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Latest Freshmeat Releases
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 Code Browser 3.2 (Default branch)
Code Browser is a folding and outlining editor.It is a lightweight but powerful tool forstructuring and browsing source code usingfolders and links. It is especially designed tokeep a good overview of the code of a largeproject.
Copix 3.0.3 (Default branch)
KaufKauf Slim Linux 2.0ALPHA (Default branch)
SendmailAnalyzer 3.1 (Default branch)
Sendmail Analyzer is a tool to monitor sendmail usage and generate HTML and graph reports. It reports all you ever wanted to know about email trafic on your network. You can also use it in an ISP environment with per domain and per mailbox reports. Statistics are generated per hour, day, month, and year.
giv 0.9.0 (Default branch)
giv, the G(reat|tk|NU) Image Viewer, is an imageand hierarchical vector viewer. It was designedespecially for scientific vision and computationalgeometry.
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Slashdot News
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Department: tip-of-the-iceburg Date: 2008-05-09T14:21:00+00:00 Comments: 47 Barence writes "A PC Pro reader has received a demand for a£600 out-of-court settlement from lawyers claiming to have forensic evidence that he illegally downloaded a PC game on BitTorrent. The law firm, Davenport Lyons, is acting on the behalf of German games distributor Zuxxez, creator of the game in question, Two Worlds. The PC Pro reader was given no prior warning to stop file sharing, unlike the usual 'three strikes and you're out' approach adopted by the music industry. The reader says, 'To add insult to injury it [Davenport Lyons] didn't pay enough postage on the letter and I had to collect it from the sorting office at a cost of£1.30. This also used up most of the two weeks that it allowed for a response.'"
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: shun-the-frumious-bandersnatch Date: 2008-05-09T13:40:00+00:00 Comments: 171 ozmanjusri writes "According to Information Week, within hours of its wide availability Windows XP SP3 had drawn hundreds of complaints from users who claim the update is wreaking havoc on their computers. One user said in a Microsoft newsgroup: 'I downloaded and installed [the SP3] package for IT Professionals and Developers on one of my computers. Now I can't get the computer to boot. I don't think Microsoft should have made this a critical update.' Other sites including IT Wire are also reporting problems, which include include random reboots or the inability to boot at all." Note that XP3 won't install on systems running beta IE8; and after a successful SP3 install users will no longer be able to downgrade from IE7 to IE6.
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: green-enveloope Date: 2008-05-09T13:01:00+00:00 Comments: 45 l2718 writes "Yesterday we discussed Skype's appeal of a German court's ruling against them regarding a violation of the GPL. Harald Welte (the plaintiff) now reports in his blog that following oral argument, Skype decided to drop the appeal and accept the lower court ruling in Weite's favor. More details and analysis at Groklaw. Congratulations to Mr. Welte and GPL-violations.org!"
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: round-infinity-fight Date: 2008-05-09T12:21:00+00:00 Comments: 81 An anonymous reader brings news that Net Neutrality legislation is making another comeback. A new bill, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), would make ISPs who fail to provide service in a non-discriminatory manner subject to anti-trust violations. From the NYTimes: "'The bill squarely addresses the issue of the enormous market power of the telephone and cable companies as the providers of 98 percent of the broadband service in the country,' said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge. But broadband providers and some congressional Republicans have argued that net neutrality legislation isn't necessary. The broadband market is becoming more competitive and net neutrality regulations could hamper investment in broadband networks, some Republicans said during a hearing this week."
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
Department: i'm-like-totally-18 Date: 2008-05-09T09:18:00+00:00 Comments: 108 Facebook has reached an agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia to develop and enhance controls to protect minors from inappropriate content. This follows a similar commitment from MySpace several months ago. The lone holdout in each case was Texas. News.com notes: "In the deal, the social network has agreed to develop age verification technology, send warning messages when an under-18 user may be giving personal information to an unknown adult, restrict the ability for people to change their ages on the site, and keep abreast of inappropriate content and harassment on the site. While the agreement is with U.S. state authorities, Kelly said that the tools deployed will apply to Facebook's international users as well. More than half of the site's 70 million users are outside the U.S."
Read more of this storyat Slashdot. 
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Latest from Techdirt.com
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Fri, 9 May 2008 07:28:00 PST
theodpwrites"Americans are a real problem, explains Bank of America in a just-disclosed patent application forCounty Assessment. 'A typical American employee,' complains BofA, 'demands a high salary, good benefits, a good work environment, vacation time, and other job-related perks.' Such problems are solved withBofA's patent-pending methodology, which eliminates 'demanding work force' problems by identifying another country for a corporation to relocate its work force to."
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Fri, 9 May 2008 04:16:58 PST
In the past we'vejokedabout the (supposed) fact that the song "Happy Birthday" remains under copyright, due to a copyright originally held by sisters Mildred and Patti Hill, the claimed original authors of the song. However,William Patrypoints us to afascinatingly detailed research paper into questions surrounding the copyright. What comes out of it is pretty strong evidence that the copyright isnot valid-- but it's never gotten far enough in court to have a decision rendered. Plus, it sounds like many aspects of the "history" of the song really appear to be close to a myth.
The sisters in question may have written the melody, but they almost definitely did not write the lyrics (their original copyright was on a different set of lyrics, "Good Morning to All"). As for the melody, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that it was actually taken from a series of extremely similar songs. So, there's a good chance they wrote neither the melody nor the lyrics. Also, there are numerous questions concerning whether or not the copyright holders correctly followed the various rules required of copyright holders at the time, suggesting that even if there were a legal copyright at some point, it's long since expired. And, of course, there's even some evidence to suggest less-than-legal tactics involved with transferring around some of the interest in the song. Amazingly, however, the legitimacy of the copyright has never been determined in court, and it now generates over $2 million per year. Over 1% of the money that ASCAP distributes to songwriters is for this one song, even though it may not be legitimate. Somehow, I doubt this is what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution.
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Fri, 9 May 2008 01:11:11 PST
Joe Mullin has the details of a rather bizarre patent disputeinvolving a patent covering the user interface of force feedback technology used in "cybersex" or "teledildonics."You may have heard of the company Immersion, which, for years, has claimed to hold pretty much all patents on "haptic" technology, which most people are familiar with in the form of "force feedback" game controllers for console games. Some feel that Immersion's patents are overly broad, but that's beside the point on this one. Apparently, at some point, Immersion realized that there was going to be (or already was) a decent sized market in using such haptic technology for virtual sex. Yet, at the same time, the company felt uncomfortable about filing infringement lawsuits on such uses, recognizing that it could lead to negative publicity. So, instead, it licensed out the patents and the right to sue for infringement to a company called Internet Services, LLC (ISLLC), which (from the description in Mullin's article) sounds like a shell company just for this purpose.
However, when Immersionwonits patent infringement lawsuit against Sony for its use of force feedback controllers on Sony gaming consoles, ISLLC apparently felt that Immersion owed it some of the proceeds. It hired famed patent attorney (and patent system expert) Mark Lemley to represent it. However, for somewhat unclear reasons, Lemley now appears to want nothing whatsoever to do with ISLLC and has asked to withdraw from the case. ISLLC has now hired other lawyersjustto force Lemley to still represent it in its lawsuit against Immersion. It's like a patent battle soap opera -- complete with sex toys. See, just because stories are about patents, doesn't mean that they're not sexy.
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Thu, 8 May 2008 21:21:00 PST
Last week we questionedwhyCongress seemed to think that the White House should be playing the role of copyright cop. Yet, apparently, the House of Representatives didn't think it was a question worth asking, as it haspassed the PRO IP billby an overwhelming vote, 410 to 10. It seems like our Congressional Representatives felt that, once they got rid ofone bad portionof the bill, that the rest of it must be perfectly fine. This bill has a ton of problems, expanding copyright law and the executive branch's authority in ways that are pretty clearly unnecessary. It is, in effect, a bill to prop up the obsolete business model of one particular industry, so it's rather disappointing that our Representatives have rushed through to approve it with little discussion or debate over whether it's even necessary. Either way, it seems unlikely to get much further, as the Justice Department has already come outagainstthe bill, one would hope that even if the Senate approves a version of the bill, the President would veto it.
In the meantime, though, given just how much damage arbitrary expansions of copyright law have done, you would think that Congress would at least want to spend some time exploring the issues before rushing through new laws. Tragically, it seems that entertainment industry lobbyists still have politicians convinced that stronger copyright is naturally "good."
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