The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) department of library sciences has just released the results of a survey of librarians. It seems to show that libraries went in both directions on post-9/11 issues regarding privacy, the Internet, and book records. Also of interest, you can read …

According to this article The Chamberlain Group (manufacturers of upscale garage door openers) has sued a manufacturer of universal garage door openers under (among other things) the DMCA for circumventing their "copy protection" scheme. Perhaps this case is silly enough to cause the DMCA to go down? Once again, the …

An article by Wired.com provides some introductory data on Grid Computing in a technology, society, business context in it's article Grid Computing is Good for Business. An interesting read for those with interest, but not much background in Grid computing. Grid computing is the name for the resource sharing …

Despite protestations to the contrary on January 23, 1984 by Apple Computer, the rise of the Macintosh has not kept us from moving closer to an Orwellian society, at least in terms of available technology. And now, the war footing threatens to create a situation uncannily familiar to readers of …

Following up on a story posted yesterday, I found a page with information comparing the US and EU Copyright terms. There's a good summary of the copyright terms in the US and the EU available here. From this, it appears that we are basically in line with the Europeans thanks …

In a good example of why you need to pay close attention to your data, a few MIT students bought some hard drives from EBay and took a look around. Read more about it here

The Supreme Court of the US has decided that it is OK for the congress to extend copyright protection (as it had in a law in 1998) to 95 years for works for hire and life+70 for works made by individuals. Hailed as a victory for the movie and …

I was interesting in figuring out what the effect of Apple moving to an IBM 970 CPU would have on their product line. Although they are not shipping (expected 2Q-2H 2003), there is some information about them available in the market based on test samples and presentations that IBM has …

An article on CNet details some of the varying opinions about the future of copyright protections and enforcement. In particular, conspicuously absent from the announcements by the BSA and RIAA yesterday were the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association).

From Mikel:If you've used Chimera on the Mac, and you haven't tweaked it already, you must enable pipelining. Quit Chimera cd ~/Library/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/.slt/ Append these lines to prefs.js: user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true); user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true); Restart Chimera The …

Admittedly, I should probably have read it before today, but I am still digging out from too much travel. For those with access, you're looking for "Legally Speaking:Reverse Engineering Under Siege" in the October issue of Communications of the ACM. (If you're not a member, consider joining at the …

The Register has an article about the RIAA using a group of hackers to create a "monitoring hydra" to report to the RIAA what music you may have on your PC. Ed. Note: CNET now reports that an spokesperson from RIAA is calling this a HOAX. I'm leaving the rest …

I've set the date for what will be a monthly series of movies shown at the house. Friends are encouraged to RSVP, so that we will know that there is sufficient seating. If you have suggestions for future movies, please drop me an email and I'll try to put them …

As announced yesterday, Microsoft has reached a tentative agreement with the State of California to settle outstanding anti-trust claims made by the state against the company. Apple Computer has taken the bold step of opposing this settlement on the grounds that it may actually benefit Microsoft, due to the manner …

An excellent article on CNet details Apple's choice of the KHTML web back-end as well as describing the Mozilla reaction to it.

According to an article on Brighthand, PalmSource will stop putting Graffiti into future PalmOS systems in deference to Graffiti 2 (which is based on Jot--I think that's the same one as Windows CE uses). The problem is a judgment against the company and in favor of Xerox.

OK, it's not real, but it makes you wonder... Show me the goods

SCO has released a press release today that refutes claims made in an earlier article by Linux Business Week (and referred to by this site). Text of the press release is in the body, but basically it says they have no desire to take legal action against fellow Linux vendors …

I'm putting up over 400 LD's for auction in the next week. If you're interested, tell me now :-). I am expecting to put them up on EBay as one big lot. However, if somebody has a better idea, please let me know, I'm very open.

An article in Linux Business Week's online edition is claiming to have seen an SCO press release about requiring a royalty payment of $96/CPU for all servers running non-SCO brands of Linux. They apparently claim that the license is required due to UNIX patents acquired by the company from …