The warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance program authorised by the Bush administration violates the US Constitution and must cease immediately. The landmark decision makes US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency’s once-secret program. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit against the government, claiming the program ran roughshod
over the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and ran afoul of federal wiretapping law
Macrovision’s best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analogue video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording. A company named Sima has products that eliminate this noise when digitising such video, as any good digitiser would do. Macrovision argues that this is a violation of the DMCA, and a court sided with them in June. Now the injunction is being reviewed, and several organisations are siding with Sima and Fair Use, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If it isn’t overturned, this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analogue recordings
A federal judge ordered tobacco companies Thursday to admit they lied about the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes and to warn consumers in advertisements and packaging that tobacco is addictive. US District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that the industry conspired for decades to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking and now must pay to help smokers kick the habit
In recent years, software companies have hammered out rules with researchers on disclosure, which cover how and when vulnerabilities are made public. Now flaw finders want something in return: more information from software providers on what they are doing to tackle the holes the researchers have reported
There will be at least 12 planets in our solar system, and probably many more, if a new definition of the word planet
is adopted. Next week the International Astronomical Union will vote on a draft definition of what distinguishes a planet from lesser space rocks. The new scheme would retain Pluto — previously threatened with ejection from the club — but it would also admit several new members, including the former asteroid Ceres, and even Charon, which until now has been classed as Pluto’s moon. Writers John Scalzi and Scott Westerfield have been having something of an on-going barney over whether or not Pluto is a planet and the whole thing resulted in Cthulhu adjudicating
Google is about to give its hometown a wonderful gift: a municipal wireless network covering the entire city of Mountain View, with free Internet access for both residents and visitors. Google’s grand gesture is incomplete in one crucial way — the company will not provide live human tech support, which is often crucial for first-time users
The state of Washington has sued the owners of the Movieland.com, alleging that the company used spyware to strong-arm users into signing up for its paid movie download service
This past weekend, the OSU Linux Users Group descended on a field in Oregon to create a 45,000+ square foot crop circle of Firefox. The photos and write-up are worth checking out — via Slashdot
The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced. There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,
says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check
AMD announced its new Rev F
generation of Opteron server processors on Tuesday in the US, the next volley in a competition with Intel’s newly competitive Xeon models. The Rev F Opterons, all dual-core models, add new virtualisation abilities and faster memory, run at the same 2.6GHz top speed as preceding mainstream models, and plug into AMD’s new Socket F
. Although that new socket disrupts server designers’ easy upgrade path from one Opteron to the next, it also lays the foundation for quad-core chips in 2007 and for server designs through the end of the decade
RealNetworks will release open-source software this year that will let Linux computers play Windows Media files
Live Writer, a new Microsoft programme for bloggers moves the company further into a growing online market, while competing with some of the smaller players that make similar software for Windows
The Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has rejected claims he has not tried to contact members of the Exclusive Brethren religious group
Descendants of extinct mammals such as the giant woolly mammoth might one day walk the Earth again. It isn’t exactly Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers are looking at the possibility of using sperm from frozen animals to inseminate living relatives.
After the recent release of AOL search logs, Paul Boutin used the site splunkd.com to analyse the logs. His analysis groups searchers into seven categories: The Pornhound, the Manhunter, the Shopper, the Obsessive, the Omnivore, the Newbie, and the Basketcase. My favorite example search is in the Basketcase category: i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life
— via Slashdot
E-mail in-boxes are under a new kind of spam attack. This new spam has confused many people due to its lack of advertising, viruses, or request for personal information. One popular theory is that these innocuous blocks of text, often drawn from popular literature, are being used to un-train
spam filters to allow more malicious spam through in the future
Nuclear bombs can kill people even if they’re not used. In the US alone, the Department of Energy estimates that more than 2,500 billion litres of groundwater are contaminated with uranium as a consequence of nuclear weapons production. In Uranium ‘pearls’ before slime
, scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say they discovered that some common bacteria could convert deadly heavy metal into less threatening nano-spheres
. In fact, these bacteria can convert soluble radioactive uranium into a non-toxic solid form called uraninite. Still, more research needs to be done before using these bacteria on a large scale, but it’s a step in the good direction. Read more for additional references and photos showing how Shewanella oneidensis can help us to decontaminate groundwater at nuclear waste sites — via Slashdot
Dell is recalling 4.1 million notebook computer batteries because they could erupt in flames, the company said Monday. It will be the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry
Google has announced a deal to make the books from the University of California library available online. The agreement bolstered the Google Book Search project, a controversial campaign by the online search juggernaut to digitise all the written works in the world and put them on the internet. The state university system has more than 100 libraries on its 10 campuses and bills the aggregate collection as the largest research and academic library in the world
Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle’s house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house. Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property
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