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We're persuaded to post this... Anonymous points out some minor discrepencies between Jack-Valenti-during-a-deposition and Jack-Valenti-in-the-New-York-Times... "There he goes again. Jack Valenti, President of the Motion Picture Asociation of America, has yet another Op-Ed in Wednesday's New York Times putting forth the MPAA's particularly twisted notion of the purpose of U.S. Copyright law. We've seen it all before: the vitriolic name-calling ("casual thieves," "Internet marauders,"), the equating of infringement with theft (which it isn't, see Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207), the demands for the transfer of even more rights from users to publishers/distributors, etc.

"What makes Valenti's piece interesting this time, though, it that it so closely follows his deposition in MPAA v. 2600 (the DeCSS case in NY). Compare this claim by Valenti in the NYT:

"A number of new movies, the ones now in theaters, have already been put on the Internet by pilfering zealots eager to enfold films in the same embrace now choking the music world, even though few computer users yet have ways to download them."

with these excerpts from the deposition:

Q Has anyone ever told you that they had ever seen on the internet a DVD de-encrypted by DECSS?
A I don't recall.
[...]
Q Do you know how many copies of films or
how many films have been copied through the
use of camcorders?
A A lot.
Q Do you know if any of those films have
been shown on the internet?
A I don't know.

Q Do you know whether the MPA has ever
checked into whether or not you can take a rented
movie and put that on the internet?
THE WITNESS: I don't know.
[...]
Q Do you know whether or not you can take
a video that you make, a duplicate, and then put
it on the internet?
THE WITNESS: I don't know.
[...]
Q You don't know whether it's possible or
whether or not it's legal. Is that right?
THE WITNESS: Don't know. I don't know
whether it's possible. I don't know whether it's
legal.
[...]
Q Do you know whether there have been any
instances where people have gone in with
camcorders and then taken the material from the
camcorder and translated it to the internet?
THE WITNESS: I don't know.
Q Do you know of instances where movies
have been shown on the internet where they have --
very shortly after the release of the film and
before DVDs or videos of that film have made
available to the public?
A I don't know.

If Jack Valenti knows so much about new movies appearing on the Internet that he can justify the claims made in his NYT Op-Ed, how come he couldn't remember any information about a single instance during his deposition?

"

e4 asks: "Let's see here: CNET and DoubleClick have patented banner ads. Amazon and LinkShare claim patents on affiliate programs. The Web essentially has an unlimited supply of advertising space, and demand from advertisers is pretty low, since the average click through rates are hovering around one percent. New products like Junkbuster are coming out all the time that help users block ads completely. Future prospects for ad-based revenue seem precarious. Venture capital may be drying up. The Internet community isn't too keen on fee-based services, and collecting and selling mailing lists, demographics and other bad mojo will get you blacklisted in a heartbeat. So how will information-based Web sites (especially smaller, independent ones) be generating revenue in five years? What will the business model be? Or will these sites just start to wither and die like neglected petunias in Phoenix?"

Günter Bechly sent in an interesting open letter to the KDE project regarding KDE, and its current exclusion from Debian (this is of course due to the licensing issues over which wars have been waged, lives lost, and kittens strangled). The letter is attached... he offers a $3k "Bonus" or "Reward" or "Bribe" depending on how you look at it, if KDE will be included with future versions of the distribution. Its an interesting one because the license issues are fuzzy to begin with, but it also shows that there is a strong demand for the software. Then again, I wonder if just hosting the debs and a line for a sources.list might suffice ... or just inclusion in non-free? The following was written by Slashdot Reader Günter Bechly OPEN LETTER TO THE KDE PROJECT Dear KDE team,

in the recent edition of Linux Weekly News of 1st June 2000 the old debate of the potential inclusion of KDE2 to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is discussed again. Even though KDE2 and QT2 are free software according to all standards (incl. DFSG), KDE2 is not planned to be included in the forthcoming Debian releases 2.2 (aka Potato) and 2.3 (aka Woody), because the QPL licence of QT2 is not compatible with the GPL licence of most of the KDE2 code. An elaboration of Debian's stance on KDE and QT licencing can be found here and here Debian does have a very strict position on such licensing issues, and even if some people may think that their position is somewhat nittygritty, it is a clear point of view that distinguishes Debian from commercial distributions (e.g. Redhat or SuSE).

The sad thing is that many people who like KDE very much, also prefer the Debian distribution because of their very commitment to the free software spirit, because of their high quality standards, because of their superior package management system, and because of their vast number of available packages (about 4500 in Potato). Therefore, it would be highly desirable for KDE AND Debian to solve the mentioned licence problems with the release of KDE2. Many discussions in the past have lead to nothing but frustration on both sides, because none of the involved parties was able to agree on a compromise.

It is possible that the licence issue could be partly resolved by Debian by the simple assumption that all KDE authors who have released their code under GPL have implicitly agreed to link their GPLed code to the QPLed Qt toolkit. However, Debian will not make this assumption, since it would weaken their stance on licence issues, and since it would also not resolve the conflict with third party GPLed code that was used by the KDE project.

Thus, there is only one realistic solution to the problem: All GPLed code in KDE2 has to include a licence that amends the GPL with the following exception clause: "This program is distributed under the GNU GPL v2, with the additional permission that it may be linked against all versions of Troll Tech's Qt library that are distributed under the QPL, and is distributed without the GPL applying to Qt". Of course changing all licences accordingly and contacting all referring authors of the code involves a lot of boring work that is not very attractive for dedicated coders, which might be the reason that the KDE project did not perform this rather simple solution yet. Therefore, I would like to stipulate the appropriate actions by offering a private donation of 3.000,- US-$ to the KDE project, in case (and only in case) that the licence of the official release of KDE2 (all official packages incl. koffice) will be modified in the mentioned way, so that KDE2 can be included in Debian-Woody at last.

The Debian project has already stated in the past that they would of course include KDE as soon as the licence conflicts are resolved. Since the Debian maintainer Ivan E. Moore II has already made inofficial Debian packages of KDE1.x and KDE2beta for the KDE Packaging Project he could likely become the maintainer of the future official packages.

I hope that my offer could contribute to a prospering common future of KDE and Debian for the benefit of the Linux community. It would be nice if I could receive something like an "official" answer by the KDE project concerning my offer. If KDE should agree, I will send a signed contract that guarantees that my donation will be immediately made as soon as KDE2 is released with the Debian compatible licence changes. It is up to the KDE project how my donation would be used; it could be used for any purpose of the KDE project, or even as a personal reward ("salary") for the referring KDE persons that will make the work of the licence changes.

With kind regards,
Guenter Bechly

P.S. Please note that I only speak on behalf of myself and that I am not representing any involved party. I am just an dedicated Linux user who happens to like Debian and KDE (and Gnome too btw ;-). Copies of this letter have been posted to Mosfet, KDE.com, TDYC, Debian, LWN, LinuxToday, and Slashdot.

--
Dr. Guenter Bechly
Staatliches Museum fuer Naturkunde Stuttgart
Abt. Palaeontologie - Sekt. Bernstein
Email (office): bechly@gmx.de Email (private): GBechly@gmx.de

localman writes: "In an ongoing legacy of tormenting Web site owners, Mattel Inc. is threatening legal action against my wife and I for planning to make a non-business all-girl video game clan site entitled thebarbies.com. Apparently they have a long history of censoring people. I've put up a page about the dispute, but what else can an individual do against a corporation?" Write a story? Seriously -- this is a standard trademark domain dispute, it's happened many times and will continue to happen -- maybe someone should write an FAQ for legitimate domain holders who get The Letter.

CitizenC writes: "ACK! According to this C|Net story, RAM prices are expected to go up again this week, due to the low supply and high demand. Buy your RAM now!"

Transition Cat asks: "Is there any demand for longer notebook computers? With laptops as light and thin as they are, it seems that a laptop with the screen stretched out to 16:9 would still be portable. The longer dimensions would also permit room for a numeric keypad. Good as a portable DVD player (with better stereo effect since the speakers could be farther apart), good for spreadsheets, good for displaying a second browser window, etc. Good idea? Nightmare for Windows drivers? Does anyone want anything like this?"

Akilesh Rajan writes: "An article at Forbes talks about the firm that supplied Metallica with the software it needed to capture 335,000 users. It 'works like 5,000 humans sitting in a room doing Web searches' to identify user names. Demand for their services is enormous, especially since they also plan to expand into the videogame and movie protection businesses." This NetPD company is unrelated to the shareware program NetPD, which, ironically, helps protect user privacy.

Three French members of Parliament have proposed a law to "increase liberties and consumer protection, and improve economic competition in the information society." It wouldn't demand free software, or even open source software - it would demand that software used by the French government have its source code available, possibly under some kind of exclusive license, and more generally that open communications standards be used. Looks like they're trying for a practical solution to bit-rot, through the only effective means. Here's their press release and FAQ.

Interestingly, they also propose that software developers have a "right to develop compatible software." Of course, my right to make my software compatible implies your obligation to document your software and protocols so that I can make my software compatible.

Their proposed law "protects commercial publishers of proprietary software and developer communities of free software against anticompetitive strategies by enforcing in a practical matter the interoperability principle introduced in the European software directive of 1991. Therefore, Article 3 states that 'any individual or moral person has the right to develop, publish and use an original software which is compatible with the communication standards of another software.'"

(Any Francophones want to tell us what "moral person" refers to here? Corporations? Committees? AI software that passes the Turing test?)

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.

We just ran a story on Friday about Mattel, which makes the Web-censoring software product Cyber Patrol, and their attempted suppression of an essay and utility to decrypt CP's list of banned sites. Since then, things have gotten even uglier. Mattel's attorneys have been mass-mailing the mirrors of Eddy Jansson's site, demanding that ISPs remove them -- the original site and some of the mirrors have been taken down already. Just to make sure though, Mattel is updating the Cyber Patrol blacklists for all of their customers to include the homepages of the authors and all of the mirrors, blocked under every blocking category the product has. (more ...)

This means, for example, that if you have Cyber Patrol set to block "Full Nudity", you might think you're blocking pictures of nude human beings, but you're actually banning criticism of Mattel and the homepages of people Mattel is suing even if the decryption utility and essay aren't hosted there, such as Matthew Skala's homepage. Feel free to download the demo version of Cyber Patrol, update the filter list to the newest one, and check this out -- or just type it into their search engine, though that won't tell you it's banned under every category. Does Skala's page contain full nudity? No? Then you're seeing an example of a company purposefully and deliberately lying about the content of a page in order to serve their own agenda.

Same thing if you chose Violence/Profanity, or Partial Nudity, or Sexual Acts, Gross Depictions, Intolerance, or Satanic/Cult, or Drugs/Drug Culture, Militant/Extremist, or Sex Education, or Gambling, or Alcohol and Tobacco -- guess what? "All categories" also include "or criticism of our company or product."

Welcome to America in the new millennium, where a corporation just made the decision to ban several documents from the World Wide Web. They did it unilaterally, without court review, without any notice to the public whatsoever, yet their decisions are now being carried out (the Cyber Patrol product automatically updates its list of banned sites on a daily or weekly basis) in public schools and libraries and companies across the country, for children and adults. (Cyber Patrol uses the same list for the "corporate firewall" versions of its products.)

A list of mirrors is still available. Get it while you can. Declan McCullagh, a journalist for Wired, has started an archive of case-related documents; -- he too has received the legal threats, despite never hosting the banned essay. (The .uni files are actually TIFF images of the documents.)

And just as I was finishing up this story, I've received an e-mail in my capacity as censorware.org webmaster. A woman wrote:

The link to the essay you mentioned on your page [our homepage] date 3/16/00 must not be correct. Could you e-mail me the essay? I am a high school librarian and am trying to find out more about what Cyber Patrol filters. Thank you.

I wrote back, among other things:

In fact the link was correct, but Mattel (the maker of Cyber Patrol) has filed suit against the authors of that essay and made legal threats to that ISP which caused them to delete the page. So, the page existed on Friday, but does not today.

I certainly understand your desire to find out what Cyber Patrol blocks, but they are going to great lengths to stop you from finding out.

Anonymous Coward asks: "If the average Slashdot reader had access to a Beowulf cluster, what would they use it for? Everyone seems to think that Beowulf clusters are fairly interesting, but does anyone have any particular job they would assign to one? If someone were to create a publically accessible Beowulf cluster, what would you do with it? Is there even a demand for such a beast?" Now this would be a neat hack, but the logistics behind running such a thing would be immense. But even though something like this may not be needed now this might not necessarily be so in the future. Something like this might be a great tool for that novice astronomer in the neighborhood ... or aspiring mathematicians in high school.

kerskine writes,"It seems that there's strong demand for Caldera's upcoming IPO CNET reported that they've raised their strike price to $10-$12. This news is in sharp contrast to more negative appraisals such as this article from Forbes.com." I only know of a small number of Linux Developers who got "The Letter" from Caldera on their IPO. Gotta wonder about that.

A few weeks ago we ran Keep It Legal to Embarrass Big Companies , detailing Peacefire's decryption of X-Stop's blacklist. Then just a few days ago, we noted that CyberPatrol's encrypted list had also been cracked. Well, Mattel, the maker of CyberPatrol and a Big Company, decided it didn't like to be embarrassed -- so it's filing suit against the coders in Canada and Sweden. In addition to demanding the removal of the decryption utility, Mattel is also seeking the logfiles of the Swedish ISP that hosts the decryption utility, to identify everyone who has downloaded it to date. Update: 03/16 6:50 PM EDT by J : Today's news was filled with Mattel's PR lies about their suit. Analysis follows.

Update: 03/16 6:50 PM EDT by J : The problems started with the AP story (cited above). The decryption software posted by the activists was described as "a method for kids to deduce their parents' password and access [pornographic] Web sites."

This was the spin that Mattel's PR people put on the story. They surely didn't want the news media reporting that activists had posted software that exposes their secret, hidden blacklist to the light of day. That wouldn't sound so good - it might get people to ask "why are these blacklists encrypted at all?"

Instead, Mattel's PR decided to say that the decryption software allows kids to view pornography. Predictable - this is the same smear that's always dragged out - but the media swallowed it uncritically. (The AP story was repeated on cnet, and everywhere else that uses the AP feed.)

Even the normally-critical Declan McCullagh wrote a story for Wired whose opening sentence was corporate propaganda. "Toy-maker Mattel has sued two programmers who revealed how to circumvent its CyberPatrol blocking software." Thankfully, the rest of his article gave the full story.

Mattel is not upset about CPHack's minor feature of circumventing the program when installed. Peacefire has been distributing their own instructions to disable Cyber Patrol for months now, and hasn't been sued. (They're pretty simple instructions, too.)

Mattel is upset that people can see the flaws in their software which were previously hidden by encryption. They want to continue selling bad software and will use the full force of law to prevent you from learning how bad it is. Legal papers have already been served and the proceedings will presumably begin shortly. Stay tuned - and don't trust press releases.

NoProb writes "Yahoo has a story that describes Steven King's new book Riding the Bullet, which will be released in electronic format only. It also states that Barnes & Noble will be giving the book away for free today only. After that it'll cost you $2.50 to download it. " OK, sure the first major book in electronic format is cool, but part of the story that I thought is interesting is that Softlock, who's actually doing the selling part has buckled under the strain. The demand for electronic information continues to grow.

Over in the UK, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill is in severe danger of becoming law. In a nutshell, ISPs will be classed as telecoms operators, the Home Secretary can demand taps on ISP traffic with little deliberation -- and without publicity -- and you can be jailed for not handing over decryption keys, even if the police can't prove that you ever had those keys in the first place. There's more on this at the URL above; it's difficult to do it justice in this space. Anyway, the good folks over at STAND are a bit concerned about this. After their earlier @dopt an MP campaign, and their Operation Dear Jack photostory, they've unveiled their latest attempt to involve people. They've set up a web/fax MP gateway. Tap in a few details, including your postcode, and then compose your message. The backend determines who your local MP is, and then faxes your carefully crafted comments off to them. What could be easier? Just remember that it's only for British constituents, and naturally, you should only use your own postcode.

msslave writes, "A local news station in Dallas reported that a Texas company, Beal Aerospace has tested the second stage of its BA-2 rocket. Designed for the "heavy-lift" market, these engines are intended for increasing demand for satellite launches. And they have spent only a half a billion dollars to get this far. "

An anonymous reader sent us to a gamepot article that tells us that importing a PSX2 (currently available only in Japan) is actually illegal. The demand on this box is amazing, but consider what it is capable of, its probably well deserved.

cloudscout writes, "The latest craze in handheld computing isn't the new Palm IIIc, it's the IBM WorkPad z50 currently being unloaded at ridiculously low prices by all sorts of discount Internet retailers. This device runs Windows CE 2.11 by default, however, a successful NetBSD Port means that this device could be the first widespread *NIX handheld. There's even a Linux Port in the works. The initial blowout saw these devices selling for under $250, but the huge demand has driven that price up to the $400 range now. Still cheap for a nearly full-sized system with 640x480 color LCD. "

|0|4 writes, "There's a CNET article about Intel's demo of a Williamette processor running at 1.5GHz. " Mentions the 1ghz P3s and other odds and ends. As always with Intel, 'Demands exceed expectations' with their new chips, so it'll be awhile before they cost less than a compact car.

Chris Halsall writes "Based on the great feedback generated by the posting of my Web Browsers under Linux article on /. and LinuxToday last month, WebReview has published an unplanned follow-up article covering four more browsers.

By Popular Demand: More Linux Browsers "