THE HOME Office wants powers to ban people it suspects of being hackers from the World Wide Wibble.
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The big idea is contained in a Home Office green paper called "New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime". By dealing with the matter in a civil, rather than a criminal court, the standard of proof is much lower. In fact hearsay is admissible evidence, so what a friend heard about you from another person could result in a guilty finding.
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While few would cry out that hackers or spammers need to be protected, others are slightly worried about civil liberties, because it means that people can have their lives ruined without the police having to prove anything to a court.

UK: Suspected hackers to be banned from web

NEW YORK - Fingering consumers who play the same CD repeatedly as the latest threat to profits, Sony BMG music corporation is introducing new digital rights management (DRM) software that will limit the number of times CDs can be played by purchasers.

Beginning next Tuesday all new CDs released on the Sony BMG label—which is home to artists such as Fiona Apple, Bruce Springsteen, and Shakira—will contain DRM software that prevents them from being played more than one hundred times. The software, an offspring of the popular extended copy protection (XCP), also prevents owners from copying a CD more than once. Furthermore, a copy must be made within the first five plays of a CD's "shelf life," and said copying will render the original CD unusable.

Quoted from www.pugbus.net. The editorial content of this site is fictional.

Thankfully it's only fiction - for now...

Newest Sony Software Will Limit CD Plays

Microsoft have released Visual Studio 2005 at long last, and have gone the extra step of giving the Express version of the tools away for free download. From my understanding of it, the free versions will only work for 1 year, and then you've probably got to pay for it.

Visual Studio 2005 for free

ibenez wrote:
This is a great tool - but doesn't sound like it'd be hard to implement yourself if you already are working in SOAP anyways

I think the point was for people using a SOAP capable environment - not necessarially using SOAP themselves. People developing in ASP.NET or Tomcat could well not be going anywhere near SOAP, and yet they can still make use of this service.

From the site:
For .NET, we provide a compiled component (DLL file) so that you don't even have to mess with SOAP and web services.

I'm not sure how keen I would be for all of my website errors to be sent to somebody else for collection. Seems like it could be a major security risk in some situations...

RE: Slashdot | Free Web-Based Exception Reporting