That was correct ages ago... most corporate computing tasks now have to be reliably standardized across desktop apps, legacy mainframe access and internet/intranet connectivity.
I don't know about the rest of the corporate environments, but we have a full-time dev team at our site, and we don't *ever* sell software. We "merely" support the administration of warehousing, invoicing and billing for the UK sales of our multinational, and we do it on SAP/R3. Our Billing software is frequently customised (We have moved one section from batchmode printing locally to spooling then transferring via an encrypted channel across the internet to a printing/mailing outsourcer only this month) and our eCommerce site is "tinkered" with nearly every day - and was a bespoke solution when we bought it in.
Windose has desktop apps and web browsing 100% in the bag these days, for reliable corporate usage. it's sad to say, but true.
Yes, I'd say 95% of our headaches are the Windows machines we use as terminals. I can't remember the last time we had a SAP problem that wasn't client-related. And yes, we *do* use network-delivered MS Office 97, and it is even stable most of the time. But I think you are confusing desktop productivity packages (which are interchangable and I don't really care THAT much if any one machine fails, provided the user can be repaired with a Ghost disk) with real system-critical applications.
Under the old addage 'you get what you pay for', who in their right mind will make the decision to go with staroffice? Probably the same "fools" that run business-critical websites on apache; or doesn't that count because it doesn't help your argument?
when it craps out the umpteenth time, people are going to start complaining You mean it might crap out more often than Office97 does? The one we have a (very expensive) 400-user licence for, but Tech support's recommended solution to any problems seems to be "upgrade to Office2K"?
The directors of corporations have a responsibility to make safe decisions No, they have a responsibility to make *effective* decisions. These may in fact be "safe" decisions, but any company whose directors are afraid to make any changes to a formula that "has always worked" are headed for the pan; Can anyone remember back when IBM and DEC had virtually a monopoly of the computer market between them? Well, if *your* company has a policy of "only buy Microsoft, no matter how badly it runs, as it is 'industry standard'" then you will
a) know *why* it is 'industry standard'
b) have handed total control of your profitability and corporate survival to an american company you have no control over or even influence with;
And if I worked there, I would be polishing my CV right now....... --
Someone should point them at The Magic Cauldron where ESR points out that the majority of software is written for in-house use, not sale. how then, are firms to function if ANY inhouse development or tweeking of their custom software is to be banned as too unpredictable? --
Rotor machines were very commonplace until about the early sixties; moreover, their descendants, shift register based stream ciphers were probably in use to this day.
Hmm. interesting thought - if there are any shift-register based machines left, are they suddenly in violation of this patent, and do they get to claim back royalties on them? --
The problem with the IP mechanism is that a lot of corporate sites spoof outbound connections so that they look to be coming from a single IP address (either to hide the 192.168 addresses they use internally as required, or just to prevent hackers from getting a picture of the size and layout of their internal networks. Because of this, there have been times when/. has been used by several of us geeks at this site at the one time, and we can have a situation where you just have to keep retrying for several minutes while we contend for one-minute slots. --
I think the truely worrying thing is that all this is being put through because of a ruling in the European Court of human rights; Basically, the ECRH said that, unless the uk had an EXPICIT law that allowed interceptions, bugging and so forth, then evidence of that type (and any further evidence that would not have been gathered if they hadn't seen the first lot of evidence) is inadmissible in court. The UKGOV position is that they are only formalising things they have *already* been doing due to the lack of a law telling them not to.
Certainly I find that a frightening thought.... --
Hmm. here in.uk, we have learned to our cost that, once the government gets used to having access to personal data on its citizens, it is very reluctant indeed to give it up. in particular, the.uk government are in the final stages of passing a bill with the following characteristics:
Any government official (including local government, police inspectors and Tax/Customs) can self-issue a notice requiring your ISP to give up emails and/or HTTP traffic logs to them.
Notices don't expire
Notices can come with an attached "gagging order" that makes it an arrestable offence (5 yrs emprisonment) to tell anyone a notice has been served on you
Gagging orders do not expire
Notices can require you turn over a secret encryption key; if you are a company employee with access to the key (for example, a.uk technician with access to the.us based ordering system for a major multinational can be ordered to download the key from that system on the.uk government's behalf)
If you have the authority to order the production of the key (for example, a UK resident CEO of a US company) they can serve a notice on you to do so
If you fail to produce the key (and forgetting / losing the key is no defence unless you can prove it in court) there is a 2 yr jail sentence in your future.
Once they have the key, no-one is liable for its safety or for any losses you suffer as a result of its disclosure
What few safeguards exist are in a Code of Practice that can be re-written by the government at any time; in addition, there are no penalties for failing to follow the Code of Practice.
The target (and/or recipient) of the notice is not required to be suspected of a crime; it is enough that the official is investigating a potential crime
the "economic well-being" of the UK is a valid justification for notices - so trade unions, human rights organisations and foreign multinationals competing against government-lobbying firms are all valid targets with no further justification required
It shouldn't be too surprising to hear that three ISPs have already announced they are planning to move their servers overseas; the largest.uk worker's union and indeed most of the Trade Union Council are planning on following suit. --
I predict the media will have a field day, Well yes, the media *always* has a field day. never let the facts get in the way of a circulation-boosting story:+)
a couple of groups of "concerned citizens" will call for a ban Sounds good - not for health reasons, but because they are *irritating* in cinemas, churches, anywhere really.... What I would *like* to see happen is that phone companies are forced to give free "hands free" sets with their phones; they aren't that expensive, and the number of idiots that currently would be driving at ($SPEEDLIMIT+5) with one hand attached to an ear and a piece of plastic might reduce (well, I *suppose* they are reducing now, but autodarwination doesn't really count)
and mobile phone companies will have a new number to differentiate their products with. Saves them making something up. in any case, we will end up with some figure that is meaningless but has a very low value (like Peak Music Power but in reverse)
The funniest thing will be seeing whether lower radiation phones give poorer reception. They will probably work around it - whenever there is a technical constraint, engineers find a way to make it work anyhow.
In a few years the media will have a new bogie man and no-one will care less. Well, the "quality sunday broadsheets" will probably drag it back out every few years when things are slow, with a "still nothing has been done about it" piece. --
Do not be fooled by this troll. There is no such thing as "LEAP". I work in the cell phone biz. *sigh* I don't think saying "you want fries with that" when someone phones counts as being in the cell phone biz. --
I can see where this could be a valid case for a secondary (and much cheaper) channel. Given that Courtney says all her expenses (studio time, promotion, tour costs) are recouped from her anyhow, then any micropayment scheme where the artist gets approximately what *her share* of the CD sale would have been can't be wrong..... --
Ok, lets face facts here. LEAP has some major advantages over WAP. It's faster, it isn't encumbered with expensive patented stuff, and its endorsed by the Internet Standards community. however, it is not here.
LEAP does not even have a foothold in the market; it is still on the drawing board. In contrast, the major Mobile Phone manufacturers like Nokia are directly benefitting from their membership of the WAP consortium; most mobile phone networks now support WAP servers directly licenced from that consortium at extortionate rates, have farmed out WAP-enabled handsets to their customers, and are now supporting the service. How do we get the manufacturers that are *directly* benefitting from WAP to support LEAP? how do we get the networks to set up and support LEAP when they are already set up for and supporting WAP? --
Why not have your lawyer submit an article to the website and have them publish it relating something other then the US and internet law As it happens, I did. I they haven't even bothered to reply as of yet....
It says you can right on the website (guess you must have missed that)!!! Nope, saw it, copied down the email address (not for submissions you notice, just a contact in case they are interested) It's been over a week now, and they haven't gotten back to me. OTOH, the most recent of their "breaking news" is June 08 - perhaps they have moved on to Texas to do "The cattle law website, for breaking news on cattle; where cattle and the law converge" --
Now double click the mouse icon in the control panel. Select "use left handed mouse" And?
MACs have one button - does it really matter if you do a swap Leftright on one button?
XWindows allows you to configure the use of each of it's three buttons - and/or configure a two button mouse to simulate the third with a both-click - Windows barely supports a third button at all (unless it is a microsoft wheel) and has no intention of emulating one.
"The Cathedral in the Bazaar" about the values of open source vs. closed source. An interesting read, if a bit naive, but it misses out one important point - people need money to live, and if their job is programming, they need to make money from doing that. Nope, he covers that as well in one of the later papers - see Th e Magic Cauldron for an example of when NOT to open source something. --
What about using apache in a mission-critical environment ? Your example does not support a comparison of open vs closed source. Notice he didn't list a webserver at all in the second set - and in fact, Oracle's *own* webserver is now a modified Apache.... --
Please dont try to divine my attitudes or intentions. hey, all I have to go on is your own words:
<whine> When are we going to get "internet" sites that notice the rest of the world?" </whine>
When the rest of the world gets off its ass and does it itself.
Feel free to tell me how I am misinterpreting...
I do not believe the internet belongs to the US, nor do I feel I have the superior attitude of "feel lucky you can play with it" If you haven't, you are doing a good job of giving that impression. if it looks like a duck, moves like a duck and quacks like a duck....
I just did not(and still don't) see where this new site claims to be the end-all for all internet laws everywhere. Lets see: Name of site: The Internet Law Journal Byline: The internet law journal: where the Internet and the Law converge Section byline: Here you will find the lastest breaking headline news concerning Internet Law.
Ok, so there's the internet bit. lets look for bits that state or even imply it is a US-centric site...
still looking..
nope. It's the internet law site, for breaking news in internet law, and it's where the internet and law converge.
You claimed it was, and was lacking in non-US content. If it does claim to be the end all for all Internet law, you would be right, but again, I dont see this attitude on the site. Probably the problem is with your vision, not the site - you see nothing wrong with a site being US centric without actually having "US law" or even "US" anywhere on it.
They're talking about a low-level format, guy. You missed his Smiley (:/ ) a low level format used to be the default for floppies - still is if you use format a:/u:+) and of course he is correct - you can't buy preformatted EXT2 floppies, you would have to LLF them yourself (mind you, I tend to mount DOS floppies, can't be bothered to EXT2 format them) --
Is it possible to buy a reliable floppy anymore? I've got pre-1990 floppies that are still readable, but brand new ones in the same drives seem to develop bad spots in hours. I find the formatting on pre-formatted disks just isn't up to spec anymore - they seem to be using some sort of high-speed formatter that doesn't leave a "deep" enough impression on the disk. Since I realised this and started doing a fresh low-level format on any "preformatted" disks I got, my error rate has gone down to the old levels.... --
The 1MB container file is compressible down to 320K by gzip. This doesn't seem right to me - shouldn't there be almost no redundancy in the encrypted file? Further investigation shows that about 930 of the 1024 1K blocks in the container occur in repeated groups of four blocks. The data inside each block are certainly scrambled beyond human recognition, but isn't this exposure of the cleartext's redundancy a sign of something wrong? It varies on the scheme used. It appears to me that each of the "virtual sectors" of your encrypted filesystem is being encrypted separately with one of four keys - and of course, identical data encrypted with identical keys will produce identical cyphertext! What you actually want to happen is for each VSector to be "seeded" with a random value (probably as part of the key) to prevent this - but in practice, having large numbers of sectors with identical data in them isn't likely to happen, so the additional overhead in normal use isn't worth the special-case. It may be worth you bearing in mind though, if you ever need to hide *how much data* you have - seed unused VSectors with pseudorandom or straight counter values, and make sure any filestructures have sufficient internal structure(pointers and so forth) that identical blocks of plaintext will come out as different file-data --
Yes but don't forget that laws in the US aren't even uniform, they vary from state to state. (e.g. Online Escrow services need a certain license to operate in California) This is not a small endeavor. I think it's great that someone is making this effort at all. It's a lofty goal. Indeed - and if they had called it something that was closer to it's actual implimentation - the All-states internet law site, or the American Internet Law site - then it would be a noble goal. However, they are claiming a bigger view than they actually intend to give - many Non-americans have gone and will go to the site hoping to find information that applies to them, and instead will find out american legal information - I am questioning labelling, not content.
England is currently on the verge of the biggest invasion of personal privacy ever envisioned by a democratic government; Companies are making contingency plans to move management and major servers out of the country, and various authorities, from Law Enforcement though the intelligence services down to Tax, Excise and Health and Safety inspectors are eagerly awaiting the right to intercept web comms without a warrant, read email without the owner's knowledge or consent, and slap gagging orders with no termination clause on anyone who might protest. So, in the midst of all this, what is the only european story to feature? the fact that an ecommerce plan may make it easier for US firms to sell in europe. Even if I was an american shareholder in a american company with a UK branch, I would want to know this - but the website is silent. --
When the rest of the world gets off its ass and does it itself. I can live with that - I know of uk sites that cover uk law, and australian sites that cover australian law. however, we aren't talking about a US site that covers US law here, we are talking about one that broadly claims to cover the entire internet - but can't look outside the US border unless it can see a reason US readers would be interested. Your post is as much a part of the "it's our Internet and you foreigners should be happy we let you play" attitude as that website is - a US-centric site is fine; once they start claiming the Global view, it seems reasonable for them to back it up by actually having a Global vision. --
Although I didn't see anything like DeCSS nope it gets a sidebar but is behind-the-times and consists almost entirely of links to other site's opinions of the matter. --
Hmm. it seems to suffer from the usual blight of "internet" websites - it assumes the US is the only country whose laws matter (the only major article on the EEC is one that describes the advantages to American businesses of the new EEC ecommerce initiative - no mention of the eec anti-hacking and english RIP measures being fast-tracked through their respective processes; there is also a sidebar commment on the new english Healthservice-online self-diagnosis helpsite, that wouldn't overflow a standard slashdot header box. When are we going to get "internet" sites that notice the rest of the world? --
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the rest of the corporate environments, but we have a full-time dev team at our site, and we don't *ever* sell software. We "merely" support the administration of warehousing, invoicing and billing for the UK sales of our multinational, and we do it on SAP/R3. Our Billing software is frequently customised (We have moved one section from batchmode printing locally to spooling then transferring via an encrypted channel across the internet to a printing/mailing outsourcer only this month) and our eCommerce site is "tinkered" with nearly every day - and was a bespoke solution when we bought it in.
Windose has desktop apps and web browsing 100% in the bag these days, for reliable corporate usage. it's sad to say, but true.
Yes, I'd say 95% of our headaches are the Windows machines we use as terminals. I can't remember the last time we had a SAP problem that wasn't client-related. And yes, we *do* use network-delivered MS Office 97, and it is even stable most of the time. But I think you are confusing desktop productivity packages (which are interchangable and I don't really care THAT much if any one machine fails, provided the user can be repaired with a Ghost disk) with real system-critical applications.
Under the old addage 'you get what you pay for', who in their right mind will make the decision to go with staroffice?
Probably the same "fools" that run business-critical websites on apache; or doesn't that count because it doesn't help your argument?
when it craps out the umpteenth time, people are going to start complaining
You mean it might crap out more often than Office97 does? The one we have a (very expensive) 400-user licence for, but Tech support's recommended solution to any problems seems to be "upgrade to Office2K"?
The directors of corporations have a responsibility to make safe decisions
No, they have a responsibility to make *effective* decisions. These may in fact be "safe" decisions, but any company whose directors are afraid to make any changes to a formula that "has always worked" are headed for the pan; Can anyone remember back when IBM and DEC had virtually a monopoly of the computer market between them? Well, if *your* company has a policy of "only buy Microsoft, no matter how badly it runs, as it is 'industry standard'" then you will
a) know *why* it is 'industry standard'
b) have handed total control of your profitability and corporate survival to an american company you have no control over or even influence with;
And if I worked there, I would be polishing my CV right now.......
--
Someone should point them at The Magic Cauldron where ESR points out that the majority of software is written for in-house use, not sale. how then, are firms to function if ANY inhouse development or tweeking of their custom software is to be banned as too unpredictable?
--
Rotor machines were very commonplace until about the early sixties; moreover, their descendants, shift register based stream ciphers were probably in use to this day.
Hmm. interesting thought - if there are any shift-register based machines left, are they suddenly in violation of this patent, and do they get to claim back royalties on them?
--
The problem with the IP mechanism is that a lot of corporate sites spoof outbound connections so that they look to be coming from a single IP address (either to hide the 192.168 addresses they use internally as required, or just to prevent hackers from getting a picture of the size and layout of their internal networks. Because of this, there have been times when /. has been used by several of us geeks at this site at the one time, and we can have a situation where you just have to keep retrying for several minutes while we contend for one-minute slots.
--
US "RIP" Bill
--
Basically, the ECRH said that, unless the uk had an EXPICIT law that allowed interceptions, bugging and so forth, then evidence of that type (and any further evidence that would not have been gathered if they hadn't seen the first lot of evidence) is inadmissible in court. The UKGOV position is that they are only formalising things they have *already* been doing due to the lack of a law telling them not to.
Certainly I find that a frightening thought....
--
- Any government official (including local government, police inspectors and Tax/Customs) can self-issue a notice requiring your ISP to give up emails and/or HTTP traffic logs to them.
- Notices don't expire
- Notices can come with an attached "gagging order" that makes it an arrestable offence (5 yrs emprisonment) to tell anyone a notice has been served on you
- Gagging orders do not expire
- Notices can require you turn over a secret encryption key; if you are a company employee with access to the key (for example, a
.uk technician with access to the .us based ordering system for a major multinational can be ordered to download the key from that system on the .uk government's behalf) - If you have the authority to order the production of the key (for example, a UK resident CEO of a US company) they can serve a notice on you to do so
- If you fail to produce the key (and forgetting / losing the key is no defence unless you can prove it in court) there is a 2 yr jail sentence in your future.
- Once they have the key, no-one is liable for its safety or for any losses you suffer as a result of its disclosure
- What few safeguards exist are in a Code of Practice that can be re-written by the government at any time; in addition, there are no penalties for failing to follow the Code of Practice.
- The target (and/or recipient) of the notice is not required to be suspected of a crime; it is enough that the official is investigating a potential crime
- the "economic well-being" of the UK is a valid justification for notices - so trade unions, human rights organisations and foreign multinationals competing against government-lobbying firms are all valid targets with no further justification required
It shouldn't be too surprising to hear that three ISPs have already announced they are planning to move their servers overseas; the largest--
Well yes, the media *always* has a field day. never let the facts get in the way of a circulation-boosting story
a couple of groups of "concerned citizens" will call for a ban
Sounds good - not for health reasons, but because they are *irritating* in cinemas, churches, anywhere really....
What I would *like* to see happen is that phone companies are forced to give free "hands free" sets with their phones; they aren't that expensive, and the number of idiots that currently would be driving at ($SPEEDLIMIT+5) with one hand attached to an ear and a piece of plastic might reduce (well, I *suppose* they are reducing now, but autodarwination doesn't really count)
and mobile phone companies will have a new number to differentiate their products with.
Saves them making something up. in any case, we will end up with some figure that is meaningless but has a very low value (like Peak Music Power but in reverse)
The funniest thing will be seeing whether lower radiation phones give poorer reception.
They will probably work around it - whenever there is a technical constraint, engineers find a way to make it work anyhow.
In a few years the media will have a new bogie man and no-one will care less.
Well, the "quality sunday broadsheets" will probably drag it back out every few years when things are slow, with a "still nothing has been done about it" piece.
--
http://www.everysoft.com/auction/
apparently quite a few of the medium-sized auction sites use that code....
--
.. or just click the (#85) link near the top, which will have the same effect (unless you want to lengthen your comment limit)
--
Do not be fooled by this troll. There is no such thing as "LEAP". I work in the cell phone biz.
*sigh*
I don't think saying "you want fries with that" when someone phones counts as being in the cell phone biz.
--
I can see where this could be a valid case for a secondary (and much cheaper) channel. Given that Courtney says all her expenses (studio time, promotion, tour costs) are recouped from her anyhow, then any micropayment scheme where the artist gets approximately what *her share* of the CD sale would have been can't be wrong.....
--
LEAP has some major advantages over WAP. It's faster, it isn't encumbered with expensive patented stuff, and its endorsed by the Internet Standards community. however, it is not here.
LEAP does not even have a foothold in the market; it is still on the drawing board. In contrast, the major Mobile Phone manufacturers like Nokia are directly benefitting from their membership of the WAP consortium; most mobile phone networks now support WAP servers directly licenced from that consortium at extortionate rates, have farmed out WAP-enabled handsets to their customers, and are now supporting the service. How do we get the manufacturers that are *directly* benefitting from WAP to support LEAP? how do we get the networks to set up and support LEAP when they are already set up for and supporting WAP?
--
As it happens, I did. I they haven't even bothered to reply as of yet....
It says you can right on the website (guess you must have missed that)!!!
Nope, saw it, copied down the email address (not for submissions you notice, just a contact in case they are interested)
It's been over a week now, and they haven't gotten back to me. OTOH, the most recent of their "breaking news" is June 08 - perhaps they have moved on to Texas to do "The cattle law website, for breaking news on cattle; where cattle and the law converge"
--
And?
--
"The Cathedral in the Bazaar" about the values of open source vs. closed source. An interesting read, if a bit naive, but it misses out one important point - people need money to live, and if their job is programming, they need to make money from doing that.
Nope, he covers that as well in one of the later papers - see Th e Magic Cauldron for an example of when NOT to open source something.
--
What about using apache in a mission-critical environment ? Your example does not support a comparison of open vs closed source.
Notice he didn't list a webserver at all in the second set - and in fact, Oracle's *own* webserver is now a modified Apache....
--
hey, all I have to go on is your own words: Feel free to tell me how I am misinterpreting...
I do not believe the internet belongs to the US, nor do I feel I have the superior attitude of "feel lucky you can play with it"
If you haven't, you are doing a good job of giving that impression. if it looks like a duck, moves like a duck and quacks like a duck....
I just did not(and still don't) see where this new site claims to be the end-all for all internet laws everywhere.
Lets see:
Name of site: The Internet Law Journal
Byline: The internet law journal: where the Internet and the Law converge
Section byline: Here you will find the lastest breaking headline news concerning Internet Law.
Ok, so there's the internet bit. lets look for bits that state or even imply it is a US-centric site...
still looking..
nope. It's the internet law site, for breaking news in internet law, and it's where the internet and law converge.
You claimed it was, and was lacking in non-US content. If it does claim to be the end all for all Internet law, you would be right, but again, I dont see this attitude on the site.
Probably the problem is with your vision, not the site - you see nothing wrong with a site being US centric without actually having "US law" or even "US" anywhere on it.
Am I wrong?
yes.
--
They're talking about a low-level format, guy. :/ ) /u :+)
You missed his Smiley (
a low level format used to be the default for floppies - still is if you use format a:
and of course he is correct - you can't buy preformatted EXT2 floppies, you would have to LLF them yourself (mind you, I tend to mount DOS floppies, can't be bothered to EXT2 format them)
--
Is it possible to buy a reliable floppy anymore? I've got pre-1990 floppies that are still readable, but brand new ones in the same drives seem to develop bad spots in hours.
I find the formatting on pre-formatted disks just isn't up to spec anymore - they seem to be using some sort of high-speed formatter that doesn't leave a "deep" enough impression on the disk. Since I realised this and started doing a fresh low-level format on any "preformatted" disks I got, my error rate has gone down to the old levels....
--
The 1MB container file is compressible down to 320K by gzip. This doesn't seem right to me - shouldn't there be almost no redundancy in the encrypted file? Further investigation shows that about 930 of the 1024 1K blocks in the container occur in repeated groups of four blocks. The data inside each block are certainly scrambled beyond human recognition, but isn't this exposure of the cleartext's redundancy a sign of something wrong?
It varies on the scheme used. It appears to me that each of the "virtual sectors" of your encrypted filesystem is being encrypted separately with one of four keys - and of course, identical data encrypted with identical keys will produce identical cyphertext!
What you actually want to happen is for each VSector to be "seeded" with a random value (probably as part of the key) to prevent this - but in practice, having large numbers of sectors with identical data in them isn't likely to happen, so the additional overhead in normal use isn't worth the special-case.
It may be worth you bearing in mind though, if you ever need to hide *how much data* you have - seed unused VSectors with pseudorandom or straight counter values, and make sure any filestructures have sufficient internal structure(pointers and so forth) that identical blocks of plaintext will come out as different file-data
--
Indeed - and if they had called it something that was closer to it's actual implimentation - the All-states internet law site, or the American Internet Law site - then it would be a noble goal.
However, they are claiming a bigger view than they actually intend to give - many Non-americans have gone and will go to the site hoping to find information that applies to them, and instead will find out american legal information - I am questioning labelling, not content.
England is currently on the verge of the biggest invasion of personal privacy ever envisioned by a democratic government; Companies are making contingency plans to move management and major servers out of the country, and various authorities, from Law Enforcement though the intelligence services down to Tax, Excise and Health and Safety inspectors are eagerly awaiting the right to intercept web comms without a warrant, read email without the owner's knowledge or consent, and slap gagging orders with no termination clause on anyone who might protest.
So, in the midst of all this, what is the only european story to feature? the fact that an ecommerce plan may make it easier for US firms to sell in europe. Even if I was an american shareholder in a american company with a UK branch, I would want to know this - but the website is silent.
--
When the rest of the world gets off its ass and does it itself.
I can live with that - I know of uk sites that cover uk law, and australian sites that cover australian law. however, we aren't talking about a US site that covers US law here, we are talking about one that broadly claims to cover the entire internet - but can't look outside the US border unless it can see a reason US readers would be interested.
Your post is as much a part of the "it's our Internet and you foreigners should be happy we let you play" attitude as that website is - a US-centric site is fine; once they start claiming the Global view, it seems reasonable for them to back it up by actually having a Global vision.
--
Although I didn't see anything like DeCSS
nope it gets a sidebar but is behind-the-times and consists almost entirely of links to other site's opinions of the matter.
--
Hmm. it seems to suffer from the usual blight of "internet" websites - it assumes the US is the only country whose laws matter (the only major article on the EEC is one that describes the advantages to American businesses of the new EEC ecommerce initiative - no mention of the eec anti-hacking and english RIP measures being fast-tracked through their respective processes; there is also a sidebar commment on the new english Healthservice-online self-diagnosis helpsite, that wouldn't overflow a standard slashdot header box. When are we going to get "internet" sites that notice the rest of the world?
--