Centennial Man

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Finally posted yesterday's Blog at 11:00AM (and re-posted the Blog for the 12^th)

An end to Flash Cookies?

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=22851

Adobe Flash update puts users in charge of privacy

May 13, 2011 by Dissent

Robert McMillan reports:

Adobe has released an important update to its Flash Player software that fixes critical security flaws and gives users a better way of controlling whether they are being tracked on the Web.

The Flash Player 10.3 update, released Thursday, lets users manage Flash cookies using their browser’s privacy settings or through a new control panel.

Read more on MSNBC.

Could this be the MPAA's Betamax case?

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/13/215216/Zediva-Fights-Back-Against-MPAA?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Zediva Fights Back Against MPAA

"When Zediva burst onto the streaming scene earlier this year, they managed to do something nobody else was doing. Navigating around the copyright law, they found a way to stream rental movies not currently available on other services, because they were still inside the DVD sales window, and filled a role not currently part of the competitions' services. The service grants a 'rental' of the physical movie to the user, who is then able to stream it over the internet, usually with the option to re-rent after being played. By having it be a rental service, they were able to avoid some of the legalese associated with streaming movies outside of that sales window. Needless to say the MPAA was not pleased. But instead of making nice with the MPAA, Zediva has decided to fight back in the form of expensive legal heavy-hitters from 'elite San Francisco law firm Durie Tangri,' which has forced the MPAA to hire their own team of expensive legal ninjas. Zediva argues what most technologically informed people would when looking at this service: that they are essentially a rental service who are renting physical media, and providing the DVD player and a very long cable to the renter's TV."

[From the first article, MPAA claims:

“Zediva illegally streams movies to its customers without obtaining required licenses from the movie studios,” the MPAA states in their press release.

“Zediva claims it is like a brick-and-mortar DVD ‘rental’ store and therefore not obligated to pay licensing fees to copyright holders. But the DVD ‘rental’ label is a sham. In reality, Zediva is a video-on-demand service that transmits movies over the Internet using streaming technologies in violation of the studios’ copyrights,” the MPAA added.

(Related) Not quite “everything you wanted to know...” but interesting. Including a blast at Cloud Computing by RIAA.

http://web.docuticker.com/go/docubase/64316

Rethinking Music: A Briefing Book

May 13, 2011 15:54

Source: The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

“We ran the program before we tested it.”

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/05/13/2249256/Algorithm-Glitch-Voids-Outcome-of-US-Green-Card-Lottery?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Algorithm Glitch Voids Outcome of US Green Card Lottery

"Results for the United States Diversity Visa Lottery for 2012 were declared void due to a programming glitch in the random selection algorithm. At first, the results were published as promised on May, 1st. Then, on May, 6th, the results were withdrawn with the web site claiming to experience 'technical difficulties.' Today (May, 13th), it is declared that the results are invalid due to an algorithm glitch; the computer program has been fixed and the lottery will be re-run. The final results are expected to be published July 15th."

For the Privacy module in my Computer Security class... Not as good as some...

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/waatp-excellent-people-search/

Waatp: An Excellent People Search Engine

www.waatp.com

Similar tools: Webmii, People Lookup and PeekYou.