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eldavojohn recommends coverage at Ars on a Byzantine case just thrown out by an appeals court. The US Air Force cracked the code that would expire a piece of software. For this they were sued under the DMCA in Blueport v. United States. The Court of Federal Claims heard it and threw it out. "The reasoning behind the decisions focuses on the US government's sovereign immunity, which the court describes thusly: 'The United States, as [a] sovereign, "is immune from suit save as it consents to be sued... and the terms of its consent to be sued in any court define that court's jurisdiction to entertain the suit."' ... 'The DMCA itself contains no express waiver of sovereign immunity,' the judge wrote, 'Indeed, the substantive prohibitions of the DMCA refer to individual persons, not the Government.'"

eldavojohn writes "There have been a lot of tests in using quantum mechanics to communicate across large distances. But a student & a professor at USC have proven that the Viterbi algorithm can be applied to quantum communication. In the traditional Alice sends Bob a message scenario, 'Bob can reliably spot errors, and knows which message qubits are bogus before he opens the message — crucial, because opening it destroys it; and if it is garbled, he has nothing.'"

eldavojohn writes "Red Hat's CEO prophetically saith 'The clouds will all run Linux' in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here's the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft's interoperability tools are vaporware, they're striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free."

eldavojohn writes "A neat little device called the R4 allows for homebrew on the DS ... and as micro SD prices fall, it is becoming easier and easier to put on these cartridges binary dumps of games people don't have the right to play. Which is why Nintendo will see them in court. Note, it's not just the console maker pressing charges, it's also Capcom, Koei, Square Enix, Tecmo, Bandai Namco, and Sega. Is this truly a case of fighting piracy, or is it also an attempt to stop homebrew from stealing the market?"

eldavojohn writes "Sometime this morning, Facebook shut down Scrabulous to American and Canadian users. Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye." This is sadly unsurprising, now that Hasbro's finally taken legal action against the developers, after quite a few months of letting it go unmolested. Seems like they waited until there was an official Scrabble client available (also on Facebook), while the snappy and fuller-featured Scrabulous kept people interested in a 60-year-old board game. The official client, which is at least labeled a beta, is a disappointment. This is not a Google-style beta release, note: it's slow to load, confusing, and doesn't even offer the SOWPODS word list as an option, only the Tournament Word List and a list based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Too bad that SOWPODS is the word list used in most of the world's English-speaking countries.) It also took several minutes to open a game, rather than the few seconds (at most) that Scrabulous took — it's pretty impressive, but not in a good way, that the programmers could extract that sort of performance from the combination of Facebook's servers and my dual-core, 2GHz+ laptop. The new Scrabble client has doodads like 3D flipping-tile animations, too, but no clear way to actually initiate the sample game that jamie and I have attempted to start. I hope that once we get past that obvious hurdle, we'll find there's a chat interface and game notebook as in Scrabulous, but my hopes are low.

Curious__George writes "I'm excited about a couple of new tools for audio for Mac OS X. One is the freeware WireTap from Ambrosia, which allows you to record any audio playing on your Mac, saving it to a file for later listening or processing. Its functionality will be built into an upcoming edition of Ambrosia's Snapz Pro X screen capture product. The other is a product that will be shipping by the end of the summer from Griffin called RadioSHARK (retail: $49.95), which is essentially a radio TiVo for your Mac: a software-controlled AM/FM radio that allows you to record radio programs (either local or Internet broadcast). I'll never miss a broadcast of This American Life again!" Curious__George might also get excited about the new Detour from Rogue Amoeba -- makers of AudioHijack, a predecessor to WireTap that has more capabilities -- which allows detouring sound output from different apps to different devices.