Quick News Links for Week Ending 12/23/2007
23 December, 2007 (14:07) | Links | By: cmdln
- Petition urging UK government to disclose data breaches
US already has such regulations, mind boggling that this is not more common.
- Net neutrality becoming “crying wolf”
The issue is hard enough to discuss given the wide array of legitimate management practices coming under scrutiny. Unfortunately, I think this happens with many technology issues because of the uneven distribution of knowledge.
- New CC licenses, plus and zero
Glad to see the rights beyond work, now CC-Plus, available as part of the official set of licenses. I hope the terminology here is clear enough for existing and prospective users of the licenses.
- NYT reports on challenges of parallel programming
The Microsoft researcher was quoted in another piece I discussed recently. Nothing really new here, but notable that the mainstream press is giving it attention.
- Chines great firewall crumbling
This is encouraging and the reasons are not terribly surprising, especially the failure of a multi-headed bureaucracy.
- Google’s interest in natural language queries
Given Norvig’s explanation, their interest in phrase to concept mapping instead of parsing natural language questions actually makes sense in terms of improving search results.
- TorrentSpy loss to MPAA
The loss is not on the merits of the case, unfortunately, but an externality that apparently caused some confusion. Not sure what this means for an appeal.
- Tangled DMCA complaint case
Just read the article, this is an extreme example of abuse and unintended consequences of the maximalist mindset.
- MSIE8 passes ACID2 test
Apparently this was done with the build running in a standards mode. Does that mean the default mode won’t be standards compliant?
- Guide to presidential candidates’ policies on science, tech
Great bit of information but the question of how we make science, tech voting issues remains.
- Busting myth of copyright as zero sum
A well made point that suggests a point that needs to be better made in the debate overall.
- Congress considering ending statutory license for terrestrial radio
I think the fact that market consolidation and increasingly poor programming has far eclipsed any issues of whether the statutory license has outlived its usefulness.
- EFF thinks ThinkSecret shutdown is for the best
Apparently keeping the site’s source confidential, even at the expense of being able to continue running the site, is more important in Opsahl’s opinion.
- Samba to receive SMB protocol documentation
This in response to an action by the EU, remains to be seen how this will affect Samba, which has done very well on the interoperability front with a few notable exceptions, like the CIFS encryption.
- Babbage Foundation re-launches as IT History Society
Preservation of digital information is an extreme challenge of which I’ve talked repeatedly. Glad to see another effort trying to grapple with it.
- New research could improve secure quantum communications
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