Federal district judge Dale Kimball issued a ruling on Friday declaring that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights. Kimball’s ruling means that the end is near for SCO’s protracted litigation trainwreck, an epic assortment of lawsuits that have achieved infamy in the tech industry. Judge Kimball finds that Novell never transferred ownership of the UNIX copyrights to SCO during or after a 1995 agreement between the two companies
The NSA wants automatic surveillance capabilities in telephone switches. But once such capabilities are built in, others could use them to intercept communications. Within ten0 years this could render the US vulnerable to attacks from terrorist groups across the globe, as well as from the military establishments of other nations. Such threats are not theoretical: In April 2004, phones belonging to members of the Greek government, including the prime minister, were spied on with wiretapping software that was misused — via Slashdot
Toshiba is recalling potentially dangerous notebook batteries for the third month in a row due to concerns about potential overheating. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said 1,400 of the lithium-ion batteries containing Sony-made cells sold with Toshiba laptops pose a fire hazard. There have been three reports of models with those batteries overheating in other countries, but none of the incidents caused injury, according to the CPSC. Models affected by the recall include Toshiba’s Satellite A100, Satellite A105 and Tecra A7. Customers whose notebook was made between January through June 2006 are eligible for a free replacement battery from the company by going to Toshiba’s battery replacement Web site
Forgent Networks, a patent troll, got the slap down by a TX jury in May when it invalidated a patent Forgent held regarding video teleconferencing over telephone lines, and today, its motion for a new trial against EchoStar was denied. In fact, the court awarded EchoStar $90k in costs. Forgent probably isn’t crying that much though, it already extorted $28m from other defendants. Forgent made a business out of cheating companies for jpeg use — ’til their patent was largely invalidated on that front as well — via Slashdot
Chronos Chromos Concrete is a system that is able to dynamically display patterns, numbers and text in concrete surfaces. Application could include anything from products for the home to large scale architectural installations
Apple isn’t just sitting on the sidelines as startups like iLike and MOG and others try to tackle the social music space. Apple has launched My ITunes, a set of widgets that may be a first step in taking their fair share of the social music market
Add gBox to the growing list of online music services hoping to chip away at iTunes’s dominance. The startup was forced out of a stealth mode when Universal announced it would test sales of some digital music without the customary copy-protection technology. Google will get standard advertising fees rather than a cut of sales under the arrangement
Google has begun selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections. The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage. According to the company’s official blog, the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google’s office applications
ISPs will be forced to filter web content at the request of parents, under a $189 million Federal Government crackdown on online bad language, pornography and child sex predators. The Prime Minister, John Howard, said that the Government would increase funding for the federal police online child sex exploitation team by $40 million, helping investigators to track those who prey on children through chat rooms and sites such as MySpace and Facebook. In a separate development, convicted sex offenders in NSW will have to register their email address with police as part of State Government efforts to stop them using the internet to prey on children
Some Gmail users have seen their storage bumped to over 9GB — 9030MB, to be exact. If not a glitch, it means Google is playing catch-up with Yahoo, which now provides unlimited storage. With no other info, we can only assume the accounts are currently being selected at random
Universal Music have announced that they’re going to try selling much of their catalogue without DRM from now until January. People who don’t want to pay for music just download it from P2P, where all the music is already available for free, without DRM. If you want to convince people to buy your music, you can’t start by making it worse than the free stuff. So it’s inevitable that Universal would come around to this position. They’re not selling DRM-free tracks through iTunes (where Apple charges a 30 percent premium) — they’re selling them through Apple’s competitors — via Slashdot
In a big win for TV viewers around the country, independent EPG provider IceTV has won their eight month battle against Channel Nine. This morning Justice Annabelle Bennett ruled in favour of IceTV that their EPG does not infringe Nine’s copyright in their television schedule. The entire Nine Network case was dismissed, with IceTV declared an independent compilation
built wholly by their own means
Beginning this week, Google News will start posting user comments, but only from people actually featured in news stories. Newspapers that were unhappy about Google News using snippets of their articles will probably be even less pleased to see the new feature deployed, since Google could become an even more formidable player when it starts hosting original content. People or organisations that are mentioned in news stories can submit comments to the Google News team, which will then display those comments — unedited — alongside the Google News links to those stories. The new system will at first be deployed only within the US, but Google is open to expanding it to other regions if the trial goes well
A security expert hired by eleven Oklahoma State University students picked apart the testimony of the RIAA’s own expert witness, pointing out the oversimplifications made by the RIAA in its lawsuits against suspected file-sharers
Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists. In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible. Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an incredible levitation effects
by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together. Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person
HTML 5 introduces new elements for the first time since the last millennium. New structural elements include aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid and command
Terrorists and other criminals could exploit a newly discovered software flaw to hijack massive computer systems used to control critical infrastructure like oil refineries, power plants and factories. Ganesh Devarajan, a security researcher with TippingPoint, demonstrated the software vulnerability he uncovered to attendees at the Defcon hacker conference on computer security
Social networking web sites such as MySpace.com are increasingly juicy targets for computer hackers, who are demonstrating a pair of vulnerabilities they claim expose sensitive personal information and could be exploited by online criminals. The flaws were demonstrated at the Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences
One of the largest surveys of music consumers (PDF: 2007 Digital Music Survey) to closely examine the question of DRM has an important two-part message for the music industry. The first is that DRM is definitely turning consumers off music sales, and charging them extra to get rid of it may be an uphill battle. The second message is that knowledge of DRM and its problems is spreading fast
Adium have noticed that there seems to be quite a bit of censorship on MSN. Essentially, a number of suspicious strings result in silent failure of delivery. The strings are unsurprisingly things like .scr and .info. They’ve started maintaining a list if you’re interested
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