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John Langford sent in the statement read by Dr. Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, who decided to skip presenting the paper he co-authored at a scientific conference due to legal threats made by the RIAA. The RIAA put out an open challenge in September 2000, requesting that researchers attack and crack the SDMI watermarking scheme, but demanded that anyone who researched the scheme suppress their results in order to be eligible for a cash prize. "Show off your skills", they said, but they didn't mean it. Felten and colleagues declined the cash prize and its accompanying restrictions, but have been threatened anyway - the RIAA would have brought a lawsuit claiming the research paper is a circumvention device forbidden by the DMCA, much like the DeCSS case.

Statement read by Edward W. Felten
Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop
Pittsburgh, PA
April 26, 2001

"On behalf of the authors of the paper "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge," I am disappointed to tell you that we will not be presenting our paper today.

Our paper was submitted via the normal academic peer-review process. The reviewers, who were chosen for their scientific reputations and credentials, enthusiastically recommended the paper for publication, due to their judgment of the paper's scientific merit.

Nevertheless, the Recording Industry Association of America, the SDMI Foundation, and the Verance Corporation threatened to bring a lawsuit if we proceeded with our presentation or the publication of our paper. Threats were made against the authors, against the conference organizers, and against their respective employers.

Litigation is costly, time-consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the other side's case. Ultimately we, the authors, reached a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers to litigation at this time.

We remain committed to free speech and to the value of scientific debate to our country and the world. We believe that people benefit from learning the truth about the products they are asked to buy. We will continue to fight for these values, and for the right to publish our paper.

We look forward to the day when we can present the results of our research to you, our colleagues, through the normal scientific publication process, so that you can judge our work for yourselves."

Oliver writes "Sony officially announced their port of Linux to the PlayStaion2 game console. In the press release they mention that they were moved by demand the community petition (see this story) demonstrated with over 6000 signers. The PS2 Linux Kit page is currently only in Japanese and there's not much info thre yet other than some pictures. But according to it, a Beta version is going to be sold to 1000 members of the community in June for about $200. The Kit is going to consist of an external HDD/Ethernet unit connected to the PCMCIA slot, found on early Japanese PS2 models, a VGA adapterplus USB Mouse and Keyboard. Kits for oversee models are supposedly in planning. The kit will include a complete Linux/X11 environment with all sources, technical hardware manuals for the EE, GS and vectorunits plus a low-level API and Mesa drivers for graphics. " Won't work for us unfortunate american PS2 junkies. But its a sweet step.

An AC sent in: "15,817 scientists have threatened to boycott all journals that refuse to provide free public online access to their articles within 6 months of publication. After all, the scientists provide the articles free of charge. What's the excuse the journals use? They claim that public archives introduce errors into the articles, making them unreliable!" We've run stories about the journal debate before; see this one or this one or this one. But it sounds like scientists are getting a bit peeved now - good for them. The lesson that "No, you don't have to give up all your rights to your work in exchange for publication anymore" is one that musicians could stand to learn as well. I guess the scientists are faster learners.

slashdoter writes: "Last year Kenneth J. Harvey defended his domain name Wallmartcanadasucks.com ( note the two ll's ) from Wal-mart. so what does he do now? What every red blooded canadian geek would, demand all of Wal-mart's domains with Wallmart ( two ll's ) in them. This would be really cool if he wins." This may be an opportune time to mention WIPO's new report on the domain name system, which recommends an assortment of new protections for trademarks in the domain name system. I haven't read it all yet, but the recommendations include taking domains away from the current holders and reassigning them, blocking new registrations of various classes of words, etc.

hph writes: "Kyodo News reports: The Tokyo High Court upheld a 1999 lower court ruling Tuesday that allowed a company to sell secondhand video game software without being restricted by the manufacturer's demand for copyright protection. Presiding judge Kazuaki Yamashita said in the ruling that the Tokyo-based game developer, Enix Corp., has no right to stop Josho Co. from selling its products freely, upholding a May 27 1999 ruling of the Tokyo District Court." The news article has already scrolled off that page, but if you go back a bit you'll find it. It's good to see that the First Sale doctrine is alive and well in Japan.

Last Saturday a comment was posted here by an anonymous reader that contained text that was copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. They have since followed the DMCA and demanded that we remove the comment. While Slashdot is an open forum and we encourage free discussion and sharing of ideas, our lawyers have advised us that, considering all the details of this case, the comment should come down. Read on to understand what this means.

This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken hearted about it than me. It's a bad precedent, and a blow for the freedom of speech that we all share in this forum. But this simply doesn't look like a case we can win. Our lawyers tell us that it appears to be a violation of Copyright law, and under the terms of the DMCA, we must remove it. Else we risk legal action that would at best be expensive, and potentially cause Slashdot to go down temporarily or even permanently. At the worst, court orders could jeporadize your privacy, and we would be helpless to stop it.

We need to choose our battles and this isn't one we want to have. We want Slashdot to be a forum where you can say what's in your heart, but we simply can't defend an anonymous poster who violates copyright law. Keep that in mind when you post in both this discussion, and in others in the future. Post your ideas. Post your thoughts. And most of all, post your links. We need to play by the rules or it's game over.

Now there is the matter of this specific comment. It contained a text called "OT III", part of what is known as the Fishman Affidavit. This text is Copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. In compliance with the DMCA, we are removing it from Slashdot. In its place we are putting non-copyrighted text: Links to websites about the church of Scientology, as well as links to how you can contact your congressman about the DMCA. Thanks a lot to Jamie for putting this together.

First of all, we would like to point out that the text of OT III is available at many other places on the web. To many to list here in fact. Instead, try a Google search on "OT III" and "Fishman", which as of this writing (March 2001) returns over 250 pages. A broader search on AltaVista returns over 2,000 webpages.

Operating in the jurisdiction of the Dutch courts, Karin Spaink's Fishman Affidavit webpage has fended off two lawsuits from Scientology, one in 1996 and one in 1999. The latter suit, according to the page, is still being appealed. >From the link listed just above, you can click through to the Fishman Affidavit, which contains links to not only to an annotated copy of OT III, but to the documents on the other OT levels as well, number one through the disputed number eight.

If you would like a plain English explanation of OT III, see OT III Rewritten For Beginners, by Jon Atack. Its author is a former Scientologist who himself completed level OT III. The webpage contains nothing copyrighted by a Scientology organization. It is an explanation of what OT III says and what that means, along with commentary by the author. Jon Atack is also the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, which is a history of Scientology from before its founding to after L. Ron Hubbard's death. At the above link, you can either purchase it, or read it in its entirety online.

If you are interested in Scientology, you will want to visit Operation Clambake, at xenu.net. It seems to be the most important central resource for information on the organization.

You may also want to visit the Lisa McPherson Memorial Page, which claims that "Lisa died needlessly at the hands of Scientology." Her case is truly a tragic one and she deserves to be remembered. The site has a great deal of information on her death. Related is The Lisa McPherson Trust, which has not only information about Lisa, but a very large archive of interviews, court transcripts, news reports, testimonials, and videos about Scientology.

Here's a Slashdot story last year on eBay removing auctions for e-meters based on the Church of Scientology DMCA copyright allegations, which is odd because Copyright law doesn't cover a physical device.

If there's anything else about Scientology you want to know, you will want to see AltReligionScientology.org, which contains a huge list of links to all the sites I don't have room to list here.

The DMCA is actually five separate modifications to copyright law. Its Title I is known for providing legal protection for "technological measures" (typically encryption) which prevent copying; this is the part that empowered the MPAA to sue over DeCSS, to name the best-known example.

That's not the part that concerns us here; Title II is its other major modification of copyright law and that's what we're dealing with. Title II created 17 U.S.C. Section 512, and we're specifically looking at our liability under paragraphs (c)(1)(A), which says we have to act "expeditiously to remove or disable access to the [infringing] material." Here's the U.S. Copyright Office's 18-page summary of the DMCA as a whole. If 18 pages is too long for you, here's the American Library Association's much quicker summary

Here's a list of resources on the DMCA, including the DMCA itself in PDF format. The EFF page on the DCMA seems to relate mostly to Title I, the anti-encryption-circumvention portion, but it's too good not to mention anyway.

Don't know who your Congressperson or Senators are? That's OK, now's as good a time as any to learn. Finding your Senators is easy, just go to Senate.gov. To find your Representative, you just need your zip code. You can use the form on the website to write them if you're lazy, but if you want your message to have more impact, print it out and send it in a real envelope. Anything's better than nothing, though.

When you write, you'll want to write something they'll read. Here are the ACLU's tips for writing to your Congressperson or Senators.

Davis King writes: "NCR is claiming that two patents it received in 1987, for a 'portable personal terminal for use in a system for handling transactions' cover the palm pilot; it's suing Palm and Handspring for patent infringement. Yet another company trying to get ahead with lawyers instead of with engineers." According to the article, "NCR asked for a jury trial on its demands that Palm and Handspring be blocked from making any more of the products, and that NCR be awarded compensatory and actual damages." What about my patent for a "medium-sized length of rope for use in jumping"?

MarchingAnts writes: "According to this article on eSchoolNews.com, Fox lawyers are demanding that the University of Wisconsin close down its immensely popular science website "The Why Files" (which has been online for nearly five years) because it supposedly infriges on its trademark of "The X-Files" and could confuse viewers of the television show. An offer made by Fox to license "The Why Files" name to the University for an undisclosed fee has been rejected, and lawyers have now said they will start legal action seeking to cancel "The Why Files.""

rderek asks: "I am an instructor at an educational, and my focus is on computer technicians (not sys-admins). The course that we run is very demanding, and produces (we think) very good techs. We are allways in the process of adjusting our cirriculum to remain current, but it may be time to adjust our teaching process. What we want is not simply to create people who know how a computer works, but who also have the attitude and mindset of good technicians. I would like to know what each of you consider to be the qualities necessary for a person to be a good tech."

lvd writes "In a fine display of common sense and knowledgability, dutch MP Rik Hindriks demands that first sharp and effectual obviousness and novelty criteria be put in the european patent law, and only then the current ban on software patents could be lifted. A summary is available of the hearing on patents between the Dutch parliament, the dutch IT branche organisation, and the Dutch open source society where this was concluded. A statement of Hindriks (in dutch) can be found there as well."

Olmy's Jart writes: "Tatu Ylonen has just posted the following message to the Openssh developers mailing list, openssh-unix-dev@mindrot.org. He is claiming OpenSSH, http://www.openssh.com, is infringing on his trademark on the terms "SSH" and "Secure Shell" and demanding that the OpenSSH project change their name." Thanks to Olmy's Jart for attaching the message - I've included it in the text below. The e-mail provides the background and thinking behind the letter. This has not yet shown up on the OpenSSH mailing list archives, http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openssh-unix-dev&r=1&w=2, although some replies are already there.

==================================================

From: Tatu Ylonen
To: openssh-unix-dev@mindrot.org
Subject: SSH trademarks and the OpenSSH product name
Organization: SSH Communications Security, Finland
Sender: owner-openssh-unix-dev@mindrot.org

Friends,

Sorry to write this to a developer mailing list. I have already
approached some OpenSSH/OpenBSD core members on this, including Markus
Friedl, Theo de Raadt, and Niels Provos, but they have chosen not to
bring the issue up on the mailing list. I am not aware of any other
forum where I would reach the OpenSSH developers, so I will post this
here.

As you know, I have been using the SSH trademark as the brand name of
my SSH (Secure Shell) secure remote login product and related
technology ever since I released the first version in July 1995. I
have explicitly claimed them as trademarks at least from early 1996.

In December 1995, I started SSH Communications Security Corp to
support and further develop the SSH (Secure Shell) secure remote login
products and to develop other network security solutions (especially
in the IPSEC and PKI areas). SSH Communications Security Corp is now
publicly listed in the Helsinki Exchange, employs 180 people working
in various areas of cryptographic network security, and our products
are distributed directly and indirectly by hundreds of licensed
distributors and OEMs worldwide using the SSH brand name. There are
several million users of products that we have licensed under the
SSH brand.

To protect the SSH trademark I (or SSH Communications Security Corp.,
to be more accurate) registered the SSH mark in the United States and
European Union in 1996 (others pending). We also have a registration
pending on the Secure Shell mark.

The SSH mark is a significant asset of SSH Communications Security and
the company strives to protect its valuable rights in the SSH® name
and mark. SSH Communications Security has made a substantial
investment in time and money in its SSH mark, such that end users have
come to recognize that the mark represents SSH Communications Security
as the source of the high quality products offered under the mark.
This resulting goodwill is of vital importance to SSH Communications
Security Corp.
We have also been distributing free versions of SSH Secure Shell under
the SSH brand since 1995. The latest version, ssh-2.4.0, is free for
any use on the Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD operating systems,
as well as for universities and charity organizations, and for
personal hobby/recreational use by individuals.

We have been including trademark markings in SSH distributions, on the
www.ssh.fi, www.ssh.com, and www.ssh.org web sites, IETF standards
documents, license/readme files and product packaging long before the
OpenSSH group was formed. Accordingly, we would like you to
understand the importance of the SSH mark to us, and, by necessity,
our need to protect the trademark against the unauthorized use by
others.

Many of you are (and the initiators of the OpenSSH group certainly
should have been) well aware of the existence of the trademark. Some
of the OpenBSD/OpenSSH developers/sponsors have also received a formal
legal notice about the infringement earlier.

I have started receiving a significant amount of e-mail where people
are confusing OpenSSH as either my product or my company's product, or
are confusing or misrepresenting the meaning of the SSH and Secure
Shell trademarks. I have also been informed of several recent press
articles and outright advertisements that are further confusing the
origin and meaning of the trademark.

The confusion is made even worse by the fact that OpenSSH is also a
derivative of my original SSH Secure Shell product, and it still looks
very much like my product (without my approval for any of it, by the
way). The old SSH1 protocol and implementation are known to have
fundamental security problems, some of which have been described in
recent CERT vulnerability notices and various conference papers.
OpenSSH is doing a disservice to the whole Internet security community
by lengthening the life cycle of the fundamentally broken SSH1
protocols.

The use of the SSH trademark by OpenSSH is in violation of my
company's intellectual property rights, and is causing me, my company,
our licensees, and our products considerable financial and other
damage.

I would thus like to ask you to change the name OpenSSH to something
else that doesn't infringe the SSH or Secure Shell trademarks,
basically to something that is clearly different and doesn't cause
confusion.

Also, please understand that I have nothing against independent
implementations of the SSH Secure Shell protocols. I started and
fully support the IETF SECSH working group in its standardization
efforts, and we have offered certain licenses to use the SSH mark to
refer to the protocol and to indicate that a product complies with the
standard. Anyone can implement the IETF SECSH working group standard
without requiring any special licenses from us. It is the use of the
"SSH" and "Secure Shell" trademarks in product names or in otherwise
confusing manner that we wish to prevent.

Please also try to look at this from my viewpoint. I developed SSH
(Secure Shell), started using the name for it, established a company
using the name, all of our products are marketed using the SSH brand,
and we have created a fairly widely known global brand using the name.
Unauthorized use of the SSH mark by the OpenSSH group is threathening
to destroy everything I have built on it during the last several
years. I want to be able to continue using the SSH and Secure Shell
names as identifying my own and my company's products and
technologies, which the unlawful use of the SSH name by OpenSSH is
making very hard.

Therefore, I am asking you to please choose another name for the
OpenSSH product and stop using the SSH mark in your product name and
in otherwise confusing manner.

Regards,

Tatu Ylonen

SSH Communications Security http://www.ssh.com/
SSH IPSEC Toolkit http://www.ipsec.com/
SSH(R) Secure Shell(TM) http://www.ssh.com/products/ssh


"

Update: 02/14 02:44 PM by CT : I just wanted to insert my 2 bits into this story. This is a problem close to my heart: I hate getting tech support for PHPSlash. I don't care that it exists, in fact, I'm happy that it does, it fills a need and a lot of people like it. But there is no doubt that this is confusing to people, I get the bug reports to prove it. (My other peeve examples are Linux Mandrake taking a certain Linux developer's name even though they knew better, and the K5 guys naming their project 'Scoop' even tho another major Web site was created by a guy with the same name). I have no problem with any of these projects: I think all 3 of them are great projects, but if they were just a little more original there would be no confusion. Now I'd personally never go so far as to call copyright infringement, I shouldn't have to. We're all nice people here. Maybe I'm just a bit idealistic on this one.

A Nameless Submittor asks: "I work as a network administrator for a large organization. Recently our security officer has demanded from our management that she be a network administrator on every system in our environment. Currently she is not an administrator on most of our systems, although she does have enough administrative power to do auditing, manage resource accesses, and manage users. Should security officers have unrestricted access to everything on a network? A security officer with the ability to shut down servers, disable services, etc. scares the hell out of me and my coworkers. Can I fight this or am I fighting a losing battle? What is done in the rest of the world?"

ruebarb writes: "It appears that Osama Bin Laden and the majority of the Slashdot community have something in common - they love that free encryption! Bin Laden has been using chat rooms, bulletin boards, email, and (presumably) PGP to plan his terrorist activities. The article is available at cnn.com -- Expect the usual political outcry and demands for restriction of encryption technology to follow shortly hereafter" And an unnamed correspondent writes: "USA Today has this report about how terrorists are using encryption to distribute secret mayhem instructions via the internet. Gee, you think? What do you think -- is this part of a PR campaign to show John Q. Public how dangerous encryption is in any hands other than gov?" In related news, several of the major news networks are reporting that innocent-looking newspapers and circulars have been employed to form the ransom notes used by notorious kidnappers; calls to ban newspapers on that ground may face some opposition from extremists, but will no doubt soon reach the legislature.

Mike McTernan asks: "I am about to start programming my final year project for my degree. I am aiming to write a lightweight application that will communicate with the user through some (yet to be dreamt up) novel speech interface. The program is to support the idea of applets that can be loaded and unloaded on demand, and should be reasonably lightweight. The target OS will be Linux on an ARM based board. My initial considerations were to use Java, since Reflection allows easy opening of new class files at runtime, but Blackdown are only upto 1.1.8 on arm, and this doesn't allow WeakReferences that I would very much need to use for the unloading aspect. I thought about using gcj but this isn't upto Java 2 either. I then though about C, and it seems tempting and would give a much finer grained control over the application. In particular I think can do anything with dlopen() that reflection can do for me in Java."

"Am I correct in thinking that C is probably more protable than Java since I can get it to compile on any Linux system, most Unix variants (with tweaks) and probably on Windows with some hacks ;) I can only run Java on a few supported platforms (downloads for Java seem only to be Solaris SPARC|x86, Linux x86 & Windows). So, in summary, should I bother with using an outdated JDK on arm and limit my self to a select range of platforms, or just dig in and enjoy the freedom of C?"

BSD Today ran a comment on Tucows shutting down the Tucows BSD Section after flames from the BSD community about the misinformation they had on the site. Tucows says that they cannot meet the demands of all the "factions" within the BSD camp. It's a cop-out in my opinion; BSD Today and Daemon News seem to do it fine. All any of us asked for was for the inflammatory pro-linux/anti-BSD flavor of it to be toned down, and the misinformation cleared up. DaemonNews also carries some appropriate comments.

kastaverious writes: "I found this on Scientific American. It talks about developments in all optical switching and the growth in capacity of optical fiber. The article has some interesting graphs of bandwidth demand and the growth in bandwidth availabilty. There is also a good explanation of some of the technical issues involved in increasing switching capacity, and efforts underway to overcome these problems." The article also has lots of good SciAm-style graphics. This short article at Janes also sheds some light on the world on undersea cable laying, which also recalls the article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired a few years ago.

Anthony Boyd asks: "I am a Web Manager in Silicon Valley, looking to hire full-time developers who know SQL, PHP, and Apache. With bonus points for knowing XHTML and Solaris. I am having a miserable time of it. It seems that supporting the Open Source community means limiting yourself to an incredibly small talent pool, or supporting people who are in such high demand that they are constantly off the market. What I am wondering is what /. readers do when they are looking for a new job. Do you just read the classifieds? Do you post your resume? Where? Are there forums you use? Tell me where to go to find you guys, because I would like to throw money and jobs your way."

quoll asks: "I work for a software development company which is entirely Linux based, and tries to release all of its code as Open Source. It's a great place to work, and I've just been asked to help make it better. After going from 12 people to 19 we suddenly don't have enough coffee making capacity, and I've been asked to research a coffee machine which can keep up with the expected increase in demand. Unfortunately I'm only familiar with feeding coffee to small groups, using drip-filters and the like. I suspect that we could use an espresso machine, but I'm concerned about the need to spend 10 minutes to make a single serving. How do other companies provide large quantities of nice (ie. non-instant) coffee? What sort of machines do people recommend?" Yes, I know that this is under the "Java" topic, but it gets so underused these days that it was getting lonely, and the icon is rather appropriate, yes?

redir writes "There is an interesting article on Reviewboard.com about Sun's bigboy E10k million dollar servers. They also have one on the E4500 and the E450.. It's a good read and breaks down the rational behind the architecture designs." I might prefer an IBM S/390 for my own den, but it's interesting for those of us at present lacking a computer budget like these demand to read about what makes them so pricey. Maxing out at 16 multi-CPU system boards and 64 gigs of RAM makes a nice start.

Dru writes: "This is an article about a hardware technology that is largely unknown in the new Unix community. In theory, with this inexpensive hardware, your BSD or Linux box could start doing guranteed reboots in under 2 minutes (no fsck required) and super fast database writes. It could leapfrog all of the journaling filesystem projects as well. Yes, I wrote the article. The article is long, detailed, and mentions FreeBSD often. However, I do believe it is relevant to any other PC Unix. If enough people learn about it, maybe they will start demanding it from their favorite hardware vendor." With RAM and hard drive space both continuing to decline, I wonder how the speed / use curve for individual PCs' storage (from L1 cache to backups) will evolve. With a similar bent, Arek urges you to "take a look at our company's Solid State Disk Drives." How'dja like 8 or so gigs of DRAM next time you edit a video or burn a CD?