In a new twist on phishing, fraudsters are sending out e-mail that attempt to trick people into sharing personal information over the phone.

Phishers try a phone hook

In a vote of 34 to 22, the House Committee on Energy & Commerce rejected an amendment to a sweeping telecommunications law, the Communications, Promotion, & Enhancement Act of 2006. The proposal, by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), would have given the Federal Communications Commission the power to prohibit discrimination when it comes to sending traffic over the Internet. In effect, the amendment would block the creation of a multilane "information highway," where network operators could give preference to their own content, or ensure speedier delivery to content providers that pay extra fees.

Net Neutrality ammendment shot down by House Committee on Energy & Commerce

The freedom-to-tinker blog has an entry on this legislation.

US Copyright May Get Harsher and Broader.

RE: Congress readies DMCA ][

Compuware pulls the plug. All I can do is laugh, and say go ollydbg!

RIP Softice

Interesting analysis of a newly proposed french drm law.

[freedom-to-tinker] Bernard Lang Reports on the Proposed French DRM Law

Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.

Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.

Company requires RFID injection

BEIJING (AP) -- China dropped its politically volatile policy of linking its currency to the U.S. dollar but retained controls on its exchange rate, switching the link to a basket of foreign currencies in a move that could push up the price of Chinese exports to the United States and Europe.

China dumps dollar in favor of basket of currencies

This is a regular web broadcast (i.e., large downloadable video files) which is mainly a parody of hardcore gamers.

Well, at least we *hope* it's a parody. I find it entertaining, anyway.

Pure Pwnage

I present to you a blatant violation of copyright

The full-text to the book the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon.

As the book is one of my favorites, I notified the publisher about three months or so ago. Apparently they don’t care that someone just posted the entire content to their books, complete with copied illustrations.

I present to you a blatant violation of copyright

ibenez wrote:

Why do people advocate open source software; but posting text of a book is bad?

If people should write and distribute software for free, people should write and distribute books, magazines, television programming, etc, for free as well.

When you write opensource software, you are taking a work you created and explicitly deciding to release it to the public. It is your work, you are free to make the decision about how it is distributed.

When you write a work of text (or video, television, etc) and it is posted somewhere without your permission, they have robbed you of your ability to control distribution.

I think the opensource developers who take the position that all software must be opensource are in the minority; certainly many of them wish to maintain some form of control over their works, just like a book or television program publisher. If they had no interest in control of any kind, they would just release their works as public domain.

RE: I present to you a blatant violation of copyright