Gaige's Pages

In an effort to assuage fears that the DMCA would stifle creativity (ahem), the Copyright Office is required to review the DMCA every 3 years to find exemptions that should be added to the law (or at least how it is applied). The comment period for this three year period ends on February 19, thus you need to submit information quickly to be considered.

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p>The EFF has filed a petition with the Copyright Office to exempt 4 kinds of data from the DMCA, including:

• DVDs with public domain work not available on other medi
• Region-coded DVDs
• Copy protected CD's
• DVDs with unskippable promotional material

By filling out this comment form, you can have your complaint added to the list sent to the Copyright Office.

Although there are many people out in the business community who think that solidified international standards are the end-all and be-all of existence (especially in Europe, as this article from ZDNET UK shows), the history of the Internet shows us that innovation occurs before standards are solidified.

A news release from NCAR (the National Center for Atmostpheric Research) outlines a new program that they are running with the FHWA (the Federal HighWay Administration) to put real-time highway and highway-related weather information on the internet for drivers and for coordination amongst organizations that maintain the roads.

Illegal Art is a museum exhibit showing in Chicago for the next month or so that is designed to exhibit items that have generated controversy due to intellectual property concerns.

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p>Subtitled Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age, the exhibit contains a wide variety of material in video, print, and audio. A representative sample (with explanations) can be found at the site above.

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p>Check it out.

The Register has an article discussing some frightening .mil vulnerabilities, including a publicly available site for registering .mil domains.

Once again, a great article in The Economist covers the copyright issue with a sane, but radical proposal in Copyrights: A radical rethink.

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p>In short, their suggestion is to return the copyright system to its origins and get it back to helping the little guy, not the behemoth.

The Washington Post has an article that appropriately eulogizes the animal that fathered many of the surviving Whooping Cranes and was the center of the movement to provide support for the endangered birds in the U.S. and Canada.

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p>More information on the work to recuperate the population of Whooping Cranes is available at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center web site.

Due to overwhelming negative feedback about their new security technology, Microsoft has decided to relabel their much-discussed Palladium technology to the much-more-difficult-to-remember "next-generation secure computing base".

Apple has posted an FAQ for X11 under OSX.

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p>Mostly configuration and installation related information, with some additional cross-grade info for people who had loaded other X11 options on their Mac's previously.

The Washington Post has an article today detailing the follow-up to a cell-phone powered cheating scheme at the University of Maryland that has landed 12 students in trouble with the school's Honor policy.