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Updates from the field on Google access in the People's Republic of China, Lance Bass's space-shot (shot down), the gaming ban in Greece, recording artists and Internet music downloads, and more. Read on for the details.

Please confirm, over. After reports that the People's Republic of China was blocking access to Google, an anonymous reader writes: "I'm working in China, and for the last 3 days Google and some other sites were not accessible. But since even sending SMS to europe didn't work I don't think it was censoring, more like routing problems of some sort. Anyway, Google is back and reports of slashdot blocking are also overrated :)"

Cradle of Democracy, or Regular Cradle? Many readers have written to point out that, just like they promised to in March, the government of Greece has gone ahead and banned electronic games. xlurker, for instance, writes "In an unbelievable move the Greek government has banned all public play of computer games with enactment of law 3037/2002. An english translation of it can be read here. This has been reported in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini and recently confirmed in detail at the German Heise site (Google translation). The law encompasses all appliances that play games, as ludicrous this sounds, it spans from cells ph ones and computers to gameboys and consoles. Greek internet cafes are protesting and international gaming events are being cancelled and relocate d. The bill was passed as a last ditch effort by the government to combat gambling. Thousands of Greek citizens have protested the blanket anti-gaming law. Online petitions can be found here and at the Greek Net Cafe site."

Welcome to your new email account. In addition to the Bayesian spam filter for Qmail mentioned in a previous Slashback, an anonymous reader writes "An article here talked about using statistical methods to classify spam (and perhaps other mail) automatically. A real implementation of this has been released (currently beta) here that acts as a POP3 proxy and works with any mail client. It inserts an X-Text-Classification: header in each mail message containing a classification of the mail into any of a number of classes that the user defines. The code is mostly Perl and an LGPL library so although the current version is for Windows it will work on other platforms and the author is asking for suggestions and testers."

Yes, I'd like to be paid in unlucky-pop-star weights, please. 21mhz writes "Reuters reports: Russia's space agency has scrapped 'N Sync singer Lance Bass's plans to join an October space mission after the U.S. pop star failed to meet payment deadlines. More details from AP. The guys that do real stuff at ISS will get an extra cargo package the weight of the unlucky pop singer."

And Lo, eleven shall have been selected, and it is so. AmateurHuman writes "After two delays, Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, have announced that the first stage of the New Fantasy Setting Search is completed. Eleven out of 11,000 entries were selected. Good job to those lucky eleven!"

Slashdot is not responsible for the content of external links. ttyp writes "We've all seen Janis Ian's opinions about P2P and the RIAA but, man, does Prince take it to a new level! Check out the artist's commentary A Nation of Thieves wherein Prince wonders, 'How long, however, b4 a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, 2 leave the system 4 good? How long b4 a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and r careful not 2 get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long b4 a critical mass of art lovers get 2gether 2 provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the xisting system artistically irrelevant?' Also check out the links to other commentaries on this page."

serutan writes: "Looks like Major League Baseball has joined other players in the big-media content industry to crack down on fans who overstep their proper place as consumers. Anybody with a website dedicated to America's favorite pastime better read this story on Yahoo."

duffbeer writes "According to an article at Yahoo!, Eliza Dushku will be in the upcoming Buffy season 7! Five episodes are scheduled, along with three over on Angel. Now starting the oft-mentioned space-cowboy-thriller Firefly on Fox, I wonder if Joss have enough juice left over to invent plots for Faith as entertaining as those in the past?" Since the Slayer line has to continue through Faith, and since Gellar wants to leave the show after season 7, there is much interesting plot potential with Faith's return.

Raiford writes "Students can now take fully guided field trips in a VR environment. An article in the newsroom section of the IEEE website describes a trip to an historic Virtual Harlem setting in the 1920s and 30s. The article gives a description of the VR technology and programming and states that the simulation is supported for both Silicon Graphics and Linux platforms"

Cytos writes "Apparently Ford has called it quits on their EV program Th!nk Mobility, stating "... we don't believe that this is the future of environmental transport for the mass market." Ford had purchased Think in 1990 and did a short run of advertisments in California for it's lease trial, even involving Hertz in helping out. I was really hoping to see this pan out, I guess our only hope for an EV now is the Toyota Rav4 EV." From the sound of it, most companies are looking at hybrid cars.

AndyAMPohl writes "An article from Yahoo! News mentions IBM plugging washers and dryers into the internet. This has several advantages: coins aren't needed since credit cards are accepted, the machines can be monitored through the web for maintenance purposes and to see if there are any machines available, and users can even control things like add soap!" The eSuds homepage has informations, FAQs, etc.

AndyAMPohl writes "An article from Yahoo! News mentions IBM plugging washers and dryers into the internet. This has several advantages: coins aren't needed since credit cards are accepted, the machines can be monitored through the web for maintenance purposes and to see if there are any machines available, and users can even control things like add soap!" The eSuds homepage has informations, FAQs, etc.

Khalid writes "People are still looking for good open source business models. Here is a very interesting one I found in the JBoss site. You can become a certified JBoss Group Authorized Consultant in exchange of $5000. Which comprise training and tests, in return, you can use the JBoss brand, which is quite recognized now. While this may not apply to all open source projects, I think this is a best of both worlds deal. The source is open for everybody (JBoss is LGPL). JBoss get a very solid network of consultants which make the JBoss brand even more solid (human networks never die). Users can get support and service and the people at JBoss Group can get some money to pay the bill and keep improving JBoss to make it an even better product, a very virtuous cycle." $5000 is a lot of money, though, and that cost is per-year, not a lifetime membership.

silentknight writes "According to MSNBC, web-based e-mail providers such as Yahoo and Hotmail may not be a haven for your private e-mail anymore. At least not while you're at work. SpectorSoft is introducing eBlaster, which aims to "secretly forward all e-mail coming and going through such Web-based accounts to a spy's e-mail". Corporations will most likely argue that, because of sites like Internal Memos, companies need to keep a tighter grip on the information that flows in and out of their companies. But attempting to spying on private e-mail?? In the words of Homer J. Simpson: "Butt out, Buttinsky"."

Longinus writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that hard drive manufacturer Seagate has "overcome a significant challenge in magnetic memory with a new technology capable of achieving far beyond today's storage densities -- up to as great as 50 terabits per square inch. Currently, the highest storage densities hover around 50 gigabits per square inch, but Seagate said its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology could break through the so-called superparamagnetic limit -- a memory boundary based on data bits so small they become magnetically unstable." Perhaps the near future of storage technology lies, for now, not in nanotech or holography, but still in magnetic recording."

Longinus writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that hard drive manufacturer Seagate has "overcome a significant challenge in magnetic memory with a new technology capable of achieving far beyond today's storage densities -- up to as great as 50 terabits per square inch. Currently, the highest storage densities hover around 50 gigabits per square inch, but Seagate said its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology could break through the so-called superparamagnetic limit -- a memory boundary based on data bits so small they become magnetically unstable." Perhaps the near future of storage technology lies, for now, not in nanotech or holography, but still in magnetic recording."

An anonymous reader writes: "JVC and Hudson soft Co. of Japan have created a technology that they claim to have tested on 200 CD-ROM devices that prevents users from copying software CDs. They plan to have special encryption keys hidden in software and which are pressed onto CD-ROMs and which can not be read with ordinary procedures. They claim that the location, length and number of embedded keys can vary making it more difficult to hack."

Scratch-O-Matic writes "This story at CNN explains how gecko feet are sticky due to an electro-mechanical phenomenon rather than a chemical glue, as had been previously assumed. The gecko is one of just a few animals capable of climbing vertical and beyond-vertical surfaces that are smooth and dry. Researchers have discovered that the secret to the adhesion lies in millions of tiny hairs called 'setae.' Each hair is the width of two human hairs, and contains about 1000 little pads at the end. The pads are so tiny that they actually cling to the surface at the molecular level, due to van der Waal forces. A gecko using all of its setae and pads at the same time could support 280 pounds. Seems to me that his should be easily replicated in the coming age of nanotechnology." Other readers point to the AP story, as carried by Yahoo! and also playing at Salon.

trouser asks: "I work in a small office using Macs running Mac OS X and PCs running Linux (Debian). There's no problem sharing files between the machines using Samba, Netatalk, and FTP. However, we want to set the Macs up so that at login they mount home directories from one of the Linux boxes so that we get the same home directory no matter which machine we login on. I've read a little about doing this using NetInfo but I gather with LDAP being included with Jaguar that there might be other options now. Any clues?"

Hiawatha writes "Years after losing its grip on the consumer VCR market, Sony has announced that it will discontinue the Betamax format. "With digital machines and other new recording formats taking hold in the market, demand has continued to decline and it has become difficult to secure parts," Sony said in a statement." Finally. Although this is the prototypical example of good technology outdone by better marketing, it's an example of a company being stupidly obstinate about wanting to own a system, and shooting themselves in the foot. Update: 08/27 17:52 GMT by H : Yes, they were successful in broadcast, and to some degree overseas - but the commercial success was still severely limited to, say, VHS.

Joe writes: "PlanetQuake3.net has a interview with id Software's Tim Willits who is the lead designer and project manager of Doom 3. Tim talks about the new generation of level editing in Doom3, his favorite maps of all time, how designers and coders work together, and many other subjects. One of the most interesting parts of the interview was this question: 'PlanetQuake3: Will it be possible to adjust the speed of the game for between single player and multiplayer play?' 'Tim Willits: Yes, most of the game logic is outside the main executable, this gives us great flexibility in changing basic game parameters between single and multiplayer.'"

selderrr writes: "Dow Jones Newswires is reporting today that Toshiba and NEC are planning to propose a new optical disk format to the DVD Forum that will offer four times more storage capacity than current DVDs. In February, a consortium of nine companies, including Sony and Matsushita, announced a new format that would offer 50GB of data storage. While the Toshiba/NEC option is smaller at 40GB, it is cheaper to produce. The two disc formats will not be compatible." Related, coryboehne writes "The New York Times has a great report detailing the history of the DVD. According to the article digital videodiscs and their players have now surpassed the VHS in terms of sales for the first time (In 2001, $10.3 billion was spent on movies, 52% of this on DVD's, now compare this to 2002, $12.4 billion total revenue with 65%, going for DVD's) . Funny considering that DVD's are only in about a third of American homes (about 30 million households, and consider that a quarter of these homes have more than one player), compare that to the unbelievable amount of VHS players (about 90% of homes in the USA have a VHS player) and it quickly shows just how popular the DVD has become."

Cygnus v1 writes "The XVID team has ceased development of the XVID video codec for the time being because they say that Sigma Designs' REALmagic MPEG-4 Video Codec software includes their code and has claimed it as Sigma Designs' own work. The current XVID homepage includes some binary-level comparisons." Update: 08/23 03:14 GMT by T : Apparently the folks at Sigma have seen that no good is likely to come from this; an anonymous reader submits a link to this release on Yahoo! which says "complete source code will be available for download starting August 23, free of charge, through Sigma's website."

PyroMosh writes "The next generation expendable heavy lifting rocket, the Atlas 5, lifted off today from Cape Canaveral Air Station. The American rocket, built by Lockheed Martin, sporting Russian RD-180 engines carried the Eutelsat Hotbird 6 telecommunications satellite into orbit. This next generation heavy lifter can out-lift any rocket built since the Saturn V 'Moon rocket', including the shuttle." Spaceflightnow has extensive coverage.

t0rnt0pieces writes "Yahoo news is reporting a story about how scientists have discovered a new way to combat the anthrax bacteria, even if the strain is drug resistant. The method uses an enzyme from bacteriophages, virii which attack bacteria. The scientists say that this method could even be adapted to combat other virii. This truly looks to be a fantastic breakthrough in the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections."

t0rnt0pieces writes "Yahoo news is reporting a story about how scientists have discovered a new way to combat the anthrax bacteria, even if the strain is drug resistant. The method uses an enzyme from bacteriophages, virii which attack bacteria. The scientists say that this method could even be adapted to combat other virii. This truly looks to be a fantastic breakthrough in the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections."

travisbecker writes "From Reuters via Yahoo! comes this story. "A Chicago company (Lifegem) says it has developed a process for turning cremated human remains into diamonds that can be worn as jewelry." As for the quality... "If it's done slowly and with a great deal of care, one could have a reasonably high-quality diamond," according to a quote in the story." This should not be confused with our earlier diamond discussion.

travisbecker writes "From Reuters via Yahoo! comes this story. "A Chicago company (Lifegem) says it has developed a process for turning cremated human remains into diamonds that can be worn as jewelry." As for the quality... "If it's done slowly and with a great deal of care, one could have a reasonably high-quality diamond," according to a quote in the story." This should not be confused with our earlier diamond discussion.

Lots of newsbits about copyright infringement today - let's mash them all together with some egg whites and breadcrumbs and see what we get. marklyon writes "The DOJ announced that they are planning to prosecute filesharers under the The No Electronic Theft ("NET") Act. John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, made the pronouncement at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's annual technology and politics summit Tuesday. Cnet has extended coverage." Reader M_Talon writes "According to this article on ZDNET the RIAA is using one of the DMCA's more nasty clauses...the right to subpoena an ISP for a suspected pirate's personal information. They want to force Verizon to reveal the customer's information, and Verizon is refusing on the grounds that the pirated material isn't on their servers." Reader MattW writes "Apparently some theaters are consenting to run anti-piracy ads before movies. After all, these are not a bunch of fat cats we're talking about -- piracy now threatens the livelihood of the rank and file workers of Hollywood. After all, the movie studios are having a terrible year, right?" Finally, the Washington Post (probably one of the last articles we post from their site, as they go registration-required) discovers spoofed files on Gnutella, and public radio is reporting that the RIAA will drop their suit against listen4ever.com, since it's, uh, gone.

Lots of newsbits about copyright infringement today - let's mash them all together with some egg whites and breadcrumbs and see what we get. marklyon writes "The DOJ announced that they are planning to prosecute filesharers under the The No Electronic Theft ("NET") Act. John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, made the pronouncement at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's annual technology and politics summit Tuesday. Cnet has extended coverage." Reader M_Talon writes "According to this article on ZDNET the RIAA is using one of the DMCA's more nasty clauses...the right to subpoena an ISP for a suspected pirate's personal information. They want to force Verizon to reveal the customer's information, and Verizon is refusing on the grounds that the pirated material isn't on their servers." Reader MattW writes "Apparently some theaters are consenting to run anti-piracy ads before movies. After all, these are not a bunch of fat cats we're talking about -- piracy now threatens the livelihood of the rank and file workers of Hollywood. After all, the movie studios are having a terrible year, right?" Finally, the Washington Post (probably one of the last articles we post from their site, as they go registration-required) discovers spoofed files on Gnutella, and public radio is reporting that the RIAA will drop their suit against listen4ever.com, since it's, uh, gone.

bwt asks: "With all the talk of DRM lately, it occurs to me that the entire concept depends on limiting the choice for computer hardware. OK, so the proper reaction to the copyright industry's attempts at PC market control is to be able to build a PC that they can't control. I know there have been some discussions on open hardware, but most if it was prior to the emergence of DRM as a real threat. In fact, Richard Stallman wrote an editorial in 1999 and said 'Because copying hardware is so hard, the question of whether we're allowed to do it is not vitally important.' DRM has perhaps changed that. Isn't the need for open hardware becoming critical? What is the status of the open hardware efforts?"

finally writes "Space elevator news is being reported on Space.com and Yahoo. I, for one, am really excited about the project. I was wondering if any of the broad range of talents and skills that we have here have thought of doing a sort of open source assistance to this project by means of donating time and knowledge." We did a big story last week on this space elevator conference.

Mark Cantrell was among several people who sent in a story about a company using "Haiku to Stop Spam. Essentially you use a copyrighted Haiku to tag that a message meets criteria (1 Recipient, Pre-Existing Relationship, etc) which then makes it a simple matter to filter the mail. I'm sure the spammers in China will laugh wildly as they forge the haiku. I challange comment posters to post only Haiku in this discussion ;)

Mark Cantrell writes: "Yahoo is running a story from Reuters Internet Report that says that companies like Doubleclick are becoming more popular with online businesses because of the low price they charge. $25 for 1000 people spammed is the example given. They do mention that there is a threat that spam may get out of hand, however. May get? Obviously they haven't seen my mailbox or Usenet lately. My favorite quote from the article: 'I think spam is becoming a problem,' Bluefly's Seiff said. 'Any time you get clutter in your mailboxes, it is not beneficial to e-mail marketers like us.'" The article touches on true spam, but mostly talks about the much more benign stuff lumped under "direct marketing," like reminder updates from stores you cleared to send it to you.

CaptTrips writes "C|Net has an interesting article on the growing wave of LAN parties. Michael Duarte best puts it when he says "being able to play as a team, talk with the people next to you -- it's just a whole different aspect than playing online. For me, it's just more fun to put a face with the name of the person you're playing with." I agree!" This is a good excuse for us to link to QuakeCon. GameSpy has extensive coverage of the con - they've got some interesting screenshots and previews up.

prostoalex writes "Music labels filed a lawsuit against major Internet service providers for not blocking access to Listen4Ever.com, music site located in China. The defendants in the suit include AT&T Broadband, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint Corp., Advanced Network Services and UUNET Technologies." Wow.

prostoalex writes "Researchers at Massey University in New Zealand built a lawnmower operated via the Internet. The device currently needs physical boundaries of the lawn, but later this year it will be able to navigate. Here's the page of Glenn Bright, the researcher quoted in the article, unfortunately, the links to the research group and list of projects appear to be broken."

Slashback tonight brings you a response to Declan McCullagh's approach to political activism (and tangentially related, evidence of Bruce Perens' very different way of doing things), a link to a few more VOIP Blasters, tantalizing news from the Blender front, and more -- all below.

Until we know how to get to Stallman's Gulch ... sbrown writes: "Public Knowledge responds to Declan McCullagh's call for less activism, more code. Don't fool yourself geeks, political participation is absolutely necessary to maintain the freedom to write code. Public Knowledge has a plan to make geek political participation easy and effective."

Speaking of activism, Roblimo reported yesterday that Bruce Perens might be leaving HP. Today, IDG reporter Matt Berger confirms the break, writing that "Perens says he is leaving HP to pursue political activism. His protests against the DMCA and other legislation that Perens says threatens the open source community, apparently, were too much for HP to handle. So he is becoming an independent consultant and will work with HP as a consultant. He also plans to follow through with a presentation of a DVD player cracking software that he says is in violation of the DMCA. HP stopped him from doing the demonstration at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention last month."

Might these be the basis of a long-distance relationship? AndersBrownworth writes "After Creative nixed their VoIP Blaster, ($20 USB to "plain old telephone line" converter with free software available) ebay prices eclipsed the $200 mark. Now, it seems Creative has found some VoIP Blasters still hanging around and is selling them as refurbished units for $29.99. Ebay prices have reflected the move in Internet time."

Much more fun than a PBS pledge drive. Kodi writes "In case you haven't been watching, Blender's campaign to become open source by raising 100,000 is almost complete, with about 85,000 raised. If you were holding back, perhaps a little doubtful that they would make it, now's the time to chip in and push it over the top."

If your donation happens to be The Last Straw (and the Blender folks can verify it), I will provide you with your choice of ThinkGeek T-shirt ;)

And such pretty campuses, too. guttentag writes "Several weeks ago, Slashdot ran a story about the Princeton admissions dean who used applicant information to hack into a Yale Web site. Today Princeton announced it will remove the official from his position; however, it will offer him another, undisclosed job. It also revealed that Princeton and other Ivy League schools were aware of the break-ins as early as May 15.

MIT's The Tech adds Princeton officials previously said they were unaware of the incident prior to July 24 when Yale's president informed Princeton's, and that Yale notified the FBI the next day (President Bush's niece was among those students whose privacy was violated). It was not until that point that Princeton placed the official on administrative leave.

Apparently, misusing applicant information to commit identity fraud is not a serious offense at Princeton unless the public learns of it (or a member of the president's family is among the victims), and even then it's not serious enough to warrant dismissal. Princeton's president also said other school officials will be disciplined, but declined to provide details, presumably to protect the privacy of those officials or the university."

portege00 writes "I just caught this story over at Yahoo! News about new pictures showing 100,000 galaxies. There's another story over on space.com along with pictures."

Anonymous Coward writes "Alcatel USA Inc. filed a lawsuit, and won, in a bid to claim proprietary rights for a software idea of one of its former employees, Evan Brown. Evan signed a invention disclosure agreement with his former employers but what makes this case unusual is that Evan never wrote anything down with regards to his idea, meaning that Alcatel seems to be claiming rights to an idea in his head. Does this mean your thoughts may belong to your company? Maybe...." This story has been kicking around for a few days but this is the first legal analysis I've seen of it. Watch what you sign! J adds: see also recent TR story and our 1999 story.

Roached writes "I ran across an article in our local paper about the United States' first wind powered federal building. It mentions that although the facility will have a slightly higher cost per Kilowatt Hour, they will have the long term benefit of pollution free energy at a stable price."

Bill Kendrick writes "A new network of seismic stations may help give as much as a 30 second warning before a major earthquake, giving time to shut down gas lines, stop public transit, etc. Yahoo! News has the story." There are lots of qualifiers in here ("as much as," "some earthquakes") but any warning is probably better than none.

Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat had been rumored to be working on support AMD's Hammer architecture, and now they have made it official. Now if I can get a hold of one of these my little site will finally be able to handle a good slashdotting with 16GB of DDR333! 'Red Hat will provide native 64-bit support for processors based on AMD's x86-64 technology, while providing support for existing 32-bit Linux-based applications.'" Combine this with Linus' feelings and Hammer is looking better and better.

Slashback items tonight include a hopeful picture of the Futurama future, good news for Ziff-Davis fans worried about bankruptcy, video-release updates for two films reviewed on Slashdot, and more -- read on for the details.

This would be reason enough to have cable. MrChubble writes: "Seems that futurama isn't as dead as previously believed. Here is a quote from a someone's experience at ComicCon: "Julie Schwartz Slide Oddball Comics Show (Hilarious as usual), and at the FUTURAMA panel they showed a preview of a forthcoming episode in which Fry, Leela and Bender become super-heroes. One thing they didn't mention at the panel, was the news that FUTURAMA would be joining Cartoon Network's ADULT SWIM in the near future." Is this too good to be true?"

We have semi-successfully identified a potential security problem ... Jim Driggers writes: "You guys recently had an article on how to escalate one's security status on a Win32 machine. The article included a link to a download called shatter.exe. My Norton antivirus says it contains the beavuh virus. I don't have IIS 5, so it is not a worry for me, but I thought you guys should know."

Actually, it shouldn't be a worry for anyone: apparently, the shatter.exe file triggers some anti-virus software, but according to several readers this is a false alarm.

How to win friends and influence people. In response to this posting ("Congress to Ashcroft: Go After Song Swappers"), Declan McCullagh writes: "FYI I've placed the congressional letter to Attorney General Ashcroft here: Also see this analysis from last summer on why P2P piracy violates the federal No Electronic Theft act: 'Duncan Frissell on why Napster users are federal felons'."

Up against the wall (of videos). An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the film Revolution OS finally makes it to a small screen near you. First copies available at HP booth at LinuxWorld, San Francisco.

It includes footage from LinuxWorld '99 in San Jose where Stallman accepts the "Linus Torvalds Award" from the hand of Linus and proceeds to talk about why Linux should be called GNU/Linux". This is a treasure."

In addition, for the skateboard-inclined, note that Dogtown and Z-Boys is finally out on DVD, too.

Slimmer and trimmer like I ought to be. prostoalex writes "The rumors of Ziff Davis filing for Chapter 11 can just stay rumors, as company claimed it achieved a compromise with bondholders on financial restructuring. Recently ZD has been shutting down a sleuth of print publications including Yahoo! Internet Life, Family PC, Expedia Travels, Interactive Week, eShopper and Smart Business. It is still a publisher of eWeek, PC Magazine, CIO Insight, ExtremeTech and other computer and gaming magazines."

SpaceTaxi writes: "Researchers reported that they were able to intercept and modify a PGP encrypted message so that, IF it is sent back to the attacker, the original message could be read by the attacker." The paper comes from Kahil Jallad, Jonathan Katz, and Bruce Schneier. Here is the Yahoo! article.

Gudlyf writes: "As an update to the previous story on Japan's governmental ID system, the AP is reporting that many Japanese have organized into protest groups that have popped up and are planning a rally at which demonstrators will show their outrage by ripping up the papers being sent out by the government to assign every citizen an 11-digit number."

jejones writes "Kristen Nygaard, co-creator of Simula 67, a variant of Algol 60 designed for writing simulations that is considered to be the first object-oriented programming language, died of a heart attack on August 10, 2002 in Oslo, Norway. An AP article, truly astonishing in its errors (e.g. "the programming language Simula...laid the basis for MS_DOS and the Internet"?!), can be found here."

Desert1 writes "Carnegie Mellon's renowned computer science department has developed a system which allows for conversation between two different languages called Tongues. Currently this has been used between Croatian and English, perhaps one day they will be able to develop one that will allow politicians to talk to normal folks and be understood." It's been in development for a while.

BoomZilla writes "Numerous stories abound regarding next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco. Reuters has published a report about Sun's upcoming announcement at the show. Apparently Sun will be revealing its first general-purpose, low-end Linux machine, and its own version of Linux. In another article CBS MarketWatch reports that IBM and RedHat/Dell will also be making major announcements." It'll at least be interesting this year with Microsoft having a booth. I'll be there as usual, but without a booth, so maybe we can russle up a party somewhere for Wed night? Anyone know a good place? Perhaps that serves Guinness & Bodingtons? Also, go see the Golden Penguin Bowl since I'm a contestant this year and will undoubtedly embarass myself terribly.

An anonymous submitter writes: "Warp 10 speeds may affect... Ooops, wrong story.. Apparently, jets are affecting the weather and contributing to about a 3 degree daily temperature variation. Even a single degree variation in overall temperature (climate) is significant, but I'm not certain how significant is 3 degrees in local temperatures." We mentioned this before - there was a Wired story - but now their work has been published in Nature and the AP has picked up the story.

eclipsemgp asks: "I am breathlessly awaiting the end of August when I can have my PS2 go online and play SOCOM, Madden, etc. I have a wireless DSL router (Linksys BEFW11S4) that I use with my iMac and XP Laptop. Is there anyway way to hook up the PS2 WITHOUT the network adapter? Maybe using the USB port I could use wireless network adapter. I know the network adater is cheap, but I will pay for less clutter and the coolness factor. Plus my wife will kill me if I have to run yet another cable across the room to the router. Any thoughts?" Would it even be this simple. Will out-of-the-box USB 802.11 adaptors even work on the PS/2, or will the Sony network adaptor be the only way to get the hardware online?

saikou writes "Yahoo has published a news about proposal of 19 lawmakers to prosecute P2P systems' users. Allthough Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, said that FBI should not go for casual users but but instead to go after operators of "network "nodes", there is not enough info in the story to see if this "should" will change to "must in addition to", if or when trying to arrest major node operators fails to curtain song swapping online. Of course, questions of what to do about foreign users and foreign music are omitted. RIAA claps its hands. I guess we should expect network congestion because of users, downloading everything in their sight to beat this initiative."

Lumpish Scholar writes "ActiveState founder Dick Hardt has quit. Or, as the press release puts it, "ActiveState Expands Board & Founder Steps Aside." No reason for the resignation was given, unless you count, "The company is looking to become a $100 million company, and they're looking for someone ... that [sic.] has that experience." ActiveState (profitably!) distributes its own proprietary products, and also both free and commercially supported versions of Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT, having given back significantly to the free / Open Source communities associated with those languages."

tarun asks: "I am creating the next version of my open source UDDI registry and decided to use an XML database backend - if I can find any good ones. The reason to make this choice was that I was impressed by oracle and db2's xml capabilities in my past lives. However, when I tried looking for an open-source alternative it seems there is nothing around except perhaps xindice -which clearly is less then perfect. I am looking for something that can work with more than one existing databases (I will ship my software with MySQL but if a large organization wants to deploy it, it should be able to do it using Oracle, DB2 or whatever they want to use) and xindice currently only works with Berkley-DB. Also, I am looking for something that can create database tables for me given an XML schema (I can tweak it later to create indexes, stored procedures etc) and given an XML document - write it to these tables. If it supports something standard like Xupdate or XQuery, that is even better."

"There are some other XML Database projects but either they have too few features or are not open-source. What is the XML-aware portion of the Slashdot community using? Have you ever run across such problems? Do you guys create your database schemas by pain-stackingly copying every element in every XML schema you have to handle to database tables and write huge amount of parsing/deparsing code both ways?"

prostoalex writes: "EasyInternetCafe, an international operation with cafes in major Western European cities, is fighting the attempts of British Phonographic Industry to fine it for letting customers burn the downloaded music to CD's. It managed to lower the original fine of 1M British pounds to GBP 100,000 so far."