An anonymous reader writes "The new Hungarian government chose to replace the home pages with a 'disclaimer' page on several governmental websites such as ministries or the Foreign Office. The title and the main message is 'OMG,' which is followed by an explanation that the inherited websites 'lack ...
It's time for Google to realize that it is way too early to be pushing an OS that only provides a browser. If Chrome OS fails on netbooks it will just make OEMs even more hesitant to use a Linux-based OS instead of Windows. Google should instead build upon its already successful Android platform and provide a system that offers local applications.
Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, has announced that IE9 will use only the H.264 standard to play HTML 5 video. Microsoft seems to have become very committed to HTML 5, while Flash loses even more ground. The announcement came the same day Steve Jobs detailed why Apple does not accept Flash on iPhone and iPad
The Hill spotlights a study released by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which concludes that companies relying on fair use generate $4.7 trillion in revenue to the US economy every year. The report claims that fair use — an exception to the copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted materials — is crucial to innovation. It adds that employment in fair use industries grew from 16.9 million in 2002 to 17.5 million in 2007 and one out of eight US workers is employed by a company benefiting from protections provided by fair use (PDF). Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) says the reasonable fair use of content needs to be preserved; otherwise, content owners will control access to movies, music, and art that will no longer be available for schools, research, or web browsing. Lofgren tied the copyright issue with the question of net neutrality. Without net neutrality 'content owners will completely control and lock down content. We're going to be sorry characters when we actually don't see fair use rights on the Web,' says Lofgren. 'If we allow our freedom to be taken for commercial purposes, we will have some explaining to do to our founding fathers and those who died for our freedom.
As well as taking an active part in OFCOM's code of obligations in regards to the ill-conceived Digital Economy Act (the UK three-strikes law for filesharers), niche ISP Andrews & Arnold have identified various loopholes in the law, the main one being that a customer can be classified as a communications provider. They have now implemented measures so in your control panel you may register your legal status and be classed as such.
The NY Times writes about Henry S. Heine, a former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the FBI has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001. Heine told a 16-member National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the FBI's scientific work on the investigation that he believes it is impossible that the deadly spores could have been produced undetected in Ivins's laboratory, as the FBI asserts. Heine told the panel that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab, an effort that would not have escaped colleagues' notice. Lab technicians who worked closely with Ivins have told Heine they saw no such work. Heine adds that, in addition, the biological containment measures where Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. 'You'd have had dead animals or dead people.' Asked why he is speaking out now, almost two years after Ivins's suicide, Heine says that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory. Although Heine does not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Ivins's flask, Heine says samples from the flask were widely shared. 'Whoever did this is still running around out there. I truly believe that.'
India's new copyright bill sounds like a pretty good piece of work: it declares private, personal copying to be 'fair dealing' (like US fair use) and limits the prohibition on breaking DRM so that it's only illegal to do so if you're also violating copyright.
The US Trade Representative issued a release just prior to the launch of the New Zealand round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations that has left no doubt the US is the biggest barrier to official release of the ACTA text. Unlike most other ACTA countries that have called for transparency without condition, the US has set conditions that effectively seek to trade its willingness to release the text for gains on the substance of the text
In addition to offering faster, desktop-like performance, better imported document fidelity, and more features found in standard Office apps, Google's new infrastructure for its web-based office suite will enable the company to more easily update the apps. A side effect (or benefit, depending on where you sit) is that the new platform will ditch Gears in favor of HTML 5
With the 2010 UK general election fast approaching, the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom will be fielding elections for the first time. The Digital Economy bill and ACTA are hot topics for UK geeks, and the Pirate Party is looking to pick up some votes. Their leader, Andrew Robinson, has agreed to answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply.
WhatDoIKnow sends in a story about an appeals court ruling in a singular case that might have the effect of narrowing "fair use" rights for transformative uses of artworks.
marpot writes: "In an effort to assist Wikipedia's editors in their struggle to keep articles clean, we are conducting a public lab on vandalism detection. The goal is the development of a practical vandalism detector that is capable of telling apart ill-intentioned edits from well-intentioned edits. Such a tool, which will work somewhat like a spam detector, will release the crowd's workforce currently occupied with manual and semi-automatic edit filtering. The performance of submitted detectors will be evaluated based on a large collection of human-annotated edits, which has been crowdsourced using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Everyone is welcome to participate."
Slashdash is the perfect dashboard widget for the Slashdot obsessed Apple toting geek. Slashdash provides a quick 5 newest articles glance on your OS 10.4 dashboard. Simply click the Slashdash icon in your widget tray, and you will have a small Slashdot themed widget window that will update every 30 minutes automatically. Click the article title and the article will open in your Safari Browser.
The Wikimedia blog has a new post from Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Erik Zachte, a data analyst, to dispute recent reports about editors leaving Wikipedia (which we discussed on Wednesday).
J. Kunegis, A. Lommatzsch, and C. Bauckhage. Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web, page 741--750. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)
V. Gómez, A. Kaltenbrunner, and V. López. WWW '08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, page 645--654. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2008)