aspect of the SCO vs IBM case: 'Novell, as part of its sale of the UNIX licenses to SCO, retained the right to require SCO to "amend, supplement, modify or waive any right" under the license agreements (and if SCO did not comply, Novell could exercise those rights itself on SCO's behalf). At IBM's request, Novell employed this right and demanded that SCO waive IBM's purported violations. When SCO did not do so, Novell exercised its right to waive the violations on SCO's behalf. Basically, this defense destroys the core of the SCO case: IBM's violation of its UNIX license with SCO.'"

mahonri5 writes "Miniture spy planes, developed by BYU and the Air Force, weighing only 3 oz, and having a 24 foot wingspan. Launched by throwing them into the air. And if that wasn't cool enough, you can fly them by laptop, PDA, or voice command. It does all the dirty work of flying on board, and you just tell it where to go. Best part, they've already been deployed. More at some Utah newspapers: here(1), here(2), or here(3)."

yeremein writes "According to this vnunet.com article, SCO's code changes Update: 10/04 20:51 GMT by T : (This should read "SGI's" rather than "SCO's.") removing arguably System-V-related code from SGI's Linux submissions is 'not enough.' According to Blake Stowell of SCO, 'Making minor amendments to its XFS file system doesn't cure the breach. SGI must do more as outlined [in the August letter] to cure all of their breaches.' But later on in the article, we learn what was outlined in the August letter: 'We don't believe that SGI has taken all of the steps necessary to cure all of the breaches, and in fact in our letter to them, we state "SGI's breaches of these agreements cannot be cured."' So SCO essentially told SGI, 'You're in violation of our contract and unless you remedy the violations, we'll pull your UNIX license. Oh, BTW, you can't remedy the violations.' This looks to me like the clearest example yet of how SCO is acting in bad faith." Read on below for another snippet of SCO strangeness.

An anonymous reader writes "As many are aware, SCO has sought (and got) a 4 month extension to its IBM lawsuit. According to the Salt Lake Tribune: 'SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said Tuesday that he understood the extension is being sought "for the purpose of gaining documents from IBM related to the patents they claim. . . . Some of the patents aren't even filed with the U.S. Patent Office, as far as we can learn."' I thought this was worth looking at, and quickly found that the patents in question are 4,814,746, 4,821,211, 4,953,209, and 5,805,785 - which can be found by typing in their numbers in this USPTO form."

luigi6699 writes "According to the Salt Lake Tribune, 'SCO Group executives have sold about 119,000 shares of their company since it filed a lawsuit against IBM in March...' Their CFO started the $1.2 million sell-off just after the lawsuit."

securitas writes "London-based military historian and commentator Gwynne Dyer writes about Asia's developing space race with plans from China and India to land people on the Moon, previously mentioned on Slashdot in China's case. In April India announced it will send an unmanned probe to the Moon by 2005 and a manned mission by 2015. Critics say it's a waste of time and money for India to pursue the goal. Meanwhile, Russian space experts are quietly helping China in what is seen as a growing alliance and a somewhat alarmist op-ed piece from the Washington Times worries about China's 21st century space dominance and monopolization of strategic resources like H3, used in nuclear fusion."

cheesedog writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a brief in federal court in support of companies that offer software to edit violence or sex from a user's DVD. The full story can be found in this article from the Salt Lake Tribune."

Jellybob writes "A little something for those of you who aren't happy with where you work: just go and work at Pixar." This is apparently part of the Finding Nemo hype machine; here's a BBC story talking about deploying metal detectors and night-vision goggles to stop people from camcording the movie.

lexbaby writes "The Salt Lake Tribune has a story about how Logan High School (Logan, Utah) is using Linux in their student programming lab. The main use is for robotics. There is the old discussion about if Linux is truly cheaper to operate in the long run. Is Linux a legitimate solution to school districts facing a financial crunch?" I hope some of the students involved post pictures of the robots they're building in class.

lexbaby writes "The Salt Lake Tribune has a story about how Logan High School (Logan, Utah) is using Linux in their student programming lab. The main use is for robotics. There is the old discussion about if Linux is truly cheaper to operate in the long run. Is Linux a legitimate solution to school districts facing a financial crunch?" I hope some of the students involved post pictures of the robots they're building in class.

An anonymous reader writes "TriWest, a federal contractor providing healthcare to the military, had computer hardware stolen from one of their offices. Social security numbers, credit card numbers, and healthcare information about 500,000 US military personnel and their families is contained on the stolen hardware. The AP picked up the story. The theft is also being covered by the Salt Lake Tribune and the Arizona Republic. This opens the door to speculation about who would be interested in the data held by a military contractor and what they will do with the information."

el-schwa writes "The Salt Lake Tribune has a story that talks about the old Micrsoft vs. Caldera anti-trust lawsuit. During the trial Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to get 937 boxes of controversial documents kept private. Now it appears that Caldera is no longer interested in paying for storage on the boxes, and they are scheduled to be destroyed."

BoyPlankton writes "According to this article in the Salt Lake Tribune, film directors are gearing up to battle companies that are making a name for themselves selling/renting out edited films to consumers. The film directors claim that it's censorship and that it's morally, ethically, and legally wrong. The companies doing it claim that consumer rights trump the artists rights in this case, and that the artists don't have the moral ground to stand on because they already edit their films for T.V. and planes. Is this issue going to further erode our rights as a consumer, or will lawmakers take this opportunity to shore them up?"

DaveAtFraud writes: "It took a little digging to find an on-line copy of this article that I first saw in my treeware daily newspaper. Thanks to the Salt Lake City Tribune for having it on-line. According to the Spamhaus project, a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam that clogs you in box. This is your chace to hear from them and what they have to say is quite interesting. If you don't think the filters and blacklists work, one spammer whines, "My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters." Stopping spam is simply a matter of economics. When its uneconomical to send spam, people will stop sending it."

DaveAtFraud writes: "It took a little digging to find an on-line copy of this article that I first saw in my treeware daily newspaper. Thanks to the Salt Lake City Tribune for having it on-line. According to the Spamhaus project, a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam that clogs you in box. This is your chace to hear from them and what they have to say is quite interesting. If you don't think the filters and blacklists work, one spammer whines, "My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters." Stopping spam is simply a matter of economics. When its uneconomical to send spam, people will stop sending it."

bradipo writes "A large number of lawsuits have been filed against companies that have not complied with the anti-spam statute in Utah. I'm not sure how this will turn out, but it should be interesting nonetheless." And reader spoton writes "The governor of Ohio has signed into law a bill that allows internet subscribers to sue for up to $50,000 and ISP's for up to $500,000. It allows you to sue for $100 per email + court and lawyer fees incurred. Looks like the cost of spamming is going up."

Slashback's updates tonight (below) bring you more information on chemically interesting furniture, old-school electronics in new-tech devices, and Brigham Young's ultra-strong building materials. Welcome to the home, car and wind-farm of the future, please mind your step.

Bratty kids get to sit near the volatile elements. Theodore Gray writes: "About a month ago there was a slashdot lively discussion about my wooden Periodic Table Table. A bunch of slashdot readers sent me elements for it: Thank you slashdot! Two people actually sent me free Ag and Pd, contrary to the jokes in the discussion. I decided the world could stand another periodic table website. Since all the eight dozen other periodic tables on the web have better reference information than mine, I used some Mathematica programs to generate links to many of them for each element. But my site is more beautiful. I'm going for science as art. Mine also has by far the best quality sample photos: High resolution, high quality macro shots of 89 samples so far."

Starts with a crank, too. ripaway writes "With all the recent stories about vaccuum tubes, I find it ironic that I stumbled on this today. Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."

Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."

We mentioned this interesting lattice-looking material a few weeks ago.

Sucking requires a context to be good or bad. Sun Tzu writes "After the recent discussion on bad software, how about a different reason for why software sucks? Maybe we programmers and users don't have it quite so bad after all."

That dadburn whippersnapper, why when I was a boy ... Junks Jerzey writes "I remember reading about Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers five years ago in Wired News. Pretty cool stuff, with an introduction by some guy called John Romero. It was available for a long time as a commercial product that used HTML for formatting, but it's now completely online, as reported by the author."

nexex writes: "This story seems brings the patent debate home; specifically, should a company or person be able to 'own' your DNA? Obviously researchers want to profit from their discoveries, thus funding new research. But critics counter they are profitting at the expense of our health, citing restrive screening licenses for things such as breast cancer and Alzheimer's. Citing a figure from a UK activist group, 500,000 gene or gene sequence patents have been applied for worldwide. Another excellent article on this issue from Salon.com was from a couple years ago."

JordoCrouse writes "There has been an uproar in Salt Lake City, Utah over the comments of the new Iomega CEO, Bruce Albertson. Albertson attacked Utah's very annoying and confusing liquor laws as a reason why Utah has had a serious problem attracting engineers and other technology oriented folk, despite the low cost of living, high quality of firms, and access to excellent education. I didn't grow up here, but I went to college in Salt Lake City, so I was used to the various quirks of the local laws, but I am wondering: Do issues like liquor laws and social life really affect where engineers and programmers want to work? Does Mr. Albertson have a point, or was he just frustrated that he couldn't atract any good prospects?"

bewert writes: "Check out [this Knight-Ridder wire story.] This could change electricity distribution economics as we know it. A project is under way to replace 9 major copper power distribution cables with 3 smaller ones made from a high-temperature superconducting material called BSCCO (pronounced bisco). Pretty interesting technology, and one that could have huge implications for reduction of transmission power losses and the need for more generation." Not to mention that it means a 25-fold reduction in the weight of the cables used to carry electricity for a large chunk of Detroit.

Last month, a 16-year-old old Utah teenager published vulgar and offensive comments about some of his classmates and school administrators on a Web site. His computer was seized by police, his files and e-mail extracted and analyzed; he was jailed in a juvenile detention center and then sent out of the state. Local officials say they may charge him with criminal libel. Copyright and patent lawsuits online, make some room. Here comes libel (Read More).

If the youth is so charged, it will mark the first criminal libel case in Utah history involving the Internet, and one of the first anywhere.

His father told reporters his son was fighting back against hostile peers. "For him, it was just a tit-for-tat thing. Everything he has done up to this point was in retaliation for what other kids did, stuff that was just as vulgar and just as hurtful. For me, the question isn't whether [my son] is going to be held accountable. It's whether the others are going to be held to the same standard."

Not likely. In 21st Century America, harassment and cruelty are fine as long as you don't do it on a computer.

The Net is raising new questions not only about copyright, but about the limits of speech and commentary in cyberspace -- a culture in which the First Amendment sometimes seems almost timid, perhaps even inadequate. It also focuses more attention on epidemic Net hostility and cruelty, against which some people may begin to take formal action. Public net postings are frequently vicious, and sometimes anonymous posters traditionally bear no responsibility for the the wantonly stupid things they sometimes say. In the context of all the other conflicts over the movement of intellectual property and speech online, some sort of legal response seems almost inevitable.

In the overall context of personal and commercial Net traffic, assaultive comments are rare. Hardly any result in actual physical harm. But as the Utah incident demonstrates, that doesn't mean they're inconsequential. The anonymous Utah Web site was vulgar and offensive, but compared to many public flames, only tepid. Flaming is obnoxious -- most of it is profoundly inane -- but the idea that it's libelous has lots of implications for life online. And none of them are good.

Questions of online responsibility for words are difficult. Anonymity is easy on the Net, and it's often impossible to know if comments online, no matter how shocking, are true or false. Vicious postings can be more damaging than the face-to-face-kind. They can be rapidly disseminated and accessed by countless numbers of people instantly.

They also occur in an environment of fear and confusion about the power of new information technologies. As with copyright, historic notions of libel and accountability may not realistically apply to this new kind of social geography.

On his Web site, the Utah high teenager allegedly called school personnel "drunks" and some female classmates "sluts." He also cast doubt on the work ethic and competency of several faculty members. He concedes the site -- put up partly in response to taunts and harassments from peers - was a mistake. He never threatened anyone with violence, and his friends and classmates vigorously deny that he was violent or menacing, or was even perceived that way. Some of his classmates told reporters he was "weird." The student said one reason school officials (they suspected him immediately) wanted him gone was that he had dyed his hair pink. He had also, said school officials, had frequent run-ins with the principal of his school and had an altercation during a football game last fall.

The teenager arrived in the small town of Milford five years ago, and had trouble fitting in from the first, said his classmates.

When school officials learned of the site on May 16, the principal notified the police, who seized the boy's computer and took it to the State Crime Laboratory for analysis. That same day, a Juvenile Court Judge ordered the student sent to Cedar City's juvenile detention center where he remained for several days until he was released.

He has left Utah and moved temporarily to his grandparents home in Southern California, pending a decision by county officials whether or not to bring criminal libel charges against him.

The Web site at issue here is, in some ways, the digital equivalent of the taunting and baiting that has always gone on in many American schools. But Net baiting raises new questions. For one thing, we are living in the post-Columbine hysteria, in which anger, alienation and offensive speech online is increasingly equated with danger -- and draws the attention of law enforcement. That makes it a powerful First Amendment issue. If a teenager calls one of his classmates a slut outside of school (but not online), it's hard to imagine he'd be arrested, driven out-of-state, or charged with criminal libel.

When he posts the same message on a Web site, it's almost assumed he could be a potential murderer, and police respond accordingly. This makes offensive speech a crime. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect offensive speech, even when it's obnoxious. When it becomes harmful, erroneous or defamatory, libel has always been the appropriate legal recourse. Libel laws don't, of course, when dealing with most public figures, or in the face of anonymity. But either way, the police aren't supposed to get involved.

The outcome of this case and others like it is critical. Free speech isn't the right to speak for free. The right to free speech in the United States means the right to be free from punishment by the government in retaliation for most speech. (It isn't absolute. You can criticize people, but you can't threaten them.) On the Net, speech has been almost completely free of interference from the government. The Utah case is a serious threat to that freedom, since the police activity isn't the result of threatening but offensive speech.

To grasp the significance, just imagine an Internet on which offensive speech becomes either criminal or libelous.

On our early-generation Internet, users have generally spoken and written (and downloaded) without inhibition or concern for any legal issues (like copyright or libel). If Utah officials and schools in other jurisdictions press ahead with this and other pending legal actions, that could change.

Along with copyright and patent lawsuits, libel actions are likely to become more commonplace online, as viciousness in posts and sites grows along with the number of people accessing the Net. The growing number of corporations and their battalions of lawyers moving online also are eager to curb unrestricted speech, as it creates -- in their minds -- hostile environments that discourage new consumers and thus are bad for business. Online hostility and viciousness could begin to have unpleasant consequences, especially for a free Internet.

Net incidents like this one seem to provoke especially irrational, even hysterical overreactions. People who say offensive things don't generally expect the police to come crashing into their homes, seize their computers, root through their e-mail and files, then toss them in jail for evaluation for a few days. This response seems obviously unconstitutional if applied to the offline, adult world. But post-Columbine, offensive and angry speech -- especially if it's delivered digitally -- is not just being banned but criminalized.

Beyond technology and commerce, the Net has become a bastion of both freedom and individualism. This is, in part, a positive side effect of the lack of inhibitions made possible by anonymity. The Net tradition of freedom has grown and become established at almost precisely the same time conventional media have become corporatized and homogenized.

America presents itself to the world as a free and morally superior culture. But in many respects, it is a bizarre and unconscious civilization. Even as it creates some of the most astonishing technology in the history of the planet, it willfully refuses to consider its implications in a sane way. The balancing of Net freedom against the right of individuals to go online without being assaulted or defamed is complicated, especially for a social system that responds to technology in such a simple-minded way.

Here, when troubled teenages lash out at peers and teachers online, we don't sit down with teachers, counselors, parents and administrators. We don't call Constitutional scholars, technologists and social scientists to ponder rational solutions to unprecedented techno-driven 21st century problems.

We call 911 and turn a kid who has trouble fitting in into both a refugee and a criminal suspect.

Mirele writes "The Salt Lake Tribune reports in an article today that a lot of formerly secret documents that Microsoft had submitted in the now-settled Caldera case have been unsealed. These documents include a deposition by a former Microsoftie that indicated she had destroyed e-mail correspondence when urged to do so by her boss. They also show Microsoft's inclination to overdesignate documents as secret. The judge unsealed all but about 30 documents. "

One of my old partners in crime, Michael Sims, contacted me with the latest report from Censorware.org. By analyzing their web logs, Censorware found that they were blocking access to such offensive materials as The Bible, and The Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution, using the unaptly named SmartFilter software. Check out the Salt Lake Tribune for more information.

slothdog writes " A Utah federal judge ruled yesterday that Microsoft must hand over the source code for Windows95 to Caldera, though they cannot use it for any reason other than litigation." The article itself is written for a novice, but wow. The implications of this are amazing.