This is pretty much old news, but the comments[1] are interesting. Link no longer available. ↩︎

Lucent Technologies (formerly Bell Labs) is the object of a lawsuit by Microsoft to nullify some of its patents for audio and video conferencing technologies. The dispute apparently started when Lucent sued Dell and Gateway over infringement of these patents. The two companies asked Microsoft for cover, since the technologies …

There is a new site (on the UIUC campus) that details the $97.8B cases against 4 college students filed in the last few weeks.

Apple released 10.2.5 (client only, Server is in test, but doesn't appear to be out yet) updates yesterday. There were a ton of security-related fixes (many for things that were only made public in the last week), along with performance increases and some other fixes. I was particularly …

Infoworld is reporting that the US Senate is going to be introducing a new bill to combat spam, possibly bringing a $10/email fine (up to $500,000) for sending unsolicited email for marketing purposes.

Some of you may have seen sporadic reports (mostly coming from the L.A. Times) that Apple is in the process of coming out with an online music service this month, along with the long-awaited update to iTunes and the new versions of the iPod. Today, an article on MacCentral …

Here's an article from Salon.com that finally shows an abuse I've been wondering about for a couple of years. The idea is that it is seldom the case that the check-out workers really verify the item identification with the item being scanned by the bar code scanner. Hence, if …

Have you been looking for a way to do auto-fill with Safari? If so, this page can be used to create a button on your button-bar that automatically fills in the information for web pages that ask for standard personal information. At least when I went to the site, the …

On a day that had most people focused on the Earth, a pair of Americans were high above the planet on a mission to reconfigure stabilization gyros on the International Space Station. One of the four gyros failed last year and was to be replaced on a shuttle mission later …

Once again, the question of whether a CD with some of the newer copy protection is really a CD or not has come to the fore. An Australian Xbox user is reporting that these CDs are not compatible with the Xbox. This detailed article from The Age in Australia describes …

So far, the FCC has been holding to its thrice-postponed November 11th deadline for number portability despite clamoring from the major cell carriers to postpone it yet again. At issue is the ability to keep your telephone number when you move from one cell carrier to another. Hidden inside is …

An article on Yahoo recounts the story of U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns throwing out a request by an MIT student to allow him to decompile internet filtering software in order to determine what sites are being blocked. The judge disagreed, stating ""there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest …

An article in the New York Times covers the behind-the-scenes jockeying by the administration and congressional republicans to remove the sunset provisions from the USA PATRIOT act.

A disturbing article in Infoworld describes the terms of the new Microsoft 6.0 software agreements. This agreement, which Microsoft pressured customers to take last year by eliminating upgrade pricing schemes, apparently has provisions that require acceleration payments of the entire contract in order to make licenses perpetual on change …

An article on BBC News describes the sentence (5 months in Jail, 5 months house arrest, and $28,500 fine) for a man convicted of violating the DMCA by importing and selling mod chips for the X Box. For those regular readers, it will be no surprise to hear that …

An interesting article on SlashDot points to recent moves by a large ISP in New Zealand whose recent change to their TOS (terms of service) appear to claim ownership of the intellectual property of their customers. The TOS[1] states that they aren't trying to gain control of customer's intellectual …

Reports on CNet indicate that Sun officials are stating publicly that they are looking favorably at the AMD Opteron 64/32-bit processor for future machines. "Can we commit to using Opteron today? No," a spokesperson said. "Can we use it? Are we likely to use it? Yes."

Although it isn't a product announcement or press release of same, it is an interesting step in the direction of the intermingling of the internet and consumer electronics. Philips Semiconductors, the electronics giant, has modified their consumer DVD-R reference design to incorporate broadband internet connectivity and video streaming. An article …

I like Japan and I like Japanese anime, so I'm going to be inclined to like a movie like Spirited Away. And so, I wasn't surprised, and neither should you be, that I thoroughly enjoyed this award winning film (Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, 2003). The animation was an …

Here is a good article on MacDevCenter about making virtual hosts using Rendezvous technology and the built-in Apache web server.