Cody Taylor

An anonymous reader writes “The French Assembly has rejected the Three Strikes bill (in French!) which would allow ISPs to cut off users found to have been downloading protected content after two warnings. Summary, the Sarcozy administration can go back with a new draft for approval by both chambers or try to get upper house approval of a softer version without the cutoff passed by the lower house.”

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nk497 writes “Conficker seems to finally be doing something, a week after hype around the worm peaked on April Fool’s Day. It has now downloaded components from the Waledac botnet, which could contain rootkit capabilities. Trend Micro security expert Rik Ferguson said: “These components have so far been missing, but could this finally be the ‘other boot dropping’ that we have all been been waiting for?” Ferguson also suggested that people behind Conficker could be the very same who are running Waledac and created the Storm botnet. “It tallies with some of the assumptions people have made about Conficker — that the first variant was actively trying to avoid the Ukraine because Waledac was Eastern European,” Ferguson added.”

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DrEldarion writes “The Associated Press, who has been acting very bipolar lately about Google News (they get paid by Google for their content, and then complain about Google “stealing” that content), has another issue with not knowing what their association is up to: they set up a channel on Youtube, and then threatened an AP affiliate for embedding that content.”

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jeffmeden writes “BusinessWeek reports today that Microsoft suffered a loss in federal court Monday. The judge rendering the verdict ordered Microsoft to pay 8 Million in damages for violating a patent held by Uniloc, a California maker of software that prevents people from illegally installing software on multiple computers. Uniloc claims Microsoft’s Windows XP and some Office programs infringe on a related patent they hold. It’s hard to take sides on this one, but one thing is certain: should the verdict hold up, it will be heavily ironic if the extra copies of XP and Office sold due to crafty copy protection end up not being worth 8 million.”

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Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a very special gift by US marines: a signed photo of Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the marines forced Saddam to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as the boyfriend of Satan. Stone said, “We’re very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. It’s one of our biggest highlights.”

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