Quick News Links for Week Ending 4/6/2008

• Group working on new standards for multicore programming
  This is at the level of an announcement and isn’t a general programming standard. Sounds like some lower level specs, like for communications and virtualization standards.
• USPTO rejects Blackboard’s patents
  They rejected all of Blackboard’s 44 patents. This may help the appeal by Desire2Learn in their recent suit where they lost.
• Google Docs adds offline support
  Surprised it took so long and that they are rolling out very slowly. Based on their Gears technology, so will work with any supported browsers.
• CCC spoofs officials fingerprint in protest
  This is a clever bit of hacktivism which may hopefully demonstrate to many the core problem with biometrics, that they cannot be revoked when compromised. There is no fingerprint reader which has not been defeated, as far as I know. None.
• Council of Europe proposes filtering, but with limits
  Sadly assumes filtering is a foregone conclusions and recommends some better and worse ideas. Happily, the CoE lacks any enforcement power, so this is just a recommendation.
• Research casts doubt on effectiveness of internet filters
  The fact that most vendors refused to participate or allow the results to be published says more than the test itself. The tests only address protocol detection not the question of legality of content.
• Why are Linux upgrades sometimes so difficult sometimes?
  JWZ is no slouch and even factoring for Atwood’s Microsoft bias, this is concerning. It is comparable to ESR screed about the fact that something as a simple as printer configuration has improved so little in all this time.
• Is Ubuntu a victim of its own success?
  This is admittedly a beta but still may be an early data point in a trend. It is unclear what response, if any, the Ubuntu folks have made to complaints about declining quality.
• Counter suit broadened to try to stop all RIAA suits
  The key is the re-filing of a complaint which the RIAA is already seeking to have dismissed. The silver lining is even if the complaint is dismissed, the damage to the RIAA’s credibility has already been done.
• Law students trying to stop RIAA investigations, too
  They are seeking an injunction against the John Doe suits. This goes beyond EFFs work, where they were just trying to hold the RIAA’s feet to the fire of proving the merit of their cases before allowing the John Doe subpoenas.
• Researchers save file size by recording performance, not audio
  The cost of modeling may limit how generally applicable this is. However, for game scores, similar applications, this may be a very useful technique to save space at little impact on results.
• Music industry stepping forward with flat licensing for ISPs
  Deflates some of the early criticism and asks some clear, objective questions about coverage and distribution of the collections. These are more likely to stall efforts which are not so dissimilar from statutory flat licenses of the past, like cable and radio.
• Venerable programming game
  A fun bit of hacker history, overlapping with studies of artificial life. Arguably the first of many similar programming competitions/games.
• DHS pretending all states have agreed to REAL-ID
  How are the DHS’ actions here even legal? Worse, it makes the chances of real discourse on the legitimate problems, challenges of REAL-ID next to impossible when the responsible federal department is so willing to ignore dissent.
• Difference between feeling and being secure
  Identifies a key dichotomy in safety, security, why it exists and how to factor it into our reasoning and action.
• Inside Intel’s multicore research efforts
  A decent if brief assessment, admitting to some reservations, of the newly launched, corporate funded research at Berkeley and UIUC.
• No Starch follows NRKbeta doctrine
  PDFs being released are DRM-free and the publisher’s thoughts are very self aware. Definitely looking for a positive effect on sales as a reason to release more titles this way.
• Progress towards, estimating costs of real VR
  Researcher thinks using most powerful super computers, passing Graphics Turing Test may be possible within the next decade.
• Net neutrality debate picks up in Canada
  Mostly as a result of Bell Canada’s recent actions, starting to throttle P2P and asking the CRTC to drop wholesale requirements on broadband.
• Tri-state quantum logic gates demonstrated
  A research breakthrough suggests that more capable quantum elements could move general quantum computing forward faster than the preceding approaches.
• New command line tricks in Leopard
  The package utility is overdue and the preferences utility is a nice way to script configuration comparable to tweaking conf, rc files in traditional Unix.

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