Every few months it seems we see yet another headline worrying about all the time kids spend online, rather than doing things like “reading books” or writing on paper. This, of course, ignores the fact that most kids today are probably doing a ton more reading and writing than they have at any time in history — thanks to the fact that so much communication online these days is written. In fact, studies have shown that (believe it or not) kids today are better writers than in the past (“using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling”). Yet, that doesn’t stop articles like this one wondering if online reading and writing really counts as reading and writing. About the best you can say for these articles is that they’re people complaining that kids these days read and write differently than in past generations. There’s little to no evidence however that kids are any worse off (despite some sensationalist headlines to the contrary). It seems like, as with every generation, there’s a group of adults who insist that “these kids today” are somehow dumber because they do things differently.

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Video gamers are a violence-prone, anti-social lot who would be better off taking up a real hobby that would make them less of a menace to society, right? Wrong. Here’s how gamers are a growing force for good.

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coondoggie writes “Microsoft’s Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving’s door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft’s representative. On top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises. Ramji’s Sisyphean task was evident last week in Portland at the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and will likely be fuel for chatter at next week’s LinuxWorld gathering in San Francisco.”

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The government of Portugal has announced plans to distribute 500,000 Intel Classmate PC units to students in the country. This is a major victory for Intel in its competition with OLPC.

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From the very

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Justice Department attorneys have filed a motion with the secretive FISA court urging it to rebuff an ACLU request for greater transparency.

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slugo writes “This wired.com article has probably the coolest laser destruction video you have ever seen. The video shows the Israeli and US Air Force working on laser defense systems. The US Air Force is starting to look for ways to laser-proof its bombs and missiles with spray-on coatings, no less. They think everyone is going to figure this laser thing out sometime and need a defense against what they are already very good at — shooting things out of the sky with a laser.”

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Sprint launched its new femtocell products today, in a bid to increase cellular coverage in hard-to-reach areas. The device acts as a miniature cell phone tower, and routes phone calls over a preexisting Internet connection back to Sprint’s service.

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While we all wait for the outcome of Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube, it appears that some other media companies aren’t waiting around. Italian media firm MediaSet, which just so happens to be owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has sued YouTube and Google for $779 million (almost as much as Viacom is suing for!). MediaSet claims that the 4,643 videos on YouTube that infringe on its copyrights have cost it 315,700 viewer days. Apparently, MediaSet prefers not to take into consideration (a) that most videos on YouTube are limited to under 10 minutes, meaning that it’s a poor replacement for watching on TV and (b) that people who watch on YouTube aren’t necessarily people who would have watched it on TV and (c) that folks who watch something on YouTube may, in turn, be convinced to watch a show on TV that they wouldn’t have watched otherwise. Why bother with little pesky details like that when you can just sue a huge company that has a lot of cash. Given that the Italian government is already trying to put Google execs in jail over some YouTube videos, this looks like a larger Italian campaign against YouTube in general.

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OSCON isn’t just a gathering for talks on topics like Creating Location-aware Web 2.0 Applications on an Open Source Geospatial Platform and fightin’ words from the stage; it’s also an excuse for some interesting social gatherings, like this year’s Community Choice awards (organized and sponsored by the corporate overlords at SourceForge, as you might recall, and with Slashdot’s own special category), at which, among other festive activities, attendees were offered the chance to get open-source-related tattoos. There are shots of some of these up on the SourceForge Community pages, and — with some overlap — even more in this set at Flickr. (My pasty bicep is the one now adorned with a circled head of a happy Tux ala IBM; I was expecting it to hurt more than it actually did.) Anyone with techie tattoos, please disclose below.

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Nintendo is bringing suit against companies who make and sell DS carts designed to open the platform to hackers and homebrew applications… but are also used for piracy.

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Tim Wu has an op-ed in the New York Times comparing the American telecommunications market to the OPEC oil cartel. My esteemed co-blogger Adam Thierer calls the comparison — and Wu’s piece — “absurd.” I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with Adam on this one. Wu’s basic point is the same one that Techdirt has been making for years: there’s not enough competition in the broadband marketplace. Adam suggests that OPEC is nothing like the telecommunications industry because “OPEC is a GOVERNMENT-RUN cartel,” implying, I guess, that the telecommunications industry is not a government-run cartel. That’s strange because Adam loves to talk about how excessive FCC regulation is holding back the telecommunications sector. Likewise, Adam has written eloquently about the harms of the FCC’s over-regulation of the spectrum. Government regulations still impose significant barriers to entry in the telecommunications market. That sounds like a “government-run cartel” to me.

It’s true, of course, that the American telecom market is less constrained than the telecom markets in some other countries. And it’s certainly less constrained than it was 30 years ago. But it’s also far from being a free market. Potential entrants to the wired broadband market face hostile local governments who often enjoy cozy relationships with the incumbents and a variety of taxes and regulatory mandates. As for wireless, Wu puts it as well as I could: “The federal government dictates exactly what licensees of the airwaves may do with their part of the spectrum. These Soviet-style rules create waste that is worthy of Brezhnev.” I read Wu as making a point that couldn’t be more libertarian: that bad regulatory decisions have limited competition in the telecom marketplace. He explicitly calls for “relaxing the overregulation of the airwaves and allow use of the wasted spaces.” Amen to that.

Now, Adam and Wu aren’t going to agree on what should be done about these problems. Wu is a fan of municipal broadband, while Adam is not. Wu supports network neutrality regulations that Adam opposes. And Wu wants more spectrum to be made available for use as a commons, while Adam would prefer to see the creation of robust property rights in spectrum. My sympathies are with Adam on all three issues. But in criticizing those specific proposals, I think it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture. The big ideological debate of 20th century telecom policy was over whether market competition or government planning is a better way to promote progress. I think it’s a sign of how completely the pro-market side has won that argument that Wu explicitly clothes his modest regulatory proposals in pro-competitive, deregulatory language. Wu explicitly acknowledges the potential for unintended consequences and the importance of robust market competition. Wu is no libertarian, but it’s silly to paint him as some kind of throwback from the 1930s.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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DrEnter writes “According to this article, Yahoo will offer some compensation after they turn off their DRM servers and Yahoo Music customers’ will no longer be able to access their music. The company said Wednesday it is offering coupons on request for people to buy songs again through Yahoo’s new partner, RealNetworks Inc.’s Rhapsody. Those songs will be in the MP3 format, free of copy protection. Refunds are available for users who “have serious problems with this arrangement,” Yahoo said. Nice to see them step-up and do something, especially without trading one DRM scheme for another.”

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While the federal government of the US has dumped on us dreadful laws like the DMCA, when it comes time for it to follow those laws itself, it takes a pass. Why be inconvenienced like the rest of us? We’ve talked about how the US government likes to ignore patent law using either “state secrets” or “sovereign immunity” claims, and now it appears they’re using that for copyright law as well. CAFC (Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) has allowed the Air Force to dismiss a DMCA lawsuit lodged against them by claiming “sovereign immunity.”

The details of the case are pretty straightforward. A guy in the Air Force, in his spare time, developed some useful software that the Air Force started using, without any sort of contractual relationship established (and, apparently, unlike most companies, it didn’t have any agreement with him that automatically gave them ownership of the software). He kept the source code secret, but the Air Force rewarded him with a promotion. But, then, the Air Force got worried that it was so dependent on this one guy, so it demanded the source code to the software. The guy refused, and received a pay cut and a demotion. The Air Force then hired another company to reverse engineer the software, and to get around the DRM that the guy had put on his original software.

No matter how silly the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision is, this would seem like a textbook case where it was violated. Except that the Air Force basically said “we’re the gov’t, so that doesn’t apply to us” and the court agreed. It must be fun to be the government, where you get to pass laws and then can ignore them at will.

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narramissic writes “In case you missed it, India’s Minister of State for Higher Education yesterday announced the development of a $10 laptop that will target higher education applications. There were no specifications given for the laptop and the rock-bottom price raised questions about government subsidies. Today, the figure was corrected: It’s not a $10 laptop; it’s a $100 laptop. Still no specs though.”

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goombah99 writes “After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Macine. It can host 32 or 64 bit Linux, Windows XP vista and 98, openSolaris and DOS. It runs on mac, windows, and unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on Macworld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like it’s competition it can run other OS’s in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.

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Reader John Lownie writes in with yet another example of legal battles gone mad over trademark and copyright, involving a teacher doing some creative things with a character in a book and the estate of an author

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Alsee writes “Welcome to our first real taste of Trusted Computing: With Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate, Service Pack 1 refuses to install on dual boot systems. Trusted Computing is one of the many things that got cut from Vista, but traces of it remain in BitLocker, and that is the problem. The Service Pack patch to your system will invalidate your Trust chain if you are not running the Microsoft-approved Microsoft-trusted boot loader, or if you make other similar unapproved modifications to your system. The Trust chip (the TPM) will then refuse to give you your key to unlock your own hard drive. If you are not running BitLocker then a workaround is available: Switch back to Microsoft’s Vista-only boot mode, install the Service Pack, then reapply your dual boot loader. If you are running BitLocker, or if Microsoft resumes implementing Trusted Computing, then you are S.O.L.”

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Back in February, there were some rumors making the rounds that the Chinese gov’t was planning to drop its “Great Firewall” of internet censorship, to make sure that reporters had full access to the internet as necessary. Then, in April, the International Olympic Committee specifically asked government censors to drop the filters during the Olympics. Even that request seemed sketchy, as the IOC said that leaving the filters in place would “reflect poorly” on China. I would think that having the filters in the first place (and putting them back after the Olympics) would also “reflect poorly” on China, but that’s a separate discussion.

However, what really does reflect poorly is the news that China hasn’t dropped the filters at all. Journalists are complaining, but apparently the Chinese censors and the IOC have come to a compromise: China won’t censor any Olympics websites. Unless they mention Tibet or something. In other words, China hasn’t really loosened the Great Firewall at all.

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palegray.net writes “Scientists have discovered new meaning behind the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, which has been referred to as the oldest known analog computing device. In addition to providing a means to calculate the dates for solar eclipses, the device apparently tracked the four-year cycles of the Olympiad. From the New York Times article: ‘Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.’”

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British hacker Gary McKinnon illegally snooped around computers across multiple US military departments in search of proof that aliens exist. After taking his fight against US extradition to Britain’s highest court and losing, McKinnon will be tried in the US for his crimes.

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DeviceGuru writes “Cal Tech claims its researchers have ‘turned science fiction into reality’ with their development of a single-chip microscope. Although it doesn’t have any lenses, the device is said to provide magnification comparable to that of sophisticated optical microscopes. The microscope’s magnifying capabilities derive from a technology known as microfluidics, which is based on the channeling of fluid flow at incredibly small scales. Applications for the so-called ‘optofluidic microscope’ are expected to include field analysis of blood samples for malaria, or checking water supplies for giardia and other pathogens. The project’s director thinks devices based on it could be implanted directly into the human body, in order to help arrest the spread of cancer.” There’s also coverage of the microscope at EE Times.

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Back in February, we wrote about how radio talk show host Michael Savage was misusing copyright law to charge the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) with copyright infringement. Savage had apparently said some negative things about CAIR, and CAIR responded by posting the segment of Savage’s show and responding to the points he raised. This kind of criticism is the very definition of fair use, and it seemed clear that Savage was trying to abuse the law to silence CAIR from responding to his allegations. What amazed me, though, were the comments responding to that post, accusing CAIR of all sorts of terrorist activities — and then naming me as a supporter of the “terrorist jihad” for pointing out that Savage was abusing copyright law. I made no statements either way concerning either what Savage was saying or CAIRs response. My interest was merely in the issue as relating to copyright law — and, on that, it appears that I was right.

The court has now tossed out Savage’s lawsuit, pointing out that CAIRs actions were, indeed, fair use.

The complaint affirmatively asserts that the purpose and character of [CAIR's] use of the limited excerpts from the radio show was to criticize publicly the anti-Muslim message of those excerpts. To comment on [Savage's] statements without reference or citation to them would not only render [CAIR's] criticism less reliable, but be unfair to [Savage]. Further, it was not unreasonable for [CAIR] to provide the actual audio excerpts, since they reaffirmed the authenticity of the criticized statements and provided the audience with the tone and manner in which [Savage] made the statements.

Furthermore, the court points out that Savage’s claim of “lost revenue” from this so-called infringement are incorrect as well:

Plaintiff instead alleges that defendants caused him financial loss in advertising revenue. Assuming the truth of this allegation, it relates only to the economic impact on future shows, and has no impact on the market for the original, copyrighted show on October 29, 2007.

If it’s true that CAIR is some sort of evil terrorist organization, then let the feds deal with it. Don’t misuse copyright law to do so. If it’s true (as others alleged in the comments) that CAIR uses similar tactics on critics, then let’s expose that as well. But, misusing copyright law should never be seen as an acceptable way to shut up an opponent. If truth is on your side, use it. Don’t try to shut up opponents by twisting copyright law to your purposes.

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A new study tracked a large population of pregnant Danes and found that by seven years after birth, behavior problems in their offspring correlated with cell phone use rates by both the mother and child. But the researchers’ carefully reasoned discussion details all the reasons that radiation from the phones isn’t likely to be the cause.

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rsiles writes “Honeynet solutions were seen just as a research technology a couple of years ago. It is not the case anymore. Due to the inherent constraints and limitations of the current and widely deployed intrusion detection solutions, like IDS/IPS and antivirus, it is time to extended our detection arsenal and capabilities with new tools: virtual honeypots. Do not get confused about the book title, specially about the “virtual” term. The main reason to mention virtual honeypots, although the book covers all kind of honeynet/honeypot technologies, is because during the last few years virtualization has been a key element in the deployment of honeynets. It has offered us a significant cost reduction, more flexibility, reusability and multiple benefits. The main drawback of this solution is the detection of virtual environments by some malware specimens.” Read below for the rest of Raul’s review.

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Dell has already entered (and exited) the MP3 player market, but the company apparently feels it’s time to take another crack at penetrating Apple’s stronghold. The Round Rock-based company plans to launch a new MP3 player in the coming months, and will use assets it purchased from software startup Zing to build a community online.

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parvenu74 writes “A story from Infoworld is suggesting that the days of Windows are numbered and that Microsoft is preparing a web-based operating system code-named Midori as a successor. Midori is reported to be an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity OS, an all-managed code microkernel OS which leverages a technology called software isolated processes (SIPs) to overcome the traditional inter-thread communications issues of microkernel OSes.”

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Over the years, we’ve pointed out some of the more ridiculous aspects of the One Laptop Per Child program (originally known as the $100 PC). While the cause is quite admirable, the project’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte has taken a rather strange way to get there. Rather than letting the competitive free market get us to a point where a $100 laptop is feasible, he would attack anyone who dared to try to create a competing product. Also, much of the OLPC was developed very much as a top down project — rather than opening it up to various participants to look at different options for making things even better or cheaper.

In fact, when the initial designs came down, the countries that were supposed to be all excited about the OLPC, such as India, weren’t particularly excited — turning down a chance to participate in the OLPC program (though, it has run some small scale tests). Now, however, India claims that it’s working on its own cheap laptop: and it’ll be a $10 PC instead of $100 (and, really, the OLPC is more like $200 anyway). It’s not clear how India plans to create such a cheap PC, and the article notes there’s a decent chance it won’t really be $10 — but a subsidized $10. Still, one doubts that Negroponte will be very happy about this, despite the fact that it advances his vision, if not his implementation. Update: Well, well, well. Now Indian officials are claiming they misspoke, and the $10 laptop will actually be a $100 laptop. If they can actually get there, more power to them — because, as we noted, OLPC’s $100 laptop is actually $200.

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The Entertainment Software Association has released its 2008 report. Forget the controversy over this year’s E3; the real work is detailed here.

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Dave writes “BEIJING (Reuters) — Some International Olympic Committee officials cut a deal to let China block sensitive websites despite promises of unrestricted access, a senior IOC official admitted on Wednesday. Persistent pollution fears and China’s concerns about security in Tibet also remained problems for organizers nine days before the Games begin. China had committed to providing media with the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, but journalists have this week complained of finding access to sites deemed sensitive to its communist leadership blocked. ‘I regret that it now appears BOCOG has announced that there will be limitations on website access during Games time,’ IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said, referring to Beijing’s Olympic organizers. ‘I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related,’ he said.” But yet somehow the mainstream media will ignore this because the Olympics are patriotic or something.

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The 2008 Olympic Games begin next week, and journalists from around the world are descending upon Beijing in anticipation. Unfortunately, China has failed to live up to its original promise of an open Internet, with reporters complaining of restricted access, slow connections, and “harassment” from officials.

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Just as you were getting used to 3.0, those Mozilla guys have announced 3.1′s Alpha release. FTA “Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an ‘early developer milestone,’ the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar.” You can download it if you dare.

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While we still need to wait for the end result of the YouTube/Viacom case to learn whether hosting infringing videos is infringement itself, there’s another open question about whether or not

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jamie writes “The politicization of Bush’s Justice Department, which this week was officially determined to be illegal, has a funny side too. Sometime in 2005-2006, White House Liaison Jan Williams attended a seminar on LexisNexis searches, and wrote one herself. When she left, she passed it on to her successor Monica Goodling in an email. Justin Mason, author of SpamAssassin, is skeptical about its accuracy: [First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm! Needless to say, when asked about it, Williams first said she didn’t remember ever seeing it, then said she’d used an edited version just once. LexisNexis records show she used it, as shown, 25 times.” Note that ‘sex!’ appears twice in the query. Must be VERY important.

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Mozilla has officially released the first Firefox 3.1 alpha. Ars takes a close look at the tab browsing features, enhancements to the Awesome Bar, and web development hotness.

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BobB writes “HD Moore has been owned. Moore, the creator of the popular Metasploit hacking toolkit, has become the victim of a computer attack. It happened on Tuesday morning, when Moore’s company, BreakingPoint, had some of its Internet traffic redirected to a fake Google page that was being run by a scammer. According to Moore, the hacker was able to do this by launching what’s known as a cache poisoning attack on a DNS server on AT&T’s network that was serving the Austin, Texas, area. One of BreakingPoint’s servers was forwarding DNS (Domain Name System) traffic to the AT&T server, so when it was compromised, so was HD Moore’s company.”

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Remember last week, when NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threatened Comcast with a lawsuit, if it didn’t start blocking access to a list of “objectionable” content? It was quite clear that Cuomo’s threat had no legal basis — as the law is quite clear that, as a service provider, Comcast is not responsible for what happens on the network — but Cuomo stated (just as clearly) that he would sue anyway, and associate Comcast in peoples’ minds with objectionable content. Unfortunately, it looks like the bullying threat worked: Comcast has agreed to support Cuomo’s proposal. There’s simply no legal basis for this, and it opens up a seriously slippery slope in saying that ISPs can block access to “objectionable” content. Yet, apparently, it’s just not worth it to stand up against politicians who want to paint you as a supporter of child porn, even if that’s completely ridiculous.

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the4thdimension writes “A UK man, accused of breaking into US Pentagon and NASA computers in March 2001, lost an extradition appeal that would have freed him, or at least had him tried in the UK. While the US accuses him of causing over $900,000 in computer damage, his attorney asserts that, if extradited to the US, he faces harsh penalties that are “intolerable” and “…he British government declined to prosecute him to enable the U.S. government to make an example of him.” He intends to appeal to the European courts.”

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Barence writes “British police are shaming hoax 999 callers and time-wasters on YouTube in an effort to cut down on non-emergency calls. Video clips uploaded include a lady phoning police to ask what year the internet started, the dramatic tale of a man whose wife would only provide salmon sandwiches for lunch, and another worried soul who had lost her glasses and could not see properly to peel potatoes. Anyone else think the chance of YouTube fame is more likely to encourage copycats than educate people about the wrongs of hoax calling?”

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ljw1004 writes “Alzheimer’s researchers are divided on whether the disease is caused by ‘beta amyloid’ (a peptide found in Alzheimer brains) or by ‘tau protein’ (normally used for cellular scaffolding, but can aggregate out of control and destroy neurons). Today in Chicago a new drug has been announced that stops tau aggregation and appears to have halted Alzheimer’s-related decline in 300 clinical trial patients. The drug is known as ‘rember.’ Do you have friends or family who appear to be on the road to dementia? Here is an online questionnaire, part of one used in the clinical trial to diagnose dementia. (Disclosure: I made the online questionnaire, and my father is one of the scientists behind the drug.)”

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Health and Human Services director Michael Leavitt is the first Cabinet member to author a blog. His thoughts on why he sticks with it inside.

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As was widely expected, Amazon has now launched a new payment service for online retailers as something of a PayPal competitor. Basically, it will let people use their Amazon account info to buy things at other stores. Of course, as others have discovered, taking on PayPal — while simple in concept — has proven a lot more difficult in practice. Companies like Google and Yahoo have tried and haven’t made much of a dent. Hell, even Amazon has tried this before, though that was a beta launch that never went very far. Actually getting retailers to implement this and then getting customers to use it is the challenge at this point, and it seems likely to be an uphill battle. There’s definitely a sense that many people don’t like PayPal, but it’s so well established that to provide an alternative, you really need to offer something that provides significant value above and beyond Paypal — and it’s not clear that Amazon really does that.

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An anonymous reader writes “The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer’s Dreams. It’s a piece that fiction magazines wouldn’t publish because it’s too technical and technical publications wouldn’t print because it’s too fictional. It’s the story of Google’s attempt to map the web turning into something else, something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, ‘This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.’ After you read it, you’ll be asking the same question the author does — ‘Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?’”

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Home automation solutions have been something of a fun toy for geeks for many, many years but are still pretty far from mainstream. However, a new force may drive new adoption: the fact that home automation systems can often track how much energy different electronics are using. Prior to this, people weren’t all that sure how much energy their consumer electronics were slurping up. But with some new home automation systems, they get a much better view into what’s being used and how — and how to change usage to cut down on the electricity bill. Of course, that makes you wonder if today’s obsession with big flat screen TVs (known as the SUVs of the TV world) will get a bit of pushback.

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Chances are the cable that connects your house to the outside world has always belonged to your local phone or cable company. Ars explores what would happen if the “last mile” were built and owned by consumers, rather than telecom incumbents.

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We’ve covered the

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Microsoft has hinted at future cloud computing efforts and its commitment to the concept, and we should expect to see both services and a new cloud computing platform in the next year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s recent troubles show that cloud computing still suffers from turbulence.

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An anonymous reader writes “Infoweek wraps last week’s event with Inside The OSCON 2008 Conference, which pulls together interviews with Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin, MySQL’s Zach Urlocker and Sam Ramji, who directs Microsoft’s Open Source Lab. Best quotes: ‘We will make a significant attempt to elevate the Linux desktop to the point where it is as good or better than Apple,’ from Shuttleworth; and ‘If I would start a business tomorrow I’d do it in the netbook marketplace. I’d build a dead-simple $200 device that targets sports fans, women over forty,’ from Zemlin.” We discussed Shuttleworth’s better-than-Apple proposition while OSCON was going on.

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The National Football League has been historically very protective of its broadcasts, slapping anyone who even tries to put a clip on the Internet. Now, though, the league has reversed course and will offer live streaming video of its Sunday night games, starting this fall.

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Almost Live writes “Oracle has released an out-of-cycle alert to offer mitigation for a zero-day exploit that’s been posted on the Internet. The emergency workaround addresses an unpatched remote buffer overflow that’s remotely exploitable without the need for a username and password, and can result in compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the targeted system.” Whoever published the vulnerability and matching exploit code did not contact Oracle first.

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot