Cody Taylor

revealingheart writes “Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0. The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn’t a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate.”

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An anonymous reader writes “If you’re planning on traveling internationally with a laptop, consider the following: District Court Overturns Magistrate Judge in Fifth Amendment Encryption Case. Laptop searches at the border have been discussed many times previously. This is the case where a man entered the country allegedly carrying pornographic material in an encrypted file on his laptop. He initially cooperated with border agents during the search of the laptop then later decided not to cooperate citing the Fifth Amendment. Last year a magistrate judge ruled that compelling the man to enter his password would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Now in a narrow ruling, US District Judge William K. Sessions III said the man had waived his right against self-incrimination when he initially cooperated with border agents.” sohp notes that “the order is not that he produce the key — just that he provide an unencrypted copy.”

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Nakeot writes “In the continuing efforts to build faster and smaller components, a group of researchers at MIT have constructed a basic prototype device that folds materials only hundreds of microns across. Mechanical engineer and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering George Barbastathis leads the charge into ‘nano-origami’ machines involving, the article reads, ‘a new technique that allows engineers to fold nanoscale materials into simple 3-D structures’ (more details available on MIT’s page). The group had worked in 2005 with MIT Associate Professor Yang Shao-Horn to build a single-fold nano-capacitor (or see Google’s HTML version), and this work appears to automate their 2005 process. A comment on the posted video appears to suggests this device is not completely automated yet, however. (This should not be confused with Paul Rothemund’s slightly-more-ahead DNA-origami technology.)”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eu, a small town in North France, ranks rather poorly in search engines as the word EU may refer to the more popular European Union or or even the Chemical symbol for Europium.

In response to its extended Gmail outage yesterday, Google has just launched the Google Apps Status Dashboard. The dashboard offers an at-a-glance look at the system health of most popular Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and the company’s suite of web-based document editors.

Apple this week is believed to have tapped its vast developer community to begin testing Mac OS X 10.5.7, a sizable maintenance and security update to the company’s Leopard operating system with a particular focus on syncing improvements.

People who bought an unlocked version of the Android G1 phone are no longer allowed to download new paid applications from the Market, after a change Google made late last week. Google is prohibiting users of the unlocked phones from viewing copy-protected applications, including those that cost to download.

Laughter filled The Pirate Bay trial here Wednesday when John Kennedy, the chief executive of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, testified that people would have purchased every music track they got free file sharing.Bursting laughter could be heard from the audio room beside the courtroom.

Microsoft has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom alleging that the device maker’s products, including some that are Linux-based, infringe on patents related to Microsoft’s FAT32 filesystem. This marks the first time that Microsoft has enforced its FAT patents against the Linux platform, a move that some free software advocates have

Linux certainly has established itself as a prominent server OS these days pushing Unix into the back ground. But the open source OS shares the stage with commercial software giant Microsoft which remains a dominant player with windows server. Or does it???