Tuesday, February 27, 2007

This makes my head ache.

"PALMER, Alaska, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Free wireless Internet service at a public library in Palmer, Alaska, doesn't mean its available for use after hours.
A Palmer man has been waiting to see if he'll be charged with criminal wrongdoing after a patrolling police officer seized the laptop he was using to play online video games in the parking lot.
Authorities told the Anchorage Daily News Saturday that Brian Tanner, 21, had been chased out of a number of locations around Palmer where he had been latching on to wireless service.
Police said that although Tanner was using an essentially free service, there are library rules governing its use and Tanner wasn't following them." LINK

Pushing the limits?

"Those amusing YouTube video clips that Internet users send to friends gobble up large chunks of bandwidth and may cause the Net to crash, some elements of the telecom industry warn.

It's an admonition many dismiss as political posturing intended to dissuade lawmakers from restricting the freedom of phone companies to manage Internet traffic as they wish.

But no one disagrees that the Web's capacity is being pushed to its limits."We don't see anything catastrophic near term, but over the next few years there's this fundamental wall we're heading towards," said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International Inc., one of the operators of the Internet backbones, which are the big pipes at the network's center." LINK

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Second Life Revolution- Is virtual terrorism terrorism? Is Linden a government?

Man, so many of these stories out of Second Life feel so surreal, but they raise important questions.

People are demanding a right to vote in Second Life, and are turning to violence.

"Cahill saw a bleak future, but he felt powerless to stop them. So he detonated an atomic bomb outside an American Apparel outlet. Then another outside a Reebok store."

The army has staged a number of protests in Second Life to publicize its position. Three gun-toting members shot customers outside American Apparel — bullet wounds in Second Life are not fatal but merely disrupt a user's experience — and Reebok stores last year.Then they stepped up the campaign, exploding nukes, which manifested themselves in swirling fireballs that thrust users at the scene into motionless limbo."
LINK

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

OLPC kicking a**, taking names in every possible way.

"For example, there is no reason why your copy of Solitaire should be able to browse through your tax records and send interesting tidbits to organized criminals in Russia. Today's generation of antivirus, antispyware programs work by having a list of all these bad programs and scanning for them. The OLPC approach is to simply deny your Solitare program from being able to access the network or browse your files. Why should it need those capabilities, anyway?"
LINK to article about the security systems on the OLPCs.

Friday, February 2, 2007

Despite laws saying that Government docs are public domain, lawyer finds drm block

I hate PDFs with the fire of a thousand suns, but this goes far beyond that.
"DMCA makes it illegal for me to use works that are completely in the public domain...it tells me that I have permission to read and print the document, but not to copy from it. Because there is no copyright, the government has no right to prevent me from copying...I have no hacking skills; I'm just a non-profit lawyer trying to read a government document. Normally I'd buy some software utility that would let me do this, but such a utility is something the DMCA definitely prohibits. I better start writing my petition for a Copyright Office exemption next time they grant them in two years."
LINK