The PHP-Nuke people mail the FSF, the FSF confirms that they are 'right' and Lawmeme is wrong.. huh. Doesn't this mean that any given linux system should have to display copyright notices to the user all the time?

I wonder if they'll send me a cease-and-desist for quoting their post without appending a copyright notice. . .

quoted:
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MissS writes "Awhile back, questions were raised as to whether or not the copyright notice at the bottom of PHPNuke created pages could be removed. Now there is an answer to this question, straight from the GNU people.

The GNU website states that if you have any questions concerning licensing, you can simply email them for clarification. That is exactly what I did and what follows is my email to them...

(My email written to licensing@gnu.org on 9/19/2002 with their response indicated by '---gt'):

PHP-Nuke - PHP-Nuke GPL Copyright Removal Question Finally Solved

See, even open source authors can be dicks about copyright! (As if there were any doubt.. ;P)

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Lawmeme operates its website using PHP-Nuke, a GNU/GPL application used to maintain blogs. Ever since our inception, Lawmeme has used PHP-Nuke (since version 5) because it is rich in features, fast, and supported by the open-source community. However, some PHP- Nuke users and the author appear to have become angry at Lawmeme because we have removed a copyright notice from the footer of the page template.

PHP-Nuke's default setting is to display the following notice at the bottom of each page that it generates:

Web site engine's code is Copyright © 2002 by PHP-Nuke. All Rights Reserved. PHP-Nuke is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL license.

This default setting wasn't always so. When Lawmeme originally used PHP-Nuke, the footer was fully customizable via the administrator's interface. Naturally, we changed the footer to meet our site's needs. As PHP-Nuke was found to have numerous cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, we began to upgrade to the most recent versions of PHP-Nuke. With every upgrade came new features, and after heavily modifying PHP-Nuke's code to fit our needs, some of the upgrade scripts didn't work correctly. In fact, the most recent upgrade, where configuration settings are stored in a database, never copied the copyright statement.

Read on for more details.

LawMeme: Feature - PHP-Nuke's Copyright Notice

So are you more likely a terrorist if you have a small bank account with lots of NFS's or if you have millions of dollars and large transactions? More dangerously "Unlike the current system, in which data stays with the airlines' reservation systems, the new setup will be managed by TSA. Only government officials with proper security clearance will be able to use it.". This means if you keep getting flagged as a problem, you cannot review the information and make corrections. Disturbing.

U.S. plan: Threat level for every flyer - Feb. 28, 2003

Heist 'geniuses' got $100m gems

The haul from Belgium's most spectacular diamond robbery in Antwerp earlier this month was worth more than 100 million euros ($107m), Belgian police have said.

In what police authorities have called the heist of the century, 123 of the 160 vaults at the Antwerp Diamond Centre were emptied.

Antwerp's judicial director, Erik Sack, called the crime on 16 February "a piece of genius in its simplicity".

He said the gang had learned to circumvent the alarm system and had copied master keys after renting an office in the Diamond Centre in the name of a phantom company.

During the theft, they taped over security cameras and may have put old videotapes in the surveillance system, police said.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Heist 'geniuses' got $100m gems

] Three weeks ago, in a stunning raid, Russian hackers
] seized control of the servers that support one of the
] Internet's largest online gaming operations, demanding a
] ransom. It was a real-life, high-tech version of the
] movie Ocean's Eleven. By the time the ransom was paid,
] one key server -- the one containing all operational data
] for 120 Internet gaming sites and a long list of
] consulting clients -- seemed to be stripped of its data.
]
] At stake were all the operational records of a gambling
] empire. "We didn't even have the names of customers,"
] says Juan Bonilla, executive vice-president of Grafix
] Softech F.A. of San Juan, Costa Rica. "We lost
] everything." To make matters worse, little, if any, of
] the data had been backed up off-site. Grafix Softech was
] losing an estimated US$75,000 a day in profits, and the
] incident left it open to lawsuits from customers whose
] businesses relied on Grafix Softech's services. What
] could have been a major disaster became a bump in the
] corporate road. In an amazing feat of ingenuity, CBL Data
] Recovery Technologies Inc. of Markham, Ont., managed to
] recover all the lost data. It was a close call, admits
] Bill Margeson, president of CBL

Backups are really keen.

Russian hackers raid largest online gaming operation

NOTE: The ISO news servers are still up, but currently have no nameservice. As soon as they do, I have a hunch the non-American servers will be back online, with nameservice. How pointless..

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WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday it had seized a website that offered information on bootlegged video games and movies, but the site remained available to many Internet users.

The Justice Department said it had taken over the Iso News site after its owner pleaded guilty to selling computer chips that would enable users to play bootleg video games on Microsoft Xbox consoles.

Some visitors to the site found a warning against copyright infringement and a link to the Justice Department's computer-crime division, but others were able to reach a version of the original site, which serves as a meeting place for Internet users.

Wired News: Government Fails to Block Bootleg Site

A great article on how the spooks are finding it difficult to keep up with technology.

These Are Not Your Father's Wiretaps

This is extremely belated. You may have noticed the orange XML icons in the lower right corner of some of the MemeStreams pages. We've added RSS support. This means you can view MemeStreams using RSS aggregators and headline scrollers (AmphetaDesk, NewsMonster, Faust's Friend). The topic pages and user weblogs are supported. The XML icons link to the RSS output. However, you can reach it by adding "?type=rss" to the end of a MemeStreams URL.

Rattle did this feature in some sort of insane 24 hour coding binge. He deserves props. [rattle: "Its time I got back.. Its time I got back.. And I don't even know how I got off the track.." -weezer]

You can now submit your MemeStreams page to weblog aggregators like Blogdex and Daypop. We'll be turning the main page in to these services this weekend.

MemeStreams has RSS support!

] According to the patent, "a search engine modifies the
] relevance rankings for a set of documents based on the
] interconnectivity of the documents in the set. A document
] with a high interconnectivity with other documents in the
] initial set of relevant documents indicates that the
] document has 'support' in the set, and the document's new
] ranking will increase. In this manner, the search engine
] re-ranks the initial set of ranked documents to thereby
] refine the initial rankings."

Um.. More on this later.

Google lands Web search patent | CNET News.com

If you use bash as your shell, you will love this.

The RPMs they have up here work perfectly with RH 7.x & 8.x.

Bash Programmable Completion