According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.

The poop is hitting the fan over tax breaks given to ratings giant Nielsen Co., which pocketed millions in Florida jobs-creation tax concessions but has turned around and dismissed hundreds of local workers after inking a $1.2B outsourcing deal with Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai. Lou Dobbs is on the case. Lou may go even more ballistic once he sees the Nielsen-Tata pact, which assures Nielsen that OT worries are a thing of the past ('there shall be no additional charge for overtime work'), allows Nielsen to have unsatisfactory Tata hires replaced within 4 weeks of starting with no charge for the original or re-performed work, gives Nielsen up to 6 man-weeks of free labor when a Tata worker is replaced, and allows Nielsen to make 'any TCS Resource' disappear with no more than 5 days notice if their presence 'is not in the best interests of Nielsen.' Nielsen execs have launched a PR counter-attack, pledging not to bully 85 year-old ladies in future layoffs. In a Letter to the Citizens, Nielsen CEO David L. Calhoun explained that Tata won a 'rigorous competition' to get the job, failing to mention that Tata was also tapped by Nielsen EVP Mitchell Habib in his CIO roles at both GE and Citigroup.

I wouldn't object to the outsourcing and as for the issue of deserved tax breaks, well corporations don't deserve them at all from my point of view. If there were no tax breaks given, this would be a non-issue.

In 1992, three surgeons at a major hospital here that specializes in organ transplants met in the hospital's cafeteria to informally discuss the California Legislature's effort to enact a mandatory motorcycle helmet law.

"This looks like it might pass," one doctor said. The others nodded. "This could have serious consequences for the hospital."

"How so?" asked the doctor sitting closest to him.

"Motorcycle fatalities are not only our No. 1 source of organs, they are also the highest quality source of organs because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic injuries to the body, except to the head," the first doctor answered. "Studies have shown that when helmet laws are enacted, motorcycle deaths significantly decrease. The hospital already has serious financial issues to deal with. This could put us out of business -- or at least the business of organ transplants."

...

Just then the third doctor stood up and said: "I'm a member of the hospital's ethics committee, and I can tell you, as physicians, we can't even have this conversation." With that, she left the room.

On June 18, Esmin Green, 49, was involuntarily admitted to the psychiatric emergency department of Kings County Hospital Center on June 18 for what the hospital describes as "agitation and psychosis."

Upon her admission, Green waited nearly 24 hours for treatment, said the New York Civil Liberties Union, which on Tuesday released surveillance camera video of the incident.

The surveillance camera video shows the woman rolling off a waiting room chair, landing face-down on the floor and convulsing. Her collapse came at 5:32 a.m. June 19, the NYCLU said, and she stopped moving at 6:07 a.m. During that time, the organization said, workers at the hospital ignored her.

At 6:35 a.m., the tape shows a hospital employee approaching and nudging Green with her foot, the group said. Help was summoned three minutes later.

In addition, the organization said, hospital staff falsified Green's records to cover up the time she had lain there without assistance.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that Circuit City will be the first to offer a new Office subscription service, first known by its Albany code name and now dubbed Equipt.

The idea behind the subscription service is to convert more new PC buyers into Office buyers. It plays on the fact that although most people don't buy Office at the same time as a computer, many do purchase a security software subscription.

Microsoft is trying to tap into the fact that while many people would rather find a copy of Office that they don't have to pay for (either an older version or a pirated copy) they are willing to pay for security software. "Security is basically the No. 1 thing that gets attached with a PC," said Microsoft group product manager Bryson Gordon.

What Microsoft should do is realize that Windows is far from perfect (or good for that matter) and offer a secure version of their operating system without cost to their customers, instead of bundling it on.

Instead they're basically saying "Oh, you want Windows, OK, well that will cost you $100." ($200 if you're not upgrading.) And then you say to them "but Billy G, I've got all these viruses and popups in my internet explorer" only to be told "Oh, well, if you don't want that, pay us an extra $70 per year."

It's as if it is in their best interest to not only write crappy software so you constantly have to buy new (not for new features, no, you should buy new to fix older problems) but also so they can see you the software subscription that fixes the software that you bought last year.

Multiple sites reported a while ago that Comcast was using Sandvine to do tcp packet resets to throttle BitTorrent connections of their users. This practice may be a thing of the past as it’s been found a simple rule in the Linux firewall, iptables, can simply just block their reset packets, returning your BitTorrent back to normal speeds and allowing you to once again connect to all your seeds and peer. So, if you are tired of Sandvine (the application used by Comcast to throttle Bit Torrent with fake TCP packet resets) screwing with your BitTorrent and a user of GNU/Linux, then this is for you. I will tell you how to take your bandwidth back.

Take a look at the FCC's best rulings, and there you will find Carterfone. You will find it, for example, in the agency's 1998 decision to let consumers pick and choose their own cable set top boxes. "Subscribers have the right to attach any compatible navigation device to a multichannel video programming system," the Commission declared. "We conclude that the core requirement, to make possible the commercial availability of equipment to MVPD subscribers, is similar to the Carterfone principle adopted by the Commission in the telephone environment."

By owning the "standard" and developing it in secret, without participation from other vendors, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible, while at the same time ensuring that their products maintain an insurmountable head start in implementing these same standards. There is no balance of interests in OOXML. It is entirely dictated by Microsoft, and voted on, in many cases, by their handpicked committees in Ecma and ISO.

...

Remember, standards bring interoperability, the ability to try out new tools and techniques, the ability to migrate, the ability to chose among alternatives, the ability even to run non-Microsoft products. If standards are meaningless and ineffective, then the incumbent' vendor lock-in will win every time. At that point, isn't it convenient for them to have a monopoly in operating systems and productivity applications? This, in my opinion, is the essence of Novell's 2004 complaint, Opera's present complaint, and the ongoing file format debate. Microsoft's monopoly power and the resulting network effects have lead to a relationship with standards where they win by winning, by drawing, or even by cheating so much that they discredit the system.

The latest outrage in the record companies' ill-conceived war against their customers comes via a Washington Post report that the RIAA is suing someone for ripping to their computer copies of CDs they've bought and paid for. A subsequent clarification shows that this particular case is more about placing MP3 files in a shared directory, rather than ripping, per se. But the record companies still say ripping your own CDs is stealing.

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Now that times are tough, though, the record companies have shown they're clueless. Rather than forge a new business model to make money in the age of the Internet, they're fighting a losing battle to hold on to an era that's already passed. OK, if they're unable to handle the copyright benefits they've been like generously awarded, we should do what we do when a child shows they can't handle a privilege they've been granted. We should take it away.

How about we cut the copyright terms down to five years. Retroactively. So now "Stairway to Heaven" is in the public domain. Hey, the ongoing RIAA lawsuit problem is gone in one fell swoop.

...

What about those who say copyrights are some kind of God-given right, which is our due under a capitalist system? That's simply a misunderstand of their purpose. Copyrights, like patents, weren't implemented to protect their owners in perpetuity. They are part of a delicate dance which attempts to balance societal benefits against incentives for writers and inventors. The intent is that you want to incentivize people to push the state of the creative and technical arts, but you don't want give those folks such overbearing protections that future advances by other innovators are stifled.

Or we could go with the original 14 years.

Avastin is a drug approved to treat colon cancer. It works by choking off blood vessels to the tumor. It turns out, however, that a tiny dose of the same drug, when injected into the eye can also stop the uncontrolled growth of blood vessels behind the retina that produces a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, macular degeneration. The good news is a compounding pharmacy can take the large dose in the Avastin package and split it into sterile eyeball-appropriate doses. The cost is somewhere between $20 and $100. That's good news for consumers, anyway. It wasn't such good news for Genentech, the maker of Avastin. So they went about making a small modification of the drug, renamed it Lucentis, and got FDA approval for its use in macular degeneration -- at $2000 per monthly injection. Avastin is not approved for the same purpose because Genentech has not applied for approval. It's still legal to use it off label, however, and numerous ophthalmologists have been doing so to save their patients and the taxpayers' money.

Genentech was not amused. So they announced in October they would no longer sell Avastin to compounding pharmacists.