arbitraryaardvark writes "The Seattle Times reports that spammer Robert Soloway has pled guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, in exchange for the state dropping multiple counts of identify theft. 'The electronic-mail fraud charge is punishable by up to five years in prison. The tax charge is a misdemeanor and carries a maximum one-year sentence. The law also allows for fines against Soloway and his business of up to $625,000 on all charges. Both sides agreed to let U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman determine not just the amount of prison time Soloway, 28, might serve but also the number of his victims, the size of any fine and the amount of restitution he may be ordered to pay.' We've previously discussed his arrest and mention in the New Yorker. The wire fraud felony count is based on selling $500 packages to wannabe spammers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

arbitraryaardvark writes "The Seattle Times reports that spammer Robert Soloway has pled guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, in exchange for the state dropping multiple counts of identify theft. 'The electronic-mail fraud charge is punishable by up to five years in prison. The tax charge is a misdemeanor and carries a maximum one-year sentence. The law also allows for fines against Soloway and his business of up to $625,000 on all charges. Both sides agreed to let U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman determine not just the amount of prison time Soloway, 28, might serve but also the number of his victims, the size of any fine and the amount of restitution he may be ordered to pay.' We've previously discussed his arrest and mention in the New Yorker. The wire fraud felony count is based on selling $500 packages to wannabe spammers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Swedish Culture & Justice ministers are preparing to give new power to Swedish courts to let them force ISPs to give up subscriber IPs. The end goal is trying subscribers in court for copyright infringement. As the one-time home of the Pirate Bay, which is now internationally distributed, they face both US pressure and push-back at home. The Swedish arm of the Pirate Party is calling this move a 'sanctioned blackmailing operation', but hopefully the Swedish courts won't allow the IFPI to use as many tricks as the RIAA has in US courts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rockhopper writes "Ars Technica has a combo review/hack guide for the Tux Droid, a programmable penguin. 'Tux is completely programmable at practically every level, and all of the source code of the firmware and software used by the droid is available from Kysoh's version control repository. There are several ways to program the droid's behavior, ranging from modifying the firmware to coding a gadget in Python.' There's a sample Python script that will cause Tux to speak IRC messages out loud when the user's name is mentioned."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The folks on wikileaks have published a new interesting and shocking report: FBI Electronic Surveillance Needs for Carrier-Grade Voice over Packet (CGVoP) Service. The 88 paged document, which is part of the CALEA Implementation Plan was published in January 2003 and describes in detail all needs for surveillance of phone calls made via data services like the internet. Wikileaks has not published any analysis yet, so maybe some of the techies hanging around this end of the internet are interested in taking that one on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Recommended reading for all interested in the RIAA's litigation war against p2p file sharing is the amended class action complaint just filed in Oregon in Andersen v. Atlantic. This landmark 109-page document (pdf) tells both the general story of the RIAA's campaign against ordinary folks, and the specific story of its harassment of Tanya Andersen, and even of her young daughter. The complaint includes federal and state RICO claims, as well as other legal theories, and alleges that "The world's four major recording studios had devised an illegal enterprise intent on maintaining their virtually complete monopoly over the distribution of recorded music." The point has been made by one commentator that the RIAA won't be able to weasel its out of this one by simply withdrawing it; this one, they will have to answer for. If the relief requested in the complaint is granted, the RIAA's entire campaign will be shut down for good."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "What could be more annoying than having ads precede online videos? How about having commercials interrupt the videos? That's the premise behind a newly-published Google patent application for Using Viewing Signals in Targeted Video Advertising."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, has told the US government to "shove" its list of countries that "sponsor terror," daring the US to place Venezuela on the list:

President Hugo Chavez dared the U.S. on Friday to put Venezuela on a list of countries accused of supporting terrorism, calling it one more attempt by Washington to undermine him for political reasons...

U.S. lawmakers including Reps. Connie Mack and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both Florida Republicans, have called for the State Department to add Venezuela to its list of terror sponsors, which includes North Korea, Iran, Syria, Sudan and Cuba. They have expressed concerns about what they call Chavez's close ties to Colombia's leftist rebels.

''Let them make that list and shove it in their pocket,'' Chavez said in a televised speech.

''We shouldn't forget for an instant that we're in a battle against North American imperialism,'' Chavez said. ''On this continent, they have us as enemy No. 1.''

Link

Vlad Dolezal writes "We tell people we use Linux because it's secure. Or because it's free, because it's customizable, because it has excellent community support... But all of that is just marketing BS. We tell that to non-Linux users because they wouldn't understand the REAL reason." The answer to his question probably won't surprise you.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I did a 20-minute interview this morning with ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick about FriendFeed and related tools.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/kirkpatrickInterview.mp3

You can receive these MP3s in your podcatcher by subscribing to the RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for this weblog.

Orlando Lima: "[Geraldine Ferraro] theorized that a self-made black guy with a Muslim name has a political advantage over a white woman who is the wife of a two-term President."

I was reading along until I came to this bit.

"When liberals need black votes they come into our communities and act like they're down."

Okay, that may be prejudice, not racism, but no matter what it isn't cool.

I am a liberal, and I feel disempowered too, and I feel that the pols come around and ask for my vote and money and that's the end of that. Even Obama has yet to prove he's any different.

We desperately need to look for things we have in common, and we all have barriers inside ourselves that we can't see. I'll listen when you say I have a barrier, but you have to do the same.

If you make being a liberal equivalent with being shallow and silly, you're buying into a Republican frame of reference, and you make it impossible for us to be powerful. And that's not something I'm going to support.

The lesson of Reverend Wright is that blacks have bad racial attitudes that balance those held by whites. Yes the whites started it, but that isn't going to help anyone (my ancestors were in Eastern Europe while that was hapening). There were reasons we were scared of blacks when I was growing up in NYC, they may not have had anything to do with reality, or maybe there was some reality to it. Remember there were riots then, and the cities were burning. MLK and Malcolm X were assassinated, but so were some white people. (To be fair, white people did most of the assassinating.)

Obama is definitely a leader in league with MLK, I watched him yesterday on TV carefully explaining what was happening, but not using words that would give the press guys any new issues to hang on him. What he's doing is hard, and great. Without Obama we wouldn't have had a reason to listen to Orlando Lima's story, above, and he probably wouldn't have had a reason to tell it.

If Obama wins, we'll be going through a lot more of it, but going through it is a lot better than living with it. At some point we're going to have to get the racism out in the open and deal with it, all of us, it's just one of many items on our national to-do list that we have been so totally neglecting.

The US House of Representatives passed a bill on Friday that rejects immunity for telephone companies that helped the NSA conduct illegal, warrantless wiretaps of the entire nation. Included in the bill is a call for a commission with subpoena power to investigate the spying program.

Bush has promised to veto any version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that fails to immunize the telcoms, but if he does not sign this bill, the ability of law enforcement entities to conduct surveillance will be severely curtailed. The question for Bush now is, "Will you admit that you live in a nation of laws, and that you can't order companies to break them with impunity, or will you undermine the fight against terrorism to keep your buddies at AT&T from facing the music?"

Instead of caving to that rhetoric, the House Democrats doubled down on their original legislation, by including a call for a commission, armed with subpoena power, that would investigate the secret spying. The bill also allows telecoms to defend themselves in court by showing secret documents to federal judge. The Bush administration had blocked them from using classified information in their own defense.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which brought the leading suit against the nation's telecoms, applauded the House's moxie.

"Amnesty proponents have been claiming on the Hill for months that phone companies like AT&T had a good faith belief that the NSA program was legal," EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston said. "Under this bill, the companies could do what they should have been able to do all along: tell that story to a judge."

The White House had no such kind words, saying the bill was "partisan" and would be "dead on arrival" in the Senate.

Link

Lynn sez, "Apparently a replica of a prop in an upcoming Sky One adaptation of the Colour of Magic, containing all the Discworld books and some production drawings. All signed by Terry. All money raised from the auction will go to the Alzheimer's Research Trust."

A unique opportunity to own a one-off replica of the luggage as featured in Sky One’s adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic. This quirky ‘suitcase’ is filled with the full library of Discworld novels, plus the production designs used to build the luggage as seen in the film. Both the books and the designs have been signed by Terry Pratchett.

Also included in this money can’t buy piece of memorabilia is a copy of the Discworld 25th anniversary edition of The Colour of Magic which hits book store shelves on the 10th March. This brand spanking new reissue not only features the stars of Sky One’s magical adaptation, Sir David Jason and Sean Astin, on the front cover, but the two actors have also signed the novel.

Link (Thanks, Lynn!)

Ant writes "There are spectacular moments, as well as the mundane, in space. Over the years, living in space has forced astronauts to make a few concessions to things you would not give a second thought about when staying at a hotel/motel. The article lists a few things that people may not have known about living in space." Your iPod needs to be modifie to use Alkaline batteries. And also, did you know... that in space... you only get one spooooon. And some people, are spoon millionaires.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve Kerrison writes "With the power of CPUs ever-increasing and the number of cores in a system increasing too, having a supercomputer sat under your desk is no longer a pipe dream. But generally speaking, the extreme high end of modern computing consists of a big ugly box housing that generates a lot of noise. A UK system integrator has developed a concept PC that blows that all away. The eXtreme Concept PC (XCP) has quite a romantic design story, with inspiration coming from concept cars and the sarcophagus-like Cray T90. The end result is a system that resembles a Cylon — computing power never looked so ominous. Although just a concept, the company behind the design reckons there could be a (small) market for the systems, with varying levels of compute power accompanied by appropriate (say, LN2) cooling."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First, let me offer a great big thank you to Youtube from me and everyone on the internet, including many small businesses. Im just guessing here, but based on reports coming from Compete and others, I don't think its a stretch to say that Youtube subsidizes the cost of more than half the user generated internet bandwidth consumed in the United States.

Yep, you read that right. If you thought that the internet only used free as an incentive back during the Bubble Years, think again. I'm sure I speak for 10s of millions of us who have hosted videos on Youtube when I offer much gratitude to Google for their generosity. Never could even I have imagined that when they bought Youtube it would be such a costly mistake. If buying a company in order to subsidize the video bandwidth of the internet isn't crazy.., I dont know what is.

Fortunately for Google, they have unquestionably the world's best network and most likely the world's lowest bandwidth costs. So if anyone is going to be able to afford that cost, it would be Google.

As long as their stock price doesn't fall another 50pct that is. At that point even the most forgiving shareholder may ask about the wisdom of subsidizing all things video on the internet. Particularly when they realize that they have forgotten to price in the overhanging risk of the legal copyright challenges still in play against Youtube. Those lawsuits have not gone away, and the risk certainly has not been reduced. They simply are not front of mind to shareholders these days.

But they may be front of mind at Google. Maybe It's just the cynic in me, but I think the primary reason behind the enhancement of Youtube APIs and the removal of the Youtube watermark have more to do with copyright than anything else

You see, when Youtube offers their API and allows users of all shapes and sizes to host video on their own sites, rather than on Youtube or Google, the copyright risk to Youtube disappears. At that point Youtube is truly just a service provider and they have no idea what content they are hosting. That gets them legal.

Currently, Youtube is not allowed to know what content is being uploaded and available on their website unless it is content for which they have a signed deal. Pundits like to attribute the lack of ads around content to advertisers concern for the uncertainty of proximity to who knows what kind of video. I don't see it that way. There is always a price advertisers will pay for Run of Site ads. The risk is not the advertisers' its Youtube's. They can't place ads according to user uploaded content because they aren't supposed to know what or where that content is.

So back to the APIs.

If a website uses the API to post a video on their own site, they assume all the copyright risk. Youtube is in the clear.

Pushing the copyright risk to the site using the API is great news for Google. They now control that's website's video economics because they are still assuming 100pct of the bandwidth costs. Because of this 1999 style generosity, Google is hoping that the website will now take advantage of any and all of their advertising programs that generate revenue for the site and of course for Google. I think thats a trade off most sites wanting to host video will make. Particularly with all the options that Google/Doubleclick can now offer.

So because of the API, Google goes from not being able to generate more than trivial revenue on Youtube to being able to generate limitless revenue on 3rd party sites.

Now that is not crazy. Thats a smart move if they can get traction with it.

In fact, a some point in the future, don't be surprised if Google makes it more and more difficult to upload video on to Youtube by REQUIRING you to sign a license for the content first. Thats a heck of a lot cheaper than paying 150k dollars per infringing download.


If I am MicroSoft, I'm freaking out realizing that something needs to be done to pre empt this move.

Your move MicroHoo.

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SkiifGeek writes "Zone-H have recently posted the statistical breakdown of the collected website defacements from the last few years. Surprisingly, in 2007 more Linux servers suffered a successful attack than all versions of Windows, combined. Similarly, more Apache installations were successfully attacked than all IIS versions combined. A day after posting this data, Zone-H have questioned the appropriateness of continuing to operate the archive. Despite the valuable information that can be gleaned from the service, it may soon be lost to the world. The natural successor to the now-defunct Alldas archive of defaced websites, Zone-H's archive maintains records of over 2.6 million defaced sites but may be shut down due to the continuous accusations of impropriety leveled against them any time they disclose and mirror a reported defacement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.