Slashdot Mirror

theodp writes "Assuming things go patent reformer Microsoft's way, answering multiple choice, true/false, or yes/no questions in a classroom could soon constitute patent infringement. Microsoft's just-published patent application for its Adaptive Clicker Technique describes how 'multiple different types of clickers' can be used by students to answer questions posed by teachers. The interaction provided by its 'invention', explains Microsoft, 'increases attention and enhances learning.' Microsoft's Interactive Classroom Add-In for Office (video) provides polling features that allow students to 'answer and respond through their individual OneNote notebooks, hand-held clickers, or computers, and the results display in the [PowerPoint] presentation.' So, did Bill Gates mention to Oprah that the education revolution will be patented?"

ihaque writes "A Stanford researcher, Philip Guo, has developed a tool called CDE to automatically package up a Linux program and all its dependencies (including system-level libraries, fonts, etc!) so that it can be run out of the box on another Linux machine without a lot of complicated work setting up libraries and program versions or dealing with dependency version hell. He's got binaries, source code, and a screencast up. Looks to be really useful for large cluster/cloud deployments as well as program sharing. Says Guo, 'CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports.'"

ashidosan writes "Hot on the heels of the Adafruit competition, Matt Cutts (a search spam engineer at Google) is sponsoring two more $1,000 bounties for projects using Kinect. 'The first $1,000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.'" Relatedly, reader imamac points out a video showing Kinect operating on OS X.

siobHan writes "The PAPA World Pinball Championships recently concluded in Scott, PA (near Pittsburgh), as covered on Slashdot already. The organizers recorded full 1080p/60 HD video of the playfield during the final games, and have uploaded the entirety of the crucial deciding game, with commentary (direct link to just the video). The winner of this game received $10,000 for his skillful play."

ptorrone writes "In this 7-minute video we explore the mysteries of Apple device charging. Usually, device makers need to sign a confidentially agreement with Apple if they want to say their charger 'works with iPhone / iPod,' and they're not allowed to talk about how the insides work. If you don't put these secret resistors on the data lines too, you get the dreaded Charging is not supported with this accessory. We demonstrate how anyone can make their own chargers that work with iPhone 4, 3Gs, etc."

eldavojohn writes "Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway was very near to the perfect book for me. It covers many things common to many Lisp languages while highlighting in moderate detail the things that make Clojure unique and worthy of some attention. The book spends a large amount of time dealing with the intricacies of interfacing fluidly with Java (down to a package rewrite inside a large project). This fits me perfectly as a Java programmer, and I now feel ready to experiment with peppering functional language capabilities into an object oriented language. The book also strives to show how to simplify multithreading through functional programming, which is good because I find multithreading in Java a serious headache that few are good at. Programming Clojure, released in May 2009, is currently the only book out there devoted to Clojure, and the introduction is written by the language's creator, Rich Hickey, who says, 'What is so thrilling about Stuart's book is the extent to which he "gets" Clojure.' The book earns its place on the Pragmatic Bookshelf by guiding the user through rewriting a part of Ant into a new build tool called Lancet — adding to the project what you just learned about Clojure at the end of each chapter." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Programming Clojure author Stuart Halloway pages 304 publisher The Pragmatic Bookshelf rating 8/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-1-934356-33-3 summary A firm definition of Clojure via examples coupled with the beginnings of actually programming Clojure. First, a lot of you are probably wondering what Clojure is and asking me why you should care at all about it. Well, Clojure is a functional programming (FP) language that runs on top of the extremely pervasive Java Virtual Machine and in doing so seems to offer a simpler way of multithreaded programming. It belongs to the family of languages that are Lisps and as a result this book covers a lot of remedial material that is common to other Lisp languages. If you're a serious lisp programmer, you'll be able to skip some of this book (the intro will guide you). Clojure has rarely been mentioned on Slashdot with the resulting comments revealing largely confusion or considering it a buzzword. It's going to be hard to write this review about the book instead of the language being that 99% of what I know about Clojure comes from this book. If you work through this book linearly, you must also use the command line read-eval-print loop (REPL) that, similar to Ruby's IRB, allows you to get hands on with Clojure and Halloway's examples.

Both Hickey and Halloway are very active in Clojure development. In fact, Halloway has a video out on types and protocols, new developments in Clojure 1.2 since the book went to print. Halloway does a good job at providing examples, keeping the book pragmatic and showing you the "wrong" way before incrementally showing you how to correctly accomplish various goals in Clojure. But he loses two points on this review for two reasons. One is that he over evangelizes about Clojure. It would lend a lot more credibility to everything else he says if he would just relent and abstain a bit from painting Clojure as the best language for any task. This ties into my second point which is the fact that books on programming languages are supposed to give the reader two very valuable things: knowledge of when to use the language and knowledge of when not to use the language. Programming Clojure is lacking in the latter--this is not a unique problem as most books about a language really sell their language. All too often in my professional career I see a solution and think, "Wow, that really was not the right tool for the job." (I'm looking at you, Java) Clojure definitely has its strengths and weaknesses despite very little evidence of the latter in this book although I was directed to a QCon presentation where the author speaks more about where Clojure excels in real life.

That said, the book is a great fit for the object oriented Java developer who does not also code a lisp-like language regularly. I say that because Chapter Two deals with reviewing all of the facets of Clojure--most of which are found in other Lisp languages which might be seen as remedial to a proficient Lisp developer. However, before you skip it entirely, there are important notes that Halloway injects into these chapters ranging from how not to do things in Clojure to the minute differences and implications they hold. Chapter Five dives into the fundamentals and features of functional programming in Clojure. This chapter was especially useful to me as I'm not used to languages featuring things like lazy sequences, caching of results or tail-call optimization. Working through the examples in Chapter Five really opened my eyes to some of the more powerful aspects of FP. Like how an infinite sequence can easily be handled by Clojure and its laziness allows you to only pay for what you need from that sequence. While definitions of infinite sequences are also possible in Haskell or Python, Clojure brings this capability to the JVM (not that anything is preventing a more verbose Java library from handling such structures).

Chapter Three focuses a lot on Clojure's interaction with Java and does a great job of showing you how to rewrite part of your Java project into Clojure and run it on the JVM. This includes calling Java from Clojure, creating and compiling Clojure into java classes, handling Java exceptions in Clojure and ends with the beginning work in Lancet (the build tool the book strives to create using what we learn in each chapter). It also contains a bit on optimizing your performance when working with Java in Clojure. This theme continues through the book as Halloway knows that one of Clojure's main selling points is that it can be so much faster than Java if you're willing to put in the extra work and planning to utilize pure functional programming.

In Java, everything is an object. In Scheme, everything is a list. Well in Clojure, the main staple is sequences which brings us to Chapter Four: Unifying Data with Sequences. While this chapter succeeds in teaching how to load data into sequences, how to consume data from sequences and how to force evaluation of lazy sequences, it felt like one of the weakest chapters in the book. This is all necessary in learning Clojure but Halloway skimps on examples and could stand to add some more examples on what is and isn't seq-able, seq-ing on various things and performing functions on various things.

Multicore chips are all the rage these days. And right now it seems that developers are by and large content with coding single threaded applications. But that may change in the future when the user expects more than a few cores in usage. In the introduction, Halloway argues a few reasons why we all should use Clojure and one of those reasons happens to be the somewhat sound logic that we will all have cores coming out of our ears in the near future. That means that as a developer you have the option to spawn more threads which means coordination of threads which means you will be forced to do the dirty dance of concurrency. Chapter Six is entirely devoted to this and, honestly, I reread a lot of this chapter as there are several update mechanisms and models that you can use to manage concurrency in Clojure. Unsurprisingly there is no silver bullet for concurrency even in Clojure. This book has but a handful of figures and their formatting leaves much to be desired but the two in this chapter are necessary references for deciding if you should use refs and software transactional memory, atoms, agents, vars or classic Java locks. This is a potent chapter that ends with a snake game implementation in Clojure demonstrating some basic concurrency. While Clojure protects you from some classically complex issues and may make concurrency vastly more succinct, it still requires a lot of thought and planning. Halloway provides good direction but clearly hands on experience is a necessity in this realm.

Chapter Seven focuses entirely on macros and is somewhat disheartening in that it presents an extremely powerful feature of Clojure that is also very complex. Halloway gives two rules and an exception for Macro Club. The first rule is: "Don't Write Macros." The second rule is: "Write Macros if That Is the Only Way to Encapsulate a Pattern." The exception is you can also write macros if it makes calling your code easier. Halloway does a good job of explaining the basics of macros in Clojure and breaks them down via a taxonomy into categories and examples of macros in Clojure. Macros are a necessity when you're trying to augment Clojure by adding features to it or if you are creating a Domain-Specific Language (DSL). Macros in Clojure do seem easier than macros in most other Lisp languages. At the end of Chapter Seven, you create a basic DSL for Lancet which was helpful even though I was left feeling helpless in the face of macros. Despite the complexity of macros in Chapter Seven, Eight's multimethods are similar to Java polymorphism and was much easier to wrap my head around than macros. Multimethods are used very infrequently (seven times in the five thousand lines that compose the Clojure core).

Chapter Nine is unfortunately less than twenty pages and deals with "Clojure in the Wild." You would think that a book in the series of Pragmatic Programmer would have more pragmatism than the features of a language with Lancet but let's face it--Clojure is a relatively young language. Nine covers automated tests, data access and web development. The automated testing is a short section on Clojure's test-is packaging. The database stuff appears to be little more than wrappers around the already mature JDBC. The web development consists of an intro to Compojure which is similar to web.py and Sinatra. Compojure shows a lot of promise in reducing the amount of code one needs to write a basic web application. It lacks the feature set and support that Rails has with rapidly building CRUD applications but holds a lot of potential to be flushed out into something similarly powerful. Halloway says his introductions to these projects should "whet your appetite for the exciting world of Clojure development" but I think a more accurate description is that these brief brushes with functional projects leaves the reader ravenously blinded by hunger for more.

Some final thoughts on the book: I caught only two very minor typos in the book. It's all English and code. There were no pictures or illustrations in this book except for one on page 96 in which a tiny drawing appears named Joe who asks a question about vectors. Oddly enough, I didn't find Joe on any of the other three hundred pages. It was very easy to work through this book from cover to cover and the example code was very instrumental in my understanding of Clojure. As a Java monkey, rereading sections seemed a requirement although the book is concise enough for me to enjoy in my free time over one week. Halloway cites mostly websites and utilizes tinyurl to reference blogs like Steve Yegge's blog and frequently he references Wikipedia. Only three of his many citations are other printed books (although one of them is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid). Halloway's greatest strength is the engaging examples (like the Hofstadter Sequence) that he picks and provides to the user and I hope that future editions of the book build on this as well as expand on the growing base of Clojure projects out there. His github is rife with both instructive and pragmatic examples that could stand to be included in a future book.

Some final thoughts on the language: Clojure holds a lot of potential that is yet to be realized. I cannot say yet whether the succinct syntax offers a good balance between quick coding and readability. To the uninitiated, the code can look like a jumble of symbols. Yes, we escape the verbosity of Java and the kingdom of nouns but is what Clojure offers (a neighboring kingdom of verbs) better? While Clojure is concise, it requires a lot of keywords which required a lot of usage look up when starting. Clojure code is potent and powerful. A mere five thousand lines of Clojure code create your engine--the core of the language. I assume this brevity is due to ingenious reuse that Clojure can offer but I would hate to be the person to maintain that code if I was not the author. What's better is that this code is quickly conjured at the REPL if you wish to read it yourself or augment a feature. A sage coworker who has seen much more than I in this business of software development recommended Clojure to me. He was right that it is a very interesting and innovative language but in my opinion it has a long way to go before it becomes the next Ruby or Java. Clojure needs an equivalent to Ruby on Rails and it's fighting an uphill battle against all the developers like myself that left college with so much object oriented coding and so little functional programming (although Scheme is my alma mater's weed out course). If you find yourself stagnating and are thirsty for some continuing education in the form of a stimulating challenge, I recommend Clojure (and this book on Clojure). Hopefully Clojure's full potential is realized by the community and it finds its deserved place in many developer's tool sets as the right tool for some jobs.

You can find Programming Clojure in three DRM-free formats and hard copy from the publisher's site. For a sample of the author's writing and to get a feel for how he injects Clojure code into it, check out his blogs on his company's website.

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

Lanxon writes "Director Chris Cairns has turned his short 'Neurosonics' film — which features disembodied heads mounted on a selection of instruments — into a live performance that's just as jaw-dropping as the original, reports Wired. The director originally created the 'Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs' film back in 2009. It's set in a lab, and depicts three scientists mounting a number of different heads onto turntables and drum sets before playing them like real instruments. The original video was created with plenty of CGI, so shifting it into a live setting was always going to prove troublesome. To bridge the gap between the virtual and the physical, Cairns enlisted the assistance of holographic projection experts Musion. The company set up the performance for the first Musion Academy Media Awards — which exist to recognize the most impressive holographic creations — and the result is truly impressive."

bonch writes "Following in YouTube's footsteps, Vimeo has now introduced its own beta HTML5 video player, and like YouTube, it uses H.264 and requires Safari, Chrome, or ChromeFrame. The new player doesn't suffer the rebuffering problems of the Flash version when clicking around in the video's timeline, and it also loads faster. HTML5 could finally be gaining some real momentum."

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TGDaily: "Researchers from Harvard and MIT have demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems with the help of low-cost, high-performance gaming hardware. [A video describing their research is available.] 'Reverse engineering a biological visual system — a system with hundreds of millions of processing units — and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,' says David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. 'It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.' The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task. The resulting models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation. Using ordinary CPUs, the effort would have required either years or millions of dollars of computing hardware. Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost."

An anonymous reader sends in this link to a video of 12-1/2 minutes of Space Shuttle pr0n. The people at the Johnson Space Center put together this video of the ascent of STS-129 using multiple imagery assets — ground, air, booster, and the shuttle itself. The booster's-eye view of splashdown and immersion is something you don't see every day. As a bonus, another anonymous reader shared a beautiful photo of the shuttle flying over rugged terrain after it separated from the ISS last week.

Jamie found a video showing an unpolished idea demonstrating the use of Microsoft Surface for D&D. Looks like they are using 4th ed as the basis for the system. This comes from the Surfacescapes team at Carnegie Mellon, which strikes me as a very good place to be a nerd right about now... provided you make your saving throws.

An anonymous reader writes "Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet, has been working on a new open source project called Swarm. The concept is to allow a computer program to be distributed across multiple computers in a manner almost completely transparent to the programmer. The system observes the program executing and figures out how the workload should be distributed for maximum efficiency. Swarm is implemented in Scala. Its at an early-prototype stage, and Ian has created a good 36 minute video explaining the concept and the current implementation."

eldavojohn writes "Star Wars Uncut has taken a novel approach to remaking Star Wars IV: A New Hope. You merely sign up for a 15 second clip, film it and submit it. The trailer is now complete and I will suspect you might enjoy the high quality (and low quality) of some of the already accepted scenes. 251 scenes remain in need of claiming with 688 claimed and 291 finished. Do your part to remake one of the greatest movies by filming fifteen seconds of yourself and your friends!"

jccq writes "Both Google and Yahoo have been supporting Semantic Web markup (RDFa, RDF and Microformats) for weeks and months respectively. What they do, at the moment, is use the markup only for visual feedback by returning better looking, more functional 'page snippets.' But how would it look if you could get all these bits and compose them automatically to form a single structured information page about what you're searching for? The folks at the DERI institute have just released Sig.ma, a visual browser and mashup generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources to combine together when answering a user query. It also comes in API mode to reuse the information Sig.ma finds inside applications. Here are a screencast and a blog post, with semantic-web-geek details."

tramm writes "I've released an extension for the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR's video mode to enable functions that are useful for independent film makers. While the camera produces a great movie out of the box, the audio is a severely limited. My code adds features that should have been in the software, like on-screen stereo audio meters, live audio monitoring, reduced audio noise and crop marks for different formats. An introductory video shows the new features in use and an audio evaluation compares it to the stock firmware with very good results. It's similar to the incredibly flexible CHDK software for Canon's point-and-shoot cameras, but targeted at the film makers using the 5D. The Magic Lantern firmware is GPLed and new features will be written to make the camera even more useful on set. There is a wiki for documentation and development."

tramm writes "I've released an extension for the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR's video mode to enable functions that are useful for independent film makers. While the camera produces a great movie out of the box, the audio is a severely limited. My code adds features that should have been in the software, like on-screen stereo audio meters, live audio monitoring, reduced audio noise and crop marks for different formats. An introductory video shows the new features in use and an audio evaluation compares it to the stock firmware with very good results. It's similar to the incredibly flexible CHDK software for Canon's point-and-shoot cameras, but targeted at the film makers using the 5D. The Magic Lantern firmware is GPLed and new features will be written to make the camera even more useful on set. There is a wiki for documentation and development."

unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica piece detailing the convoluted lengths to which the MPAA will go in order to keep anybody from ripping a DVD, ever. The organization showed a film to the US Copyright Office, in the triennial hearing to spell out exemptions to the DMCA, giving instructions for how a teacher could use a camcorder to record a low-quality clip of a DVD for educational use — even though such a purpose is solidly established in law as fair use. "Never mind that this solution results in video of questionable quality and requires teachers to learn even more tech in order to get the job done. It also requires schools (or, given the way most schools are run, the teachers themselves) to incur additional costs to purchase camcorders and videotapes if they don't have them already. Add in the extra time involved, and this 'solution' is a laughably convoluted alternative to simply ripping a clip from a DVD."

Justin Schunick points out a video demonstration of a 3D input system which senses the user's hand position, but without requiring the user to touch a controller or wear a trackable position indicator. From the provided description: "Utilizing the theory of electrostatics, we have designed a low-cost human-computer interface device that has the ability to track the position of a user's hand in three dimensions. Physical contact is not required and the user does not need to hold a controller or attach markers to their body. To control the device, the user simply waves their hand above it in the air."

Gambrinus writes "Can someone that hasn't seen the original Star Wars trilogy retell it? This guy recorded his friend retelling him the plot of the original Star Wars trilogy. He then made some animations to go along with her narration."

ptorrone writes "Make: television debuted online and on public television (broadcast / cable tv). The series encourages everyone to invent, reinvent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Based on the popular Make magazine, each half-hour episode hopes to inspire viewers to think, create, and, well, make. Each episode can be viewed or downloaded DRM-free, in HD on makezine.tv — the show is also available on Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv and iTunes."

mhm was one of many readers to note that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to the iPhone. "Planetbeing, one of the iPhone devteam members, has been working on porting Linux to the iPhone (along with a custom bootloader called OpeniBoot). Today they managed to boot the kernel! Video showing the boot process has been posted. Instructions and binaries are available on the project blog."

dominique_cimafranca writes "The Dynamic Graphics Project of the University of Toronto has released a pretty nifty 3D curve sketching system. Apart from the large drawing area, the tablet software looks very intuitive to artists. From the site: 'The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.'"

RevWaldo writes "The International Olympic Committee filed a copyright infringement claim yesterday against YouTube for hosting video of a Free Tibet protest at the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan Thursday night. The video depicts demonstrators conducting a candlelight vigil and projecting a protest video onto the consulate building; the projection features recent footage of Tibetan monks being arrested and riffs on the Olympic logo of the five interlocking rings, turning them into handcuffs. YouTube dutifully yanked the video, but it can still be seen on Vimeo. (Be advised; there is some brief footage of bloody, injured monks.)"

maemst writes "The project selection phase of the Google-sponsored 24-hour programming contest Hackontest ends in two days. Until today, almost a thousand persons voted for new features in 57 open source projects. Currently sK1, TYPO3 and OpenLieroX, phpMyAdmin and Inkscape are on the top list. However, only the developers of three of them may participate in the competition on September 24/25, 2008 in Zurich, Switzerland. code_swarm animations of the top five projects show how previous development has evolved so far."

An anonymous reader writes "A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: 'This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: 'This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: 'This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: 'This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.'"

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including a possible iBill framejob, the first steps towards defying the Real ID act, Peter Quinn continues his support for Open Source, Judge flunks lawsuit against spammers, WinXP on a Mac, round 2, Juniper drops message board suit, Vint Cerf answers questions on TLDs, PriceRitePhoto gets relisted, and RIM goes on the offensive for patent reform -- Read on for details.

iBill stolen info a framejob? An anonymous reader writes "The database of stolen credit card information recently discussed on Slashdot appears not to have come from iBill after all. From the article: 'Secure Science's Lance James backed away from his conclusion that iBill, which processes most of its transactions on behalf of adult services, was the source of the leak. He says pornography transaction databases may be considered especially desirable to spammers, and that a criminal may have deliberately mislabeled a database taken from another source.'"

First steps towards defying the Real ID act. An anonymous reader writes "With House Bill 1582, The New Hampshire House of Representatives has taken the first steps towards defying the Federal Government on the infamous Real ID act, which last year passed 100-0. This bill does not express disagreement with the Real ID act, it prohibits the state DMV from amending licensing procedures altogether, and it passed 270-84. Several impassioned testimonies were given at the House, and even those against the bill expressed displeasure with the Real ID act. It now moves on to the 24-member state Senate. The afternoon's proceedings can be viewed or listened to via the NH General Court website under the afternoon of March 8th."

Peter Quinn continues his support of Open Source. Stony Stevenson writes "Computerworld Australia reports that former Massachusetts state government CIO, Peter Quinn is fronting the battle for OpenSource. He believes the cost of government is not sustainable in its present form and any technology leader who is not supporting and implementing open standards should resign and get out of the business. From the article: 'Even though the personal toll from state government experience was huge, Quinn said he would not be silenced. "I will remain very vocal and prominent regarding open standards, open source, especially Open Document Format and all aspects of accessibility for the disabled community," he said.'"

Judge flunks lawsuit against spammers. Hawkeye writes "A federal court in California has just created a huge legal loophole for companies who hire sleazy spammers. Kennedy-Western, an unaccredited university (aka diploma mill) has been absolved for outsourcing its email advertising to 'proxy-abusing, header-forging, hash-busting spammers,' according to the story at Spam Kings. The court ruled that Kennedy-Western didn't violate the CAN-SPAM Act because the plaintiff, a small California ISP named Hypertouch, 'failed to provide any evidence that KWU had actual knowledge or consciously avoided knowledge of a current or future violation of the CAN-SPAM Act by anyone who sent the e-mails at issue.' Perhaps not surprisingly, KWU enlisted as an expert witness Jason Rines, an email marketer who once worked with the notorious Sanford Wallace and who has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List."

WinXP on a Mac, round 2. fan777 writes "Slashdot recently posted a story regarding blurry Flickr photos on what may be the first WinXP installation on a Mac. To those who claimed heavy photochopping, narf2006 has finally released a blurry video (Complete with Mirror || Torrent)."

Juniper drops message board suit. It seems that Juniper Networks has finally come to their senses and dropped the suit against several unidentified LightReading message board users. From the article: "What is still unknown is whether or not Juniper ever uncovered the identities of "Does 1-10." The company's complaint cited several messages that got the company riled up, and most those messages allege that Juniper is bribing lawyers and spying on its employees."

Vint Cerf answers TLD questions. netzer writes "CircleID is running responses they have received from Vint Cerf on the questions submitted to him from the community with regards to top level domains."

PriceRitePhoto gets relisted. Thomas Hawk has an interesting blog entry in which he details how PriceRitePhoto, the online retailer who gained so much recent infamy, has been relisted on Yahoo! shopping after only a three month penance. From the article: "What was interesting to me at the time when the PriceRitePhoto story was going on was that PriceRitePhoto had supposedly been delisted a year earlier from comparison shopping site PriceGrabber. What I never could get is how after being delisted on PriceGrabber that PriceRitePhoto ended back on there a year later to try and rip me off. Of course that first delisting didn't get the visibility that mine did, but not to worry, not only is PriceRitePhoto back in business at Yahoo! Shopping, they are back in business on PriceGrabber as well. This after being delisted there at least twice that I know of."

RIM goes on the offensive for patent reform. flanman writes to tell us it seems that RIM has decided to continue the patent reform fight even after giving up their recent court battle. RIM is running full page ads in a number of US newspapers urging lawmakers to change the way patents are issues and managed. RIM also has more details on the Blackberry site.

Fennie writes "Designtechnica has published their 2006 Best of Web 2.0 list. Some of the sites include Flickr.com, Vimeo.com and Writeboard.com. From the piece: 'The next generation of the web is here! With new kinds of desktop-like applications being released left and right, how will you know where to go and what to use? That's why we're here: To show you the best of Web 2.0 sites that you can get the most out of. No matter the task, video, audio, or photos, we have a site that works great for what you want to do and uses all the great features of Web 2.0 technology.'"