A
news.com article reports that AOL will soon be mass distributing Netscape 6 on CDs in numerous magazines owned by Time-Warner. Great, the faster sooner users replace their Netscape 4.x installations, the better. Alas, I'll still have to cater to 4.x till 2002, but I look forward to dancing on 4.x's grave.
beebware wrote, "The copyright, at no time, remained with the editor. If it did, then ex-editors could use court rulings to remove their listings. Netscape do own the copyright (and always have) - but with an 'non-exclusive licence', meaning you grant them the right to use the data but you still have full rights to do what you want with it."
According to the old FAQ,
Editors retain rights to their own material that they submit to the Open Directory, but the Open Directory can use it too. When editors submit information to the Open Directory, they grant the Open Directory a non-exclusive right to use or modify material they submit as necessary for the benefit of the Open Directory directory. The Open Directory has a compilation copyright on this directory.
It seems that the creative copyright on submissions remained with the editors, who licensed the material to Open Directory. The Open Directory had the compilation copyright on the directory collecting these disparate submissions.
Could ex-editors revoke the "non-exclusive right to use or modify" so granted? I don't know. It may well be one of the motivations behind the recent changes.
Editors retain rights to their own material that they submit to the Open Directory, but the Open Directory can use it too. When editors submit information to the Open Directory, they grant the Open Directory a non-exclusive right to use or modify material they submit as necessary for the benefit of the Open Directory directory. The Open Directory has a compilation copyright on this directory.
The new guidelines:
By participating in the Open Directory, and
in consideration for the ability to participate in it, you assign to Netscape Communications Corporation all copyright and other interests in the material you submit to the Open Directory Project (whether link descriptions, email, communications, directory organization, or otherwise). Netscape will have the non-exclusive right to use and modify this material.
No doubt some sort of recompense must be named to comply with local laws, as when Eddy Jansson signed over the copyright to CPHack for a Canadian dollar. But by giving our creative copyrights to Netscape in return for the privilege of donating our labor there, it seems like we're no longer volunteers but people who are paying to be able to work for the ODP.
I'm sure Netscape doesn't intend it that way. Netscape is just trying to keep other companies from using ODP data without complying with the license, changing or adding just enough entries to make the compilation copyright difficult to assert.
For my part, I can't think of any link descriptions I'd have a use for the copyright on. I doubt "directory organization" is even copyrightable. But I do want to retain the copyright on my e-mail and other communications (like posts on the internal editor forums). That goes too far, IMHO.
> If we took the time to do some research, I think we could get The Bible banned on the similar grounds.
Judges 19:24-29
"Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel."
According to Alemite, only aiders and abetters
on
CPHack Appeal Denied
·
· Score: 1
In Alemite Mfg. Corp. v. Staff, 42 F.2d 832 (2d Cir. 1930), the court held that a former employee of a defendant under an injunction could not be held in comtempt for acts performed independently of his former employer. Judge Learned Hand wrote:
[N]o court can make a decree which will bind any one but a party; a court of equity is as much so limited as a court of law; it cannot lawfully enjoin the world at large, no matter how broadly it words its decree. If it assumes to do so, the decree is pro tanto brutum fulmen, and the persons enjoined are free to ignore it. It is not vested with sovereign powers to declare conduct unlawful; its jurisdiction is limited to those over whom it gets personal service, and who therefore can have their day in court.
He cites abetting someone or acting as their agent as the only exception:
[T]he only occasion when a person not a party may be punished is when he has helped to bring about, not merely what the decree has forbidden, because it may have gone too far, but what it has the power to forbid, an act of a party. This means that the respondent must either abet the defendant, or must be legally identified with him.
IANAL, but it seems to me that all this means
my mirror site is not affected by the injunction at all. I've never been in contact with Eddy and Matthew. They are not trying to circumvent the permanent injunction, nor am I colluding with them to do so. So as far as contempt of court goes, I'm in the clear.
There are other less impressive things I can still do, such as predict with 90+% accuracy the outcome of coin tosses. If I think about it and try to figure out what will happen my accuracy goes to shit. But if I just let go and let the answer come to me I'll get it right almost always.
I think the claim that you still can predict coin tosses with 90% accuracy is more impressive than that you used to control rain or that you believe you once exorcised a demon. It would be easily demonstrable and scientifically testable. If you could do it under controlled conditions, you could even win the million dollar Randi Psychic Challenge.
However, it seems more likely that your statistics are biased. For example, by continuing runs as long as you're getting hits and ending them when you start missing, by not counting any runs when your accuracy is low, or by choosing when in a run to start and stop counting after the fact (selecting only the streaks).
I think Jesse Ventura showed that the non-voters can get off their couches and vote against the corporate-friendly centrists, if a third party candidate is famous and charismatic enough. Ralph Nader is famous, but he's not exactly mediagenic. The media that lavished so much attention on the Republican's sideshow didn't paid little notice when Nader appeared across town from the convention, which he denounced as a corporate-paid "political orgy".
Even if he is dry as dust, four years of Nader vs. Congress could be entertaining.
On April 11, the EULA for vTrails's TourBar plugin contained this text:
"12. vTrails.com may, in its sole discretion and at any time, modify or discontinue the Software or your use of it, and\or limit, terminate or suspend your use of or access to the Software and\or assess or add charges for using the Software and\or make any changes to or terminate this License Agreement, with or without notice to you. You agree that vTrails.com shall not be liable to you or to any third-party for any of the above actions or conditions."
So, they could charge you money for using TourBar at any time without notice!
I spoke to a 'Mastersurfer' named Daniel about the license agreement, and he responded "You're actually reading that thing?!!!" I quoted the text to Daniel and he said said he would ensure it was changed. I checked back a month later. Daniel's not working there any longer, but the EULA has indeed been rewritten without that provision.
Interesting... So the next time the MPAA swears out affidavits under penalty of perjury, naming dozens of sites with files named decss.tar.gz, they're liable if any of them turn out to be spoofs?
The MPAA's lawyers must spend billable hours carefully checking each and every single site they name in any complaint, or they could end up arguing from the other side of the courtroom.
That takes the World's Largest Game of Whack-A-Mole to a new level, where you have to whack only the moles and not the rabbits. (Or perhaps a better analogy is not shooting the pop-up target of the old woman with the shopping bags.)
So users who can't post DeCSS (ex. those with accounts from craven ISPs or universities) may be able to help the cause by posting the easily defensible parody. It embarrasses those whose reflexive response to letters from corporate lawyers is to censor first and ask questions later. Even if the MPAA never swears out a false complaint, it costs them time (= money) to look into and perhaps bark at sites hosting the spoof. It may even raise public awareness.
The injunction was a result of the following action, and prohibited any further publication by the defendants or anyone in active concert with them of "CP4break.zip" or "cphack.exe" or any derivative thereof:
Microsystems Software Inc. et al. v. Scandinavia Online AB et al., Case No. 00-cv10488-EFH (D. Mass.)
Therefore, your personal website at http://woodstock.uplink.net/~robinl has been removed. You may petition for the reinstatement of your website, sans any questionable material, by emailing webmaster@uplink.net. The decision whether or not to reinstate your website will be made after a review of your site's content and will be made at UpLink's sole discretion.
--- Andrew Frederick UpLink Webmaster
I'm sure nobody is surprised that Mattel's recent dropping of Microsystems hasn't had any impact on Microsystems continuing its hollow legal threats. I wonder if they timed the letters to be received on a Friday.
Eddy writes, "I made a mental note about speaking to Matthew, that maybe we should release the whole thing under the GPL... I forgot." He also writes "As far as I'm concerned, the string ["Released under the GPL" in Unit1.pas] weren't meant to be in the distribution, and Mattel got my rights to it." (I assume he feels the same way about the "Released under the GNU Public License" string in Unitl.dfm.)
It seems he wanted to release it under the GPL, but not without Matthew's okay, and the statement was left in inadvertently. From Matthew's site, he certainly doesn't approve. So, respecting Eddy and Matthew's wishes, I shall remove the GPL'd version.
It seems like you're referring to the General Public License terms allowing you to copy and distribute verbatim copies of source code provided:
"you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty"
"keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty" and
"give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program"
The copyright holder, of course, has the right to copy and distribute without meeting the conditions of the GPL, since the copyright gives them the right to copy. So Eddy may very well have been able to release CPHack under the GPL, yet distribute it without meeting the above terms.
Now if I want to redistribute Eddy's source on my web site, I do have to meet the above conditions. So, my site has a version of the source code with conspicuous copyright notices, warranty disclaimers, and a copy the license. It reminds me of self-repairing DNA in a way.:-)
By the way, if you ran the program, you'd see that in does indeed display a copyright notice. The window's title bar reads "Cyber Patrol Hack v0.1.0 - (C)2000 Eddy L O Jannson". There's also a conspicuous message reading "Released under the GNU Public License".
Matthew Skala wrote cn_decode.c and cph1_rev.c, but not cphack.
Skala's statement is almost certainly in response to <a href="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/03/28 /081250&cid=103">scumdamn posting versions of these two files with GNU boilerplate comments</a> in the previous slashdot thread on this subject. It seems that scumdamn was overzealous.
Rushing in where angels fear to tread, I've used my license to modify and posted cphack 0.1.1 on my BoCP4 mirror site. It's just the same cphack with GNU boilerplate comments and Mattel copyright notices, and the GPL in the zip. If you wish to download this new and not at all improved version: http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://woodstock.u plink.net/~robinl/mirrors/cphack11.zip
At the bottom of cp4break.html is the following copyright notice "(c)2000 Eddy L O Jansson and Matthew Skala. All rights reserved. All trademarks acknowledged."
Does that copyright notice to the whole report/source code/binary package? It's an interesting question.
I just updated my mirror page with a link to this slashdot article. I thought I'd post the others on the list here for everyone's edification (and because the server of my personal web page probably wouldn't take it if you went there for it!)
Wired: Mattel Stays on the Offensive (27 Mar 2000 2:45PM PT) "Upping the stakes in a battle over a utility that reveals Cyberpatrol's list of off-limits websites, Mattel threatened mirror sites with contempt charges during a court hearing Monday afternoon."
ZDNet: Hackers settle Cyber Patrol suit (27 Mar 2000 2:11PM PT) "ACLU attorney 'surprised' as programmers surrender rights to their hack of Cyber Patrol filter and agree to permanent injunction."
ZDNet: ACLU slams Cyber Patrol tactics (27 Mar 2000 4:03AM PT) "The American Civil Liberties Union criticized Internet filtering software maker Microsystems Software Inc. and its parent company Mattel Inc. on Friday, accusing them of attempting to limit free speech on the Internet."
Wired: Mattel's Filter Fiasco to Court (27 Mar 2000 3:00AM PT) "A federal judge in Boston will hear arguments on Monday over whether a program that reveals Cyberpatrol's secret blacklist should be banned from the Internet."
ZDNet: You've got a subpoena! (24 Mar 2000) "Call it legal spam. Lawyers in the Cyber Patrol legal battle have created an e-precedent -- sending subpoenas by e-mail."
CNN: Cyber Patrol decoding brawl gets ugly and international (21 Mar 2000) "A legal dispute between a U.S. toymaker that produces a popular Internet pornography filter and two programmers that decoded the software could heat up into a messy international brawl."
Slashdot: Mattel/Cyber Patrol Censors Critics Again (20 Mar 2000) "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."
Wired: CyberPatrol Hackers Lose Round (17 Mar 2000) "A federal judge in Boston has tried to ban the distribution of a computer program that reveals CyberPatrol's secret list of sex sites."
Slashdot: Mattel dislikes being embarrassed (16 Mar 2000) "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. Today's news was filled with Mattel's PR lies about their suit."
Wired: Mattel Sues Over Blocking Hack (16 Mar 2000) "Toy-maker Mattel has sued two programmers who revealed how to circumvent its CyberPatrol blocking software."
Several news outlets uncritically ran Ted Bridis's AP newswire story characterizing the decryption program as a tool to let children view pornography:
"A company that makes popular software to block children from Internet pornography is suing two computer experts for distributing a method for kids to deduce their parents' password and access those forbidden Web sites."
"Early today, activists copied the utility and details of the effort and began distributing them across the Internet on nearly two dozen Web sites that duplicated Jansson and Skala's original work. Those efforts apparently were coordinated on technology Web site Slashdot.org, where the lawsuit was roundly condemned."
CNN: Software company files lawsuit against hackers (16 Mar 2000) CNN's version also adds the cnet paragraph and some additional reportage, but still mischaracterizes the program. However, their later coverage was more evenhanded.
Speaking of Opera, a version 3.61 for Windows was released yesterday. There isn't a list of bugs fixed from version 3.60, but one visible change is that there's no toolbar in full screen mode any longer. You can download the update from the Opera Software website.
Opera is a great browser for power users. It's the fastest browser around, lean enough to fit on a single floppy, has so many keyboard shortcuts you hardly need a mouse, and supports more CSS than anything short of Gecko. You can toggle off images per window, open pages in the background, or call up a window listing all the hyperlinks on a page.
There are many features of Opera I'd like to see Mozilla adopt. I'm looking forward to the X11 port, which is still in development.
Speaking of Opera, a version 3.61 for Windows was released yesterday. There isn't a list of bugs fixed from version 3.60, but one visible change is that there's no toolbar in full screen mode any longer. You can download the update from the Opera Software website.
Opera is a great browser for power users. (There are quick keyboard shortcuts for everything, and commands to do things like open pages in the background, or display a window of all the links on a page.) It also has far and away the best style sheet support short of Gecko. However, the Linux/X11 port is still in development.
Slashdot Mirror
A news.com article reports that AOL will soon be mass distributing Netscape 6 on CDs in numerous magazines owned by Time-Warner. Great, the faster sooner users replace their Netscape 4.x installations, the better. Alas, I'll still have to cater to 4.x till 2002, but I look forward to dancing on 4.x's grave.
Did any of the compliance bugs named in Flanagan's petition to postpone the release get fixed before the final release?
Now it's official. Netscape.com has an announcement of the final release of 6.0. It's now available through their download page.
According to a news.com article , Netscape 6 will also be mass distributed AOL-style on CDs included in numerous magazines owned by Time-Warner.
ZDNet's story on the release refers to Flanagan's petition to postpone the release until standards compliance bugs were fixed.
cnet has already posted a review.
beebware wrote, "The copyright, at no time, remained with the editor. If it did, then ex-editors could use court rulings to remove their listings. Netscape do own the copyright (and always have) - but with an 'non-exclusive licence', meaning you grant them the right to use the data but you still have full rights to do what you want with it."
According to the old FAQ,
It seems that the creative copyright on submissions remained with the editors, who licensed the material to Open Directory. The Open Directory had the compilation copyright on the directory collecting these disparate submissions.
Could ex-editors revoke the "non-exclusive right to use or modify" so granted? I don't know. It may well be one of the motivations behind the recent changes.
The old FAQ:
The new guidelines:
No doubt some sort of recompense must be named to comply with local laws, as when Eddy Jansson signed over the copyright to CPHack for a Canadian dollar. But by giving our creative copyrights to Netscape in return for the privilege of donating our labor there, it seems like we're no longer volunteers but people who are paying to be able to work for the ODP.
I'm sure Netscape doesn't intend it that way. Netscape is just trying to keep other companies from using ODP data without complying with the license, changing or adding just enough entries to make the compilation copyright difficult to assert.
For my part, I can't think of any link descriptions I'd have a use for the copyright on. I doubt "directory organization" is even copyrightable. But I do want to retain the copyright on my e-mail and other communications (like posts on the internal editor forums). That goes too far, IMHO.
> If we took the time to do some research, I think we could get The Bible banned on the similar grounds.
Judges 19:24-29
"Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel."
In Alemite Mfg. Corp. v. Staff, 42 F.2d 832 (2d Cir. 1930), the court held that a former employee of a defendant under an injunction could not be held in comtempt for acts performed independently of his former employer. Judge Learned Hand wrote:
He cites abetting someone or acting as their agent as the only exception:
IANAL, but it seems to me that all this means my mirror site is not affected by the injunction at all. I've never been in contact with Eddy and Matthew. They are not trying to circumvent the permanent injunction, nor am I colluding with them to do so. So as far as contempt of court goes, I'm in the clear.
In this This Modern World strip, Sparky speaks out about settling for the lesser of two evils.
I think the claim that you still can predict coin tosses with 90% accuracy is more impressive than that you used to control rain or that you believe you once exorcised a demon. It would be easily demonstrable and scientifically testable. If you could do it under controlled conditions, you could even win the million dollar Randi Psychic Challenge.
However, it seems more likely that your statistics are biased. For example, by continuing runs as long as you're getting hits and ending them when you start missing, by not counting any runs when your accuracy is low, or by choosing when in a run to start and stop counting after the fact (selecting only the streaks).
Michael Moore (of Roger & Me and The Awful Truth fame) has written a letter to the non-voting majority suggesting they join him in voting for Nader.
We could certainly do a lot worse than put a consumer watchdog in the White House. Ralph Nader has written in his weekly column that Congress and the President should disclose their records on the Internet. If he were elected, I'd love to see him follow through on that and run a wired administration.
I think Jesse Ventura showed that the non-voters can get off their couches and vote against the corporate-friendly centrists, if a third party candidate is famous and charismatic enough. Ralph Nader is famous, but he's not exactly mediagenic. The media that lavished so much attention on the Republican's sideshow didn't paid little notice when Nader appeared across town from the convention, which he denounced as a corporate-paid "political orgy".
Even if he is dry as dust, four years of Nader vs. Congress could be entertaining.
Search Engine Watch is a monthly newsletter which does in-depth comparison reviews of search engines.
So, they could charge you money for using TourBar at any time without notice!
I spoke to a 'Mastersurfer' named Daniel about the license agreement, and he responded "You're actually reading that thing?!!!" I quoted the text to Daniel and he said said he would ensure it was changed. I checked back a month later. Daniel's not working there any longer, but the EULA has indeed been rewritten without that provision.
Interesting... So the next time the MPAA swears out affidavits under penalty of perjury, naming dozens of sites with files named decss.tar.gz, they're liable if any of them turn out to be spoofs?
The MPAA's lawyers must spend billable hours carefully checking each and every single site they name in any complaint, or they could end up arguing from the other side of the courtroom.
That takes the World's Largest Game of Whack-A-Mole to a new level, where you have to whack only the moles and not the rabbits. (Or perhaps a better analogy is not shooting the pop-up target of the old woman with the shopping bags.)
So users who can't post DeCSS (ex. those with accounts from craven ISPs or universities) may be able to help the cause by posting the easily defensible parody. It embarrasses those whose reflexive response to letters from corporate lawyers is to censor first and ask questions later. Even if the MPAA never swears out a false complaint, it costs them time (= money) to look into and perhaps bark at sites hosting the spoof. It may even raise public awareness.
Not bad for just posting a little joke file.
The ODP already has a Disputed Domain Names: verizonreallysucks.com category for links about this dispute.
The ODP already has a Dis puted Domain Names: mattl.com category for links about this dispute.
According to the ODP Guidelines, inactive accounts expire after three months.
It seems my ISP finally received a notice of injunction today, since the webmaster sent me the following e-mail at 12:10 this afternoon (ET):
I'm sure nobody is surprised that Mattel's recent dropping of Microsystems hasn't had any impact on Microsystems continuing its hollow legal threats. I wonder if they timed the letters to be received on a Friday.
Just read Eddy's post.
Eddy writes, "I made a mental note about speaking to Matthew, that maybe we should release the whole thing under the GPL... I forgot." He also writes "As far as I'm concerned, the string ["Released under the GPL" in Unit1.pas] weren't meant to be in the distribution, and Mattel got my rights to it." (I assume he feels the same way about the "Released under the GNU Public License" string in Unitl.dfm.)
It seems he wanted to release it under the GPL, but not without Matthew's okay, and the statement was left in inadvertently. From Matthew's site, he certainly doesn't approve. So, respecting Eddy and Matthew's wishes, I shall remove the GPL'd version.
It seems like you're referring to the General Public License terms allowing you to copy and distribute verbatim copies of source code provided:
The copyright holder, of course, has the right to copy and distribute without meeting the conditions of the GPL, since the copyright gives them the right to copy. So Eddy may very well have been able to release CPHack under the GPL, yet distribute it without meeting the above terms.
Now if I want to redistribute Eddy's source on my web site, I do have to meet the above conditions. So, my site has a version of the source code with conspicuous copyright notices, warranty disclaimers, and a copy the license. It reminds me of self-repairing DNA in a way. :-)
By the way, if you ran the program, you'd see that in does indeed display a copyright notice. The window's title bar reads "Cyber Patrol Hack v0.1.0 - (C)2000 Eddy L O Jannson". There's also a conspicuous message reading "Released under the GNU Public License".
Matthew Skala wrote cn_decode.c and cph1_rev.c, but not cphack.
8 /081250&cid=103">scumdamn posting versions of these two files with GNU boilerplate comments</a> in the previous slashdot thread on this subject. It seems that scumdamn was overzealous.
Skala's statement is almost certainly in response to <a href="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/03/2
Rushing in where angels fear to tread, I've used my license to modify and posted cphack 0.1.1 on my BoCP4 mirror site. It's just the same cphack with GNU boilerplate comments and Mattel copyright notices, and the GPL in the zip. If you wish to download this new and not at all improved version: http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://woodstock.u plink.net/~robinl/mirrors/cphack11.zip
At the bottom of cp4break.html is the following copyright notice "(c)2000 Eddy L O Jansson and Matthew Skala. All rights reserved. All trademarks acknowledged."
Does that copyright notice to the whole report/source code/binary package? It's an interesting question.
I just updated my mirror page with a link to this slashdot article. I thought I'd post the others on the list here for everyone's edification (and because the server of my personal web page probably wouldn't take it if you went there for it!)
"Upping the stakes in a battle over a utility that reveals Cyberpatrol's list of off-limits websites, Mattel threatened mirror sites with contempt charges during a court hearing Monday afternoon."
"ACLU attorney 'surprised' as programmers surrender rights to their hack of Cyber Patrol filter and agree to permanent injunction."
"The American Civil Liberties Union criticized Internet filtering software maker Microsystems Software Inc. and its parent company Mattel Inc. on Friday, accusing them of attempting to limit free speech on the Internet."
"A federal judge in Boston will hear arguments on Monday over whether a program that reveals Cyberpatrol's secret blacklist should be banned from the Internet."
"Call it legal spam. Lawyers in the Cyber Patrol legal battle have created an e-precedent -- sending subpoenas by e-mail."
"A legal dispute between a U.S. toymaker that produces a popular Internet pornography filter and two programmers that decoded the software could heat up into a messy international brawl."
"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."
What a misleading headline. Yet another example of McPaper earning its abysmal reputation.
"A federal judge in Boston has tried to ban the distribution of a computer program that reveals CyberPatrol's secret list of sex sites."
"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. Today's news was filled with Mattel's PR lies about their suit."
"Toy-maker Mattel has sued two programmers who revealed how to circumvent its CyberPatrol blocking software."
Several news outlets uncritically ran Ted Bridis's AP newswire story characterizing the decryption program as a tool to let children view pornography:
cnet's version adds this interesting paragraph:
CNN's version also adds the cnet paragraph and some additional reportage, but still mischaracterizes the program. However, their later coverage was more evenhanded.
> ...include a header which says "this message is not spam", allowing people to filter on it.
I already filter on messages that say "This is NOT SPAM". They go straight to my spam folder. Haven't had a false positive yet.
Speaking of Opera, a version 3.61 for Windows was released yesterday. There isn't a list of bugs fixed from version 3.60, but one visible change is that there's no toolbar in full screen mode any longer. You can download the update from the Opera Software website.
Opera is a great browser for power users. It's the fastest browser around, lean enough to fit on a single floppy, has so many keyboard shortcuts you hardly need a mouse, and supports more CSS than anything short of Gecko. You can toggle off images per window, open pages in the background, or call up a window listing all the hyperlinks on a page.
There are many features of Opera I'd like to see Mozilla adopt. I'm looking forward to the X11 port, which is still in development.
Speaking of Opera, a version 3.61 for Windows was released yesterday. There isn't a list of bugs fixed from version 3.60, but one visible change is that there's no toolbar in full screen mode any longer. You can download the update from the Opera Software website.
Opera is a great browser for power users. (There are quick keyboard shortcuts for everything, and commands to do things like open pages in the background, or display a window of all the links on a page.) It also has far and away the best style sheet support short of Gecko. However, the Linux/X11 port is still in development.