Cody Taylor

cryfreedomlove brings news that YouTube has once again been blocked in China. The Google-owned video site was censored in China last year because of videos about the protests in Tibet, and that may be the impetus behind this latest restriction. According to a New York Times report, “‘The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,’ said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley… Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable.”

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clover kicker writes “The CBC reports that the group managing Canada’s .ca internet domain is working to foil an internet worm set to attack starting April Fool’s Day. ‘This is the first virus that’s really focused on domain names as part of propagating the virus itself,’ said Byron Holland, CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, a non-profit organization that represents those who hold a .ca domain. CIRA’s strategy includes pre-emptively registering and isolating previously unregistered .ca domain names that Conficker C is expected to try and generate, said a news release issued by the group. That would make those names unavailable for anyone to register in order to set up a website to host the worm’s ‘command and control’ file. A list of the names has been predicted by security experts based on the worm’s code. In addition, CIRA is investigating and monitoring activity at names on the list that have already been registered and will ‘take appropriate action if suspicious activity is detected.'”

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tboulay writes “The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation. The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. Texas is such a large textbook market that many publishers write to the state’s standards, then market those books nationwide. ‘This is the most specific assault I’ve seen against evolution and modern science,’ said Steven Newton, a project director at the National Center for Science Education, which promotes teaching of evolution.” Both sides are saying the issue it too close to call. Three Republicans on the school board who favor the teaching of evolution have come under enormous pressure to reform their ways.

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ruphus13 writes “Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz continues to promote the use of Open Source, and says the downturn in the economy will only boost the momentum behind FOSS. From his post, ‘Free and open source software is sweeping across the vast majority of the Fortune 500. When you see the world’s most conservative companies starting to deploy open source, you know momentum is on your side. That’s creating massive opportunity for those of us who have pioneered the market, to drive commercial opportunities… We announced just last week that we’re building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms — from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. By building on open source, we’re able to avoid proprietary storage and networking products, alongside proprietary software.'” In related news, the Sun-IBM deal proposed last week has been called “anti-competitive” by a tech industry group, while others are speculating on how it could affect Linux and Java.

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DaGoatSpanka writes with news that Mississippi Governer Haley Barbour signed a bill into law on Friday which instituted a ban on automated cameras that would snap pictures of motorists when they ran red lights. “The new law says the two cities that already have the cameras, Jackson and Columbus, must take them down by Oct. 1. Other cities and counties are banned from starting to use them.” We’ve discussed situations in the past where cities looked at such cameras as “profit centers,” and even tampered with their traffic light timing to catch more motorists. Now, in Mississippi, the contractors who installed the cameras are unhappy, since they received a cut of the ticket revenue generated by the cameras. However, lawmakers overwhelming voted to get rid of them (117-3 in the House, 42-9 in the Senate), because “the cameras were an invasion of privacy and their constituents thought they had been unfairly ticketed.”

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In a matter of months, expect both Yahoo and AOL to come up with their own news feed offerings, likely to be embedded in their more popular web services. While Yahoo’s working on a life-streaming product called Yahoo Updates, AOL’s new offering that takes a cue from Facebook Connect is being called “Site Social” internally.

alaskana98 writes “Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt volcano has erupted 3 times, with the first event starting at 10:38 PM Alaska standard time. The ash cloud is estimated to be higher than 50,000 feet. So far, only light ash fall is predicted for areas north of Anchorage.”

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “The Obama Administration’s Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court’s more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?”

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MBCook writes “AppleInsider has an article discussing Dell’s attempt to enter the smartphone market, as well as the news that the phone was rejected by carriers as too dull. The article doesn’t pull punches: ‘Dell’s failure to successfully step from the commodity PC business into the mobile handset market should come as no surprise, as smartphones requires expertise in software platform development, consumer design savvy, and portable device engineering, all things Dell has never demonstrated any proficiency in.'”

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Kugrian writes “Showing that it’s not just the British and the French who have trouble seeing each other on the high seas, a US Nuclear submarine yesterday crashed into a US Navy heavy cruiser. The USS Hartford, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, was submerged as it crashed into the USS New Orleans in the strait of Hormuz, resulting in the spillage of 95,000 litres of diesel fuel. Both vessels were heading in the same direction when the collision occurred in the narrow strait and were subsequently heading to port for repairs. A spokesman for the 5th Fleet said that the USS Hartford suffered no damage to its nuclear propulsion system.” According to the USS New Orleans’ Wikipedia page, it’s actually an amphibious transport dock.

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