Last year, HP announced a special button that could be put on blogs to let usersmore easily printblog posts, without all the extraneous stuff on the website. At the time, we didn't see the value at all, but plenty of folks responded in the comments that it seemed like a good idea. It wasn't long b...

cce writes "The MicroID standard, despite getting thrashed soundly by Ben Laurie two years ago, has since been recommended by the DataPortability Project and published on the user profiles of millions of users at Digg and Last.fm. MicroID is basically a hash calculated using a user's profile page UR...

Remember the Phantom? Depending on your perspective, thismysteriousgaming console, first announced in 2003, was either a too ambitious product that could never get off the ground (living up to its "phantom" name in that it was almost never actually seen) or abig scamto part investors with money. O...

arcticstoat writes "In a bid to deter people from using pirate versions of Windows XP, Microsoft is now updating its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool to introduce a few uncomfortable niggles for users of pirated versions of Windows. These include replacing the desktop wallpaper with a black scre...

at0mic26 writes "I am currently tasked with finding a cost effective solution to our 30+ degree Celsius server room. The only air conditioning currently provided is a single duct pipe from one of two air conditioner units. I was thinking of stealing air from the second air conditioning unit with som...

Usually, when you're dealing with a bank, they encrypt your passwords so that no one else can read them. However, apparently that isn't always the case -- and this allowed an employee at Lloyds TSB tochange the password of one member from "Lloyds is pants" to "no it's not". The customer actually f...

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Wired: "After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab. Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Be...

We've seen a few cases against the RIAA in which either state officials or defendants will point out that the RIAA's hired hands in tracking down file sharers -- companies like MediaSentry -- areviolating state lawsrequiring private investigators' licenses for certain activities. Now, the American ...

SCO has filed amotion[PDF], titled Debtor's Motion for (1) a Determination that Stock Options Granted to Executives Were Awarded in the Ordinary Court of Debtors' Business and (2) Continuing Authority to Grant Ordinary Course Stock Options. SCO says it consulted with the US Trustee's Office and it ...

dotne writes "Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported E...

This is hardly a new phenomenon, but the Wall Street Journal is noting that some bands and some record labels areavoiding putting music on iTunes(or in some cases, pulling music off iTunes) in an effort to force people to buy the full album, rather than just a few tracks. There are plenty of reason...

tykev writes "A customer wanted to return the license for preinstalled Windows Vista Business that came with his Lenovo laptop. After some lengthy negotiations with representatives of Lenovo's technical support and management, he was offered financial compensation for returning the license in the am...

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A California copyright infringement case brought by an adult video maker against a video sharing web site, Veoh Networks, has been thrown out, based upon the 'safe harbor' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ('DMCA'). In a 33-page decision (PDF), the Court ...

We've been talking about the variety of new and differentbusiness modelsspringing up around investigative reporting, and here's another interesting take on the matter. Wikileaks, the site that's become rather infamous for publishing all sorts of leaked documents is experimenting withauctioning off ...

There is an old Japanese proverb that goes, "Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher." This week's mail is all about teaching. Whether it is about the seriousness of psychic ability, a short history of trolls or explaining how much free time and malice your dad'...

waderoush writes "In an unusual move that could alienate a large segment of potential customers, iRacing.com, an online racing simulation company that opened its site to the public on August 26, is calling its system a 'driver development tool' that isn't designed for PC or console gamers. 'We don't...

jvatcw brings us a story about Betty Ostergren, who operates a website dedicated to pointing out the social security numbers visible in public records. The purpose of the site is to raise awareness of privacy concerns regarding the personal information shared in Virginia's governmental websites. Leg...

Back in June, we were bothered by the fact that the FBI waswasting its timeinvestigating a blogger who had posted some unreleasedGuns N' Rosestracks on his site. Music gets leaked all the time, and it's difficult to see why this is an FBI matter in any form. Turns out that the FBI takes its GNR le...

Riding with Robots writes "The robotic geologist Opportunity has nearly reached the rim of Victoria Crater, which it is leaving after a year of exploration inside. Rover handlers decided to abandon attempts to approach the crater's cliff walls when they saw a power spike similar to the one that prec...

palegray.net writes "Researchers at the University of California have developed a new network routing algorithm that has the potential to significantly boost Internet traffic routing efficiency. This new approach focuses on the needs of dynamic networks, where connections are frequently transient. F...

Cyber thieves are hatching a plan to steal US funds through British supermarkets, the BBC learns.

The next version of Internet Explorer has features to make browsing and searching easier and more secure....

A judge has ruled that online video hosting site Veohis not guilty of copyright infringement for videos uploaded by its users. The judge made the proper ruling here, noting that the DMCA's safe harbors protect Veoh. The lawsuit was brought by adult video entertainment firm Io, who was upset that V...

SlappingOysters writes "In the lead up to the World Cyber Games finals in Germany, Gameplayer has an incredible interview with Tournament Director Alex Walker in which he freely admits knowledge of participants taking illegal drugs to enhance their performance. The interview came in response to a pr...

Vigile writes "In a somewhat surprising move from a company that is used to holding its proprietary technologies close to its chest, NVIDIA has announced that it is opening up a 'certified SLI motherboard' program for boards using the upcoming Intel X58 chipset. The X58 is Intel's core logic offerin...

Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failur...

A Briton accused of hacking into secret Nasa military computers loses his appeal against extradition to the US....

The Patriot Act allows the FBI to issue "National Security Letters" to ISPs and other organizations, seeking information on users of those service providers -- with an automatic gag order forbidding the service provider from tellinganyonethat they have received an NSL. Not surprisingly, this result...

Aaron Sorkin, who created The West Wing and wrote Charlie Wilson's War, is making a film about Facebook....

Following the recent post we had about Appletaking downpopular games from its App store, the latest buzz in on Appledenying a comic book reader entrance to its iPhone app storebecause the primary comic book being offered was too violent. This has created quite an uproar -- though, again, Apple has ...

Interims disappointComputacenter shares are down more than seven per cent this morning after the firm reported a 14 per cent fall in profits in the first six months of the year.…...

Our survey says...Which?, the UK consumer organisation, has ranked the UK's most reliable laptops.…...

BT insists orders will be deliveredOnline retailer Dabs.com has told customers to hang fire for a few days while orders due to be delivered by Amtrak are reassigned to another courier.…...

At some point, it won't make sense to post these sorts of examples any more because it will just be common sense that bands can and do benefit from so-called "piracy," but every time we post one of these stories, we get people complaining that this couldn't possibly work for others. When a band is ...

Apparently this is the week for force feedback "haptics" company Immersion to settle its various patent lawsuits. We already noted the infamous teledildonics case has beensettledand now it'ssettled an ongoing lawsuit with Microsoft as well. We wrote about thedetailsback in May. It's a case that h...

Do you rememberDarl McBride testifying at trialinSCO v. Novellin April that if you wanted to get Unix source code, the only way to get it was to license UnixWare and that UnixWare was just the latest version of Unix? The court believed that story, so for the sake of history and truth, then, here i...

NASA is admitting that laptop brought to the international space station in Julyapparently contained a virus designed to swipe user passwords, though they're not sure how it happened. The computers don't control anything mission critical, but are used by astronauts to send email and to track their ...

To Guam and beyondIt looks like Google is prepping another underwater comms cable.…

Rent due again?Suing communication providers over alleged patent infringements has worked pretty well for Judah Klausner.…...

For the last few years, various connectivity providers sold "unlimited" data plans when the reality was the plans weren't unlimited at all. Many providers are now changing the plans and instituting more clear caps, but it still seems a bit ridiculous to have marketed unlimited data plans and then p...

The 463 blogpoints usto an interview with Mitch Kapor of Lotus and EFF fame, in which hemakes the case for a national Chief Technology Officer.The idea seems to be that technology policy in the United States is currently fragmented among a bunch of different positions, and having a designated top te...

The semantics of force feedbackMicrosoft and the force-feedback technology firm, Immersion, appear to have come to final terms after six years of suing each other.…...

It's easy. Those tubes are bustedMore evidence that the intertubes are fundamentally broken has been served up byWired.comin an article laying out a technique to surreptitiously hijack huge chunks of the internet and monitor or even modify unencrypted traffic before it reaches its intended destinati...

The Associated Press has been having a hard time keeping up with the times. While there was the highly publicized situation where itthreatenedsome bloggers with its own, highly questionabledefinitionof fair use, a much bigger deal is that it's increasinglycompetingwith its own member newspapers by ...

I've been getting email asking if I'll be covering the newly filedApple v. Psystarlitigation. Here's Apple'scomplaint[PDF]. I must tell you frankly that I was in the"a pox on both their houses"category, so I thought I probably wouldn't do so in depth.But then I noticedmedia reportsthat Psystar ha...

Chinese Democracy, American ExtremismThe FBI has arrested a 27-year-old American blogger for leaking some unreleased Guns N' Roses tunes to the internet.…...

SQL tools plug gapsWhat was seen as a major hole in Google'sMapReducedatabase technology has been plugged, not once but twice. In the same week.…...

Want to know when someone is preparing to take away your First Amendment rights? It's when they claim that they have a proposal that involves"balancing" those rights with other events(sent to us byEric Goldman). In this case, the proposal comes from a professor from Brigham Young University, Chery...

A man who chose "Lloyds is pants" as his telephone banking password found it had been changed to "no it's not"....

German spies Phenom X2Quite contrary to rumors AMD scrapped its plans to bring dual-core K10 parts to the market, the chip maker may have already begun selling the line to its partners on the sly.…...

A road map for regulators of the futureGetting a head start on the world's antitrust regulators, an astute Finn is offering a bastardized version of Google's search engine that ignores sites served up by Google itself.…...

Apparently Judy Estrin, a well-known Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and exec, is coming out with a new bookwarning that the infrastructure needed for innovation in Silicon Valley is going away. The complaint basically appears to be that there's too much emphasis on the short-term, with companies ...

One of the more well-publicized lawsuits involving the RIAA was the Howell case, which got a lot of press when some folksmisreadthe RIAA's filings against Howell. Either way, that point became meaningless when the judge ruled in Howell's favor that "making available"is notinfringement by itself. O...

A few weeks back, we wrote about Ryanair's decision tocancelflight tickets that had been bought by travelers via third party websites. This made no sense to us whatsoever. These third party websites were acting as resellers, and doing something that seemed perfectly legal: providing new avenues fo...

Parlez-vous GoogleTalk? Er, noAndroid developers have admitted that Google's mobile phone platform won't support GoogleTalk in its first version, and that Bluetooth support will be severely limited.…...

Peterborough AttacksA small British company developing a unique form of hovering aircraft says it will soon demonstrate a new and much more serious version of its technology.…...

Handset sales continue to soarGlobal mobile phone sales will exceed 1.2bn handsets this year, although tough economic conditions are already biting into phone sales, market watcher Gartner has warned.…...

But UK punters still protectedThe Mobile Marketing Association has published its guidelines for advertising pushed over Bluetooth connections, and considers anyone who hasn't opted out to be fair game for spammers.…...

'Off the record' browsing is goUpdatedMicrosoft has outlined the new privacy tools available in its forthcoming browser Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).…...

Rum, sodomy and the lashAvast there and unfurl theTwat-O-Tronye scurvy landlubbers of Middle England, lest Portsmouth Historic Dockyard make barrel boys of ye all, damn their eyes:…...

Push two keys to bypass passwordiPhones protected by a password aren't actually protected at all, as just by pressing a few keys a miscreant can access all the phone's functions without needing the password at all.…...

Playing with the big boys nowSercois to acquireSI International, an IT reseller specialising in the US federal market, for $423m cash - a 40 per cent premium on SI's closing price on NASDAQ yesterday. Serco is also asssuming net debt of $87.3m, so the enterprise value of the deal is $510m - a multip...

Laptops taken to the International Space Station were infected with a computer virus, Nasa confirms.

Show us the money, says NASAPresidential contender John McCain and two other bigshot Republican senators have written to George Bush urging that NASA keep the Space Shuttle fleet alive beyond 2010. The politicians are concerned about US reliance on Russia for manned space transport in the early year...

A human exoskeleton robotic suit is helping people paralysed from the waist down to stand, walk and climb stairs....

The Advertising Standards Authority calls an iPhone advert "misleading" for saying all of the web is available on the phone....

A PC containing personal data of a million bank customers is sold on a net auction site for£35, according to the Daily Mail....

Latest official figures show the number of UK households with internet access rose to 16.5 million this year....

Bill Thompson has the future in his hand

Tricky hack attacks could be thwarted by using trusted sites to police web use, say researchers.

Six international teams competed this weekend in the first-ever hydrogen-powered motorsport race.

Why crime maps may not make people feel safer

The parties stipulated to another extension on the deadline for Novell to file a brief describing what pre-judgment interest it wants from SCO on the amount ordered by the Utah District Court on July 16. The new deadline is August 29. Just a brief note in case you were wondering why there was no f...

The majority of election officials in England support a ban on the sale of voters' personal details to companies, a survey finds....

"Another week, another -rc,"began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc4 Linux kernel, continuing,"this time the diffstat is almost totally dominated by the addition of the musb driver that drives the MUSB and TUSB controllers integrated into omap2430 and davinci. That, together with the removal ...

When I read that Radio New Zealand had just decided to start adding Ogg Vorbis filesto their online offerings, I was curious. How do folks make such decisions? I surely wish everyone would do what Radio New Zealand has just done.So I asked Richard Hulse of Radio New Zealand, the station's media man...

A UK-built solar-powered plane sets an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft....

KDE has decided to offer its code contributors an option to use a Fiduciary Licence Agreement that it worked out with FSFE'sFreedom Task Force. It's a recommendation, not a requirement. It's a copyright assignment vehicle designed to ensure legal maintainability of the project. And I hear that t...

Machines may be about to outsmart humans

Young US voters can now register to vote in the presidential election via Microsoft's gaming network....

The chips which can power themselves

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith blames a private contractor for losing details of criminals held on a computer memory stick....

"I'd like to get a first round of review on my AXFS filesystem,"began Jared Hulbert, describing his newAdvanced XIP File Systemfor Linux. XIP stands for eXecute-In-Place. The new filesystem received quite a bit of positive feedback. Jared offered the following description:"This is a simple read o...

More bills, bills, bills in the bankruptcy, but it's winding down. But SCO is winding up. Guess where Me Inc Software, the subsidiary, is located? In Utah, or Delaware, or anyplace that the US bankruptcy court in Delaware or the creditors can get at the profits, which SCO executives havedescribe...

SCO was taken to court again in Germany, by one of the companies that got an injunction years ago, Heise isreporting, and now it must pay a fine to the company, Thinking Objects Software GmbH. Three companiestook SCO Germany to courtback then, and this is one of the three. I'll show you a comput...

Most of the attorneys who are listed as being involved inSCO v. AutoZonehave been told that by the court they are in violation of Special Order 109, which is a requirement to participate in the electronic filing system. They are instructed to go to theUS District Court for the District of Nevadaweb...

Kurt Opsahl of EFF has justannouncedthat the restraining order on the MIT students has been lifted:Today, Judge George O'Toole lifted the gag order on three MIT students who were sued by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority for discovering a security vulnerability in the MBTA's fare paymen...

"The latest feature release GIT 1.6.0 is available at the usual places,"began Git maintainer, Junio Hamano,announcing the latest stable releaseof the distributed version control system originally written by Linus Torvalds. Among the current changes, Junio noted,"with the default Makefile settings, ...

I've been puzzling over something in theISO press releaseannouncing that thefour appeals against OOXMLas an ISO standard, from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela, wouldgo no further. In the press release, it said this:According to the ISO/IEC rules, DIS 29500 can now proceed to publication ...

Arecent discussionon the Linux Kernel mailing list noted that threaded 64-bit applications suffer a drastic slowdown in pthread_create performance when stack utilization goes above 4GB. Ingo Molnar offered an explanation of the problem,"unfortunately MAP_32BIT use in 64-bit apps for stacks was appa...

More bankruptcy filings. And there are upbeat chirpings in the air in Utah, with SCO proclaiming its own future brighter than they thought it would be, and you can read all about it in Tom Harvey'sarticlein the Salt Lake Tribune, which calls SCO"the comeback kids". No bias there.It might be a tad ...

SCO keeps changing its story of"infringement", and so over the years, we've tried to track all the twists and turns, comparing their allegations with evidence available on the Internet or in our collections. SCO made it harder when it removed its collection of press releases from its site and from...

Here are some more screenshots for you, showing the real Santa Cruz Operation relationship with Linux before the modern day SCO Group began suing the world and its dog. Back in the late 1990s, Santa Cruz had what it called its"Linux strategy". It included both money and support to help Linux succeed...

I know it will not surprise you to hear that ISO/IEC have rejected thefour appeals against OOXML. Here's theirpress release. Now what?Andy Updegrove:Under the ISO rules of process, this now paves the way for the as-adopted version of OOXML, now called IS0/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology - Off...

"It is about time to take a step back and describe what I have been implementing,"began Daniel Phillips, referring to his new Tux3 filesystem. He provided a simple ASCII diagram that detailed the filesystem's hierarchical structure, describing each of the elements. About one he noted,"the volume t...

There is a status conference scheduled in AutoZone for Monday, September 22nd at 9 AM. Here's the notice on PACER:71 -Filed& Entered: 08/14/2008Minute Order Setting HearingDocket Text: MINUTE ORDER IN CHAMBERS of the Honorable Judge Robert C. Jones, on 8/14/2008. By Deputy Clerk: K. Goetsch...

I've been getting a lot of requests to tell you what the appeals court ruling inJacobsen v. Katzermeans. Some would like me to simplify and just tell you the bottom line, so here it is, my take on what it all means:It means that while OSI's handling of a list of approved licenses worked very well ...

New functionality has been enabled that allows logged-in users to highlight interesting mailing list discussions. This new feature has been provided out of necessity, as I'm finding myself with insufficient time of late for keeping up with the many mailing lists I track to post articles on KernelTr...

"Things really _have_ calmed down, and hopefully we've also resolved a lot of the regressions in -rc3,"began Linus Torvalds,announcing the 2.6.27-rc3 Linux kernel. He noted that much of the patch size was from the inclusion of the new ath9k wireless driver, with much of the rest of the patch size d...

This just in: the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has justoverturned[PDF] the lower court's decision inJacobsen v. Katzer, themodel train case....

The MIT Students have now filed their response to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority'sMotion to Modifythe terms of the temporary restraining order it got from the court. There is also a letter from a group of computer science professors and computer scientists in support, along with tw...

SCO has fileda motion[PDF] asking for a third extension of the exclusivity period. It wants 105 days after any final judgment is entered in theSCO v. Novelllitigation. Since at the moment no one knows when a final judgment will be filed, it's a request for an open-ended extension. The hearing on th...

Mikulas Patocka announcednew patches introducing snapshot mergingfor the Linux kernel's logical volume manager. He explained,"snapshot merging allows you to merge snapshot content back into the original device. The most useful use for this feature is the possibility to rollback [the] state of the w...

"Btrfs v0.16 is available for download,"began Chris Mason, announcing the latest release of his newBtrfs filesystem. He noted,"v0.16 has a shiny new disk format, and is not compatible with filesystems created by older Btrfs releases. But, it should be the fastest Btrfs yet, with a wide variety of ...

"The big advantage Hammer has over Tux3 is, it is up and running and released in the Dragonfly distro,"began Daniel Phillips, offering a comparison between the two filesystem. He continued,"the biggest disadvantage is, it runs on BSD, not Linux, and it so heavily implements functionality that is pr...

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.9. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP ...

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. Windows binaries will be available starting with alpha2 (intermediate snapshots available at snaps.php.net). The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as ...

Overall 158 tests have been submitted as part of TestFest 2008 since the launch of the TestFest submission site by 30 different people from people all over the world. Actually this is not counting the various submissions by existing core developers, who also took this opportunity to add some more te...

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions. The most noticable changes are the function reference, predefined variables, context options and parameters ...

The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Ten students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer: Zend LLVM Extension by Joonas Govenius, mentored by Nuno LopesPHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick RethansPhD (PHP Docbook) Project by Ru...

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediateavailability of PHP 5.2.6. This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Further details ab...

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physicall...

Once again we are glad to announce that we have been accepted to be a Google Summer of Code project. See our program for this year's GSoC.We would like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Google Inc. for this privilege to participate once again, and would like to invite everyone to look at our...

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.8. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP ...