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Software The European Commission wants to destroy the European software business by introducing an American style software patents system. The American software patents system is a largely discredited one and does not really protect the interests of the small business. Instead it allows the people with the most money and lawyers to register the most ludicrous patents as can be seen for example with the Amazon 1-Click patent. European Linux users, the people responsible for some of the most innovative software of the last few years are naturally outraged at the dubious intentions of the European Commission. A petition site has been set up to allow people to register their disquiet at the activities of the European Commission. Full Story Break Up Judge Jackson has ruled that Microsoft is to be broken up into two separate companies for a period of ten years. One company would deal exclusively with operating systems and the other will deal with applications. The decision was strongly worded. The present management of Microsoft seemed unwilling to accept that it had violated the anti-trust laws and as a result the Judge ruled for a structural penalty. Full Story Clueless Censorship A website on TInet, one of Telecom Eireann's ISPs, has been pulled. It carried a list of radio scanner frequenciesthat happened to include the Irish police frequencies (Both Gardai and RUC). The TInet site had been alluded to by a somewhat clueless journalist who had previously considered that HackWatch was a "cracking" related site. Full Story Porn Scam Channel Bizzarre, the hardcore porn channel run by Paul Goodman of Active Logic and PR Technology infamy has apparently been put into liquidation. Another of Goodman's operations, The Card Company, has also been put into liquidation. According to one source, the creditors' meetings for the two companies are to be held as early as next week. Full Story NZ Arrest Chris Carey was arrested on Thursday night (08/01/99) in New Zealand. Carey had escaped from Ford open prison in the UK in August 1998. He had been living in St. Johns, Auckland and used an alias of Chris Broady. Full Story Now We're All Sons Of Bitches! The European Community has outlawed piracy on conditional access systems. With the publication of the Directive on the legal protection of encrypted services, commercial piracy of satellite and cable services has effectively been made illegal. It is up to the member states of the European Community to integrate the Directive with their legislation. The legislation is not as bad as the first drafts. In fact it is a more enlightened version. While it specifically outlaws commercial piracy, it leaves the hobbyist area alone. The members of the European parliament, Commission and Council apparently realised that they were working for the people and putting voters in prison is not good for business. Full Story Raid BSkyB seem to have problems with Sky Digital being hacked already. At least it seems that way as a warrant for a search on the premises of Paul Maxwell-King's Maxking Interfaces Limited stated that the grounds were Conspiracy To Defraud BSkyB. The strange thing about this is that there is no confirmed hack on Sky Digital at this time and the analogue Sky services seem to be largely ignored apart from the small PCTV experiments and VCL activity.
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