Category: Technology

Dell has decided to drop floppy drives from new computers.

According to this CNet article, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has given Microsoft a stay on the order to ship the Java runtime environment with Windows. Microsoft called the orginal 120-notice order “extreme and unprecedented”. Does this mean we will see the JRE in the next release of Windows?

In this piece, the Guardian writer Jack Schofield argues that computer systems have become ‘horizontally integrated’, they give customers greater choice but also lead to unpredictable quality. “Rather than being spoon-fed by high priced vertical suppliers, customers have to become their own systems integrators and IT managers. The products may be cheap, but freedom has…

In the latest bit of DMCA lunacy, copyright guru David Nimmer turned me onto a case that his firm is defending, where a garage door opener company (The Chamberlain Group) has leveled a DMCA claim (among other claims) against the maker of universal garage door remotes (Skylink). Yet another case where the anti-circumvention provisions of…

The .mil domain is to be locked down so as to prevent terrorists gaining acces to sensitive information, Donald Rumsfeld has said. I hope they tighten it up good because there is an awful lot of information available at defenselink.mil.

A guy who once worked for the RIAA, has revealed their methods for monitoring peer to peer networks like the now defunct Napster, and new Gnutella, Morpheus and Kazaa programs. He admits that he suggested poisoning the networks with bogus files so as to disrupt and frustrate file sharing on the Internet. Interesting reading.

Two MIT students have found that hard drives can reveal lots of information about their previous owners. In a study they found that most hard drives still have information on them even after deletion or formatting. So next time you sell a hard drive to somebody make sure you write over all that porn.

The Reg is reporting that Adobe did not really urge the Department of Justice not to prosecute Elcomsoft. Instead they fully supported it, and also fully support the DMCA. I do not like Adobe anymore.

An interview with the programmer who successfully beat the prosecution against him under the controversial DMCA. Glad to see he won, even Adobe dropped the original case because of the public outcry.