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Australian Website Bans ... Australians
Nazlfrag writes "Earlier this month the blog and discussion forum ZGeek was sued for $42 million AUD over a user's comment. The plaintiffs are aspiring movie producers who claim to have lost a movie deal due to a 9/11 conspiracy discussion thread. Even though the initial lawsuit has been thrown out, and the company complied with lawyers' demands by taking down the offending posts, it is believed the plaintiffs will file suit again. In addition to suing the forum, in an Australian first they have been granted an injunction to force the ISPs to disclose the IP addresses of the two posters involved. Due to the risk of incurring even greater legal costs the company is closing its doors in Australia, and will ban their fellow countrymen from posting there again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why OpenBSD's Release Process Works
An anonymous reader writes "Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule — 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function. Theo de Raadt explains in this presentation how the OpenBSD release process is managed (video) and why it has been such a success."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
World's First 3D Webcam Tested
CNETNate writes "The world's first 3D webcam not only takes anaglyphic images, but will let you have a stereoscopic 3D video chat over the Internet. It's the work of a unique camera called 'Minoru,' which has been tested and documented in a feature today. Be warned though: anaglyphic photography was clearly not invented to create comfortably-viewable videos."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Choosing Better-Quality JPEG Images With Software?
kpoole55 writes "I've been googling for an answer to a question and I'm not making much progress. The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images. There are many programs, free and costly, CLI or GUI oriented, for finding visually similar images — but I'm looking for a next step in the process. It's known that saving the same source image in JPEG format at different quality levels produces different images, the one at the lower quality having more JPEG artifacts. I've been trying to find a method to compare two visually similar JPEG images and select the one with the fewest JPEG artifacts (or the one with the most JPEG artifacts, either will serve.) I also suspect that this is going to be one of those 'Well, of course, how else would you do it? It's so simple.' moments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
62% of Sun's Stockholders Vote For Oracle Deal
Moon Workstation writes "In an special meeting held at Santa Clara, CA, 62% of Sun's stockholders voted for the acquisition by Oracle. As a result of this Sun's stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday. The acquisition is still waiting for approval by the US Department of Justice and anti-trust offices in other countries. The planned acquisition is source for rumors and speculation about the future of different Sun products, like OpenSolaris, CPUs and others." (MySQL among them.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Video, But Originals Lost
leetrout writes "I attended a media briefing held by NASA at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning where they released restored video of the Apollo 11 mission. The clips released are about 40% of the total footage to be restored by September by Lowry Digital in Burbank, CA. Wired has all the clips. A couple remarkable comments made during the briefing included the opinion from the original footage search committee that the original slow scan footage (stored as a single track on telemetry tapes) has been lost forever as the tapes were likely recycled by the mid '80s (apparently common NASA practice). Also, that someone from the applied physics laboratory was in Australia converting the slow scan directly to video. This differs from NASA's goal of merely broadcasting the event, at which it was successful. Unfortunately, no one knows where those tapes of approximately two hours of footage are located."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Three Arrested For Conspiring To Violate the DMCA
jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards. He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
RIAA Loses Bid To Keep Revenues Secret
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's motion to keep secret the record companies' 1999-to-date revenues for the copyrighted song files at the heart of the case has been denied, in the Boston case scheduled for trial July 27th, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The Judge had previously ordered the plaintiff record companies to produce a summary of the 1999-to-date revenues for the recordings, broken down into physical and digital sales. On the day the summary was due to be produced, instead of producing it, they produced a 'protective order motion' asking the Judge to rule that the information would have to be kept secret. The Judge rejected that motion: 'the Court does not comprehend how disclosure would impair the Plaintiffs' competitive business prospects when three of the four biggest record labels in the world — Warner Bros. Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and UMG Recording, Inc. — are participating jointly in this lawsuit and, presumably, would have joint access to this information.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Game Developers Should Shut Up About Used Games
Ssquared22 writes "It may feel like a rip-off to some, but you've got to admit that paying $30 for Gears of War 2 sure beats paying $60! Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them, and companies like Gamestop continue to laugh all the way to the bank. In an article at Crispy Gamer, David Thomas dissects one of the most critical issues in gaming today: used games and merchants (online and brick-and-mortar) who specialize in this 'sleight of hand.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New Binary Diffing Algorithm Announced By Google
bheer writes "Today Google's Open-Source Chromium project announced a new compression technique called Courgette geared towards distributing really small updates. Courgette achieves smaller diffs (about 9x in one example) than standard binary-diffing algorithms like bsdiff by disassembling the code and sending the assembler diffs over the wire. This, the Chromium devs say, will allow them to send smaller, more frequent updates, making users more secure. Since this will be released as open source, it should make distributing updates a lot easier for the open-source community."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What If the Apollo Program Had Continued?
proslack writes "The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA's copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA's request to fund an extended moon programme. What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA's wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years..." A nice little what-if sort of story that makes sorta nostalgic for a non-existent present.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LoTR Lawsuit Threatens Hobbit Production
eyrieowl writes "J.R.R.'s heirs are suing for royalties on the LoTR films. Apparently they haven't gotten any money due to some creative accounting. Peter Jackson ought to understand...he had to sue the studio for much the same reason. As for The Hobbit? FTFA: 'Tolkien's family and a British charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, seek more than $220 million in compensation...[and]...the option to terminate further rights to the author's work.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Huge Unidentified Organic Blob Floating Around Alaska
Z80xxc! writes "The Anchorage Daily News reports that a 15 mile-long blob of unknown, 'gooey,' probably organic material is floating past communities on Alaska's North Slope. The US Coast Guard sent pollution experts to investigate, who determined that it was not an oil spill or other type of pollution, but were unable to determine what it is. A sample is currently being analyzed by experts in Anchorage, while the blob is following the current northwards."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Firefox 3.5's First Vulnerability "Self-Inflicted"
CWmike writes "Mozilla has confirmed the first security vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, saying that the bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company's newest browser. A noted Firefox contributor called the situation 'self-inflicted' and said it was likely that the hacker who posted public exploit code Monday became aware of the flaw by rooting through Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug- and change-tracking database. The vulnerability is in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that debuted with Firefox 3.5, said Mozilla. '[It] can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code,' Mozilla's security blog reported Tuesday."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Typography On the Web Gets Different
bstender writes "Most major browsers — including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera — recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and learn more. You'll see three new typefaces — Liza, Auto, and Dolly — used in the body text and headlines." No doubt the licensing issues are just as complex as the font nerd potential.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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