US Chamber of Commerce: “Censoring Foreign P2P Sites Not Censorship”

by Jared Moya

  Steve Tepp, Senior Director of Internet Counterfeiting and Piracy for the U.S. Chamber’s Global Intellectual Property Center, argues that recently proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act does not amount to ” foreign political censorship” even though the bill would force ISPs to “prevent the importation into the United States of goods and services offered by an Internet site dedicated to infringing activities,” and it’s unlikely accused website operators from around the globe would be able to appear in a US courtroom to dispute the charges.

The US Chamber of Commerce is trying to counter critics claims that recently proposed legislation would not be tantamount to “foreign political censorship.”

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/90904/us-chamber-of-commerce-censorin-foreign-p2p-sites-not-censorship/

FBI drive for encryption backdoors is déjà vu for security experts

By Ryan Singel, wired.com 

The FBI now wants to require all encrypted communications systems to have backdoors for surveillance, according to a New York Times report, and to the nation's top crypto experts it sounds like a battle they've fought before.

Back in the 1990s, in what's remembered as the crypto wars, the FBI and NSA argued that national security would be endangered if they did not have a way to spy on encrypted e-mails, IMs and phone calls. After a long protracted battle, the security community prevailed after mustering detailed technical studies and research that concluded that national security was actually strengthened by wide use of encryption to secure computers and sensitive business and government communications.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/fbi-drive-for-encryption-backdoors-is-deja-vu-for-security-experts.ars

Twitter worms spread quickly thanks to blatant security flaw

By Peter Bright | Last updated about 9 hours ago

Anyone checking twitter.com this morning was probably greeted with a mess of JavaScript, mouseover effects, and spam retweets, after a flaw in the site's handling of hyperlinks allowed attackers to inject scripts into Twitter's pages. The mere act of visiting the site with scripting enabled was sufficient to cause exploitation. Payloads ranged from the harmless—tweets with a black background—to the more malicious—redirection to porn sites.

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/09/twitter-worms-spread-quickly-thanks-to-blatant-security-flaw.ars

P2P defendants demand legal fees from Far Cry filmmaker

By Nate Anderson | Last updated 21 minutes ago

Lawyers for the US Copyright Group have sued more than 14,000 people in 2010, all of them in the federal courts of Washington, DC. Individuals have moved to quash the subpoenas that would expose their names, but these have been almost wholly rejected, in large part because they were written (sometimes by hand) by individual defendants making inappropriate arguments. But now, some defendants are fighting back in a much savvier way, with actual lawyers. And they want their pound of flesh from rightsholders.

The Far Cry case targets more than 4,000 "Doe" defendants alleged to have shared that particular Uwe Boll film using BitTorrent, and it's in that case that a major "Omnibus Motion" has now been filed. A group of defendants have hired several DC lawyers to file a joint motion demanding that the subpoenas in the case be quashed, that the defendants be dismissed from the litigation, and that Boll's production company cover their legal expenses (something probably not anticipated by Boll's firm, Achte/Neunte Boll Kino Beteilingungs GmbH, when it signed on with US Copyright Group to score some cash).

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/turnabout-p2p-defendants-demand-legal-fees-from-film-company.ars

Saddle up: world's smallest airline seat unveiled

Would you fly shoe horned in too a seat so small that your cat would struggle to fit, well some of the worlds airlines consider their customers to be no more than mere cattle as they prepare to increase plane seating to the detriment of passenger comfort and safety. Greed pure and simple as this article from the Melbourne Age details.

By Craig Platt

If you find economy class seats too cramped for comfort, we have bad news: they may be about to get even smaller.

Italian airline seat and interiors manufacturer Aviointeriors has designed a saddle-like seat with just 23 inches of seat pitch (the space between seats) – significantly smaller than the average 32 inches in economy class. Even the highest-density airline seating normally offers 28 inches of seat pitch

http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/saddle-up-worlds-smallest-airline-seat-unveiled-20100914-15ad6.html?rand=1284447337070

UK teen banned from US after sending threatening Obama email

The USA may talk about free speech and as long as you don’t call the president a prick and you are located in the US it probably still does, However if your any where else in the world watch out as this article demonstrates and oh don’t send offensive emails it can cost you your right to travel.

Not allowed into US for life

By Marc Chacksfield

Dear Mr Obama *hic*

A 17-year-old teenager from Bedfordshire has found himself with a lifetime ban from the US, after it was found that he sent a threatening email to President Barack Obama.

Luke Angel from Silsoe, sent the email while drunk and called the president abusive names after watching a documentary on the 9/11 attacks.

After the email was sent, the FBI intercepted the message and contacted police in the UK about the incident.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/uk-teen-banned-from-us-after-sending-threatening-obama-email-716306#ixzz0zXf73HF6

Claimed HDCP master key leak could be fatal to DRM scheme

By Peter Bright

High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), the copy protection system used to prevent the making of perfect digital copies of audio and video data sent over DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI interfaces, may have been blown out of the water if a post made to pastebin.com yesterday is what it claims to be. The post purports to contain the HDCP "master key," a 40×40 matrix of 56-bit numbers, which is used by the HDCP licensing company, Digital Content Protection (DCP), to generate the private keys used in all HDCP devices.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/claimed-hdcp-master-key-leak-could-be-fatal-to-drm-scheme.ars

Brisbane atheist burns Koran and Bible

Courtney Trenwith

A Brisbane atheist is bracing himself for a criminal investigation after posting an online video showing him burning the Koran and Bible.

Lawyer Alex Stewart appears to smoke marijuana using pages from the religious texts, before rating which "burns better".

The homemade video was posted on video sharing website YouTube on Friday.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/brisbane-atheist-burns-koran-and-bible-20100913-157ao.html

The Never Ending Pencil

Designers: U Jung Heo & Sa Yoeng Kim

To cut a long story short, what we have here is a simple writing tool called the Continuous Pencil, which can be used till the very end. We usually end up discarding pencil stubs…I know my children waste too many saying that short pencils are uncomfortable to hold. So basically you keep increasing the length of your stubs with a handy interim-headless-long stick that fits snugly into its rear. Quite simple and straight, but is it a refinement of the 1 + 1 Pencil?

http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/09/10/never-ending-pencil/

when life gets a little much, sleep on it 

I found this on the web @ http://semisorted.wordpress.com/, and I love it , this is the most brilliant photo ever . kudos to the person who took it and the cat

Panasonic adds Netflix streaming to 2010 TVs

Viera Cast-equipped tech gets streamed movies

By Matthew Bolton

Panasonic extends its Viera Cast service

US owners of this year's range of Panasonic's Viera Cast TVs and Blu-ray players will find that they can now stream video from Netflix, thanks to a software update.

The new service sits alongside what was already on offer, including Amazon video on demand, Skype, Pandora and YouTube.

While UK users won't be able to take advantage of the latest feature, Panasonic says it's "constantly looking to provide the best possible entertainment experience for our customers", so maybe we can hope to see it match Samsung and integrate LoveFilm streaming in the future.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/television/hdtv/panasonic-adds-netflix-streaming-to-2010-tvs-715673#ixzz0zArTdI9x

park your pirate ship in Switzerland, it won't get spied on there 

By Nate Anderson | Last updated about 5 hours ago

Switzerland, a longtime haven for all kinds of financial shenanigans, has just expanded its reputation for "discretion" to cover file-sharing as well. That's the conclusion of Logistep AG, anyway, as a Swiss court has just gutted its P2P surveillance business with a ruling that says gathering even publicly available information is illegal.

Logistep has operated in Switzerland since 2004, doing what all of these firms do: trolling BitTorrent sites for movies, music, or software, then connecting to swarms and logging the information of everyone offering the file. Bits of the file are downloaded as proof that these aren't simply "mistitled" files, and information like IP address, file hash value, and time of day are recorded in a giant spreadsheet. Content providers who rely on Logistep can take this information and submit it to local courts, seeking to identify and then sue individual file-swappers.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/switzerland-gathering-ip-addresses-from-bittorrent-sites-illegal.ars

Windows Phone aims to bury its past (and iPhone)

by Ina Fried

Microsoft's Windows Phone team staged a mock funeral for the iPhone and BlackBerry on Friday, a sign of both Redmond's ambition and the immensity of the challenge facing the new phone operating system, which is slated to hit the market next month.

Microsoft jokingly buried the competition with a mock funeral on Friday, but the question is whether Windows Phone 7 will really be able to take on Android, the iPhone and others when it hits the market next month.

Two hearses were among a dozen floats that were part of a parade that took place on campus on Friday to celebrate the completion of a total overhaul of Microsoft's cell phone strategy.

Photos of the event turned up on Flickr, but Microsoft was less than eager to talk about the goings-on.

"The Microsoft event on campus was an internal event to celebrate the finalization of Windows Phone 7 software," a company representative said in a statement.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20016134-56.html?tag=cnetRiver#ixzz0zASaBiVe

No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digital resale

By Nate Anderson 

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit todayruled (PDF) on a long-standing case involving used software on eBay, and it came to an important decision: if a company says you don't have the right to resell a program, you don't have that right. Could this mean the end of the resale market for all digital content? Yup. But the court says it had no choice.

The case is Vernor v. Autodesk, in which Timothy Vernor made his living from selling items (including software) on eBay. Vernor had picked up some old copies of AutoCAD from an architect's office sale, complete with their serial numbers, and he put them up on eBay noting that they were not currently installed on any computer. Sounds legal, right?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/the-end-of-used-major-ruling-upholds-tough-software-licenses.ars

Google Instant 'invented by Yahoo! in 2005'

Ex-Yahooligan rues death of LiveSearch

By Cade Metz in San Francisco 

A former Yahoo! product manager has claimed that Google Instant was invented by Yahoo! in 2005.
In a blog post, former Yahoo! search product manager Steven Hood points out that in 2005, the company rolled out to tool known as Live Search, an AJAX-based online application remarkably similar to Google Instant.
"[Google Instant] is a fundamental change to a user interaction model that’s been largely unchallenged for years," Hood writes. "By all accounts this is a bold and brave innovation. Which is why it may surprise you to learn that Google Instant is actually five years old. Yahoo built it back in 2005."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/10/google_instant_v_yahoo_live_search/

Righthaven: saving the newspaper industry, one lawsuit at a time

By Nate Anderson

The Trauma Intervention Program (TIP) of Southern Nevada is a nonprofit that sends trained volunteers to the site of severe accidents, suicides, fires, and violent theft. The volunteers comfort family members, witnesses, and bystanders—traumatized people who can't be helped by anything found in an ambulance.

TIP might seem an unlikely target for a federal copyright lawsuit, but it found itself hauled into court last week for posting 14 local newspaper articles about TIP and its volunteers to the group's website. In most of the articles, TIP volunteers are the main sources for the reporters, providing plenty of quotes and (sometimes jarring) anecdotes about their work.

The lawsuit was filed by a company named Righthaven, an entrepreneurial venture formed by a Vegas attorney and the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was filed without warning or notice, and it seeks more than just statutory damages and attorneys' fees; it asks the court to "direct GoDaddy and any successor domain name registrar for the Domain to lock the Domain and transfer control of the Domain to Righthaven."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/righthaven-saving-the-newspaper-industry-one-lawsuit-at-a-time.ars

Microsoft legal punch may change botnet battles forever

by Elinor Mills

With court backing and a novel use of a civil procedure, Microsoft appears to be close to obliterating the Waledac spam botnet, changing the way online criminal operations are defeated going forward.

A magistrate judge in federal court in Virginia is expected to recommend within days that the judge hearing Microsoft's case grant a default judgment, Richard Boscovich, a senior Microsoft attorney told CNET on Wednesday.

This would mean that the 276 Web domains deployed as Waledac command-and-control servers to provide instructions to thousands of infected computers would be forfeited to Microsoft, effectively shutting down the botnet for good

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20015912-245.html?tag=topStories2#ixzz0z2lK1DQi

Apple relaxes restrictions on iOS app code, iAd analytics

By Chris Foresman 

Recent revisions to the iOS developer agreements caused considerable controversy by restricting which programming languages could be used to develop iOS apps. Those changes also restricted what kind of analytics data could be collected by developers and advertisers. Now, however, Apple has backed off on its position: it will relax these rules in order to give developers more flexibility. Additionally, Apple will now actually publish a list of app review guidelines for developers—the first time the company has done so since the App Store launched more than two years ago.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/09/apple-relaxes-restrictions-on-ios-app-code-iad-analytics.ars

Optical Speedbumps Create Illusion of Little Girl Darting Out In Front Of You

By Clay Dillow

Civil authorities around the world have tried all kinds of tricks to get drivers to slow down: speed bumps, rumble strips, flashing lights, the decoy police cruiser, and of course the good old-fashioned speed trap. The British Columbia Automobile Association Traffic Safety Foundation is taking a different tack: scaring the living hell out of drivers. In an effort to brusquely remind drivers of the consequences of wanton acceleration, they’re painting an elongated image of a child chasing a ball into the street in 2D on the pavement in such a way that it appears three-dimensional.

http://www.popsci.com.au/2010/09/optical-speedbumps-create-illusion-of-little-girl-darting-out-in-front-of-you/

Google launches live-updating 'Instant' search

By Julianne Pepitone

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- One of the Internet's most iconic images -- Google's search screen -- is being overhauled. On Wednesday the company launched Google Instant, a live-updating service that aims to shave seconds off the typical search time. The update began hitting users' computers about an hour before a scheduled Google press event to unveil the change.

Now, when users search Google, the results are refined in real time as more keywords are added. The search box jumps to the top of the search page and results appear in a constantly changing list. Users can select the right site if it catches their eye before they finish typing.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/08/technology/google_instant/index.htm

Frito-Lay snacks on electric delivery trucks

by Candace Lombardi

Frito-Lay plans to have 176 all-electric trucks in its U.S. fleet by the end of 2011.

(Credit: Smith Electric Vehicles) PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay announced on Wednesday that it plans to add more than 176 all-electric trucks to its delivery fleet over the next year and a half Five all-electric trucks have been deployed for the company's New York routes this month, with plans to implement a total of 21 all-electric trucks by the end of the year that will include the company's Columbus, Ohio- and Fort Worth, Texas-area routes. Another 155 all-electric trucks will be added to Frito-Lay's U.S. fleet by the end of 2011. The company already has six EVs operating in its Canada fleet.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015833-54.html?tag=cnetRiver#ixzz0yyYVV3UR

European Parliament passes anti-ACTA declaration

By Nate Anderson

Today 377 members of the European Parliament adopted a written declaration on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in which they demand greater transparency, assert that ISPs should not up end being liable for data sent through their networks, and say that ACTA "should not force limitations upon judicial due process or weaken fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and the right to privacy."

The "written declaration" has no binding force; any MEP can issue one (there's a 200-word maximum), which is adopted when more than half of all MEPs sign on. If adopted, "written declarations are printed and posted on a board at the entrance to the Chambers in Strasbourg and Brussels." They also go up on the Web and get passed on to the European Commission.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/european-parliament-passes-anti-acta-declaration.ars

Google to launch TV service in Australia next year

Google will launch its service to bring the web to TV screens in the United States before Christmas and worldwide next year, its chief executive said, as it extends its reach from the desktop to the living room.

CEO Eric Schmidt said the service, which will allow full internet browsing via the television, would be free, and Google would work with a variety of programme makers and electronics manufacturers to bring it to consumers.

http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/hometech/google-to-launch-tv-service-in-australia-next-year-20100908-15046.html?autostart=1

Google invites Yahoo users to log into services via OpenID

By Jacqui Cheng 

Yahoo users can now use their Yahoo logins to sign up for Google services thanks to OpenID, with other providers coming soon. Google announced Tuesday that it was implementing the OpenID standard for its login process in hopes of making things easier for Internet users who have too many logins to keep track of, though whether users will actually use it remains to be seen.

For those who aren't already familiar, OpenID is a (somewhat slow-moving) movement aimed at establishing a safe, secure, and standards-based single sign-on framework for use across the Internet. The initiative allows people to sign in and access multiple websites with a single username.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/09/google-invites-yahoo-users-to-log-into-services-via-openid.ars

HP SUES Ex-CEO Mark Hurd Over New Job At Rival Oracle

By JORDAN ROBERTSON 

SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard Co. is suing the chief executive it ousted last month, Mark Hurd, to stop him from taking a top job at rival Oracle Corp.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a California state court, came a day after Oracle hired Hurd as co-president to help lead the database software maker's efforts to steal business from HP. HP claims that Hurd won't be able to perform his job at Oracle without spilling HP's trade secrets and violating a confidentiality agreement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/07/hp-sues-exceo-mark-hurd-o_0_n_707795.html?utm_source=chrome

Android to control half of smartphone market, say analysts

By Larry Dignan

A bevy of Android devices will ultimately mean that Google’s mobile operating system will control largely half of the smartphone market, according to a Piper Jaffray report. Apple’s iOS will probably top out with market share of 20 percent to 30 percent in the long run.

The big picture? Android and Apple will squeeze rivals such as Nokia and Research in Motion, according to the Piper Jaffray report. These also-rans will duke it out for the 20 percent share left on the table.

Android will grab half of the smartphone market ultimately just because of its product cycle and multiple partners. The HTC, Motorola and Samsung Android device barrage is impressive. In the end, RIM and Nokia will cave and adopt Android as an operating system and give the operating system a massive market share boost

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/android-to-control-half-of-smartphone-market-say-analysts/38881?tag=mantle_skin;content

Texas opens antitrust investigation of Google

by Tom Krazit

Google will face an antitrust investigation in Texas over charges that it manipulated search results, in what appears to a similar case to one pending in Europe.

Google confirmed an earlier report by Search Engine Land Friday after the close of the stock market that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has contacted it in connection with an "antitrust review" of Google's business practices. Earlier this year, European regulators opened an investigation regarding claims by a Microsoft-friendly price-comparison site called Foundem that Google was downranking Foundem in hopes of putting the site out of business.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20015601-265.html?tag=topTechContentWrap;editorPicks#ixzz0ystg1ynm