There's a neat little rule in press coverage: three stories makes a "trend" even if there's not much more to it. This works particularly well on stories where you're trying to scare people into worrying about something "bad" happening out there. Of course, rather than explore how widespread the pr...

An anonymous reader writes "eBay's has lost its fight to ban all payment methods except PayPal. When Paypal originally announced the scheme it was to be global, but they began with a dry run in Australia to test the reaction of government and consumer authorities. In the public slanging match that f...

Right on the heels of theawfulcourt decision in France saying that eBay can be barred from selling evenlegitimateproducts, it appears some companies in England are shooting for a similar ruling.Jon Pyserwrites in to let us know that a bunch of baby stroller companies in the UK are pushing hard tosto...

There are some competing opinion pieces in the LA Times, starting off with one siding with J.R.R. Tolkien's kidsin their legal fight for royalties from the Lord of the Rings trilogy movies:Tolkien obviously isn't Peter Jackson, who directed the franchise, or Liv Tyler or Viggo Mortensen, who starred...

FiReaNGeL writes with an excerpt from a story at e! Science News: "Taking advantage of a unique cosmic configuration, astronomers have measured an effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the extremely strong gravity of a pair of superdense neutron stars. Essentially, th...

akutz writes "I've had the flu since Tuesday afternoon. My wife picked me up from work with a temperature of 103.6 and it finally broke at 98.7 around 3am this morning. Yay. The problem is that I used my laptop during my periods of feverish deliriousness, contaminating my shiny 15" MacBook Pro with ...

After reports said that UK broadband ISP Virgin Mediawouldbecome the recording industry's copyright cop, Virgin came outdenying it, saying that kicking users off the internet was draconian. However, it later admitted that it would send warning letters to people, based on theflimsy evidenceused by t...

Friends, I don't know what it means but look at this docket entry in theSCO v. Autozonecase:69 -Filed& Entered: 07/03/2008Minute OrderDocket Text: MINUTE ORDER IN CHAMBERS of the Honorable Judge Robert C. Jones, on 7/3/2008. IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the parties shall submit a status report t...

An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of se...

Mark Cuban has a weird obsession with trying to convince people that YouTube is illegal, despiteplentyof evidence to the contrary. His latest discussion on the topic is a real stretch. In response to thebad rulingthat gives YouTube log files to Viacom, Cuban is saying that Viacom can now wipe out ...

kthejoker writes "Apparently companies are even worse about losing our data than we suspected. From the article:'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 ...

We've covered the concept of SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) suits plenty of timesbefore. These are bogus lawsuits filed to try to bully a critic into shutting up. In one such case, involving an incredibly broad subpoena against a librarian blogger compiling information on t...

Bridger writes "Poker software called Polaris will play a rematch against human players during the 2008 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Developed by an artificial intelligence group at the University of Alberta in Canada, Polaris will be pitted against several professionals at the Rio Hotel betw...

destinyland writes "8.7 million AOL subscribers face a new 20% fee increase next month— unless they agree to never call AOL's technical support lines. They'll have to use AOL chat for support or the online help "portal" unless their issue is a failed connection— and they're being enrolle...

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched avideo on YouTube, says a US court....

Two different themes we've discussed here quite often are (1) that movie theaters need to stop worrying about piracy, and focus more on improving themoviegoing experienceand (2) thatadvertising is content-- and it better be good content if you want the advertising to be effective. That's why it's s...

A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Lt. Col. John Bircher, head of an organization with a difficult-to-navigate name: the U.S. Army Computer Network Operations (CNO)-Electronic Warfare (EW) Proponent's Futures Branch. Lt. Col. Bircher has answered from his perspective, at length, not just the us...

A new survey on broadband adoption in the USsuggests that broadband adoption in the US may be leveling off, or stalling out completely as the numbers aren't all that different than they were at the end of 2007 (55% have broadband now, compared to 54% in December). Of course, there are a variety of ...

necro81 writes "Barely a month ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a freeze on applications for solar power plants on federally managed land, pending a two-year comprehensive environmental review. After much hue and cry from the public, industry, and other parts of government, BLM has ...

Barence writes "The majority of dial-up Internet users say they don't want to upgrade their connection to broadband, according to a new study in the US. The Pew Internet& American Life research found that 62% of dial-up users had no interest in upgrading to a high-speed connection." (CNN is carr...

In the ongoing trainwreck that is Viacom's misguidedlawsuitagainst YouTube (the one they would bebetter offlosing) a judge has come out with a ruling on evidence that Google has to hand over to Viacom -- and it's being portrayed in the press as both a win and a loss for Google. On the "win" side,Go...

The music industry says thousands of UK broadband users who share tracks illegally will be warned about it in letters....

arcticstoat writes "Next week, the G8 summit will discuss proposals for new international piracy laws, which include border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates. The laws will also prevent ISPs from being liable for copyright infringement. If the G8 summit were to agree on these me...

The classic concept of how to force someone to think for themselves rather than mindlessly obey authority is to have two equally powerful authority figures demand that the individual do the completely opposite actions (an example: having two top generals on either side of a low ranking soldier, one ...

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the transforming nature of the Web now that Tim Berners-Lee's early vision has been supplanted by today's much more complex model. AJAX, Google Web Toolkit, Flash and Silverlight all have McAllister asking, 'Is [the Web] sti...

Viacom haswon, or more accurately partially won, amotion to compelGoogle to turn over a lot of YouTube records so that the court can tell what proportion of videos are infringing compared to how many are not. Here's theorder[PDF]. Google opposed the motion, trying to protect its users, with aCross...

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningle...

Whorhay writes "A Dutch doctor and a violin maker from Arkansas have compared five classical and eight modern violins in a computed tomography (CT) scanner. Apparently the 300-year-old violins are made of wood with a more consistent density than the modern violins. They aren't saying for sure that t...

Back in November, the news broke on the Friday after Thanksgiving that the federal government routinelyasked for and receivedinformation from mobile phone operators about the location of various mobile phones (effectively tracking their owners) without bothering to show any sort of probable cause. ...

Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they...

For a while now, we've been pointing out how, for advertising to be effective, it also needs to begood contentthat people don't just "not mind" seeing, but which they're willing to actively seek out. It appears that automaker Kia has decided to go with the exact opposite strategy. Reader Brooks wr...

In the past, we've covered plenty of stories aboutsocial engineeringto get people to admit stuff they shouldn't -- suggesting you really just need to ask people to give up personal info and they will (sometimes giving them a gift helps, but just asking alone will often do the trick). The latest stu...

Microsoft, free software and the future

CCC rating (That's Credit crunch computer cock-up)Moody's, the ratings agency, is reviewing its computer models and setting up a central monitoring system after admitting that a bug led it to incorrectly grade several European mortgage debt instruments.…...

'Important. If you don't read this, your broadband could be disconnected'The BPI has written to 800 Virgin Media customers warning them to stop sharing music files or risk losing their broadband connection.…...

Here's one for the "didn't quite think that through, did you" files.Gizmodopoints us to the news that British authorities trying to prevent illegal trash dumping put a hidden camera at a popular dumping site. The only problem was that they disguised the hidden camera (which cost somewhere around $2...

Now to get everyone to agree what that meansOperator talking shop the Open Mobile Terminal Alliance has embarked on an ambitious plan to bring Web 2.0 to mobile phones, called Bondi to reflect the joy of surfing.…...

We were just complaining about the fact that governments should beexposing APIson certain government data so that people can create more useful services out of them -- and it appears that someone in the UK was having similar thoughts. The government is nowopening up a bunch of datato whoever wants ...

While there was some interesting chatter around some reports back in April that the last eight years of patent appeals board judges may have beenunconstitutional, as we noted at the time, the whole thing was really a very, very minor procedural point. Effectively, the constitution requires the Secr...

We were one of a very small number of people who actually sawsome logicbehind Blockbuster bidding for Circuit City -- though, it seemed unlikely that Blockbuster viewed the purchase in the same way we did. Most people assumed (probably correctly) that Blockbuster didn't really have much of a plan a...

The $200m laptop failure surpriseNvidia issued some somber news for shareholders today, revealing a financial forecast cut short due to slowing sales, a delayed ramp for new product, and a hefty payout due to faulty laptop chips.…...

He's a believer in pocket changeDell's rebirth as a technology juggernaut is well underway. Just ask Michael Dell.…...

The creators of Firefox 3.0 celebrate the news they have set a new world record for software downloads....

Laws passed as an emotional reaction to a tragic situation are almost always bad laws. The state of Missouri hassigned into law a bill to make online harassment a felony. This is in response, of course, to the infamous "Lori Drew/Megan Meier" case that has received so much attention. Of course, w...

SEC may forgive, but lawyers won't forgetThe US Securities and Exchange Commission may have washed its hands of the Apple stock option backdating affair, but Steve Jobs and company aren't quite clear of the dirt yet.…...

Twittering Shuttleworth's gasRadio RegEvery time Mark Shuttleworth farts an angel gets its wings. Or at least that's what his girlfriend told me.…...

There have been a series oflawsuitsover the years concerning whether or not magazines could create CD-ROM archives of their magazines without having to pay all their freelance authors again. The court rulings have been mixed, to say the least -- with some ruling one way, and others ruling the other...

Ex employees embrace life after betaSo,everyoneand theirbrotheris yapping about arecent blog postfrom Microsoftie Dare Obasanjo, who says he knows lots o' people who've forsaken Larry and Serg for Big Steve.…...

Ars TechnicareviewsJonathan Zittrain's new book,The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.Zittrain is by all accounts a smart guy and an engaging speaker, and it sounds like his book makes a lot of worthwhile points about the importance of open, "generative" technologies. But I just can't get wo...

WOW! ignores CongressThough the head of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet has urged American ISPs to "hold off" on the use of so-called behavioral ad systems, it seems at least one company has yet to heed the suggestion.…...

The ninth mode of art runs on HP clustersExclusiveFor more than six months, a list ranking the top supercomputers in China has been floating around, but no one has managed to solve its riddle.…...

Renewed vowsParallels is giving some delayed attention to Hewlett-Packard's Integrity servers today.…...

If you can't beat them, buy themPlatform Solutions Inc. (PSI), the upstart mainframe house that's been leading international anti-trust charges against IBM, has today been bought by, er, IBM.…...

There's some news on theTrend Micro v.Barracuda Networkscase. That is the one where Trend Micro sued Barracuda over ClamAV and brought a complaint to the International Trade Commission. Barracuda has just filed a countersuit in California, alleging patent infringement by Trend Micro. They say it...

Software for Hard TimesMicrosoft has tied up with ailing US retailer Circuit City to launch its Office and security subscription service which hits the market bearing the moniker "Equipt".…...

Copyright ambulance chasers open up new marketThe Central London County Court has ordered four BitTorrent users to pay a video games company £750 interim damages following a landmark victory by no win, no fee copyright lawyers.…...

You're retired?Sir Alan Sugar is leaving Amstrad a year after he sold the set-top box maker business to BSkyB.…...

Lock up your daughtersIt's time to lock up your daughters, and here's why: The roving spycar of Google's Street View has been spotted prowling the mean streets of London...…...

And can we mention your border plans are rubbish too?The bosses of the UK's major airlines have attacked plans to force airport workers to enrol in the national ID card scheme, claiming that "the UK aviation industry is being used for political purposes on a project which has questionable public sup...

A wolf in sheep’s clothingReviewUK-based gaming PC specialist Chillblast is a master in the art of overclocking, producing systems that perform blisteringly fast - yet entirely stable: its latest desktop creation is the Fusion Juggernaut.…...

Seven years and a bioterror defense industry later...When the US Department of Justice agreed to pay Steven J. Hatfill $5.82 million in damages for trashing his life and reputation late last week, it was another big low in the mess that's been the Amerithrax 2001 case. With the de facto exoneration ...

Home Office: What's it got to do with RIPA?Liberty called for an overhaul of RIPA yesterday after the European Court of Human Rights slapped the UK government over the way it applied the UK's previous interception legislation.…...

Why doctors are switching on to video games

The UK government launches a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects....

I thought you would like to see a recently decided US case where fair use was upheld as a defense. I collected some materials toexplain fair usein an overview the other day, but here's a case that explains the elements that courts look at, in a real live case, and it particularly makes clear what t...

Plans for Google and Yahoo search advertising deal may stall as the Justice Department investigates.

How robots are transforming care in the NHS

ASA upholds complaint about advertisements lodged by rival broadband provider BT.

A security firm reveals the results of an experiment where 50 people from around the world surfed the web unprotected for a month....

Mobile phone firms reach a deadline to cut the price of sending text messages in EU member nations....

Telecoms specialist offers his view on rebuilding Burma

Do you remember Copiepresse, the Belgian association of newspapers thatwent after Googlefor linking to their members' articles in Google News? They tried todo something similarto -- get this -- the EU Commission, butthey just got zonked. Their case was tossed out last Thursday by the Belgian Brus...

Personal flying machines will be a reality, says home computer and electric car pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair....

A French court orders eBay to pay 40 million euros in damages to luxury goods group LVMH for allowing the sale of fake goods....

Bill Thompson on the end of the Bill Gates era

US digital music service Rhapsody is the latest company to embrace MP3 downloads without copy restrictions....

A 16-year-old from New York State harnesses the power of online social networking to try and break a world record....

"Thousands of Neo FreeRunners have been loaded into planes and fired around the world,"announced Sean Moss-Pultz, the Openmoko CEO, in a frequently philosophical email titled"let us impact the material world", posted to theOpenmoko community mailing list. He continued,"many of our distributors have...

Recommendations for how ISPs can fight spam are issued by a global body dedicated to looking at the issue....

The hits and misses of his leadership of Microsoft

Here's the transcript from the June 17 bankruptcy hearing on SCO's motion to get another extension of exclusivity, as text. When SCO's attorney, Arthur Spector, arrives at the podium, he tells the court that this"itty bitty SCO case"is unique."I don't think the Court has seen many cases like this,...

The chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates, is stepping down from his day-to-day job at the world's largest software company....

SCO has filed two monthly operating reports, one for SCO Group and one for SCO Operations. This is like watching water drain from a slow tub.Also the transcript of the June 17 hearing is now available. And Dorsey& Whitney have submitted another bill going back to April.From the transcript, we s...

Recently, I didan update on the Sun/NetApp litigation, but now there is something better, anupdate by Mike Dillon, Sun's General Counsel. What a great name for a lawyer it would be if his parents had named him Matt. He says thank you to all who helped with prior art:After NetApp sued Sun, we respond...

"It hasn't been a week, I know, and this is a pretty small set of changes since -rc7, but I'm going to be mostly incommunicado for the next week or so, so I just released what will hopefully be the last -rc,"began Linux creator Linus Torvalds,announcing the 2.6.26-rc8 kernel. He added,"or maybe not...

"HP has released AdvFS, a file system that was developed by Digital Equipment Corp and continues to be part of HP's Tru64 operating system,"announced Xose Vazquez Perez, offeringa link to the re-licensed source code. 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau replied favorably,"wow! That's awesome. I discovered ...

Here is the testimony of the final witness Novell called in theSCO v. Novelltrial, Greg Jones, Vice President of Technology Law at Novell. He followed Darl McBride to the stand. His testimony came on day 2 of the trial.It's primarily because of what I learned from this testimony that I took a long...

"As part of the Linux Foundation Technical board, we confront the issue of closed source Linux kernel modules all the time, and we wanted to do something that could be seen as a general'public statement'about them that is easy to understand and point to when people have questions,"began Greg KH, exp...

Do you remember back in 2005 a company calledCognex took on Lemelson Partnership and won, invalidating 14 of Lemelson's patents? Well, it turns out that after that, they took on Acacia Research, and they justbeat themtoo. Acacia is now minus one of its patents.Here's the order[PDF]. Cognex is no...

Now that AP haspurported to establish fair use guidelinesthat would make 5 words licensable as *not* fair use, I thought I'd explain a bit about fair use and about why Groklaw no longer will link to or quote from any AP articles. I've seenreportsthat AP has backed off in some not quite clear-to-...

We have theOrder[PDF] now granting SCO's motion for an extension of time to come up with a reorganization plan, along with theminutes from the hearing[PDF] on June 17, along with various certificates of service. The order gives SCO until August 11 to file a plan, but it can ask for more extensions ...

"Another week, another -rc,"began Linux creator Linus Torvalds,announcing the 2.6.26-rc7 Linux kernel,"and as usual, it's mainly drivers and arch updates - over 90% of changes are in one or the other."He continued:"A big part of it (about two thirds of the driver update, in fact) is a late-dropping ...

I thought you might like to see the Microsoft-Department of JusticeJoint Status Report on Microsoft's Compliance with the Final Judgments, as entered inNew York, et. al. v. Microsoft, CA No. 98-1233 (CKK), and inUnited States v. Microsoft, CA No. 98-1232, dated June 17, 2008. And I'd like to point ...

Matthew Dillon continues to make significant progress on his HAMMER clustering filesystem for DragonFly BSD. He labeled the latest release 56c, noting that it,"represents an additional significant improvement in performance, [also including] bug fixes and most of the final media changes."A signific...

"In the kerneloops.org stats, a new oops is rapidly climbing the charts,began Arjan van de Ven, referring to his website where he automatically collects kernel oops and warning reports from mailing lists, bugzillas, and a special client. Regarding the latest oops, he noted,"the oops is a page fault...

Yesterday, wereportedthat Darl McBride said that the plan for a reorganization is to spin off the"Unix assets"and leave him behind as CEO of the remnants of the company, that is, of the litigation. There aremore detailsin the Daily Herald today, and apparently that is only one possibility:Among pro...

"As promised, this cycle was short and the release is with only relatively small impact changes,"said Git maintainer Junio Hamano,announcing the release of Git v1.5.6. He noted that both gitk and git-gui have been updated. To improve portability, when running"git init", git now autodetects whether...

"HAMMER makes no modifications to the B-Tree whatsoever on the front-end. When you create, delete, rename, write, etc... when you do those operations HAMMER caches them in a virtualization layer in memory and doesn't make any modifications to its on-media data structures (or their in-memory repres...

I don't have details yet, but here's the first report from today's bankruptcy court hearing on SCO'smotionto extend its exclusive right to file a reorganization plan, which Novell had filedobjectionsto:Just got back. Many notes to decipher and type up for you. Short version - the whole hearing was...

An anonymous poster told us about a recent order from Judge Kimball in another case, unrelated to SCO, but one that references his own decision inSCO v. Novell. So I took a look at the order, and it answers a question I've had, namely, what if, at trial, a judge were to realize he'd made a mistake ...

SCO has filed its10Qand all thecertifications, for the quarterly period ending April 30, 2008, and here's a snip:It is the Company's intent to appeal the adverse August 10, 2007 summary judgment ruling as soon as that opportunity is available to the Company. However, the Company must complete furth...

Let's continue with our look at the trial testimony in theSCO v. Novelllitigation. This is day 2, April 30, when our star witness of the day is Darl McBride. That day, the Chris Sontag testimony had finished up, which I'veshown you already, and after him, Novell called Darl to the stand. After him...

"I regularly run and post various benchmarks comparing POHMELFS, NFS, XFS and Ext4, [the] main goal of POHMELFS at this stage is to be essentially as fast as [the] underlying local filesystem. And it is..."explained Evgeniy Polyakov, suggesting that the POHMELFS networking filesystem performs 10% to...

Let's not forget Pachulski Stang. They have an8th billfiled now, their bill for April, and they'd like their money too. This bill is for$12,000.50 and expenses in the amount of$1,366.60 for expenses. The balance brought forward is$30,995.13, with a"total balance now due"in the amount o...

First, this is off topic for Groklaw. I know. But I have some information about theKozinski storythat I'm not seeing reported. I provided it to the LA Times yesterday. Seeing it not reported there today, and factoring in that the email might have been caught in a spam catcher, I will provide it her...

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 JoonasGovenius, mentored by NunoLopesPHP Optimizer by SamuelGraham Kelly IV, mentored by DerickRethansPhD (PHP Docbook) Project by RudyNa...

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 ...