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Updated: 15 min 42 sec ago

House Judiciary Chairman Plans Comprehensive Review of US Copyright Law

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 12:05pm
SEWilco writes in with news that U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte plans on conducting "...a comprehensive review of US copyright law over the coming months.""In a speech given in celebration of World Intellectual Property Day at the Library of Congress today, Goodlatte mentioned a few examples of the sorts of problems that he hopes to address in such a review: 'The Internet has enabled copyright owners to make available their works to consumers around the world, but has also enabled others to do so without any compensation for copyright owners. Efforts to digitize our history so that all have access to it face questions about copyright ownership by those who are hard, if not impossible, to locate. There are concerns about statutory license and damage mechanisms. Federal judges are forced to make decisions using laws that are difficult to apply today. Even the Copyright Office itself faces challenges in meeting the growing needs of its customers - the American public.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



House Judiciary Chairman Plans Comprehensive Review of US Copyright Law

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 12:05pm
SEWilco writes in with news that U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte plans on conducting "...a comprehensive review of US copyright law over the coming months.""In a speech given in celebration of World Intellectual Property Day at the Library of Congress today, Goodlatte mentioned a few examples of the sorts of problems that he hopes to address in such a review: 'The Internet has enabled copyright owners to make available their works to consumers around the world, but has also enabled others to do so without any compensation for copyright owners. Efforts to digitize our history so that all have access to it face questions about copyright ownership by those who are hard, if not impossible, to locate. There are concerns about statutory license and damage mechanisms. Federal judges are forced to make decisions using laws that are difficult to apply today. Even the Copyright Office itself faces challenges in meeting the growing needs of its customers - the American public.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



House Judiciary Chairman Plans Comprehensive Review of US Copyright Law

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 12:05pm
SEWilco writes in with news that U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte plans on conducting "...a comprehensive review of US copyright law over the coming months.""In a speech given in celebration of World Intellectual Property Day at the Library of Congress today, Goodlatte mentioned a few examples of the sorts of problems that he hopes to address in such a review: 'The Internet has enabled copyright owners to make available their works to consumers around the world, but has also enabled others to do so without any compensation for copyright owners. Efforts to digitize our history so that all have access to it face questions about copyright ownership by those who are hard, if not impossible, to locate. There are concerns about statutory license and damage mechanisms. Federal judges are forced to make decisions using laws that are difficult to apply today. Even the Copyright Office itself faces challenges in meeting the growing needs of its customers - the American public.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



House Judiciary Chairman Plans Comprehensive Review of US Copyright Law

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 12:05pm
SEWilco writes in with news that U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte plans on conducting "...a comprehensive review of US copyright law over the coming months.""In a speech given in celebration of World Intellectual Property Day at the Library of Congress today, Goodlatte mentioned a few examples of the sorts of problems that he hopes to address in such a review: 'The Internet has enabled copyright owners to make available their works to consumers around the world, but has also enabled others to do so without any compensation for copyright owners. Efforts to digitize our history so that all have access to it face questions about copyright ownership by those who are hard, if not impossible, to locate. There are concerns about statutory license and damage mechanisms. Federal judges are forced to make decisions using laws that are difficult to apply today. Even the Copyright Office itself faces challenges in meeting the growing needs of its customers - the American public.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



House Judiciary Chairman Plans Comprehensive Review of US Copyright Law

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 12:05pm
SEWilco writes in with news that U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte plans on conducting "...a comprehensive review of US copyright law over the coming months.""In a speech given in celebration of World Intellectual Property Day at the Library of Congress today, Goodlatte mentioned a few examples of the sorts of problems that he hopes to address in such a review: 'The Internet has enabled copyright owners to make available their works to consumers around the world, but has also enabled others to do so without any compensation for copyright owners. Efforts to digitize our history so that all have access to it face questions about copyright ownership by those who are hard, if not impossible, to locate. There are concerns about statutory license and damage mechanisms. Federal judges are forced to make decisions using laws that are difficult to apply today. Even the Copyright Office itself faces challenges in meeting the growing needs of its customers - the American public.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Shuttleworth Calls Ubuntu Performance Art, Calls Out Critics

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 9:29am
darthcamaro writes "Mark Shuttleworth has taken a lot of heat for Ubuntu's decision to use Unity, to move away from Wayland and about its stance on the community distros like Kubuntu. In a new interview Shuttleworth shoots back claiming no matter what he does people will always find fault due to...'competitive pressures.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



No Porn From Public WiFi Hotspots In the UK Proposed

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 7:06am
whoever57 writes "Prime Minister David Cameron is proposing that porn should not be available through WiFi hotspots in public areas. Exactly how this will be implemented has not been identified, even to the extent of whether the ISP or the hotspot operator should implement the blocking. From the article: ' The Prime Minister said: “We are promoting good, clean, WiFi in local cafes and elsewhere to make sure that people have confidence in public WiFi systems so that they are not going to see things they shouldn’t.” His intervention comes after a long-running campaign from children’s charities to ensure a blanket ban on unacceptable sites on public WiFi networks.'"

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An Open Letter To Google Chairman Eric Schmidt On Drones

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 4:27am
savuporo writes "A DC Area Drone User Group has posted an open letter in response to recent comments by Eric Schmidt about banning drones from private use. The closing section reads: 'Personally owned flying robots today have the power to change the balance of power between individuals and large bureaucracies in much the same way the Internet did in the past. And just as the military researchers who developed GPS for guiding munitions could never have imagined their technology would be used in the future to help people conduct health surveys in the world's poorest countries or help people find dates in the world's richest, there is a whole world of socially positive and banal applications for drones that are yet to be discovered. We should embrace this chance that technology provides instead of strangling these opportunities in their infancy. Our hope is that you and the rest of Google's leadership will embrace this pro-technology agenda in the future rather than seeking to stifle it. We would welcome the opportunity to speak further with you about this topic.'"

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Aereo Ruling Could Impact Pandora

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 2:13am
itwbennett writes "Aereo's court battles are far from over, to be sure, but the ruling earlier this month that the TV streaming service doesn't violate copyright laws must have the folks at music streaming service Pandora shaking their heads, wondering why they're still paying royalties that currently consume more than half their revenues. The implications of Aereo's business model are far-reaching and may ultimately 'be resolved by Congress, just as it did when cable first came on the scene, by passing legislation to redefine a public performance,' writes broadcast industry attorney David Oxenford."

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IBM Robotic Coworker Will Help Engineers Fix Broken Systems

Thu, 25/04/2013 - 12:37am
coondoggie writes "When it comes to fixing broken systems, especially in remote locations, engineers could soon turn to a new mobile robotic system IBM is developing that could help them more easily find the broken equipment, offer up information about the system and provide real-time visual support from supervising experts. The mobile maintenance, repair and operations prototype includes an application that lets a supervisor monitor an engineer's progress towards the maintenance site, and a robotic arm coupled with a camera system, a microphone and laser pointer."

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Israel Airport Security Allowed To Read Tourists' Email

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 11:52pm
wiredmikey writes "Israeli security officials at Ben Gurion airport are legally allowed to demand access to tourists' email accounts and deny them entry if they refuse, the country's top legal official said on Wednesday. Details of the policy were laid out by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein in a written response to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the group said in a statement. 'In a response dated April 24, 2013, the attorney general's office confirmed this practice,' ACRI said, quoting sections of the document which said it was only done in exceptional cases where 'relevant suspicious signs' were evident and only done with the tourist's 'consent'. 'Allowing security agents to take such invasive measures at their own discretion and on the basis of such flimsy "consent" is not befitting of a democracy,' commented Lila Margalit from ACRI."

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Thousands of SCADA, ICS Devices Exposed Through Serial Ports

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 11:06pm
Trailrunner7 writes "Serial port servers are admittedly old school technology that you might think had been phased out as new IT, SCADA and industrial control system equipment has been phased in. Metasploit creator HD Moore cautions you to think again. Moore recently revealed that through his Critical IO project research, he discovered 114,000 such devices connected to the Internet, many with little in the way of authentication standing between an attacker and a piece of critical infrastructure or a connection onto a corporate network. More than 95,000 of those devices were exposed over mobile connections such as 3G or GPRS. 'The thing that opened my eyes was looking into common configurations; even if it required authentication to manage the device itself, it often didn't require any authentication to talk to the serial port which is part of the device,' Moore told Threatpost. 'At the end of the day, it became a backdoor to huge separate systems that shouldn't be online anyway. Even though these devices do support authentication at various levels, most of the time it wasn't configured for the serial port.'"

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Ask Slashdot: Do You Move Legal Data With Torrents?

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 10:17pm
An anonymous reader writes "We've recently seen a number of interesting projects come from bittorrent.com, including Sync and SoShare. I sometimes use torrents to move several GB of data, especially when pushing large bundles to multiple destinations. It's mostly a hodgepodge of open source tools, though. Apart from anecdotes and info from bittorrent.com, details are thin on the ground (e.g. the Blizzard Downloader). I have two questions for the Slashdot community. 1) Do you use BitTorrent to move data? If so, how? i.e. What kind of data and what's the implementation? 2) If you've looked at torrent clients/tools, what's missing in the open source ecosystem that would make it more useful for moving around large blobs of data?"

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Amazon Reportedly Working On Set-Top Box

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 9:34pm
Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon has plans to release its own television set-top box later this year. The device will stream video over the internet from Amazon's video service catalog. From the article: "Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is pushing the company into a broadening array of hardware, including tablets, electronic readers and a planned smartphone. ... The set-top box is being developed by Amazon’s Lab126 division, based in Cupertino, California -- the city that’s also home to Apple. Lab126 has toyed with building connected television devices for several years, the people familiar with the effort said. ... Plans for pricing couldn't be determined. Amazon’s typical strategy is to sell hardware at competitive prices, sometimes at a loss, with the intent of making up for discounts through sales of content, including books and movies. Amazon could also use the set-top box to promote its online store.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



NASA Lets Us Watch the Sun Spin For 3 Years In 4 Minute Video

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 9:11pm
An anonymous reader writes "Back in February 2010 NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory–a 3-axis stabilized satellite and fully redundant spacecraft. The aim of the SDO is to monitor solar activity and see how that impacts space weather. As part of its observations, the SDO captures an image of the Sun every 12 seconds using the onboard Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, but varies those shots across 10 different wavelengths. NASA has now collected three years worth of image data from the SDO and has put together a video letting us see the Sun spin in all its glory." If you watch closely, you can see individual frames containing the Moon and Venus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



NASA Lets Us Watch the Sun Spin For 3 Years In 4 Minute Video

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 9:11pm
An anonymous reader writes "Back in February 2010 NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory–a 3-axis stabilized satellite and fully redundant spacecraft. The aim of the SDO is to monitor solar activity and see how that impacts space weather. As part of its observations, the SDO captures an image of the Sun every 12 seconds using the onboard Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, but varies those shots across 10 different wavelengths. NASA has now collected three years worth of image data from the SDO and has put together a video letting us see the Sun spin in all its glory." If you watch closely, you can see individual frames containing the Moon and Venus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



NASA Lets Us Watch the Sun Spin For 3 Years In 4 Minute Video

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 9:11pm
An anonymous reader writes "Back in February 2010 NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory–a 3-axis stabilized satellite and fully redundant spacecraft. The aim of the SDO is to monitor solar activity and see how that impacts space weather. As part of its observations, the SDO captures an image of the Sun every 12 seconds using the onboard Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, but varies those shots across 10 different wavelengths. NASA has now collected three years worth of image data from the SDO and has put together a video letting us see the Sun spin in all its glory." If you watch closely, you can see individual frames containing the Moon and Venus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



NASA Lets Us Watch the Sun Spin For 3 Years In 4 Minute Video

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 9:11pm
An anonymous reader writes "Back in February 2010 NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory–a 3-axis stabilized satellite and fully redundant spacecraft. The aim of the SDO is to monitor solar activity and see how that impacts space weather. As part of its observations, the SDO captures an image of the Sun every 12 seconds using the onboard Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, but varies those shots across 10 different wavelengths. NASA has now collected three years worth of image data from the SDO and has put together a video letting us see the Sun spin in all its glory." If you watch closely, you can see individual frames containing the Moon and Venus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



NASA Lets Us Watch the Sun Spin For 3 Years In 4 Minute Video

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 9:11pm
An anonymous reader writes "Back in February 2010 NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory–a 3-axis stabilized satellite and fully redundant spacecraft. The aim of the SDO is to monitor solar activity and see how that impacts space weather. As part of its observations, the SDO captures an image of the Sun every 12 seconds using the onboard Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, but varies those shots across 10 different wavelengths. NASA has now collected three years worth of image data from the SDO and has put together a video letting us see the Sun spin in all its glory." If you watch closely, you can see individual frames containing the Moon and Venus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



NASA Lets Us Watch the Sun Spin For 3 Years In 4 Minute Video

Wed, 24/04/2013 - 9:11pm
An anonymous reader writes "Back in February 2010 NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory–a 3-axis stabilized satellite and fully redundant spacecraft. The aim of the SDO is to monitor solar activity and see how that impacts space weather. As part of its observations, the SDO captures an image of the Sun every 12 seconds using the onboard Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, but varies those shots across 10 different wavelengths. NASA has now collected three years worth of image data from the SDO and has put together a video letting us see the Sun spin in all its glory." If you watch closely, you can see individual frames containing the Moon and Venus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.