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No-contract iPhone on the way

2008-07-07T18:58:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! AT&T Mobility put some asterisks on its iPhone 3G pricing Tuesday but also revealed an interesting option coming in the future: an iPhone without a contract. In the news release disclosing terms and monthly rates for iPhone 3G service plans, the carrier hinted at the upcoming offer without saying anything about when it will become available. Freedom will come with a price -- $599 for an 8GB device and $699 for a 16GB -- but this will mark the first time consumers in the United States are able to buy an iPhone without being tied down to a two-year contract. [ For the big picture on the iPhone 3G, see InfoWorld's special report ] The phone probably would still be locked for use only on AT&T's network, said Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg. But buyers could choose a pay-as-you-go plan for voice service -- there is no prepaid data plan from AT&T -- or just use the device as a media player and calendar and access the Web via its Wi-Fi radio. Unlike the slimmer iPod Touch, the iPhone has a camera and a small speaker. The numerous third-party applications coming to the iPhone later this month presumably also could be used without a service plan. However, the no-contract phone is likely to have a narrow appeal, he said. "That's a pretty hefty premium you're going to pay over an iPod Touch," Gartenberg said. The iPhone 3G is set to go on sale July 11. On Tuesday, AT&T revealed details of the four plans it will offer for the iPhone 3G. They range from $69.99 per month for 450 anytime minutes and 5,000 night and weekend minutes, to $129.99 per month for unlimited anytime minutes. All the plans include unlimited data but not an SMS (Short Message Service) package. Taxes are extra. There are more details at AT&T's iPhone page. Also on Tuesday, AT&T said the iPhone 3G's vaunted $199 price would only be available to three kinds of customers: -- people who bought the iPhone before July 11 -- customers new to AT&T, or ones activating a totally new line -- existing AT&T customers who are eligible for an upgrade discount This means current AT&T customers with handsets other than the iPhone will have to pay $399 for an 8GB iPhone 3G or $499 for the 16GB model unless they are due for a phone upgrade discount. Any AT&T customer upgrading to the iPhone 3G will be charged an upgrade fee of $18 instead of the standard $36 activation fee that newcomers to AT&T will pay. Those who bought a 2G iPhone on or after May 27 will be able to swap it for a 3G model and pay only a restocking fee. However, anyone upgrading from a 2G iPhone to the new model will have to enter into a new two-year contract under a 3G iPhone plan. Used 2G iPhones can be handed down to family or friends, but their new owners will have to take the handsets to an AT&T store for activation before using them as phones, according to AT&T. Despite the debuts of alternatives such as the Samsung Instinct from Sprint Nextel, there's still no real competition, Gartenberg said. The iPhone's iPod features and direct connection to iTunes, plus its software overall, make it stand out. "None of them are quite delivering on the same experience that Apple is, just yet," Gartenberg said. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

NTT to Impose Broadband Upload Limits

2008-07-07T18:56:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! One of Japan's biggest Internet service providers will soon begin imposing daily upload limits on its customers in response to a portion of its user base who upload massive amounts of data. OCN, the carrier operated by NTT Communications, will introduce a daily upload limit of 30G bytes from Aug. 1. Customers that exceed the amount will first be asked to observe it, but those that repeatedly break it will have their access suspended, the carrier said Wednesday. Downloads will continue to be unlimited. By targeting large uploaders the limits will likely hit the small portion of OCN's 7 million customers who operate file-sharing servers from their connections, said Tei Gordon, an NTT spokesman in Tokyo. The limit corresponds to about 7 full-length movies per day. NTT, like most Japanese Internet service providers, has enjoyed booming business from the fast spread of fiber optic Internet connections that provide links of 100M bps (bits per second) to and from the Internet for around ¥5,000 (US$46) per month. In parallel with the explosion in broadband usage has come a need to continuously upgrade its core network to carry ever-increasing amounts of traffic that now include streaming IPTV services offered by the carriers themselves. However, NTT said that despite the upgrades "a small number of individual users have been monopolizing substantial network resources by uploading massive amounts of data, which can slow the speed of the network and lower communication quality for other users." Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Firefox Users Most Secure on Internet, Study Reveals

2008-07-07T00:32:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! Mozilla Firefox fans might rest a little easier these days after a study released Tuesday revealed that its users are most secure on the Internet. The study "Understanding the Web browser threat: Examination of vulnerable online Web browser populations and the "insecurity iceberg," was a collaborative effort conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM (NYSE:IBM) Internet Security Services. The research offers a comprehensive analysis of Web browsers, particularly in the area of security. The study's aim was to analyze Web browser preference and behavior for people using the Internet. Altogether, the study found that less than 60 percent (59.1) of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers. Failure update browsers exponentially increases the chance for remote attacks executed by hackers, the study found. In recent years, the Web has become the vehicle for malicious attacks, which have enabled cyber criminals to execute code that shuts down a system or takes complete control of a user's PC. Unlike years past, hackers now are creating new malware specifically to gain access to user's personal and financial information, with the aim of committing identity theft or selling it on the black market. The study concluded that of the hundreds of millions of users accessing Web browsers worldwide, more than 600 million were at risk of attack for not running the latest, most secure Web browser version as of June 2008. Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day. However, despite Firefox's single click integrate auto-update functionality, 16.7 percent of Firefox users still continue access the Web with an outdated version of the browser, researchers said. The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available. Meanwhile, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)'s Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than half of IE users -- 47.6 percent -- were running the most secure browser version during the same time period. Opera ranked slightly higher than IE, with about 56 percent of users who said that they have applied the latest version of the browser to their computer. Of the four browsers surveyed, Opera ranked last in popularity, with a just 11 million users that comprise .8 percent of the marketshare. Altogether, Safari has captured only 48 million users, equaling about 3.4 percent of the market -- a user base far surpassed by Firefox's 227 million and IE's 1.1 billion, encompassing 16.1 percent and 78.3 percent of the market respectively. Researchers initiated the study to highlight the growing global problem of Web exploitation and the increasing number of users who log onto various Web browsers. Among other things, the researchers aimed to address the growing number of threats launched by attackers in recent years that exploit Web vulnerabilities with stealthy and silent attacks for financial gain. "Profit motivated cyber"criminals have rapidly adopted Web browser exploitation as a key vector for malware installation," researchers state. "As popularity of this attack vector has blossomed, there have been frequent reports of hundreds of thousands of Web sites succumbing to mass-defacement, where the defacement often consists of an embedded iFrame. These iFrames typically include content from servers hosting malicious JavaScript code designed to exploit vulnerabilities accessible through the user's Web browser and subsequently to initiate a drive-by malware download." The researchers also stated that attacks have become so sophisticated that they are able to spread malicious code to numerous users by infecting "legitimate" high trafficked and popular Web sites, underscoring the need for users to apply the latest browser patches and updates when surfing the Internet. Researchers also advised that in light of a more dangerous security landscape and the barrage of Trojans, botnets and other malware, users need to use the most recent version of the installed software and immediately apply the latest patches as they become available. "With today's hostile Intent and drive-by download attack vectors, failure to apply patches promptly or missing them entirely is a recipe for disaster; exposing the host to infection and possibly subsequent data disclosure or loss," they said. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

FriendRank

2008-07-07T00:31:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! Like most normal people, I was just having an interesting telephone conversation with a friend of mine (at 2am) about Google, Yahoo, Friendster, on-line marketplaces, approximate searches, and some secret stuff. Along the way I got to thinking about some of the fundamental similarities between Google (those who mapped the relationships among web pages and put them to use) and Friendster (those trying to map human relationships and put them to use). It occurred to me that Friendster needs FriendRank. Like Google's similarly named dead technology, PageRank, think of FriendRank as a way of providing a measure of influence among "friend nodes" in a social network. Imagine, for example, that Howard Dean wants to convince me to vote for him. He can either advertise in the hopes of reaching me, or he can be a savvy Internet sorta guy and try to use my social network (thru the Internet, of course) to do the job. At first you might think okay, that's easy. You just need to find the shortest path thru the network from Howard Dean to me. Then you'd figure out who along the way he needs to contact to try to get to me. Well, maybe. Social networks aren't that simple. They don't always use the shortest path--at least not in the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" sense. Often times they use the most well lubricated path. Or the path that may result in reaching the greatest number of people who are "close" to me. Or those that have more influence with me in matters of politics, as opposed to something complete unrelated like cat grooming. You get the idea. Like PageRank, it's a multi-dimensional measure that could prove to be quite powerful if applied properly. It's like a routing problem with different dimensions involved. FriendRank would quantify that stuff. It's the algorithm used to find paths of social influence in various contexts, for various purposes, and in varying networks. Or maybe it's the value that algorithm produces for a given set of inputs. Either way, it's the idea that counts, right? Initially. Then comes the implementation. Now, if you go search for references to FriendRank, you'll see a few. So this term (and idea?) isn't exactly original. But some of the real possibilities just clicked for me about 10 minutes ago, and believe me, this example is the tip of the iceberg. Some of the discussion here is really, really missing the point. So try not to get sucked into that void. (Yes, I'm purposely not saying a lot of what I could yet. It needs time to percolate...) On a semi-related note, it's too bad there's no Friendster web service API I can use to get the data needed to prototype this, huh? That could be a lot of fun. Or really frustrating, as most hard problems are... :-) On the other hand, Friendster is not a necessary component in the equation. (Or Tribe.net, or LinkedIn, or...) It's just damned convenient since it's big and centralized. If I could get access to enough IM buddy lists, blogrolls, and so on, it'd be doable but much, much harder. Okay, bed time now. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

eBay backs down on PayPal changes

2008-07-07T00:28:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! eBay has backed down on plans to force all of its users on to PayPal just as the competition regulator looked set to scuttle the move. The policy would have locked out all payment methods - direct bank deposits, cheques and money orders - except PayPal, which eBay owns, and cash on delivery/pick-up. eBay's proposals inspired a massive backlash among sellers, who would have been slugged with extra fees because PayPal charges them for each transaction. Sellers complained eBay users should be given the choice of which payment method to use, rejecting eBay's claims that the decision was purely to protect users from fraud. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which held a conference in Sydney this week to help it decide whether to allow the policy, looked set to scuttle the plan on the grounds it would lessen competition in the online payments market and deny consumers choice. But today, before the ACCC could announce its final decision, eBay said it would not go ahead with the plans. "While we disagree with the ACCC's draft notice, we have decided to withdraw the notification to stop any further confusion and disruption among the eBay community," said eBay vice president Simon Smith. "eBay regrets any uncertainty that this process has caused among the Community and believe that today's decision will remove further doubt." However, eBay has refused to roll back the first stage of its proposed changes, which required all sellers to at least offer PayPal as one of the payment options. "Forcing sellers to accept PayPal payments will harm competition by making it more difficult for PayPal's competitors to compete," said Dale Clapperton, chair of the online users lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia. "eBay should allow sellers the choice of whether or not to deal with PayPal. Many sellers choose not to use PayPal because of higher fees or past bad experiences. "If PayPal is truly the best payment option, why does eBay need to force people to do business with them?" Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Baby Equitments

2008-07-07T00:16:00.002+08:00

Are you looking for baby equitments for you baby or your future baby? Then look no further was i have this speicla website that is offering this speical deal for you so that you can buy the best and the cheapest baby equitment in the internet baby boutique Newsletter They also have an option for you to subcribe to their product feeds where they would sen you imeediate updates on their products. They also allow you to pay via Discover, Visa and many other major payment methods Check them out

V-Moda Gunmetal Rouge

2008-07-06T20:08:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! Here is the video review of the V-Moda Gunmetal Rouge Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

V-moda Blush

2008-07-06T08:20:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! Here is the video review of the V-Moda Blush headset Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Laptop Losses Total 12,000 Per Week at US Airports

2008-07-06T00:37:00.001+08:00

Slashdot It! Companies lose a lot more laptops than they disclose, according to a report published Monday. According to a study of 106 major U.S. airports and 800 business travelers published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer, about 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Only 30 percent of travelers ever recover the lost devices. Nearly half of the travelers say their laptops contain customer data or confidential business information. The report offers a very different view from sources that collect breach disclosure information, such as Attrition.org, where only a few companies disclose laptop thefts each week. Many employees are embarrassed to report the loss of a laptop, and many companies don't report them, experts say. "It’s staggering to learn that up to 600,000 laptops are lost in U.S. airports annually, many containing sensitive information that companies must account for," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. "IT departments must re-evaluate the steps they’re taking to protect mobile professionals, the laptops they carry, and company data stored on mobile devices." Dell used the report to support its launch of Dell ProSupport Mobility Services, a suite of modular asset and data protection services to help companies protect laptop computers and company information, especially when the computers are lost. The Ponemon study indicates that most airport laptop losses occur at the security checkpoints or at the departure gates, where it's easy to leave things behind. More than 70 percent of business travelers say they feel rushed when trying to get on their flights, and 69 percent said they are usually carrying too many items while trying to catch their flights. Los Angeles's LAX reported more laptop losses than any other airport, about 1,200 per week. Most of the airports said they generally keep the laptops for some period of times, then destroy them if they are unclaimed. Sixty-five percent of the business travelers admit that they do not take steps to protect the confidential information contained on their laptops when traveling on business, according to the study. Forty-two percent say they don't back up their data before going on a trip. Fewer than 20 percent of respondents said they have whole disk encryption or file encryption on their machines. Interestingly, only 1 percent of the respondents admitted personally losing a laptop computer. However, 84 percent say they know someone who has lost a laptop while traveling on business. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

We did it! We set a Guinness World Record.

2008-07-06T00:35:00.003+08:00

Slashdot It! Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web. Ever since Firefox was launched in 2004 we've relied on our community to help us spread the word, and thanks to projects including crop circles, newspaper ads, giant stickers, videos, blogs and more we now have over 180 million users in more than 230 countries. So what's next? We'll just have to wait and see what YOU come up with! Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Microsoft addresses XSS in Internet Explorer

2008-07-06T00:31:00.003+08:00

Slashdot It! Microsoft is planning to add a series of new security features to the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, including protection against cross-site scripting attacks. A beta version of IE 8 is due out in August, and along with the XSS filter, it will include a filter designed to provide better protection against phishing attacks, features that make it easier for developers to request resources and share information across domains, and some changes to the way that ActiveX controls are handled by the browser. Specifically, developers will be able to write controls that are only available for the individual user who downloads them. The announcement of the new security features in IE 8 came just a week after the release of Firefox 3, the latest version of IE's main competition in the browser world. Firefox 3 also includes updated antimalware and antiphishing capabilities and several other security updates. Microsoft has been fighting to repair the security reputation of IE for several years, since the initial release of Firefox, which the Mozilla Foundation has positioned as a more secure alternative to IE. But Microsoft has been making steady progress on the security of its ubiquitous browser in recent versions, and IE 8 serves to further that cause. The most intriguing and potentially most useful feature in the new browser is the XSS filter, which is built to protect against Type-1 XSS attacks. These attacks are among the more common ones online right now, and many non-technical users have little idea that they even exist, let alone what to do about them. The XSS filter in IE 8 monitors all of the requests and responses made by the browser and automatically disables XSS attacks when they're detected. Users will see a modified version of the requested page, showing them that the attack was blocked. "Ultimately we have taken a very pragmatic approach -- we choose to not to build the filter in such a way that we compromise site compatibility. Thus, the XSS Filter defends against the most common XSS attacks, but it is not, and will never be, an XSS panacea. This is similar to the pragmatic approach taken by ASP.NET request validation, although the XSS Filter is able to be more aggressive than the ASP.NET feature," David Ross, a security software engineer at Microsoft wrote in an announcement of the new features. Also, in the new version of IE, the Data Execution Protection (DEP) feature will be enabled by default on machines running either Vista SP1 or XP SP3. DEP is designed to prevent malicious code from writing to addressable memory space. The feature has been in previous versions of IE, but was disabled by default because of compatibility issues and other considerations Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Google Changes Home Page, Adding Link to Privacy Policy

2008-07-06T00:15:00.001+08:00

Slashdot It! The word “privacy” now appears on Google’s home page, with a link to the company’s privacy policy. With that one word, the Web search giant heads off the growing controversy over whether its previous practice ran afoul of a California law, the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003, which requires the operator of a commercial Web site that collects personal information to link to its privacy policy from its home page. When I wrote in May that Google appears to be violating the law, Google told me that it did not believe that it was required to put a link on its home page. The company said that its privacy policy was easy enough to find, either on the page called “About Google” or by searching for “Google privacy policy” on its search engine. Later, I spoke to Joanne McNabb, the chief of California’s Office of Privacy Protection, who said that her agency believes that Google should have a link to its privacy policy on its home page. After the issue buzzed about the blogosphere, four privacy groups wrote Google urging it to change its practices. Google announced its change of heart on both its main corporate blog and on its public policy blog. (It may be a coincidence, but the changes were made late on July 3, the day before a three-day weekend. Was that perhaps to avoid much notice?) Both posts said, “We added this link both to our homepage and to our results page to make it easier for users to find information about our privacy principles.” Neither post mentioned the California law. In the main blog post, Marissa Mayer, the Google vice president who looks after the user interface of its search engine, reiterated that the company believes in keeping its main page short. She said that Google’s two founders told her the word privacy could only be added to the home page if another word was deleted, leaving the page at 28 words. So the copyright notice at the bottom of the page was changed from “© 2008 Google” to “© 2008 - Privacy.” Ms. Mayer wrote that it is implied that Google is the one copyrighting the page. I’ve dropped an e-mail to Google to ask a few questions about all this, but it may not be until next week that we can get answers. UPDATE Steve Langdon, a Google spokesman, sent this in response to my question about why Google did this now: Some users, bloggers, and regulatory bodies have asked us why we didn’t have a link, and, after evaluating, we decided that it was the right time to add one. While users have always been able to easily search for and find our policy before, or click through to it, this provides an easier path to learning about our privacy approach. We’ve also added the same link on the results page, as many users arrive on them directly. Mr. Langdon said he didn’t know what sort of contact Google had with California officials or whether there was any discussion of legal action by the state. He said he would check and get back to me. His statement above does say that the company was approached by “regulatory bodies.” Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Stolen: Google employees' personal data

2008-07-05T08:43:00.001+08:00

Slashdot It! Google has confirmed that personal data of U.S. employees hired prior to 2006 have been stolen in a recent burglary. Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company Google and other companies use to handle human resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on May 26. An undisclosed number of employees' details and those of dependents such as names, addresses, and Social Security numbers were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information. It's still unclear how many more of Colt Express' clients were affected by the breach. CBS' CNET Networks, publisher of News.com, was also affected by the burglary, with about 6,500 employees' details stolen. Although there is no evidence of misuse of the data to date, the information obtained could be used by identity thieves to create fake accounts and identities. It's only come to light now that Google was one of the companies affected. Google itself was not burglarized, nor were any of its internal systems compromised. Danny Thorpe, former chief scientist at Borland and engineer at Google who now works for Microsoft, was informed of the theft on July 1. A letter from Google said personal data of Google employees hired prior to December 31, 2005, may have been stolen in the May 26 burglary of Colt Express Outsourcing Services. No credit card numbers were in the stolen data; just names, addresses, SSNs--all the information needed for a thief to open a credit card account under another's name. According to Thorpe, Google has offered to cover the cost of a one-year subscription to a credit report and identity theft-monitoring service. Similar benefits were offered to CNET Networks employees. ITWorld reported last week that Colt Express Outsourcing Services was in financial difficulty and could not help those affected. The company's CEO, Samuel Colt III, said in a statement "We do not have the resources, financial and otherwise, to assist you further." "We take the security of our employees very seriously and require outside vendors to meet appropriate security standards. We review and update these standards on an ongoing basis," a Google representative said. "Google is not currently using Colt's services and had made this decision long before this incident." Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube

2008-07-05T08:19:00.004+08:00

Slashdot It! A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far. The order raised concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors. Viacom also said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside lawyers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google. Still, the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or fall unexpectedly into the hands of third parties. “These very large databases of transactional information become honey pots for law enforcement or for litigants,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P. or Internet protocol address. Both companies have argued that I.P. addresses alone cannot be used to unmask the identities of individuals with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using other records of their online activities. The amount of data covered by the order is staggering, as it includes every video watched on YouTube since its founding in 2005. In April alone, 82 million people in the United States watched 4.1 billion clips there, according to comScore. Some experts say virtually every Internet user has visited YouTube. Google and Viacom said they had had discussions about ways to further protect users’ anonymity, but as of Thursday evening the two companies had yet to agree on how to do that. “We are investigating techniques, including anonymization, to enhance the security of information that will be produced,” said Michael D. Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel. Mr. Fricklas said Viacom would not have direct access to the data, and that its use would be strictly limited by the court order. Viacom would not, for example, chase down users who had illegally posted clips from “The Colbert Report.” “The information that is produced by Google is going to be limited to outside advisers who can use it solely for the purpose of enforcing our rights against YouTube and Google,” Mr. Fricklas said. In a letter sent Thursday, Google’s lawyers pressed their counterparts at Viacom to accept a more limited set of data. “We request that plaintiffs agree that YouTube may redact user names and I.P. addresses from the viewing data in the interests of protecting user privacy,” wrote David H. Kramer, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In a response, a Viacom lawyer wrote that Viacom was “committed to working with Google” on the privacy issue. Interestingly, Google has rejected demands by privacy groups for more stringent protections for I.P. address records, saying that in most cases the addresses cannot be used to identify users. Yet Google argued that YouTube viewing data should be kept from Viacom, in part, to protect the privacy of its users. Judge Louis L. Stanton of the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over Viacom’s lawsuit against Google and YouTube, referenced Google’s past statements on I.P. addresses to conclude that its “privacy concerns are speculative.” “It is an ‘I told you so’ moment,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. Other privacy advocates said they welcomed Viacom’s commitment to limit its use of the information, but they remained concerned about user rights. “Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group. That right is protected by the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, Mr. Opsahl added. Congress passed that law in 1988 to protect video rental records, after a newspaper disclosed the rental habits of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee. Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people. In 2006, after AOL released for research purposes the search records of thousands of anonymous users, reporters from The New York Times were able to track down one person by analyzing her search queries. Mr. Opsahl said anonymous viewing habits may similarly yield clues about the identity of viewers. Viacom wants the viewing data in part to help it determine the extent to which YouTube’s success was built on the popularity of copyrighted clips that were illegally posted to the site. Outside experts say that without the data it would be virtually impossible to pin that down. Judge Stanton agreed that the information could help Viacom make its case. “A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiff’s vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial noninfringing use defense,” he wrote. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Obama Voters Protest His Switch on Telecom Immunity

2008-07-05T08:19:00.003+08:00

Slashdot It! Senator Barack Obama’s decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants has led to an intense backlash among some of his most ardent supporters. Thousands of them are now using the same grass-roots organizing tools previously mastered by the Obama campaign to organize a protest against his decision. In recent days, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on a social networking site on Mr. Obama’s own campaign Web site. They are calling on Mr. Obama to reverse his decision to endorse legislation supported by President Bush to expand the government’s domestic spying powers while also providing legal protection to the telecommunication companies that worked with the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks. During the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to fight such legislation to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. But he has switched positions, and now supports a compromise hammered out between the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership. The bill is expected to come to a vote on the Senate floor next Tuesday. That decision, one of a number made by Mr. Obama in recent weeks intended to position him toward the political center as the general election campaign heats up, has brought him into serious conflict for the first time with liberal bloggers and commentators and his young supporters. Many of them have seen the issue of granting immunity to the telecommunications companies as a test of principle in their opposition to Mr. Bush’s surveillance program. “I don’t think there has been another instance where, in meaningful numbers, his supporters have opposed him like this,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Salon.com writer who opposes Mr. Obama’s new position. “For him to suddenly turn around and endorse this proposal is really a betrayal of what so many of his supporters believed he believed in.” Jane Hamsher, a liberal blogger who also opposes immunity for the phone companies, said she had been flooded with messages from Obama supporters frustrated with his new stance. “The opposition to Obama’s position among his supporters is very widespread,” said Ms. Hamsher, founder of the Web site firedoglake.com. “His promise to filibuster earlier in the year, and the decision to switch on that is seen as a real character problem. I know people who are really very big Obama supporters are very disillusioned.” One supporter, Robert Arellano, expressed his anger on the Obama site. “I have watched your campaign with genuine enthusiasm,” Mr. Arellano wrote, “and I have given you money. For the first time in my life, I have sensed the presence of a presidential candidate who might actually bring some meaningful change to the corrupt cesspool of national politics. But your about-face on the FISA bill genuinely angers and alarms me.” For now, the campaign is trying to put a positive spin on the new FISA fight among its supporters. “The fact that there is an open forum on BarackObama.com where supporters can say whether they agree or disagree speaks to a strength of our campaign,” said Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman. Several activists and bloggers predicted that Mr. Obama’s move toward the center on some issues could sharply reduce the intensity of support he has enjoyed from liberal activists. Such enthusiasm helped power his effort to secure the Democratic nomination, and it has been one of his campaign’s most important tools for fund-raising and organizing around the country. Markos Moulitsas, a liberal blogger and founder of the Daily Kos Web site, said he had decided to cut back on the amount of money he would contribute to the Obama campaign because of the FISA reversal. “I will continue to support him,” Mr. Moulitsas said in an interview. “But I was going to write him a check, and I decided I would rather put that money with Democrats who will uphold the Constitution.” Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer who advises the Obama campaign, said Tuesday in an interview that Mr. Obama had decided to support the compromise FISA legislation only after concluding it was the best deal possible. “This was a deliberative process, and not something that was shooting from the hip,” Mr. Craig said. “Obviously, there was an element of what’s possible here. But he concluded that with FISA expiring, that it was better to get a compromise than letting the law expire.” Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

AMD Q2 2008 Earnings Announcement:

2008-07-05T08:17:00.001+08:00

Slashdot It! AMD (NYSE:AMD) has scheduled a conference call to announce and discuss its second quarter 2008 financial results: Date: Thursday, July 17, 2008 Time: 2:00 p.m. PT (5:00 p.m. ET) There will be a live and subsequent archived audio webcast via the following link: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/InvestorRelations/0,,51_306_643,00.html The webcast archive will be available for 10 days after the conference call. At approximately 1:15 p.m. PT on Thursday, July 17, 2008, AMD will release its Q2 2008 financial results press release. We will begin the call at approximately 2:00 p.m. PT with a brief management-led review followed by Q&A. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Will Bill Gates’ departure usher in open source friendly era at Microsoft?

2008-07-04T17:57:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! Will Microsoft become more open to open source with the departure of Bill Gates? It’s a tough call. Observers from both the open and closed source worlds say the exit of Microsoft’s longtime leader won’t usher in a GPL era at the company but it will likely accelerate what is already a changing attitude in Redmond. “We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji’s group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,” said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. “With Gates’ departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.” Gates’ exit will help acceptance of open source, another observer said. “For much of Microsoft’s history, its primary strategic initiative has been Windows everywhere. Bill Gates was the primary architect of this and it has served the company well in reaching the $50 billion revenue mark. To get from $50 to $100 billion, however, they will clearly need to embrace the non-Windows world,” said Barry Crist, CEO, Likewise Software. “I suspect this will be easier for Microsoft to accomplish without Gates. We see substantive signs of this happening already.” One open source backer hints that Gates’ early departure from Microsoft signals the beginning of the end for proprietary software. “Bill Gates figured out how to harvest from software licensing early on in the game, and built the biggest software company on the planet from it. [But] selling software licenses has become a triviality,” said Juergen Geck, CTO of Openxchange, which competes against Microsoft Exchange. No one expects Microsoft to open source any of its crown jewels but even Microsoft programmers expects to see more openness and source code releases in the post Gates era. “I have a strong feeling that Microsoft will consider anew all their options with regard to open source strategy and the open source community. I think that Microsoft will remain much like it is now [in that] it will continue to release commercial software and take intellectual property rights very seriously. But I do think you’ll see more open source/shared source/community projects on CodePlex, on the model of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, “ said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at TwentySix, a longtime Microsoft partner and developer in New York. “I think you’ll see Microsoft engage more closely with open source companies, interest groups and enthusiasts, both within the .NET world, and outside of the Microsoft universe.” Brust said a “good harbinger of this is Moonlight, the Novell-sponsored, open source, Linux-based implementation of Silverlight, and the fact that Microsoft worked with that team to help them get the product built. “Scott Guthrie is largely responsible, as far as I can tell, for this kind of constructive engagement with the open source world, and I think his influence will grow.” One exec at the Linux Foundation can’t predict what Microsoft’s new top brass will do but open source will continue to put enormous pressure on the company’s margins and closed source ways. “That depends on Ballmer and Ozzie and the results of what I imagine are some interesting debates internally. There is no doubt that Microsoft has no choice but to acknowledge that the closed development model for building software doesn’t work any more,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “The future of cloud computing and Web 2.0 application development will be built on Linux and open source.” Others say Gates will continue to influence the company as its chairman of the board and largest shareholder, and impose his vision on strategic decisions. “Bill Gates has planned his departure well and today Microsoft is led by so many great leaders. He is a powerful symbol and an icon that we all will miss. But being Chairman is also an important position in Microsoft so he will still oversee long term strategy,” said Per Werngren, president of IDE, of Stockholm, Sweden and president of the Internal Association of Microsoft Certified Partners. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Tech majors to join hands against patent suits: report

2008-07-04T17:54:00.000+08:00

Slashdot It! Information technology giants are teaming up in defense against potential patent-infringement lawsuits, the Wall Street Journal said on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. The companies plan to buy up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of parties that could use it against them, the paper said. The paper's sources said the companies, which include Verizon Communications Inc, Google Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Ericsson, are believed to have a joined a group calling itself the Allied Security Trust. The companies will pay roughly $250,000 to join the group and will each put about $5 million into escrow with the organization to go toward future patent purchases, the paper said. Verizon, Cisco and Google did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment. HP and Ericsson could not be reached for comment. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare