Slashback: Fairness, Radioactivity, Recovery

Slashback tonight brings you an easy way to let the U.S. Congress know how you feel about fair use, an update to the legend of Elena's Chernobyl motorcycle trip, a twofold resolution to the Freenet Project's PayPal snafu, and more. Read on for the details. A bell to reach your slavish public servants. Cory Doctorow (not just a writer, he's also the EFF's European Affairs Coordinator) writes with a followup to a recent Slashdot story on Boucher's reintroduction of the DMCRA. "I thought I'd mention that EFF has an 'action center' item that lets Slashdot readers (and others) write to their Congresscritter with one click, urging them to support the bill."

Ha, ha, puny earthlings! TinoMNYY24 writes "The Independent broke the story of SpaceShipOne leaving the Earth's atmosphere. The headline of the story is "'SpaceShipOne' becomes first privately funded vehicle to break through earth's atmosphere." One more step towards the X-Prize."

A data recovery success story - please send more. bigdog1 writes "I also had the IBM 75GXP data loss problem reported on slashdot. Like the guy in this article, I was not able to pay someone to do my data recovery. However, I eventually was able to get almost all of my data back using a free program, NTFS Reader. The only problem was that the file names were not in the long format. From now on I am buying an extra hard drive, but has anyone else had success stories recovering their data? Long file names?"

Too little, too late. An anonymous reader writes "I recently e-mailed paypals's public relations department and urged them to restore Freenet's paypal account. Their reply indicates that they have reexamined Freenet's account and decided not to terminate it after all. No news on the freenet project page, but here's paypal's reply:

'I apologize that your concerns were not addressed in the previous email. Our Compliance Department has reviewed The Freenet Project account in question and the service has been fully restored. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.

Sincerely,
Andrew
PayPal Account Manager'"

ultranova writes "Because PayPal has offered no explanation or apology, the project does not intend to continue advocating its usage, and has migrated to Amazon Honor System."

'Adventure Capitalist' is a much better motorcycle story anyhow. malign writes "Mary Mycio notes that the 'Ghost town' photo essay is probably faked, and notes her reasons. There go my fantasies! :(" Rumors and grumblings to this effect have been around for quite a while, but this seems the most straightforward debunking I've seen of the trip a Ukrainian woman named Elena claimed to have taken through the Chernobyl area.

(We posted two stories about the alleged trip in March.)

Corporate machinations meet the mounties. los furtive writes "The CBC is reporting that HP has agreed to pay back the Canadian Government $146 million that had been defrauded from the Department of National Defense (previously mentioned here). HP claims it was the victim of 'a complex scheme designed to exploit both parties through contracts inherited through HP's merger with Compaq Computer Corp.' In the end they decided it was more appropriate to take action against those responsible and not engage in protracted litigation with the government."