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The other shoe has dropped on a weird little deal between Microsoft and Novell over SUSE Linux last week. Microsoft gave Novell $440 million for SUSE support, and then Novell gave back $40 million to license Microsoft’s bogus patent claims against Linux.

Now Microsoft’s Chief Rageaholic Steve Ballmer has explained the deal: Novell’s $40 million “payment” is an admission of guilt. Every Linux user who doesn’t use SUSE (the only “licensed” Linux) is a patent infringer. All Linuxes except the ones that Microsoft blesses are illegal.

A key element of the agreement now appears to be Novell’s US$40 million payment to Microsoft in exchange for the latter company’s pledge not to sue SUSE Linux users over possible patent violations. Also protected are individuals and noncommercial open-source developers who create code and contribute to the SUSE Linux distribution, as well as developers who are paid to create code that goes into the distribution…

At the time, Microsoft officials, including Ballmer, were mum on whether the Linux kernel, which is governed by the General Public License and takes contributions from programmers all around the world, violated Microsoft’s patents.

Ballmer was more open Thursday.

“Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered,” Ballmer said. This “is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”

Ballmer can kiss my ass. Now that the SCO lawsuit has failed utterly on all the points he makes, he’s trying to do the same thing again, this time directly by microsft instead of some bought-off crony.

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Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?

Click and read the whole thing, these passports are worse than useless.

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The MPAA studios are at it again, snatching away our fair use rights, so they can sell them back to us for an “additional fee.”

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York, Paramount Pictures v. Load ‘N Go Video, the MPAA member companies have sued a small business for loading DVDs onto personal media players (e.g., iPod Video) on behalf of customers.

According to the suit, Load ‘N Go sells both DVDs and iPods and loads the former onto the latter for customers who purchase both. The company then sends the iPod and the original DVDs to the customer. So the customer has purchased every DVD, and Load ‘N Go just saves them the trouble of ripping the DVD. The movie studios’ suit claims that this is illegal, because ripping a DVD (i.e., decrypting it and making a copy) is illegal under the DMCA. The suit also claims that this constitutes copyright infringement.

Although this lawsuit happens to be aimed at Load ‘N Go, the DMCA theory in the complaint makes it crystal clear that the MPAA believes it is just as illegal for you to do the same thing for yourself at home. Apparently, Hollywood believes that you should have to re-purchase all your DVD movies a second time if you want to watch them on your iPod.

This is copyright gone too far. If you buy a DVD, you should be able to make a personal copy of it for your iPod, just like you should be able to make a copy of a CD for your car, without having to ask permission or pay a second time. That’s one of the things fair use is for. Of course, the MPAA claims the DMCA changed all that. Before the DMCA, the studios would have had to go to court and prove that “space-shifting” is not a fair use. After the DMCA, they simply argue that “circumvention” of the CSS encryption on DVDs is forbidden by the DMCA, fair use or not.

This lawsuit is just the latest example of the entertainment industry taking aim not at “pirates,” but at the legitimate fair use rights of music and movie fans (we’ve already written about the lawsuits against the XM inno and Sima). And it’s not just lawsuits — here’s a summary of what entertainment industry lobbyists are pushing in Congress.

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The two teachers of a primary school here, who forced their pupils to lift their skirts up to see who was menstruating after a used sanitary pad was found in a washbasin outside the toilet, have apologised to the pupils and the parents.

Richard Knight, 44, chairman of the Parent-Teacher Association of SRK Infant Jesus Convent I, said the teachers apologised to the parents on Thursday when the parents went to the school to discuss the incident with the teachers and headmistress.

Knight, a professional tour guide, said after the meeting, all pupils from Year Four, Five and Six were assembled and the teachers apologised to them for taking such drastic action.

“The teachers also explained to the students that they had to take such drastic action because none of the students owned up.

“They needed to know why a used sanitary pad was not disposed of properly as it was not the first time it had happened,�? he said.

They should not have done that. Period.

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Lexington County school officials say a five-year-old kindergartner brought a folding pocket knife to school and faces expulsion.

Mary Beth Hill with Lexington District One says the Saxe Gothe Elementary School student tried to use the knife to open his sealed lunch in the cafeteria yesterday.

Hill says the student never threatened anyone at the school. She says officials think the boy didn’t know he had done anything wrong.

Sheriff James Metts says state law says it is illegal to bring any weapon onto school grounds. But Metts says the child is too young to face any criminal charges.

Hill says the boy was suspended immediately.

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An incident late Tuesday night in which a UCLA student was stunned at least four times with a Taser has left the UCLA community questioning whether the university police officers’ use of force was an appropriate response to the situation.

Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, was repeatedly stunned with a Taser and then taken into custody when he did not exit the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely manner. Community Service Officers had asked Tabatabainejad to leave after he failed to produce his BruinCard during a random check at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

I’ve always thought a camera was useless in a cell phone. I now realize I was wrong…

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A Nevada town passed a law this week making it illegal to fly a foreign nation’s flag by itself, the latest swipe by a U.S. community at illegal immigrants.

The town council of Pahrump, which lies in the Mojave Desert west of Las Vegas, voted 3-2 on Tuesday to make flying any foreign flag above the U.S. flag or alone an offense punishable by a $50 fine and 30 hours’ community service.

I wonder if this flag qualifies:

And anybody want to bet the Pahrump police won’t recognize a Puerto Rico flag?

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President Bush said Friday the United States’ unsuccessful war in Vietnam three decades ago offered lessons for the American-led struggle in Iraq.

No, not the lessons you think:

“We’ll succeed unless we quit,” Bush said shortly after arriving in this one-time war capital.

And this time his daddy was unable to arrange a visit with the Texas Air Guard instead:

“Laura and I were talking about how amazing it is that we’re here in Vietnam,” the president said.

Wat vertel je het nederlandse volk?

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Woensdag onttrok een tbs’er uit de Kijvelanden zich in Heerlen aan zijn begeleiders tijdens een bezoek aan een begraafplaats. Begin oktober ontsnapte ook al een tbs’er van deze kliniek. Deze bedreigde en beroofde binnen elf uur twee mensen en verkrachtte een 20-jarige vrouw.

Volgens het Openbaar Ministerie was de tbs’er die in Heerlen de benen nam, veroordeeld voor een vermogens- en zedendelict, maar vormt hij geen groot gevaar.

Wat vertel je de duitse politie als vermoed wordt dat hij de grens over is?

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De tbs’er die woensdag in Heerlen ontsnapte is een ‘ziekelijk gewelddadig persoon’. Die informatie heeft de politie in Aken gekregen van collega’s van de Limburgse politie, aldus een woordvoerder van het Duitse korps. De politie heeft de identiteit van de man inmiddels bekendgemaakt.

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If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)

[The Onion:]

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The new law doesn’t make any additional types of gambling illegal. Rather, it merely attempts to make it harder to engage in online-gambling activities that Congress already believes are illegal—by requiring credit-card companies to identify and block transactions with online casinos. But in laying out with specificity what kind of Internet gambling Congress thinks is—and is not—already prohibited, the law likely will add to a free-trade debacle in which the United States already finds itself knee-deep.

To understand why this new law may cause free-trade problems, you need to know a little bit about U.S. laws governing both online and brick-and-mortar gambling.

For that, read the article. I’ll skip ahead to the interesting bits:

In 2003, the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda took a look at the thicket of U.S. laws governing gambling and decided that they violated the United States’ free-trade obligations, as administered by the World Trade Organization.

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Antigua’s basic theory in its WTO complaint was simply that, if the United States allows any Internet gambling at all, it couldn’t, in light of its WTO obligations, impose barriers to foreign companies seeking access to its market. It was a pretty straightforward free-trade argument.

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The WTO gave the United States a year to comply with its ruling by either changing its laws to fully ban online gambling or by allowing foreign access to the online-gambling market. That year ended last April, but rather than do anything to comply, the United States simply issued a statement to the effect that it had spent the year reviewing the matter and decided that it has been in compliance all along. Antigua is, unsurprisingly, challenging this response. A final decision from the WTO is expected early next year.

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The obvious question is what Antigua can do with a victory at the WTO. Retaliatory tariffs plainly aren’t particularly appealing for small country like Antigua, because they would certainly hurt more than they would help. But the plucky little island paradise does have some creative options at its disposal. If the United States remains recalcitrant, under the WTO rules, Antigua would potentially have the right to suspend its own compliance with the treaty that obligates it to respect the United States’ intellectual-property laws. That, one can well imagine, might get Washington’s attention.

Want a cheap copy of Microsoft’s latest software or a nice medical device that, annoyingly, is protected by a U.S. patent? Come to Antigua. In such a scenario, Antigua couldn’t simply be ostracized as a rogue state. It would have every right under WTO rules to pursue such a course. In fact, Antigua could go down this road only in response to the United States’ continuing refusal to honor its international obligations. While there undoubtedly would be complicated issues and restrictions on the scope of any suspension the WTO approves, the United States shouldn’t assume that the world body is too timid to hand Antigua this sort of stick with which to retaliate, since it has authorized intellectual-property-based reprisal before. Antigua’s frank calculation here, of course, is that while the administration might be comfortable stiffing the Antiguan trade representative, it would probably take notice if, say, an irate Microsoft or Disney started insisting that it get this problem solved.