Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Help ClamAV, Find Prior Art On Trend Micro Patent #5,623,600.

I was visiting Groklaw to read about last gasps of SCO, when I noticed the request for help to find prior art on TrendMicro Patent #5,623,600.
Rather than repeating, I will state the facts and guide you to the article. Thank you for helping and I will. The Groklaw post is pretty big, and need to read it to find out what really going on.
" We have another Pick Your Brain request. This one comes from Barracuda Networks, the email and web security appliances company, but it's about an attack on ClamAV, the Open Source antivirus product.

Barracuda includes ClamAV in some of its enterprise solutions, although it's a small part of what Barracuda does. And Trend Micro has accused ClamAV of infringing a patent it owns, #5,623,600. It specifically has named Barracuda Spam Firewall, the Barracuda Web Filter, and the Barracuda IM Firewall as infringing. Trend Micro has been trying to get Barracuda to either pay license royalties for including ClamAV or stop using ClamAV in its products."

Groklaw Article.


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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Boss Media Launches Next-Generation Gaming Platform

Boss Media Launches Next-Generation Gaming Platform

STOCKHOLM, Sweden--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Regulatory News:

Boss Media (STO:BOSS)has launched its Gaming Management System (GMS), a newly developed game and business platform. GMS was launched concurrently with Hembingo, a new Swedish online bingo operation (www.hembingo.com). Hembingo premiered Monday, 21 January in cooperation with the Swedish news tabloid, Aftonbladet. Hembingo is based on Boss Media's newly-developed Flash-based bingo platform.

The launches of our bingo client and Gaming Management System are milestones for Boss Media and our customers, says Eric Matsgård, Head of Marketing and Products, Boss Media. GMS is the gaming industry's first true player-centric, one-account solution. GMS and our bingo client are both next-generation product families, developed to power the gaming operation of the future. We will successively roll out both of these products to our new and existing customers in 2008.

Gaming Management System is based on standard technology and an open, scalable architecture. From a single platform, GMS integrates and manages all areas of a diverse gaming operation: all game systems, all distribution channels, all players, and all transactions and business information.B

Boss Media AB (publ) is one of the worlds leading independent and total suppliers of systems for digitally distributed gaming entertainment. Boss Media develops gaming system solutions for such distribution channels as personal computers/Internet, interactive gaming terminals and digital- TV. Licensees are offered a customized gaming system, an integrated payment system and operator related services. The Boss Media-share is listed on the OMX Nordic Exchange list (Small Cap/IT). More information about Boss Media is available at www.bossmedia.com


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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

IP Address is Personal Information, EU Says.

When I read this Washington post article, I said yes. People have been using IP Addresses in their daily use and it is personal information. I have had the same IP range since 1990's and it has really become a part of my information. Way to go EU.

BRUSSELS -- IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany's data-protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the E.U. group, which is preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others comply with E.U. privacy law.

Scharr told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address, "then it has to be regarded as personal data."

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is. That is true but does not take into consideration that many people regularly use the same computer and IP address.


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Monday, January 21, 2008

Georgia Black with Green Marlbaro In Japan

Marlbaro (miss spelled intentionally, unlike I do most of the time) green packs with canned coffee called Georgia Black for sale in Japan for people want to kill them slowly. Got to know via BoingBoing from urban dirt.
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DLD08, Digital, Life, Design 2008 in Germany:

A Video introduction, from all things digital. Last one DLD07 was real fun!

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

A CyberJoke Called CyberLaw®

I have to point you to this article about a lawyer who copyrighted cyberlaw! EFF begins its article with;
"Eric Menhart may call himself a cyberlawyer, but we think he has a lot of learn about cyberlaw -- and common sense. Menhart is the author of a blog about cyberlaw issues called, logically if not innovatively, "Cyberlawg.""
Please read and educate yourself at EFF.
Slashdot discussion is here. (Pretty interesting!)
I also read his response of his blog, to which a link is provided at EFF.
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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Microsoft launchs the .NET Reference Source project.

Microsoft said this week that it is now allowing developers to examine source code for .Net Framework libraries as a way to help developers build better software. But developers first will need to upgrade to the newly released Visual Studio 2008 software development platform.
But I have a sneaky feeling that once you examine the code, M$ might own you and what ever you do!
I have not read the complete details of the release yet but I will once I know, I will certainly will post the information. I just found out the information on Infoworld, but actual technical information of getting it working could be found at Shawn Burke's blog, one I actually read.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

PhishTank Findings And The Catches For 2007

Let me post about a service that I am using, and I recoment to many people. I just remembered that I did not post about it before. Yes the product is PhisTank!. PhishTank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. Also, PhishTank provides an open API for developers and researchers to integrate anti-phishing data into their applications at no charge.
I recommend it to anyone who wants to have a peace of mind. If you want to how they performed, they have released a press release about the catch they made last month of last year.
Jan 5, 2008 — SAN FRANCISCO -- OpenDNS (www.opendns.com), the award-winning DNS service that makes the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, today announced December 2007 statistics for PhishTank , the free community Web site where anyone can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. During the month of December, the PhishTank community voted more than 77,000 times on more than 15,000 suspected phishes. PhishTank is the only consumer-friendly, anti-phishing effort that publicly shares timely phishing data.

Highlights from the December 2007 PhishTank statistics include:

Total number of votes by the PhishTank community: 77,769

Total number of unique, suspected phishing scams reported: 15,529

Country hosting the most phishing sites: United States

Percentage of phishing sites hosted in United States: 30

Median time it took for the PhishTank community to verify phishes: 6 hours, 56 minutes

For more detailed information about PhishTank's December 2007 statistics, including graphics you can use on your Web site, please visit: http://www.phishtank.com/stats/2007/12/
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

VOIP IP Telephony Brakes Technorati 50000 Rank Barrier!

Good Luck Partner! Let us brake some more ranks!
VOIP IP Telephony: Just Broke Technorati 50000 Rank Barrier!
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VOIP IP Telephony Brakes Technorati 50000 Rank Barrier!

Good Luck!
VOIP IP Telephony: Just Broke Technorati 50000 Rank Barrier!

Three Pound Macbook Air Floats! at $1799

3 lb Macbook Air is revealed at Macworld. Also claims to be the thinnest notebook in the world! But as with all other thin stuff, bunch of thick stuff is missing!
1.6 GHz Standard, 1.8 GHz Option -- Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB Memory standard
80Gb hard disk standard. 1.8" hard drive, 64GB SSD as an option.
13.3" display, LED backlit. iSight built-in. MacBook-like keyboard, but an ambient light sensor, multi-touch track pad, 1 USB port - micro-DVI, audio out, 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1/EDR, no optical drive.
5 hours of battery life.
All for $1799

Intel shrunk the Core 2 Duo - they did it by 60%. According to Intel CEO says it is thick as a nickel - and wide as a dime.

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Macworld Keynote By Steve Jobs Live

Out of four products that Steve is going to talk about, Mac OS X Leopard is the first one. We are also going to get Time Machines. New Airport Extremes with "server grade" hard drives. They are Time Capsules and 500 GB version - $299, 1 TB $499.
iPhone SDK is coming but people get new software today,
maps with location, Lyrics, Webclips, Customize home screen, SMS multiple people. Webclips are bookmarks on your home screen. you can have up to 9 of them. It's a free download and is available today.
iPod Touch finally gets the 5 apps its been missing. Mail, Stocks, Notes, Maps and Weather, if you pay $20 (If you have already bought your iPod Touch!)
iTunes get 20 million songs. 125 million tv shows. 7milion movies iTunes Movie Rentals, and bunch of new partners on board;
Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline, Fox, WB, Disney, Paramount, Universal, Sony.
We will be back with the last product announcement soon.
Info via Apple Gazette live;

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Monday, January 14, 2008

EU To Probe M$ (Microsoft) Again For Anti-Competitive Measures

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- European Union regulators said Monday they were again investigating software giant Microsoft this time on suspicion of abusing its market dominance by squeezing out competing Internet browsers and software rivals dependent on Microsoft programs.

The European Commission opened two formal probes, It's the first move against the company since a court four months ago backed the EU in a long-running legal battle over Microsoft's actions in using its ubiquitous Windows operating system to elbow into new software markets.

Microsoft said it would cooperate fully with the Commission's investigation and provide any and all information necessary.

"We are committed to ensuring that Microsoft is in full compliance with European law and our obligations as established by the European Court of First Instance in its September 2007 ruling," it said in a statement.

EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said he could not put a time frame on how long it would take regulators to decide whether they would file formal charges against the company, saying this usually depended on "how complicated the issues are and the level of cooperation that we receive from the company under investigation."

Although regulators did not specifically name Microsoft's latest operating system, Vista, they will look at some of its features such as desktop search.

The EU is also wading into a row between Microsoft and open source developers backed by International Business Machines by looking into Microsoft's open format for archived documents - Office Open XML.

The first new probe - triggered by a complaint from Norway's Opera Software - will look at whether Microsoft illegally gives away its Internet Explorer browser for free with Windows. Opera had called on the EU to strip Internet Explorer out of Windows or carry alternative browsers.

The investigation will check also if "new proprietary technologies" held other browsers back by not following open Internet standards. Regulators said they had also received allegations that Microsoft had also illegally packaged desktop search and Windows Live to its operating system.

The second investigation will examine whether Microsoft withheld information from companies that wanted to make products compatible with its software - including Office word processing, spreadsheet and office management tools, some server products and Microsoft's push into the Internet under the name of the .NET framework.

Since Microsoft supplies the software to the vast majority of home and office computers, rivals complain that refusal to give them interoperability information shuts the door on a huge potential market.

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Sunday, January 13, 2008

Where To Find MAC WORLD 2008 Coverage?

Macworld 2008 will be extensively covered at Apple Gazette.com. If you like to subscribe to Apple Gazette's RSS Feed it is here, and you can read LIVE Keynote coverage at Live CenterTwitter and Flickr. on Jan. 15th. You can also follow our Macworld coverage on
Here is a list of sites where you’ll be able to follow live blogging of the event. If you are one of those that will be covering the event and don’t see yourself listed below, please contact Apple Gazette and they have promised get you added as soon as possible.

Apple Gazette
Apple Matters
Appletell
Arstechnica.com
Daily Tech Talk
Engadget
Loop Rumors
MacRumors
Mac Scoop
MacSpark
MacTeens
PomCast
SteveNote Live
Stuff
Uneasy Silence
World of Apple


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Friday, January 11, 2008

Microsoft Says "NO" To Dual Boot OLPC XO Laptops

News com is reporting that Microsoft put stops on talk of a dual-boot XO laptop after OLPC chairman and founder Nick Negroponte told IDG News Service Wednesday that the two organizations are working on such a project. "While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop," a Microsoft representative said in a statement Thursday.
Dual Boot Support development? oxymoron I would say. I have been dual, tripple booting systems for years before I settled of VMware, both PC and Apple hardware I run. Looks like M$ just being big! The OLPC might ship with both operating systems, Linux and Microsoft XP.
Here is the article.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Radiohead's “In Rainbows” is #1 In Sales Charts.

Radiohead's “In Rainbows” album reached the #1 spot in the U.S. sales chart this week, selling 122,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

It arrived in stores in CD format on New Year's Day, nearly three months after the artsy British rock group unleashed the album to the Web at a cost to be determined by the user -- whatever price fans chose to pay, including nothing at all. We reported about that in Geemodo twice;

RadioHead Might Find That Pot of Gold "In Rainbows"

in November and

Radiohead's Social Experiment, Trusting People

in October last year. Seems that it is working for Radiohead and some others as well. Perhaps time to say bye to RIAA like outfits and practices. As weseepeople mentioned, you can trust people.
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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Next Step For OLPC, Pixel Qi

Pixel Qi, a spin off from OLPC is set to create a $75 laptop, according to company website. I am one of the proud owners of OLPC but yet to take out of packing properly, I have been busy ever since I received the package. At least I am happy that there is some child somewhere. The Give one get one program is something that you can pursue untill Pixel Qi come our way. The New device(s) said to be carrying specialties including:

  • Extreme low-cost
  • Extreme low-power
  • Mass producible new display technologies
  • Outdoor use, sunlight readability and robustness
All these efforts are being lead by Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen was previously the founding CTO of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Notably Mary Lou invented the laptop's sunlight-readable display technology and co-invented its ultra-low-power management system. Critically, she transformed these inventions into ready-to-ship hardware, integrated into the XO laptop.
Pixel Qi
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Friday, January 04, 2008

OLPC to Intel, We Will Not Miss Your Half Hearted Efforts

PC World is reporting on OLPC's reaction to Intel's decision to quit OLPC, One Laptop Per Child Initiative. It is widely believed that Intel decided to leave the OLPC after refusing a request to abandon its Classmate PC program, Intel Vesion of XO.

Intel's resignation from the One Laptop Per Child Project's board of directors will have "no impact" on the group's operations, since the chip maker contributed little to the project since joining last year, OLPC President Walter Bender said in an interview.

"We never really got much going with Intel to have an impact," Bender said.

Intel joined OLPC's board of directors in July as part of an agreement that seemed to bury the hatchet between OLPC and Intel's competing Classmate PC project. In addition to ending a war of words between Intel and OLPC, the two sides agreed to cooperate on technology development. Work also began on the development of a version of OLPC's XO laptop using an Intel processor instead of the AMD chip found in the current version.

But the partnership agreement ultimately yielded little, and Intel made a "seemingly half-hearted effort" to build a version of the XO based on one of its microprocessors, Bender said.

The development of an XO laptop based on an Intel processor was widely believed to rely on a version of Intel's upcoming Silverthorne processor, due out early this year. But the use of Silverthorne, billed by Intel as an inexpensive and power-efficient processor, was never confirmed by either Intel or OLPC, although Intel employees privately hinted at its use.



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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Association Sued For $20Million By Nigerian Company Lancor

January 02, 2008 (IDG News Service) -- A company suing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Association for patent infringement has asked for US20 million to settle claims that the nonprofit had copied its keyboard.

Lagos Analysis Corp., or Lancor, is still trying to settle after filing the patent lawsuit in Federal High Court, Lagos Judicial Division in Nigeria, said Adé Oyegbola, Lancor's CEO. Lancor, now based in Natick, Massachusetts, has offices in Nigeria and owns a Nigerian patent for a four-shift keyboard, allowing computers to better handle multiple languages, Oyegbola said.

Oyegbola on Wednesday confirmed information published on the Groklaw blog saying that in August his company had asked OLPC for $20 million. That figure was based on OLPC information on potential distribution in Nigeria, Oyegbola said.

Nigeria, in July 2006, placed an order for 1 million of the laptops, but the Nigerian government is now reviewing that decision. Lancor's Konyin Multilingual Keyboards sell for $19.95, meaning 1 million of them would be worth approximately $20 million.

Computerworld


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Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Next Step For RIAA, "Listening to Music is illegal"

After reading this article and this, I am at a loss. What is RIAA is trying to achieve? Totally alienate everyone? I think the copying for personal use has come before the courts before. Since IANL, I will leave the legal stuff to the people who know about them. RIAA, the only music I listen is what I hear over radio in my car and occasional listening/viewing on TV. May be you can take on TIVO like entities because they record music and TV shows.
I have not bought a CD in years (but we buy even more expensive Japanese music, which cost us twice as much as a US music CD, because we have a Japanese member in the family.) in protest to ugly practices of RIAA. But I think now I will visit stores looking for music that is not RIAA affiliated.
I hope musicians will learn that they are too being ripped off by a bunch and react properly. also I hope more of; "RIAA Gets opposition From Student Lawyers" , "RadioHead Might Find That Pot of Gold "In Rainbows"" and less of "Jamie Thomas appeals RIAA (Capital Records v Jammie Thomas) decision," this year and most preferably that RIAA finds a better way to protect IP, intellectual properties of artists, not pockets of few individual corporations.

Update;
I also saw the following article; Make your own deductions;
The only problem with the outrage over the news that the RIAA has begun to target CD ripping is that no such claim was made. RIAA lawyer Ira Schwartz, writing in a supplemental brief, made clear that the defendant was being targeted not for ripping CDs, but for putting songs in a shared Kazaa folder, making them available globally.
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