Slashdot Mirror

Snibor Eoj writes "According to an article on Yahoo! News, Xerox has won a ruling that will allow it to pursue a claim against 3Com over a patent violation. They claim that the Graffiti language used in the Palm division violates the patent for a handwriting recognition method called "unistrokes" developed at Xerox PARC. "

Robert Wilde writes "The Supreme Court has turned down Microsoft's appeal of a ruling, allowing 10,000 temporary employees to sue for benefits such as the right to purchase Microsoft stock at a 15% discount. This lawsuit has implications for permatemps throughout the tech industry." I'm actually interested in seeing how many of the temps take Microsoft up on buying stock options.

Almost everybody sent this one in: "AOL and Time Warner merge!" See stories at cnnfn.com, Yahoo! News or almost any other online news outlet. Or go straight to the source(s); the Time Warner and AOL press releases, which make this sound like the greatest thing since the first two 'net nodes were connected together. Now you'll be able to get all your Internet needs, from connectivity to content to shopping, delivered by a single experienced company. No more need to deal with Web sites that stray from the party line, take risks (and screw up now and then), or any of that other messy old-fashioned "Internet as anarchy" stuff. To get online in the future, all you'll need to do is plug in your computer, turn off your brain, and enjoy!

Kris_J writes "The Register says that "Apple-branded PalmOS-based device have already started coming off Taiwanese production lines". The Newton is dead, long live the PalmOS." It will be interesting to see that if this pans out, how much Newton technology will end up in this PDA. Towards the end, the handwriting recognition on the MessagePad was quite good, even if the unit itself was quite bulky. Who knows, maybe iPalm? :)

Anonymous Coward writes "David Bowie, the most wired rock star on the planet (he even has his own ISP!) has opened an online bank! What strange times we live in." Indeed. It's a shame there are no physical branches of the bank; I would probably trust banks more if the bank managers were dressed like Jareth from Labyrinth.

wetmondo writes "When ICANN was started in order to open up domain registration to competition, some people worried that this might create some problems. Well, here is proof that they were right. Yahoo! is reporting that they screwed up and registered domain names with dashes at the end such as e-.com. Domain names with dashes at the end causes ftp and telnet to fail."

ThatGuyAZ writes "President Clinton announced this morning that he's proposing to put $91 Million into supporting the college educations of computer science students. I'm wondering how much this might be in response to criticism that too many foreigners were in sensitive positions during the Y2K bug-fix stage. But that's just my guess..."

The continued reign of Linux on Wall Street has found another sequel with CyberNet planning an IPO. CyberNet is, according to the press release, "a developer of Linux server software". And in an aside, The Motley Fool has an article on the LinuxOne IPO entitled LinuxOne: The Beauty of a Bad Example - Lesson: Caveat Emptor. Very amusing.

rawlink writes "Corel has announced that they are working w/ GraphOn to support their Bridges client software on Corel Linux. This will allow the Linux client to access Windows apps over a network connection, much the same way that Citrix does." I hope this won't be too expensive; it could instantly enlighten the minds of a lot of people wondering what the next OS for their LAN should be...

The Inphidel wrote, "Hackers, and maybe even crackers, the goverment wants YOU. Seems the pentagon wants to make sure enough GEEKS are on hand to kick some technological [redacted]. Sounds like fun to me." Story at Wired; another one on the same topic at Yahoo! News was submitted by Doofus.

The Inphidel wrote, "Hackers, and maybe even crackers, the goverment wants YOU. Seems the pentagon wants to make sure enough GEEKS are on hand to kick some technological [redacted]. Sounds like fun to me." Story at Wired; another one on the same topic at Yahoo! News was submitted by Doofus.

Anonymous Coward writes "Yahoo reports Red Hat is buying this e-commerce company. Their product (credit card verification system) appears to be closed-sourced." I called Melissa London at Red Hat to find out the scoop; it's all open source above the API. Below that, the verification system makes use of the financial institution's proprietary protocols, which are made available to HKS under NDA. It's not perfect, but until the banks get clueful, it's the best we can hope for.

Masloki sent it: an article on prodigy-news that says "Facing a barrage of criticism, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman today withdrew a federal interpretation letter saying that companies' normal workplace safety obligations also apply to employees who do their work at home." That's one OSHA regulatory attempt that certainly didn't last very long; we only got the word about the proposed regulation yesterday.

Fillup writes "According to this article from Wired News, the ever-so-security-conscious Microsoft has overlooked yet another major privacy and security issue." Basically the bug allows sending of email from unknowing WebTV surfers. Amusing that they're using it to spam the abuse email address, but its a definite concern.

Yesterday, while the management of eToys was faxing, calling, and emailing the media to get its story out, its legal team had sent a very different message. You probably saw our pointer to the Wired story which claimed the toy company had "given up." No such luck. The story behind the scenes was a little different. Click for more.

It's one thing to drop a lawsuit. It's another to "move away" from it. According to Chris Truax, the lawyer for the Etoy art group, which version the media heard depended on what time they were in touch with the eToys management. The initial version, he claims, was that eToys was dropping the suit. A later version was that they were "backing away" from the suit. A third version reassured the press that a precondition specified in the legal document was never intended to be a demand - only a request.

To see how the coverage changed throughout Wednesday, see the first Wired story, then the NYT/CNET story, the Yahoo/TheStandard story, and then the second Wired story.

The problem was that eToys.legal was not working from the same playbook as eToys.PR. The precondition, clearly a showstopper, also calls into question whether the giant toy firm has a clue about what is really at stake.

That precondition was:

"to give good faith consideration, as our neighbor on the Internet, to concentrating the profanity, nudity and violence that is sometimes part of the etoy corporation message on etoy corporation's other websites."

Asking artists to censor their work, of course, flies like a lead wheelbarrow. At the same time the company spokesman was saying "our intent was never to silence free artistic expression," their legal team was doing precisely that. The entire short letter in which this request was made was focused on finding a resolution to the perceived problem of "profanity, nudity, and violence," and concluded by noting that co-existence was possible if "etoy corporation will respond favorably to this proposal."

The later Wired story quotes eToys management as putting this spin on it:

"This is a simple, straightforward, good-faith effort on our part to resolve this matter. We are asking that they make good-faith efforts to put some of the material that kids and parents might find offensive on another part of the site."

They can repeat the words "good faith" all they like, but that doesn't make this any less censorship. Imagine operating as an artist, knowing that for the rest of your tenure with the Etoy art group you must work very carefully not to put material inappropriate for children too close to your homepage. One use of the F-word already led to this lawsuit; how hair-trigger would the lawyers be the second time around? You'd want to tone down your message, lest you be accused of working in "bad faith."

But maybe this letter was just badly worded; perhaps there was a miscommunication somewhere between the PR and the legal departments.

Or, maybe this whole episode was a cynical attempt to calm down the activist community and get the story out of the public eye.

Think about what eToys is really saying. They have cost the art group a fair amount of money in legal bills and have shut down their website for (to date) a month. Now they say they want to walk away as long as Etoy does the same.

If someone came onto your property, stole your computer - and then a month later, after you'd spent thousands of dollars trying to get it back, offered to return it on the condition that you promised not to sue - would you be inclined to accept that condition?

How would you feel if they asked you to make a "good-faith effort" not to use your computer to write any "profanity"?

Chris Truax stopped short of saying whether Etoy would or would not continue their defensive countersuit if eToys' original suit were dropped, saying only "if the suit is dropped unilaterally, that's a very positive step." In my talks with him, he has seemed committed to finding a way to settle this matter without resorting to a knock-down, drag-out court battle, and he has said he'd like to help eToys management to educate themselves about being good netizens.

But he also pointed out several times that "the devil is in the details." And, of course, he's right. This whole mess won't be over until it's over.

It's a shame that the courts are still seeing issues like these at the end of 1999; those in positions of power should have learned about being good netizens by now. Etoy's story isn't all that unusual. While the art group has been under fire, there have been simultaneous attacks on the scholarly arts organization Leonardo and a computer club which happens to share the same initials as the BBC. Stay tuned.

Time for an etoy.com news roundup. The Etoy artists are still operating under a ridiculous injunction that bars them from operating a website at their domain. NSI caved to what they perceived as a court order and put the entire domain on hold, so email is blocked too. And Monday's meeting with the judge turned out to be merely a status conference which, according to Etoy's lawyer, "took all of 45 seconds." Nothing was decided, and the injunction remains in effect. But there's good news about the trademark. Click to read more.

The status conference was scheduled for 8:30 AM on the Monday after Christmas weekend, and Etoy's lawyer wasn't able to attend. Essentially it was the judge checking in with eToys' lawyers; the next meeting is scheduled for Jan.10, but that will probably also be just a status conference.

Here's the good news. According to Etoy's lawyer, one of eToys' major claims to trademarked ownership of "etoy" has been shot down.

eToys had purchased the trademark "ETOYS" from Etna Toys, a New York importer which had secured the mark for itself in 1990. In this way, the company which hadn't formed a website until 1997 could claim that it owned a trademark older than the art group which had been operating on the web since 1995.

Fortunately for Etoy, the Trademark Office decided that "ETOYS" was too generic to be trademarked, and invalidated it. According to this decision, prefixing "e" to the generic term "toys" is not enough to make it trademarkable. This decision may yet be overturned, but it's looking more promising by the day.

Meanwhile, Wired reports that John Perry Barlow and Douglas Rushkoff have joined the etoy crisis advisory board. Barlow calls this domain name dispute "the battle of Bull Run." He's got a point - NSI has taken a highly unusual action based solely on the bullying of a legal firm and a single clueless judge. If that matters more than the time-tested rules of the internet, we're all in trouble. Barlow says that Jon Postel, who worked so hard to establish those rules, would be in tears.

TBTF points out that eToys' stock has been plummeting since Dec.1 and asks why. Since that story, it has continued to fall. Some think this has something to do with their bullying Etoy; others disagree; there are some good comments in the Take It Offline forum that TBTF started.

Etoy's supporters' website at toywar.com promises "TOYWAR.com 1.0 will leave the etoy.BETA-LABS in a few days" but it's been saying that for weeks.

Finally, Etoy's friends at RTMark have taken it upon themselves to wage a game against eToys. The point is apparently to drive their stock price to zero. To me, this sounds about as fun as Quake over a 1200 baud modem, but maybe I'm just too bourgeois.

Jason Shindler writes "Looks like Yahoo! is back on the "real" bandwagon -- they will continue offering Real as an option to broadcast.com customers. Slashdot earlier reported that they were switching exclusively to Windows Media Player (yuck!)" Internetnews.com story here. Another quick followup: Fox got lambasted here on Slashdot earlier this month for denying www.fox.com access to people who don't use Windows or Mac operating systems. Later they apologized and said they'd fix the problem. They have kept their word. Thanks, Fox people!

nullspace writes "I know this is a little late for Christmas, but in Chile several children stoned Santa when he refused to throw them candy from a truck. In the end the children climbed on the truck and stole several toys from Santa's bag. The story is found on Yahoo!. "

ThatGuyAZ writes "The Clinton Administration today announced that it'll be seeking to license all internet drug sales. This seems to be the first step in sweeping the power to regulate these transactions from the states to the federal government. (States currently license pharmacists.) I know the /. libertarians want no regulation at all (right up until they receive a bad prescription themselves), but is giving this problem to the federal government really a solution? Will this soon be happening with state-based licensing of lawyers, doctors, etc.? " Very interesting application of the inter-state commerce clause, although my unschooled opinion is that it's a defensible application of said clause.

erikaaboe wrote to us with yet-another-end-of-year round-up. This time around Dvorak has taken a look at the past year. Winners include Linux, dot-com millionaires, while WinCE and DIVX are flops. Interesting commentary on the dot-com millionaries though.

pal writes "Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) is recording an album in February, according to his web site. The interesting part is that the web site is being used as what looks to be an interactive forum! Under "Questions?" there is a bit about the Declaration of Independence, and The Spirituality of the Internet, all with WWWboards there for feedback. Does he intend to allow the internet-going public to influence his lyrics? The last question is: "What do you think?" " This sort of work - remote collabrative work is kind of what Everything2 is trying to do. It's a very interesting point: How do you work over-the-wire?

mack knife writes "Applied Digital Solutions, Inc., received a patent for a device which can be implanted under the skin and powered by biomechanical energy. The device, a transceiver, can be tracked through GPS. God help us all. Yahoo story here." Or see the company's page. If your kid gets lost at MouseWorld^tm, no need to use the park's PA system and annoy everyone by paging him - just whip out the GPS transceiver and home in on him. Maybe we can start implanting them at birth.

CaptainCarrot writes "This story at Yahoo has the details. Apparently the police there think that some nutcase who went on a shooting spree in Sao Paulo last month was copying a scene from Duke Nukem. That he was also a coke fiend seems to be besides the point. "

CaptainCarrot writes "This story at Yahoo has the details. Apparently the police there think that some nutcase who went on a shooting spree in Sao Paulo last month was copying a scene from Duke Nukem. That he was also a coke fiend seems to be besides the point. "

Desco writes "Two MIT professors are filing a suit against the Ask Jeeves, Inc. search engine for it's "qestion-and-answer" interface. The Boston Herald reported in this article. The two professors, Patrick H. Winston and Boris Katz, are in the Electrical Engineering/Coputer Science and Artificial Intelligence departments respectively. Ironically, on the institute's artificial intelligence department's webpage, this article can be found on the dangers of software patents. " Thanks to sudog for this update on Yahoo!.

Desco writes "Two MIT professors are filing a suit against the Ask Jeeves, Inc. search engine for it's "qestion-and-answer" interface. The Boston Herald reported in this article. The two professors, Patrick H. Winston and Boris Katz, are in the Electrical Engineering/Coputer Science and Artificial Intelligence departments respectively. Ironically, on the institute's artificial intelligence department's webpage, this article can be found on the dangers of software patents. " Thanks to sudog for this update on Yahoo!.

Ken Heng asks: "I'm shopping for a 15" flat panel LCD monitor. But since a lot of these come with their own drivers, I'm afraid that when I get one, I may be unpleasantly surprised if they don't work with my Linux system. Or if they work (yes, I have seen in Xconfigurator, you can choose the LCD panels with different resolutions), they may not be fully functioning. FYI, I'm using RedHat 6.1 on an Intel Pentium II platform. Please advise if anyone knows about this."

Carnage4Life writes "Upside has a very good editorial on the history of patent law and corporate America. The Kodak/Polaroid debacle, the fact that Dell has patented building PCs to order, the creation of the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit (CAFC) which tripled the amount of patents granted from before its creation and the current Internet patent minefield are all discussed in this well-written editorial."

demachina writes "Xybernaut, a maker of wearable PC's featured in Slashdot a couple months ago, has added Linux support. They say Linux "provides a stable platform that works well in a network environment" and it "requires far fewer computer resources than competing operating systems and allows for increased efficiency" " This one has a wrist mounted screen among other things. I'm totally going gargoyle.

TheFitz writes "Hewlet-Packards new flagship internet product E-Speak has been released open source. The story can be found here on Yahoo or you can get information at E-Speak's homepage. Apparently this is similiar to a Java system in that it's a transparent application API over the HTTP protocol." No weaselly license, either; GPL and LGPL all the way. Cheers for HP!

karrde writes "Yahoo Biz has a story here about CoSource.com being bought out by Applix. Seems the president of CoSource will still control it, along w/ controling the Linux division of Applix. "

karrde writes "Yahoo Biz has a story here about CoSource.com being bought out by Applix. Seems the president of CoSource will still control it, along w/ controling the Linux division of Applix. "

Khalid pointed us at a LWN story that talks about a member of the Blackdown team resigning from the Java Porting effort following all the recent craziness surrounding Sun and Java and Blackdown. Kevin B. Hendricks is a tenured professor who was working on the project for fun, announced his resignation, and pointed out several problems with the way Sun handled this whole thing. Its a good bit to read to get a more inside perspective.

the gaijin writes "I'm looking for an alternative to Netscape Proxy Server, ideally using Linux and an Apache SSL variant. Our architecture follows the "reverse secure proxy model": A proxy server (Solaris + Netscape, 2 machines in round robin) handles HTTPS requests from a browser client. The proxy decodes the request and passes it as an HTTP request to one of the many application servers. The application server returns an HTTP response to the proxy, which then encodes the response and returns HTTPS to the browser client. (Application servers are actually grouped into farms defined by a Radware loadbalancing appliance; the proxy talks to the farms-- but the proxy is unaware of this). Has anyone implemented a model like this using the Apache proxying facilities, using one of the SSL variants? Is it possible? " jimjag writes: There's an article in Web Techniques that shows how to use mod_proxy and mod_rewrite to implement one layer of the above: the reverse proxying part.

Well, I'm going to drown in submissions if I don't post the news that VA Linux Systems opened at 299$ a share, which is some sort of record, I'm sure. You can check it's current trading level as well, albeit with a twenty-minute delay. Congrats to all involved.

Well, I'm going to drown in submissions if I don't post the news that VA Linux Systems opened at 299$ a share, which is some sort of record, I'm sure. You can check it's current trading level as well, albeit with a twenty-minute delay. Congrats to all involved.

The Samo Fool wrote in with some news from Forbes, via Yahoo: Forbes Magazine has declared Legos to be the Toy of the Century. Very well deserved, and interestingly enough one of the few commercial brands choosen by Forbes - other winners for X of Century included the paperclip (No, not the MS Office Assistant) and the vacuum cleaner.

Well VA Linux Systems has been popping up all over the news, from a story in MSNBC to a commentary from news.com. The latest word is that they have repriced their offering, putting the shares' range at $21-23 per share. As soon as the SEC approves this, the people on the friends and family list should expect to be contacted to confirm their position. Update: 12/07 05:40 by H :Thanks to readers for the latest update on pricing - it is $21-23.

moonboy sent us a Yahoo article that talks about the mars probe is probably lost. $165M down the drain, but it was for science right? I definitely have mixed feelings on this one. I'm not sure about the long term effects of this, but it definitely has been a credibility disaster for NASA.

moonboy sent us a Yahoo article that talks about the mars probe is probably lost. $165M down the drain, but it was for science right? I definitely have mixed feelings on this one. I'm not sure about the long term effects of this, but it definitely has been a credibility disaster for NASA.

jyang writes "Washington Post reported AT&T to Open Door to Net Rivals. The agreement is only with MindSpring. Fate of noise maker like AOL and GTE is not mentioned. " Read the story from Oregon about AT&T being forced to open the pipes. Hopefully this means boardband sooner for everyone. The deal, however, is not a binding business agreement - it's just a statement of agreement with "principles".

noom writes "Dell and Redhat have extended their strategic alliance", with Dell agreeing to install RH Linux on all of it's PowerEdge servers and Redhat agreeing to provide support. Sheesh, that was unexpected. "

Ice_Hole sent us linkage to a story talking about IBM developing new 90 GHz Circuits for microprocessors. The SiGe-Copper transistor mix can apparently be built on existing assembly lines, and they've actually been doing it at .5 and .25 microns.

It's been a long week for etoy.com. On Monday, a judge issued a preliminary injuction fining them $10,000 each day that their website was hosted at their domain. They shut it down right away, of course. They're just internet artists. They don't have six billion dollars like the company that filed the suit: eToys.com. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Click More. Update: For more information about etoy, see the freshly-updated dmoz category.

etoy was founded in 1994 by a group of European artists who worked on the cutting edge, doing performance art at techno events and raves. Their focus has always been on the internet as new medium; this interview gives a feel for their perspective.

They picked the name "etoy" literally by consensus and running code. Being from Italy, England, and Switzerland, physical collaboration was difficult, so they got together on an IRC channel and went through a list of random names generated by a perl script. When "etoy" came up, they all knew that was the name they wanted; they first used it in October of 1994. In October 1995 they put up their website at etoy.com.

Christmas 1995 came and went.

In 1996, etoy won their first artistic award. Their work typically blurs the line between real world and art; in this case, they had undertaken to demonstrate how important and yet how fragile the system of search engines was. By subverting the meta tags of prominent websites like Playboy, they pulled inexperienced surfers to their site, where they put in a plug for Kevin Mitnick, and had a few laughs at the newbies' expense. They called it the "Digital Hijack."

A curious kind of art. In 1996 it was original enough to win an award from Ars Electronica. Nowadays everyone knows the trick, the search engines find it and disregard it, and some underhanded websites try to make a fast buck by stealing trademarks - but etoy did it first, for fun.

Christmas 1996 came and went.

In June 1997 etoys.com, with an S, began operations. It wasn't until October that their website went online. They filed for a U.S. trademark on their domain, at which point etoy got a little alarmed and filed for their own trademark on their own domain. Maybe because they're based in Europe, or maybe for some other reason, etoy says their application is still pending on some technicalities.

But it doesn't matter when their trademark is granted. Their website went online in October 1995, two full years before etoys', and it's date of first use that's important - not the date of filing.

Christmas 1997 came and went.

Christmas 1998 came and went.

But now it's 1999, the year of the e-tailer. Suddenly etoys.com, with an S, has gone public and is worth six billion dollars. Meanwhile etoy.com, without an S, again putting the spotlight on corporations and society, has raised money by "selling shares" of itself. I'm not quite sure how they did it, but at an artists' gathering, a half-serious, half-mocking exhibition-slash-fundraising they pulled in something over ten thousand dollars. (Which they then donated to their friends in the U.S., also working at the boundary of society and corporations, RTMark, best-known for their George W. Bush parody site.)

In the year of the e-tailer, what kind of speech scares corporations more than anything? Disrespect. Artists who don't play by the rules. People who don't understand that business is serious business.

Etoys.com, with an S, wants etoy.com, with no S. They offered money. At one point they were offering cash and (mostly) stock that would have been worth almost half a million dollars. No sale.

But that should give us an idea of how much they're willing to spend on lawyers.

Finally, in September, eToys filed a lawsuit against etoy, on the grounds that a potential customer had mistakenly gone to the wrong site and had seen the message that - if they wanted to enjoy etoy.com to its fullest extent - they should download "the fucking flash plugin." They also didn't like the pierced breasts or etoy's sense of humor.

To be precise, they claim that "the antisocial, obscene, and offensive images associated with defendants' use of the mark 'etoy,' both on the Internet and elsewhere, have tarnished the ETOYS® mark and the eToys brand name..."

Let this be a lesson to anyone whose domain is coveted by a multi-billion-dollar company: careful with the F-word.

In October and November the case was bounced from an L.A. court to U.S. District Court, and finally to a California State Court. In late November the judge refused a request to let the European artists attend the proceedings by teleconference. In those proceedings, the judge was told that the artists had engaged in "digital hijacking" (the 1996 project), and had sold shares of stock without being properly regulated on an official stock exchange (the 1999 fundraising exhibition). Worst of all, they were hosting illegal hardcore pornography (which was actually just a link to another site).

They claim:

"Defendants use the mark ETOY indiscriminately and in random association with unrelated concepts. For example, on the etoy web site alone, defendants use the mark ETOY in conjunction with other, randomly selected words to create phrases such as: 'etoy.research,' 'etoy.eternity,' 'etoy.timezone,' 'etoy.history,' 'etoy.servers,' 'etoy.strategy,' 'etoy.journeys,' 'etoy.universe,' and 'etoy.crew.'

"By using the mark ETOY in this random, indiscriminate manner, defendants cause both ETOY and the ETOYS® mark to lose any distinctive, signifying meaning."

Serious business.

The lawyers also kindly suggested that, since at least one etoy member is from Switzerland, they really would be more suited to a website in the .ch domain: etoy.ch. Never mind the years of work and the reputation that the artists have built around etoy.com - we all know that "dot-com" belongs to America!

Faced with a torrent of buzzwords, the judge issued a preliminary injunction barring etoy from: operating a website in the etoy.com domain; associating their domain name with the "digital hijack"; or selling their "shares" in the U.S.

Penalty for disobeying the injuction: $10,000 per day in fines.

On November 30, etoy.com shut down its Apache webserver. Its last access came from the eToys law firm (which has been monitoring it closely). They had no choice, really. In fact, when I talked with a member of etoy, he was very nervous about saying things which might get him in more legal trouble. Suddenly, the artists are afraid to speak.

How can this be, when, as the Village Voice wrote in an excellent article, this lawsuit doesn't even pass the "giggle test"? It's absurd to think that one website can shut down another for having a similar domain name - when the second site is not a domain poacher and has been operating two years longer than the first.

The date of the next court hearing, at which this preliminary injunction will surely be overturned: December 27th. How convenient! Just after the Christmas shopping season.

If you'd like to see more about etoy, their domain is down of course, and I don't know of any mirrors, but their fans have constructed a site at toywar.com that has some information. And etoy may put some or all of its site back online at its IP number (not name!): 146.228.204.72:8080.

Good rules have been written to prevent things like this from happening. Unfortunately, the rules have not taken effect yet for most domains. Even after they do take effect, their legal status will be uncertain until they are tested in court.

Those rules are ICANN's Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. This policy ensures that the conditions under which a domain name can be disputed are strictly limited. For such a dispute even to proceed, a complainant must assert that each of three things is true:

your domain name infringes on a trademark;

you have "no rights or legitimate interests" to your domain;

and your domain name is being used "in bad faith."

As long as you're operating in good faith, or you have any legitimate interest in your domain, there is not even cause to bring up a dispute over a domain. Clearly this puts etoy.com on firm ground, because regardless of the trademark issue (which should be resolved once their mark registration is granted) they win on the other two points. This doesn't stop clueless judges from issuing injuctions, of course. But having these rules codified as official policy will give the legal system better guidelines to operate by.

These rules went into effect for some domain name registries on Wednesday, but will not apply to the most popular registry, Network Solutions, until January.

I can't even complain to eToys.com. I clicked all over their website looking for an email contact address and couldn't find one. When I filled in the web form to ask that someone get in touch with me for this story, all I got was a email form letter:

It is our goal to respond to all order-related e-mail within 24 hours. If your e-mail is not order-related, we will do our best to take care of your questions, concerns and suggestions as soon as possible.

It's 72 hours later, so my email must not have been sufficiently order-related.

In the meantime, I can at least have the satisfaction of taking my order-related business elsewhere this holiday season. I'm sure eToys couldn't care less, but it will serve me as a small comfort during the remaining 22 holy shopping days. In a world run by retailers, e-tailers, and lawyers, I need everything I can get to help me make sense of the bizarre orgy of spirituality-soaked commerce that serves as the endcap of each year. Hohoho.

Let's start this off with some Microsoft parodies: Polo pointed us to a version of office2000 that many Slashdotters might prefer to the Microsoft version. Lexie (ask out CowboyNeal!) sent us a Microsoft Monopoly that you probably won't see in stores. G. Crisp sent us a Lego Penguin: proof that someone has both too much spare time, and too many legos. An anonymous reader noted that you can get AccuWeather®5-Day Forecast for AREA 51. Forecast calls for black helecopters and Gillian Anderson. witten sent us a random Jon Katz story generator called (not surprisingly) Katzdot. While we're on the subject of Slashdot, it's worth nothing that ThinkGeek is now carrying new Slashdot T-Shirts. Of course personally I'd prefer the 'Kernel Panic' shot glasses, but then again, I've had a pretty long week. dayeight sent us something that is pretty indescribible. It involves video games, but presumably it also involved some sort of illegal substances too. I think its a metaphor for something. How about a few 'True Stories' to brighten up your day (no I'm not talking about zany Talking Heads movies). First zentropy sent us what seems to be a true story about why sports and Taco Bell just don't mix. An anonymous reader showed us a woman who is trying to get workers comp from her employer since she got carpal tunnel... her job involves phones, but it wasn't dialing them that caused the *ahem* injury.

StDave writes "Yesterday Cisco announced a very cool technology. It is a 44Mb wireless technology that doesn't require line of sight and has a range of 30 miles. Take your ADSL line on the road with you. " Wow - they've found a way to use the "ghosting" caused by obstructions to tv and cell signals. Base units will cost around 150,000$ and the transceivers will be under 500$, with start of marketing sometime around June.

fabrini writes "That cute little animated Comet Cursor, that some websites try to send you when you visit their site, is actually doing more than impressing the kids. It's also tracking your activity on over 60,000 websites using a unique serial number -- and all without asking. "

creativemeans writes "Yahoo! is running a story on electro hippies plotting to sabotage the WTO. Actually I'm just curious if anybody has a link to the electrohippie site. The idea is pretty revolutionary I guess, but I've considered the Internet the battle ground for freedom for a long time already. Maybe the next century will be like the 60s, but nobody will replace Jimi." Update by RM: Slur was the first to send in the electrohippies URL. Thanks!

devphil writes "Reuters reports that six new planets have been discovered using the gravity-wobble method. Five of them are in the "habitable zone." More details are online. " Well, they all appear to be Jupiter size class, so are most likely composed of the same elements. The primary elements of Jupiter are hydrogen and helium gas, which combined with an enormous gravity well don't make it very friendly to carbon based life. But five of the six are in the zone that would support liquid water, deemed a life-necessary element.

zDooder writes "According to Yahoo Finance, rumors are flying on Wall Street about RedHat buying out Corel. " Corel's stock has been all over the place as a result (Discloser:I own some Corel stock). It's definitely an interesting match. Corel's distribution is based on Debian, and Word Perfect is a decidedly closed source product. I'm not putting a lot of weight in this one, but I've heard stranger rumors so who knows.