Think of it as Rodney King, but with Open Source video rather than sale to the highest network bidder...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061111/ap_on_re_us/videotaped_arrest
YouTube.com video prompts probe of LAPD
By ALEX VEIGA, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 11, 7:08 AM ET
LOS ANGELES - An
FBI investigation prompted by video footage of a man being punched repeatedly in the face by police has demonstrated anew the power of the Internet sensation of the year, YouTube.com.
... The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that a Superior Court commissioner viewed the video nearly two months ago, heard the officers' testimony, and concluded that their conduct was "more than reasonable" because Cardenas was resisting.
... Legal observers said the public has become somewhat desensitized to questionable police tactics caught on tape because such videos have become more prevalent since the King beating. In many cases, officers have been exonerated.
"The first reaction by people is one of outrage," said Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. "But the more you see police officers using force on tape, the more you get used to it."
...and they seem familiar with a few Open Source products!
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-6134573.html
Open source earns legal victory
November 10, 2006 2:26 PM PST
The open source software operations of IBM, Red Hat and Novell need not fear prosecution under antitrust laws, a federal appeals court has ruled.
Plaintiff Daniel Wallace had sued the open source giants, contending that they had conspired with the Free Software Foundation and others to offer their wares at an "unbeatable" price (read: free), thereby squeezing competing alternatives from enterprising software writers like Wallace out of the market. (Wallace, according to court documents, wanted to compete with Linux, "either by offering a derivative work or by writing an operating system from scratch.")
A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit disagreed, upholding an earlier decision by a lower court.
"People willingly pay for quality software even when they can get free (but imperfect) substitutes," the judges wrote in a six-page opinion (click for PDF).
They named Open Office, a suite of word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software designed as an alternative to Microsoft Office, and Gimp, an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, as examples of instances in which proprietary software manufacturers have had no trouble hanging onto the "lion's share" of the market.
The judges went on to knock down--and arguably mock--Wallace's arguments that people who release their software under the GNU General Public License are "conspirators" engaged in "price fixing."
"A 'quick look'," wrote the judges, "is all that's needed to reject Wallace's claim."
You don't often see articles like this in the traditional (non-techie) media... Some good quotes.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061112/BUSINESS/611120399
Security puzzle
Employers and clients at risk when vital data is carried around in laptops
By Dana Knight dana.knight@indystar.com November 12, 2006
So, you have been granted the privilege of a company laptop.
Here's a piece of advice: Treat that little black notebook like it's a pile of cold green cash.
... "Literally, pretend you are carrying around millions of dollars and protect it as such," said Amie Peele Carter, a partner with law firm Baker & Daniels who specializes in intellectual property.
... Some companies are instituting stringent policies, encrypting data and requiring 128-character pass codes. Others are counting on employees to use common sense.
More than 600,000 laptops are stolen annually and just 3 percent of those are recovered, according to the FBI.
... For some, the phenomenon hit home last month when an outside contractor working with Mishawaka-based Sisters of St. Francis Health Services inadvertently left compact discs containing confidential patient billing information in a laptop bag she purchased and then returned to a store.
The CDs contained names and Social Security numbers for about 260,000 patients and 6,200 employees, including some in Indianapolis.
St. Francis has a policy requiring such data be encrypted, or electronically scrambled, to keep unauthorized users from accessing it, according to spokeswoman Kay Johnson. The information on the misplaced CDs was not encrypted, however. A lawsuit has been filed by one of the patients affected and is awaiting class-action status approval.
... At JPMorgan Chase, encryption is also used.
"Even if it is stolen, you can't log on," said Nancy Norris, spokeswoman for the bank. "We take laptop security very seriously."
The company, for example, does not store confidential information on the hard drive, but only on the secure network, which is tough to access. Even in the office, a laptop must be secured with a locking cable and then locked in a cabinet at night, Norris said.
What is data security worth?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/10/BUGO4M8LB148.DTL&feed=rss.business
Another reason for data laws
David Lazarus Friday, November 10, 2006
As rental-car giant Hertz prepares to go public next week, the company seems to be having an unusually difficult time keeping confidential info under wraps.
In a regulatory filing on Wednesday, Hertz Global Holdings said it had dropped Deutsche Bank from its underwriting team after "several e-mails" discussing the $1.5 billion initial public offering were inadvertently sent by the bank to about 175 institutional clients.
Meanwhile, the names and Social Security numbers of an undisclosed number of Hertz workers were found last month on the home computer of a former employee of the company.
... In Hertz's case, the company is being reticent about the loss of its data. Broome declined to discuss details of the case or the number of workers affected.
"All we know is that our employee information is out there," he said. "We don't know how it got out there."
According to Hertz's letter to workers, dated Oct. 27, the data were found by the FBI "on the home computer of a former training department employee in Oklahoma City."
"We believe that the former employee obtained this information in the course of his employment in the training department and kept a copy when his employment ended, in violation of Hertz's policies," the letter says.
The letter says the computer is now in the possession of the FBI but offers no explanation for why federal agents are involved in the case, or how law enforcement became aware of the missing data. It says there's no evidence any of the data have been misused.
Broome told me that the missing info dates back to December 2002 and that Hertz previously used people's Social Security numbers as their employee I.D. numbers. He said this is no longer the case.
Broome said the company's training department keeps files on which employees had taken which in-house courses, and it would thus have been natural for the former staffer, who has not been identified, to have access to people's names and Social Security numbers.
"At one point in this person's career, it would have been appropriate for this employee to have had the data," he said.
Broome declined to describe the circumstances by which the data came to be in the former employee's home or for how long the data had been in this person's possession.
He said he didn't know whether the former worker had stored the data on a company laptop and then failed to return the computer, or whether the former worker had smuggled the data out by disc and uploaded it into his or her own computer.
... In any case, it's clear that Hertz's security policies were inadequate when it came to keeping track of the info. And the company isn't alone.
Isn't this similar to allowing Spanish speaking, (or in my case) Chech or Twi speaking) students to use their native language to answer questions?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/11/1356212&from=rss
New Zealand To Allow 'Text-Speak' On Exams
Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday November 11, @10:19AM from the beginning-of-the-end dept. Education Communications
ScentCone writes "New Zealand's Qualification Authority (which sets testing standards for the public schools) is confident that those grading papers will understand the meaning of students' responses, even if they use phone/IM-style text-speak. From the article: 'credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.' Many teachers are not amused, and critics say that the move will devalue NZ's equivalent of a high school diploma."
Not to mention that graders will need to be restrained so they don't gouge their own eyes out. While in the medium of text messages, some shorthand might be in order, but I didn't realize that world paper, pencil, and ink shortages were so severe so that text-speak is necessary everywhere.
Virtual Law
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/nov/12/virtualreality_crimes_present_literal_challenge_re/
Virtual-reality crimes present literal challenge for real-life police
‘We’re in an information economy’
By Eric Weslander Sunday, November 12, 2006
Earlier this year, Lawrence resident Carissa Hill called the police.
She had been swindled out of money by an online scam artist who had assumed someone else’s identity. But the money that Hill lost wasn’t in U.S. dollars. They were Linden dollars, the currency used in an online, computerized world called “Second Life.”
... Think Hill’s crime report sounds frivolous? Consider that the virtual money she lost could have been traded on an online currency exchange for $180 in cold cash. Hill’s computerized alter ego, “Leia Lulu,” is a real estate developer who earns real-life money for renting and selling land that exists only in pixels and in people’s imaginations.
... “Second Life,” launched in 2003, is the brainchild of Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based team of developers with expertise in physics, 3-D graphics and networking. It’s described on the company’s Web site as “a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents.”
Much of the buzz surrounding the company comes from the fact that participants can own what they create inside the world, and can benefit from it by selling it or trading it with others. Linden dollars can be bought and exchanged for U.S. dollars using a credit card.
Through their online personae, known as “avatars,” residents design and buy clothing. They build shopping malls where they charge rent for a storefront. They build night clubs, where they put out tip jars and offer virtual-money prizes for dance contests.
It also can be a venue for promoting a real-world business or idea. Reuters news service, for example, last month opened a virtual “news bureau” there. A staff reporter regularly holds “office hours” via his online persona, and the company posts real-life news feeds on billboards. Wired magazine also has built a headquarters there.
... The equivalent of more than $1 million in U.S. dollars changes hands there each day, and last month, a congressional committee said it was looking at whether those transactions should be taxed.
Is this absurd?
Nancy Baym, an associate professor of communication studies at Kansas University, said that despite the hype, “Second Life” isn’t that different from other forms of online communication that are far more prevalent, such as e-mail or instant messaging.
“Second Life” just hit a million users. In the big picture, it’s pretty low, compared to, say, MySpace, which has about a 100 million users,” Baym said.
But isn’t it absurd to think that something created in “virtual reality” — for example, a poster to hang on the wall of a virtual apartment — could have a value in real life? Baym says, “No.”
“We’re in an information economy, and it’s not that big of a step from telecommuting to work and never being physically present in the home office,” she said. “If you think that people are making a living trading stock via the Internet, it’s not that big of a leap to go into providing PR services via ‘Second Life’... Things like Web design and public relations and consulting and education, all of those things can go on in that kind of a forum.”
The new Rumsfeld
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012978.html
November 10, 2006
National Security Archive Posts The Robert Gates File
National Security Archive: "Bush administration nominee for Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates had a long career in government which showed a notable combination of ambition and caution, according to a new book by Archive senior analyst John Prados [Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006)] which deals with Gates among its much wider coverage of the agency since its inception...Excerpts from Safe for Democracy related to Mr. Gates are here posted by the Archive. They are accompanied by the full three volumes of the extraordinary confirmation hearings of Gates for CIA director which took place in 1991, and which at the time constituted the most detailed examination of U.S. intelligence practices carried out since the Church and Pike investigations of the 1970s. Also posted is the portion of the report by Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh which concerns Mr. Gates, along with his response to those findings."
Interesting. What would you like to review?
http://publishing2.com/2006/11/11/reviewme-creates-a-currency-and-marketplace-for-buying-influence/
ReviewMe Creates a Currency and Marketplace for Buying Influence
SPONSORED BY REVIEWME
I’m being paid $125 to write about ReviewMe (half of what ReviewMe charges for a review on Publishing 2.0). I would have written about ReviewMe anyway, but it’s certainly nice to get paid. Will getting paid influence what I say? I’ll get paid regardless of what I say, but I’ll admit that I’m conscious as I write of this being a paid posting.
There has been much fear and loathing in the blogosphere about PayPerPost and its fostering of deceptive marketing practices. ReviewMe avoids many of PayPerPost’s mistakes, in particular by requiring disclosure and not requiring that reviews be positive.
... The real innovation of ReviewMe is that they’ve created a marketplace for buying influence. Unlike PayPerPost, which lists fixed-price review opportunities that any blogger can select, ReviewMe allows advertisers to select the blogs where they want to be reviewed — each blog can accept or reject the paid review opportunity.
It gets even more interesting when you look at how each blog is priced — based on a combination of Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking, and estimated RSS readers. This is the first real effort I’ve see to create a currency for influence. Is this the right formula? The market will ultimately have to decide, but it’s exactly the kind of metric that bloggers need to sell their true value — page views just ain’t going to cut it.
Geek stuff...
Geek to Live: Essential tools for the placeless office
Us Lifehacker editors have never been in the same room at once, yet we work together every weekday from 5 different cities across 2 time zones. If your team is distributed across vast distances like we are, you need to set up shop not with Aeron chairs and cubicle walls but with the right collaboration tools. Thanks to the wonders of the internets and a growing crop of mature webapps, this kind of "placeless office" is now possible.
We've covered tons of web services that help long-distance co-workers collaborate, and you've got to choose what works best for your team. That said, today I've got a rundown of the web-based software that runs Lifehacker's virtual headquarters.
I'm just a student at heart...
http://www.productivity501.com/2006/11/free_academic_p.html
Free Academic Podcasts
About a year ago, I put together a listing 30 or 40 free podcasts of lectures from Universities. When I started putting together another list, I was amazed at how many more lectures are available. The 134 lectures in this list are all free and don't require any type of authentication--you don't have to be a student to download them. The links are to the rss feed of class lectures. If you copy the URL and in iTunes click on Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast it will automatically download the lectures and new ones as they become available.
...but is it community property?
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/story_pages/showbiz/showbiz1.shtml
Oops, I vid it again
By Rav Singh
SUPERSTAR Britney Spears is facing a mega divorce payout because she did it again and again and again...on a HONEYMOON sex video.
Dumped husband Kevin Federline has been touting the four-hour tape for sale and has already been offered £26 MILLION.
A film company wants to make it available online to fans around the world.
... She is worried she will become infamous like Paris Hilton —whose home-made sex video, was put on the internet by her ex and became one of the world's most popular sites.
... Last week she filed for divorce after dumping him by text.
http://www.lifegoggles.com/?p=150
4 easy steps to getting your videos online
Posted on November 10th, 2006 in Internet, Web Apps, Movies by Joel
... so I thought it would be interesting to go through the process of uploading a video to each of the sites and measuring how easy it was and the resulting video quality.
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