Slashdot Mirror

bbt wrote in to tell us about Gnute, Rolls wrote in to tell us about the Tabloids' Web site promoting Napster mischief, and Jeckle shared the Washington Post article about the Canadian band, Kittie, using the web to propagate their music. I love Kittie. Oscarfish wrote in about a fantastic "Wall Street Journal article at ZDNet reporting that Napster executives are in meetings with record label executives. This here is a good one. KingOfBongo told us about the Economist article that suggests "...the music industry could easily build a closed commercial news distribution service superior to rogue freeware Napster."

Toy companies sending data (no matter how innocuous) from your hard drive out into the wide world might not be such a hot idea, and it looks like that realization has spread. Virginia and D.C. residents (and truthfully, many others as well) may be ubterested in upcoming UCITA action. AT&T has won another round in the regulation / deregulation scuffle, and there's a suprize bit of tasty news to top to wash those down with.

Don't worry, Ma'am, we're from the Toy Company. You can trust us. Kip writes: "The Associated Press is reporting that Mattel Interactive will provide a tool to remove software that was surreptitiously placed on customers' computers and is designed to transmit and receive information to and from Mattel. An uninstall program will be available late Monday for Windows 98, others to follow later in the week. This is a followup to last week's story."

Victory is in the eye of the beholder. Ant writes: " SAN FRANCISCO -- AT&T Corp., the No. 1 U.S. telephone and cable television company, claimed victory in a battle over high-speed Internet access Thursday when a federal appeals court ruled that local authorities cannot require it to open broadband access to rivals. In a unanimous decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Portland, Ore., could not regulate AT&T's Excite@Home (Nasdaq: ATHM) cable broadband infrastructure using laws designed to govern traditional cable services."

This will please some people (who'd rather not see network control handled by fiat) but there are quite a few places where your only 'choice' in network connectivity is along the lines of "any color so long as it's black."

Yes Virginia, there really is a legislature. Ristoril passed on on this press advisory which may be of interest to anyone following the passage of UCITA in its various state incarnations.

Richmond, VA--The Joint Commission on Technology and Science's Advisory Committee 5, which is charged with studying the impact of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) on Virginia's business, libraries, and consumers, will hold its first meeting on Thursday, June 29, 2000, 10:00 a.m. in House Room D of the General Assembly Building. This meeting will be for organizational purposes.

Although this meeting is not a public hearing, the Commission has set aside one hour so that members of the public can address the Advisory Committee. A sign up sheet will be available at 9:30 a.m. at the meeting location. Due to time constraints, only ten persons will be able to present their comments for five minutes each. If you wish to address the Advisory Committee, please sign up at the day of the meeting. You may not sign up prior to this date and time. In addition, please be prepared to submit a written transcript of your oral comments to the Commission. Even if you do not address the Advisory Committee at the meeting, you may always submit written comments. Written comments may be submitted to:

John S. Jung, Staff Attorney
910 Capitol Street, 2nd Floor
Richmond, VA 23219
E-mail: JJung@leg.state.va.us
Fax: 804-371-0169

Other opportunities for the public to address the Commission and/or the Advisory Committee will be scheduled in the future.

The proposed agenda for this meeting is available on the Commission's website http://jcots.state.va.us, under "Meeting Information.""

Note that the full commission is meeting Tuesday July 25, 2000 at 10:00 A.M. in the same location noted above.

Another trickle of palatable news. natpoor writes "The fan who had ironchef.com has brought it back to life as ironsteph.com to avoid trademark issues. She has trimmed away possibly objectionable copyrighted material, and linked to the fair use clause on the home page. It is clearly for educational purposes, and doesn't have any large copies of television footage. Slashdot covered the initial cease-and-desist letter from FujiTV, let's see what happens."

horos1 writes "Is copyright protection on gnutella enforceable after all? I thought that gnutella users were better off (ie: more anonymous) than napster users in this regard, but this story on zdnet implies otherwise." As I understand it, this app can report user names and IPs of people who download boobie trapped files that the software pretends to serve. Yes, you to can be Lars!

horos1 writes "Is copyright protection on gnutella enforceable after all? I thought that gnutella users were better off (ie: more anonymous) than napster users in this regard, but this story on zdnet implies otherwise." As I understand it, this app can report user names and IPs of people who download boobie trapped files that the software pretends to serve. Yes, you to can be Lars!

Magorak writes "ZDNet is running an article on the upcoming PC Expo show in New York which is going to feature new notebooks from NEC and IBM which will have Transmeta's TM5400 processor in it. There's mentions of Transmeta's background, future company partnerships, and other goodies."

Magorak writes "ZDNet is running an article on the upcoming PC Expo show in New York which is going to feature new notebooks from NEC and IBM which will have Transmeta's TM5400 processor in it. There's mentions of Transmeta's background, future company partnerships, and other goodies."

Tomcow2000 was one of many who wrote "David Boies, the lead attorney for the prosecution in the DOJ's lawsuit against Microsoft has been hired to defend Napster in its various legal battles. Check out the full story on ZDNet." This is an extremely important for win for Napster. I also think that Napster should change their slogan to: "Napster: If We Survive the Lawsuits, we're set." *grin*

RobinX writes: "If you have any combination of cordless phones, wireless ethernet, wireless video, or Bluetooth you could be having problems. I've got two different 2.4 GHz phone brands that are interfering with each other and with my home 802.11b wireless ethernet network. It seems that the 2.4 GHz range isn't licensed so companies are free to do their own thing. Check out this article for more." I've been noticing problems recently as well, between phones from the same manufacturer and the WaveLan cards.

njcfm writes: "Ok, you've all heard and seen embedded Linux running in all sorts of useful devices; now with the backing of Intel it can run your home network too!" The story is about UPnP ^[?] for which Intel has released a Linux toolkit.

coj writes: "In a move that seems like a response to Sony's recent announcements, ZDNet is reporting that Sega is in talks to license the Dreamcast technology to other companies. Maybe the U.S. consumer is finally ready for an all-in-one set-top box ... or maybe the console manufacturers are making the same mistakes 3D0 did. Should be interesting."

flupke asks: "In this article at ZDNet one can read about Linux consolidations. They provide several possible schemes such as: Caldera & SuSE, LinuxCare and O'Reilly, SCO and Turbo Linux, Compaq and MandrakeSoft. I don't think it's very accurate, but I'd like to have Slashdot readers on this subject because one day, it will happen ..."

Deslock asks: "I drool over the Compaq IPAQ hardware, but don't want to deal with WinCE (ver3.0 is an improvement, but retains much bloat). According to this story, the IPAQ stores the OS in FlashRAM, so I'm wondering what other OSs I can run on this cool device (Both the next PalmOS and the Yopy will supposedly use the StrongARM)."

Yesterday, the court decided to break up Microsoft. Here's a little list of resources and places on the web where you can learn more about it. Microsoft has requested that the ruling be set aside until an appellate court hears its case, read about that on CNN. ZDNet has a big thing on it here, as well as new words from Judge Jackson. The Financial Times site, FT.com, has news and a Ballmer interview here. Here's something from the Washington Post, talking about the possibility of an out-of-court settlement. Enjoy.

Giant Space Hamster writes "I don't know if you've seen this already, but Gamespot has an extensive article on Linux gaming." Well-written and informative. Click it, baby.

TRingstad writes: "ZDNet has an article about a new worm infecting Gnutella users. The worm changes the gnutella.ini file to accept VBS files and places 23 Trojan files in the Gnutella download directory so that others on the network may find them. It then creates a 'victim' file with some statistics on what generation of the worm infected the user and on what date. Finally, it copies a warning, 'If I was a naughty boy, I could use scripting to get name, email, whatever file I want.'"

TRingstad writes: "ZDNet has an article about a new worm infecting Gnutella users. The worm changes the gnutella.ini file to accept VBS files and places 23 Trojan files in the Gnutella download directory so that others on the network may find them. It then creates a 'victim' file with some statistics on what generation of the worm infected the user and on what date. Finally, it copies a warning, 'If I was a naughty boy, I could use scripting to get name, email, whatever file I want.'"

Here's another quick round of Napster updates! First off, LinuxParanoid wrote in to tell us about Napster reinstating a portion of the accounts removed by the Metallica-inspired crackdown. Grexnix shared at article at the Beeb about Madonna's record company threatening legal action against Napster because a single from her not-yet-released album was leaked onto the net. DanCentury wrote in to tell us about The Offspring selling Napster hats, shirts and stickers on their website. gmr2048 writes "For anyone who may have owned an old HP4020 or 6020 or a Phillips CDD2000 or CDD2600 check out this lawsuit settlement HP/Phillips was sued because of the lack of quality in these units. They have settled and you may be entitled to a repair/replacement or $200 (if you've disposed of your original burner)." Cool! Also, check out the Brunching Shuttlecocks' 'Napster of Puppets,' and 'Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Pirated Mp3s' at Modern Humorist.

We've been choking on submissions about Napster and MP3 so here's a selection of them: Alexander Burke shared this ZDNet Article about how TVT Records (the fine folks who bring you Snoop Dogg) is getting into the let's-sue-Napster game. Borodir wrote in about how Suzanne Vega influenced the mp3 compression format, and Slashdot reader Napster Online told us about the Salon interview with Napster iCEO Hank Barry. Here's an editorial by John Perry Barlow about the whole Napster mess and a finally a ZD UK story about MP3 pirates going to jail in the future.

Small Hairy Troll writes "An ZDTV article (requires Realplayer, Media Player or Quicktime) on how insane housing prices in Silicon Valley have become. An income of $50,000 with a family of four qualifies for government assisted housing. Ties somewhat into the earlier Slashdot thread 'Too Old To Code?': What interesting times we live in. "

Small Hairy Troll writes "An ZDTV article (requires Realplayer, Media Player or Quicktime) on how insane housing prices in Silicon Valley have become. An income of $50,000 with a family of four qualifies for government assisted housing. Ties somewhat into the earlier Slashdot thread 'Too Old To Code?': What interesting times we live in. "

cbull writes: "Yahoo! has an article that indicates the judge in the Microsoft case thinks splitting Microsoft into three companies is attractive to him. This is based on a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Computer and Communications Industry Association and Software and Information Industry Association." And mfinke wrote: "Just saw the CNN article here about Judge Jackson's ruling that DOJ's proposal to split the company will still be considered when he rules. " Finally, mizhi pointed out this ZDNet coverage of the proceedings, saying "Basically, the government says that instead of splitting Microsoft into an operating system company and applications company, it should also split it into a third independent company for Internet Explorer."

hypos writes: "According to this ZDNet article, IBM is going to add an insulating layer of oxide between the transistor and its silicon bed, which IBM claims can increase a processor's performance by 20 to 30%. Best of all, it's supposed to come to new Macs soon. "

starvo pointed us to a ZD Net story about the recent trouble at LinuxCare. It's got a fair amount of details about all the problems that led to both the CEO & CIO jumping. Linuxcare has been pretty mysterious about the whole thing, so it's nice to finally get some meat to chew on... the article is relatively fair.

LinuxGeek writes: "IBM will be producing copper interconnect Alpha CPUs. The samples are already running 1.2GHz. Hopefully they can make them cheap and plentiful." Similarly, sokoban writes: "News.com is reporting that IBM is planning to manufacture Copper Alpha CPU's. Now that is a fast piece of equipment. Here is the link." And nobody ever got fired for buying ... err, Alphas. Soon, 32-bit will seem so quaint, eh?

A huge number of people have been submitting the story on ZDNet (originally from the WSJ) regarding folks like Linus and others about Napster. Many of the submissions have been along the lines of "Linus Bashes Napster." He doesn't -- he's merely saying that copyrights aren't necessarily a bad thing, and that piracy is a bad thing. As well, there's some good points about the Napster/Open Source relationship -- the article is worth reading in depth.

nicktook writes: "ZDNet has this story that RedHat has released a full alpha distribution for the 64-bit Itanium processor. Can Itanium hardware even be bought yet?" Not by jes folks, that's for sure. cnoe also sent a link to the official announcement from Red Hat as well. Coupled with SGI's release of Pro64 compilers for Itanium, it seems like Intel's Next Big Chip keeps whispering "penguins." Stunning news from MS on this front is long overdue.

belgin writes: "According to this ZDNet article, the U.S. House Commerce Committee is considering a law that places a bounty on illegal spammers. These bounties would be paid to ISPs and individuals who track down and turn in spammers. Specific types of spam mentioned by the article include fraudulent spam and spam that attempts to falsify its origin. Fun to think about if you've landed on one too many spam lists, but a little scary in 'leads to ...' department." The bill, called H.R. 3113, or the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 2000, would impose Federal law in the form of what seem to be common-sense restrictions on electronic junk. But belgin is right -- what consequences might laws like this have that we don't want to trade for, even in spam? Would private solutions be better in the long term?[updated 18th May 2000 13:45GMT by timothy] Not to be confused with last year's H.R. 3113.

A lot of people have been submitting the news from ZD-Net concerning the security hole found in the Microsoft Office Assistant, Satan the Paper-Clip. Er...rather, "Clippy". Dildog, of @Stake, found the hole, which is quite similar to the recent Outlook security that allows for automatic scripting.

caligula writes: "Just saw this [macnn.com report]: 'Tuesday, May 17 updated 2:30 pm, top stories. During the hardware keynote of WWDC, which ended just minutes ago, Apple demonstrated a dual-processor G4 Power Mac running Mac OS X. Of note to developers is that Cocoa/Carbon applications do not need to be changed in any way to take advantage of multi-processors. Benchmark demonstrations ran roughly twice as fast on the dual-G4 system compared to the single-G4 Power Mac that was on stage. No mention was given as to when these multiprocessor G4s would ship, although it was stressed that it would not be happening any time soon but that they would definitely be out by next year's WWDC.'" JonahLee pointed out a related link on macosrumors.com, and migooch noted this slightly more informative ZDne t story. Mortals still must wait at least 'til January.

Anonymous Coward passed along an interesting bill in the U.S. House which he says will be voted on tomorrow (Tuesday). The original H.R. 1291 limited the FCC's powers. This amendment adds language that could be interpreted to expand the FCC's jurisdiction to include voice-over-IP transmissions. This page, at least, evinces great fear over that possibility. But I don't think that's what it means. Read more...

What pulver.com says is that H.R. 1291 "caves in to the Bell Companies and opens the door for the FCC to regulate and impose access charges on IP voice services." But what does the bill really say?

The original bill prohibits the FCC from taxing service providers by the minute:

"...the Commission shall not impose on any interactive computer service ... or other information service provider any access charge for the support of universal service that is based on a measure of the time that telecommunications services are used in the provision of such interactive computer service or information service."

The amendment, which is what is being protested, changes "interactive computer service or other information service provider" to "Internet access service." But the change that's causing concern is the final paragraph which was added by Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI):

"Nothing in this subsection shall preclude the Commission from imposing access charges on the providers of Internet telephone services, irrespective of the type of customer premises equipment used in connection with such services."

OK, so it's saying that this bill will not prohibit the FCC from regulating voice over IP - but since when does it have that power to begin with?

Does the bill's language give the agency that power? Does it hint that maybe in future the feds will crack down on multiplayer games with voice messaging, or PGPvoice?

Or, is it just, as one slash coder commented, "like telling the FCC they are not prohibited from taxing waffle irons" -- a silly and unnecessary piece of CYA?

I don't think it's either. I spoke with Dave Farber at the FCC, and he indicates the agency is not interested in regulating the internet. It's historically been very hands-off and there's no reason to think that will change. This pending legislation seem to be just Congress's way of saying "we're not ruling anything out" -- it doesn't mean that such regulation is on the horizon. So there's no cause for panic.

Update: CNET's story is the paranoid version; ZDnet's is a little more reasonable.

There's been a number of things happening of late in the MP3 world - first off, MP3.com has complied with the Federal Court ruling by silencing (their term) major label albums. They're still including classical and indie tracks, but not much major label stuff. Also, ZD is carrying a story about Dr. Dre gearing up to ask Napster to ban users a la Metallica. I also got an e-mail from folks at SpeakOut who are trying to help out people hit by the Metallica/Napster deal - so, if you got banned check it out.

trazom28 writes: "According to ZDNet, Sony has announced the release of the Playstation 2 in North America on Oct. 26. MSRP is $299 with an 8 meg memory card, controller and multiport for $34 extra. Predicted software prices will be $49. Can you say drool? :-) " [Updated 18:20 GMT by timothy] According to dairypope, the price of $299 will not include the 8-meg card, but rather "only an AV cable, power cable, and one Dual Shock controller, as reported by DailyRadar."

An Anonymous Coward (and numerous others -- thanks) have written with news of Larry Ellison's (not Oracle's) new venture. "$199 for Network PC (w/o monitor). Local storage in flash memory, operating system on CD only. (No HD). 64M ram, 266Mhz Pentium-Class. Small Footprint." Added to which, cr@ckwhore added this link to ZDNet coverage of the device and pointed out " This thing costs $199, and has more power than the i-opener or that other websurfer thing ... get the tools back out ... this one is coming apart soon!!" The gimmick is that for now, no one can buy one for personal use (must wait till later in the year) -- but you can pay to contribute a NIC machine to a public school.

whitefox writes "Another ZDNet article states that advertising network 24/7 has sued DoubleClick over patent infringement, this one for 'On-Line Interactive System and Method for Providing Content and Advertising Information to a Targeted Set of Viewers.' " The irony here is almost delicious.

whitefox writes "Another ZDNet article states that advertising network 24/7 has sued DoubleClick over patent infringement, this one for 'On-Line Interactive System and Method for Providing Content and Advertising Information to a Targeted Set of Viewers.' " The irony here is almost delicious.

whitefox writes "Another ZDNet article states that advertising network 24/7 has sued DoubleClick over patent infringement, this one for 'On-Line Interactive System and Method for Providing Content and Advertising Information to a Targeted Set of Viewers.' " The irony here is almost delicious.

Sleen pointed us to a ZD story about ZeroPaid.com's Wall of Shame. Its pretty amusing actually: since gnutella is truly distributed, you know the IP of people who download things from you. ZeroPaid is posting the IPs of people who try to download their faked kiddie porn. This is an obvious side effect of using a totally distributed application to distribute information: the information can be distributed like wildfire, but the privacy concerns are significant.

buzzcutbuddha writes "Bob Young from Red Hat issued his rebuttal to John Taschek's Anti-Open Source Article on ZDNet. Well written and articulate, and to the point ... He shoots, he scores!" Check out the original article blasting the open-source idea. Good rebuttal, Bob.

Paul Bristow writes: "John Taschek of ZDNET has written a superbly under-informed criticism of the entire open source movement, based on the fact that Mozilla isn't offically released yet. Look at the article here to see him completely ignore apache, the kernel, fetchmail, KDE/Gnome and all the other great open source projects that make the internet possible and livable in. " Remember: If you are going to e-mail them, or respond in here, respond in a calm, intelligent manner, refuting the points they make without flaming - we all represent the Open Source Community.

The Code Hog was among the first to write with the news that "CNBC is reporting that MP3.com lost its court case with RIAA; the court finding that MP3.com is infringing on 'thousands' of artists property." Alert readers like Szyzyg and SethJohnson contributed links to coverage on zdnet and on yahoo respectively.

Intoxicated Duck writes: "ZDNet reported that AMD announced it's Duron processor this morning. Looks like they're trying to compete with the Celeron. Wait! wasn't the Celeron supposed to compete with AMD?" What about overclocking?

Chad Schmidt linked us to a ZD story where they suggest that Dr. Dre, following his suit against Napster, may go after users directly. I'm kinda torn, I mean, these users are committing theft by distributing MP3s, but there sure are a lot of them. On the other hand, this does open up a new and exciting revenue stream for music superstars who just aren't making as much money selling albums any more *grin*.

Carnage4Life writes: "ZDNet has an article on Ransom Love's (Caldera CEO) speech at the Comdex/Spring 2000-Linux Business Expo. The high points of his speech include his fears that the Linux revolution may be silencing lots of others by its success; [the contention that] proprietary software isn't all bad (Sun's Star Office is his example); Linux is as much a proprietary system as any other since the GPL forces one to adhere to it's rules just as proprietary licenses do; a brief description of the road map of Caldera's Linux development in the future; and finally a few comments on what he felt was the too-strict demand by some open source licenses that all code should be opened." Some good points, but mainly a lot of unsurprising viewpoints considering Caldera's outsider position in the actual Linux Community.

rstory writes "ZDNet is reporting that "An encryption method widely expected to secure next-generation wireless phones and other devices succumbed to a brute-force collaborative effort to break it." The story is here." This particular ECC algorithm was brute-forced. Not major news, does nothing toward proving that brute force is the best method of attack on ECC codes and of course, your calls still aren't safe from eavesdropping since the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires that telco's build in eavesdropping capabilities for the government.

keepper writes. . . well, absolutely nothing actually. But he (or she) did send a pointer to There's no BS in BSD, another ZDNet think piece on the Walnut Creek/BSDI merger.

Quite a number of people have written over the last couple of days about Intel's decision to open-source CDSA, their security software, when it's released on May 15. That's their Common Data Security Architecture -- it's an enterprise-level security application.

Lets start this off with some homework: we were nominated for a 2000 Webby in Community. Please go vote for us (requires annoying login, but please do it anyway! I want a crappy little trophy!) Now with the 'biz outta the way, brainsik pointed us to the Brainshaker: a headmounted subwoofer that looks like it would make Quake a bit to real. Plastik noted a web filter guaranteed to offend the conservative and humorless. But it makes reading Slashdot damn entertaining. And if you're interesting in violating most religions, vkulkarn found an "Escort" who apparently reads Slashdot (will she go out with CowboyNeal?) Speaking of religion, Zippy noted that I am apparently a prophet in the Church of The Enlightenment , along with Jay Stile of Stileproject . Illiad, from Userfriendly.org is a bard. webword sent us CalculusGirls.com which combines 2 of the many things I don't understand. Andy Lester noted that Brunching Shuttlecocks has a book on "Fuzzy Logic Functions", in the style of O'Reilly. yek401 noted that his english professor builds barbie doll cyborgs: god bless tenure ;) Trenchcoat Steve warned us about Moon Land Registry which claims to be selling land on the moon for $10/acre: you even get a deed and mineral rights... and it might be legal! Gravey noted that their are two new Reboot movies going into production. For you conspiracy theorists, backtick noted that everyone's favorite software monopoly might be getting into the furniture biz along with Lazyboy. SgtPepper pointed us to RFC 2795 which "describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters" ucsimon noted that LegoLand in California just gota liquor license. Mind you after a few shots of vodka, finding a 2x2 blue block takes a lot longer. Let's wrap up with jyuter's note that Comedy Central has vid clips of the south park kids doing Python's parrot sketch in Quicktime or Real.

Anonymous Coward writes: "/. gets an honourable mention in the current issue of Apacheweek. Admitting that ApachePDA was an April Fool's joke, Apacheweek says the gag snowballed beyond expectation when the story was posted on /. and the alleged PDA took 80000 hits in two hours. The good news is that Apacheweek claims a PalmOS web server port is already in the works and Perl has already been ported. The article is at link " Also noted in ApacheWeek is the article in PC Week where it's stated that "neither PC Week Labs nor Sun recommends its (Apache's) use in high-transaction environments". Then again, PC Week themselves run Apache. Hmmmmm.

silicon_synapse writes, "ZDNET has a story about the new Opto-chip which can supposedly transfer data at 100GB per second. Yes, gigaBYTES. A two-hour digital movie could download in 1/20th of a second. The only problem is making the rest of the computer fast enough to take advantage of it. " The researchers are being published today in Science magazine and claim that the U.S. military will be using this as early as next summer. However, I think this is going to be another case of wait-and-see - the technology sounds a little too good - "spray on" application and such.

silicon_synapse writes, "ZDNET has a story about the new Opto-chip which can supposedly transfer data at 100GB per second. Yes, gigaBYTES. A two-hour digital movie could download in 1/20th of a second. The only problem is making the rest of the computer fast enough to take advantage of it. " The researchers are being published today in Science magazine and claim that the U.S. military will be using this as early as next summer. However, I think this is going to be another case of wait-and-see - the technology sounds a little too good - "spray on" application and such.