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Stories and comments across the archive that link to technews.com.

Stories · 11

  1. The J.R.R. Tolkien of the Web

    Internet · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the shelob-is-jealous dept. · 134 comments
    rhwalker22 writes "In a column titled "Lord of the Webs," The Washington Post's Leslie Walker looks at Tim Berners-Lee ("the J.R.R. Tolkien of the computer world") and the Semantic Web project. Berners-Lee was in Washington recently to tout the project: 'In his futuristic scenario, the Semantic Web offers controlled access to American health care data, plus databases charting the location and status of rivers, underground water, forests and local vegetation, along with economic data on local industries and what they produce -- all marked up in special vocabularies. Those allow scientists to run global queries across the Web, fishing randomly for correlations that might exist between where the sick people lived, worked and played -- such as a polluted stream or industrial dump.'" See an older article on the Semantic Web.

  2. Evolution Of The Online Tax Debate

    Money · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the money-money-money dept. · 211 comments
    rhwalker22 writes "Last November, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project drafted a plan to make it easier for states to cooperate in collecting sales taxes on products sold over the Internet. That plan is now headed to governors and state legislatures for debate. While that debate begins, the sales tax group is moving into new territory, debating how to apply sales taxes to digital services, like music and software downloads, and IP telephony. Most states participating in the sales tax project have sent representatives to Tampa, Fla., this week to take up this subject, according to a report by washingtonpost.com."

  3. Tauzin Changes Tone on Do-Not-Call List

    Yro · Privacy · · posted by timothy · from the ring-ring dept. · 17 comments
    rhwalker22 writes "In YRO, you've got a prominent discussion about a Washington Post report that Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) was moving to kill the FTC's do-not-call list program. You should feature The Post's Jan. 9 follow-up, which reported: "Amid a strong show of congressional support for a government program to curb unsolicited calls, a key House committee chairman yesterday dropped his opposition to a Federal Trade Commission request for quick funding for a national do-not-call list.""

  4. FCC to Permit Complete Media/Telecom Consolidation

    Themedia · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the bend-over dept. · 301 comments
    rhwalker22 writes "Today's Washington Post has a piece reviewing some of the major decisions the Federal Communications Commission will be making in the next few months, moves that could fundamentally rewrite the rules for the broadcast media and Internet service providers. Excerpt: 'Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information, from programming of television and radio news and entertainment to owning the pipes that connect people to the Internet.'"

  5. VeriSign and Other Registry Giants Blast ICANN

    Yro · Internet · · posted by timothy · from the struggle-in-the-primordial-soup dept. · 166 comments
    rhwalker22 writes: "VeriSign, ENIC, and Nominet UK today released a letter to the U.S. Commerce Dept. urging Uncle Sam to 'scale back the powers of the body that manages the Internet's global addressing system,' according to this report on washingtonpost.com. ICANN, of course, has its own take on the Registries' letter..."

  6. Control of the .ORG TLD

    Internet · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the insert-group-sex-joke-here dept. · 158 comments
    rhwalker22 writes "TechNews.com has an in-depth look at the 11 groups bidding to run dot-org when VeriSign gives it up later this year." I have a sneaking suspicion that my bid of $100 and a case of guinness has been outdone.

  7. Slashback: Counterstrike, Identification, Patenxtortion

    Slashback · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the joining-the-spider-man-herd dept. · 357 comments
    Slashback has updates tonight on the fate of Counterstrike in Germany, PanIP's lawsuit-happy past, and facial recognition software's spotty results so far. Go on, read more!

    False negatives, false positives, anda false sense of assurance. coryboehne writes: "TechNews has a report on the face recognition system installed at the Palm Beach Internation Airport early results of face-recognition surveillance suggest the technology is proving once again to be unreliable.

    The ACLU said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss." The system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.

    Seems to me that this is a controlled environment for the most part, and still they have problems this big? I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly. I suppose the biggest problem is the size of the database that would be necessary to hold the high quality pictures necessary for accurate identification.

    However I must admit that I am rather glad that this is'nt working yet as I'm not too sure I even like the idea of being able to digitally locate and track anyone within range of a camera."

    This is what's meant by "repeat offender." Audent writes: "Following on from this story on Slashdot about PanIP's nasty habits, InfoWorld is running a story about it all.

    To quote from the story about PanIP's boss:

    'These lawsuits aren't the first time that PanIP principal Lawrence Lockwood has initiated legal proceedings against companies he felt were infringing his patents. Lockwood filed a lawsuit against American Airlines in 1994, claiming that American's SABREvision airline reservation system infringed on other patents he holds. Lockwood lost the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and then lost again on appeal in 1997.'
    He's since had a bunch of patents disallowed. He's obviously learned from his earlier 'mistake' and is only going for the smaller companies.

    Kick his ass I say. Disclaimer: I work for IDG Comms in New Zealand)."

    Temporary sanity. CyberQ writes: "Some news from Germany on the censorship front: Despite demands from prominent politicians the responsible Federal Authority decided today not to ban the sale of Counterstrike to minors [Link in German, use the fish]. This came after weeks of public discussion following a school shooting by a student who apparently trained by playing CS."

  8. Slashback: Counterstrike, Identification, Patenxtortion

    Slashback · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the joining-the-spider-man-herd dept. · 357 comments
    Slashback has updates tonight on the fate of Counterstrike in Germany, PanIP's lawsuit-happy past, and facial recognition software's spotty results so far. Go on, read more!

    False negatives, false positives, anda false sense of assurance. coryboehne writes: "TechNews has a report on the face recognition system installed at the Palm Beach Internation Airport early results of face-recognition surveillance suggest the technology is proving once again to be unreliable.

    The ACLU said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss." The system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.

    Seems to me that this is a controlled environment for the most part, and still they have problems this big? I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly. I suppose the biggest problem is the size of the database that would be necessary to hold the high quality pictures necessary for accurate identification.

    However I must admit that I am rather glad that this is'nt working yet as I'm not too sure I even like the idea of being able to digitally locate and track anyone within range of a camera."

    This is what's meant by "repeat offender." Audent writes: "Following on from this story on Slashdot about PanIP's nasty habits, InfoWorld is running a story about it all.

    To quote from the story about PanIP's boss:

    'These lawsuits aren't the first time that PanIP principal Lawrence Lockwood has initiated legal proceedings against companies he felt were infringing his patents. Lockwood filed a lawsuit against American Airlines in 1994, claiming that American's SABREvision airline reservation system infringed on other patents he holds. Lockwood lost the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and then lost again on appeal in 1997.'
    He's since had a bunch of patents disallowed. He's obviously learned from his earlier 'mistake' and is only going for the smaller companies.

    Kick his ass I say. Disclaimer: I work for IDG Comms in New Zealand)."

    Temporary sanity. CyberQ writes: "Some news from Germany on the censorship front: Despite demands from prominent politicians the responsible Federal Authority decided today not to ban the sale of Counterstrike to minors [Link in German, use the fish]. This came after weeks of public discussion following a school shooting by a student who apparently trained by playing CS."

  9. Is The Net At Fault For Illegal Filesharing?

    Yro · Internet · · posted by timothy · from the blame-society dept. · 434 comments
    hbean writes: "Laywers for the file sharing programs Morpheus and Grokster are saying that if their client's programs are illegal for sharing copyrighted content, then so are the networks of ISPs that allow users to connect to each other -- check it out here. I wonder if these legal types are ever going to actually blame this on the actual people who are sharing ..."

  10. More Domain Disputes Labeled 'Reverse-Hijacking'

    Yro · Internet · · posted by michael · from the no-harm-in-trying dept. · 155 comments
    merodach writes: "This article on technews.com actually has a rare piece of good news in it - two corporations whose attempts to take domains from others were rebuked as attempts at "reverse hijacking." We can only hope that maybe the arbitrators are finally beginning to see the light." Read the story and be amazed at the audacity of these companies.

  11. Slashback: Quiesence, Jazz, RAND

    Slashback · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the blacksburg-field-office dept. · 182 comments
    Welcome to Slashback for 20011018 -- read below for an update on Code Red (is Red Dead?), RAND patents in Web standards (some semi-good news on that front), the sad death of some MIDI software, and an upgrade for Thailand.

    Please write your elected W3C representative. haplo21112 writes "The W3C has posted a next-steps comment on the mailing list for the Patent Policy Frame Work proposal.

    It announces among other things that two Open Source People have been added to the working group as Invited experts, Eben Moglen (General Counsel, Free Software Foundation) and Bruce Perens (Co-Founder of the Open Source Initiative). They have also announced a home page for the Working Group at: http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg/

    Especially interesting is the Second Objection noted on the page from IBM, where basically they are revealed as one of the drivers of the proposal. They grumble about RF and pretty much say they would vastly prefer RAND."

    You'd like to think so, eh? ColaMan writes: "Is CodeRed finally dead? I've had a counter on my webserver (yay apache!) that tracks attempts, but since the start of the month only 1 lone attempt has been logged on our permanent IP dialup connection (and that was just overnight). This compares to 2490 attempts for August and 931 for September. Nimda still seems to be plodding along though - I've had 159 unique ip's so far this month and 466 for September. Knowing that my IP address is in some bandwidth-forsaken backwater of the internet, I was wondering how things were going CodeRed-wise in the Real Internet?"

    I forget -- does the M stand for "Microsoft," or "Macintosh"? An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember this story from last Tuesday asking about audio applications on linux? Today the Jazz++ mailinglist declared jazz++ dead (find the message here). While not the perfect midi sequencer, jazz++ is robust and GPL'd. Since jazz++ only appeared twice in the postings (each moderated at +1 ...) related to the earlier story, it would seem this fine product has low visibility among the /. crowd. The only viable GNU/Linux midi solution died the same week ./ had a call for audio solutions on Linux. Gotta love irony..."

    From Bundesrat to Bangkok Germany may be considering it, but Thailand is doing them one better. TheMMaster writes "According to this article on newsbytes, the Thai government will switch to open-source software, linux on the desktop, StarOffice. This is a nice example of OSS, and probably why a lot of people contribute, to help people (OK and for fun)"

    As usual, the actual developers float high above the flames on their behalf. Yep, KDE is 5 years old -- and fm6 writes: "A nice contrast to the usual GNOME-versus-KDE flamage: the users of news.gnome.org wish KDE a happy 5th birthday." Remember, the flame wars you see about these two projects have little to do with the fact that both have already created killer desktops, and are continuing to do so faster than human beings should be allowed to travel.