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Microsoft may not have beaten French Linux vendor Mandriva in a large deal to supply Nigerian elementary schools with laptop computers and software after all.

Mandriva had closed a deal in mid-August to provide a customised Linux operating system and support for 17,000 Intel Classmate PCs intended for Nigerian schools, but found out last week that the company deploying the computers for the government, Technology Support Center (TSC), planned to wipe the computers’ disks and install Windows XP instead.

Now, however, a government agency funding 11,000 of the PCs has overruled the supplier. Nigeria’s Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) wants to keep Mandriva Linux on the Classmate PCs, said an official who identified himself as the programme manager for USPF’s Classmate PCs project.

“We are sticking with that platform,” said the official, who would not give his name.

Even bribes don’t work… Microsoft can’t even pay people to use Windows!

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g DRM is saving digital music, reckons British retailer 7Digital. The company says DRM-free music sales now outnumber sales of DRM-enumbered music by 4:1 , and credits EMI with the shift.

Removing the locks and keys also helps shift albums, with 70 per cent of MP3 sales by value being full albums.

A recent report prepared for the British music industry by Capgemini suggested that it was the “format shift” to single track sales, or “unbundling” the bundle of the album, that was the most responsible for revenue decline since 2004.

“It’s MP3, absolutely,” 7Digital MD Ben Drury told us. “People understand that MP3 works everywhere – that isn’t true for AAC and certainly not for WMA.”

Gee, guess what? You stop treating your customers as potential thieves, and they actually start buying your stuff again… who would have thought…

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Leaseweb vraagt in hoger beroep aan de rechter om niet zomaar gedwongen te worden persoonsgegevens af te staan en websites offline te halen.

De internetprovider werd op 21 juni gesommeerd om de website Everlasting.nu offline te halen en de NAW-gegevens van de site-eigenaresse te verstrekken. Inmiddels heeft Leaseweb aan de eisen voldaan, maar bestrijdt het het vonnis uit principe.

Voor het hoger beroep heeft het bedrijf een memorie van grieven geschreven van 33 pagina’s, die in handen is van Webwereld. Hierin stelt het bedrijf onder andere dat Stichting Brein vooral veel beweert en weinig onderbouwing levert.

“In deze zaak stelt Brein dat als een bestand de naam van een film draagt dat dit dan ook een film zal zijn. Er wordt niet gecontroleerd of dit correct is of niet”, zegt Joel van der Goen, advocaat van Leaseweb tegenover Webwereld. “De lat is nu door de rechter zo laag gelegd dat iedereen een sommatiebericht kan sturen en sites offline gehaald moeten worden.”

Van der Goen weet dat dit ook gebeurt en wijst op een sommatie van Brein rond een eDonkey-geval, waarbij de belangenorganisatie niet eens meer de moeite neemt om nog een voorbeeld te noemen. “Je hoeft dus niet eens meer te motiveren”, verzucht Van der Groen. “Aan de andere kant kunnen we niet zomaar zonder duidelijke aanleiding websites van klanten offline halen.”

Ook dit weblog staat in de rekken van Leaseweb…

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- De maximale bestandsomvang van veertig kilobyte voor een online advertentie is niet meer van deze tijd, vindt een groep internetreclamemakers.

De adverteerders zijn daarom een protestwebsite begonnen, waar ze oproepen tot een herziening van de standaard. Het Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) stelde de bovengrens van veertig kilobyte in 2003 vast, om te vooorkomen dat internetgebruikers met een trage inbelverbinding te veel tijd en geld kwijt zouden zijn aan het downloaden van advertenties.

De limiet in mijn webbrowser staat op NUL kb, en dat blijft zo, hoeveel “protest-websites” ze er ook voor openen.

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Which is pretty funny, since as President, Bush seems to have pre-approved pardons for every war criminal with a Republican party card. McClatchy’s Joe Galloway has the money quote:

When George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, the state investigated, indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison for 10 years a county sheriff who, with his deputies, had waterboarded a criminal suspect. That sheriff got no pardon from Gov. Bush.

This is the first of a great series of pictures:

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This spectacular 2,000 page US military leak consists of the names, group structure and equipment registers of all units in Iraq with US army equipment . It exposes secretive document exploitation centers, detainee operations, elements of the State Department, Air Force, Navy and Marines units, the Iraqi police and coalition forces from Poland, Denmark, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania, Armenia, Kazakhstan and El Salvador. The material represents nearly the entire order of battle for US forces in Iraq and is the first public revelation of many of the military units described. Among other matters it shows that the United States has violated the Chemical Weapons Convention.

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The British lottery put out a “scratch-off” game called “Cool Cash”. The idea of it is that it’s got a target temperature on the card, and to win, you need uncover only temperatures colder than the target. Simple, right?

Since Britain is on the metric system, they measure temperatures in Celsius. So naturally, some of the temperatures end up being below zero. And that’s where the trouble came in. So many people didn’t know that below zero, larger numbers are lower and thus colder, that the lottery had to withdraw the game!

To quote one of the “victims”:

On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

I love that “I’m not having it” line. That’s a classic.

What I find particularly surprising is that this isn’t just math – it’s just a basic, minimal awareness of your surroundings. We’re talking about adults here – people who’ve clearly lived through plenty of winters, where the temperature in Great Britain routinely drops below zero degrees celsius. That means that these people don’t know that when it’s -10, it’s colder than when it’s -2! To me, this seems to be on about the same intellectual level as trying to eat wax fruit, because you don’t know he difference between it and real fruit.

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Prominent secular and atheist commentators have argued lately that religion “poisons” human life and causes endless violence and suffering. But the poison isn’t religion; it’s monotheism. The polytheistic Greeks didn’t advocate killing those who worshiped different gods, and they did not pretend that their religion provided the right answers. Their religion made the ancient Greeks aware of their ignorance and weakness, letting them recognize multiple points of view.

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It was right then that I realized a major difference between skeptics and woos, between those dedicated to using and promoting the scientific method and those whose ignorance, nihilism, and epistemological hedonism lead them to believe all kinds of total nonsense. We are interested in being justified in our beliefs and claims. They, on the other hand, just want to be right. They need to be right. They hunger and thirst to be right. They have an ideological mental framework that is immune to evidence and so perserves their rightness ’til the bitter end.

That’s why they’re so fucking insufferable when they are right.

But the problem is that it isn’t about being right. This is the same mentality that so many psychics and prognosticators showcase on a daily basis: “If I say Y at time t0, then later on at time t5 Y is shown to be true, I was right.”

No, you were not right. You made a lucky guess. If I hand-pick my lottery numbers and then happen to win, it does not mean I was right. It means I was extraordinarily lucky.

But that’s beside the point. When somebody makes a claim like that, they don’t want to hear that they weren’t right and they won’t listen to you when you say it. What you must ask them is “Who cares?”

Because seriously, who does? If your prediction or claim or opinion is not backed up by any evidence, it doesn’t matter that you were “vindicated” by new studies at a later date. What matters is that you were not justified in holding your original opinion. What matters is that, though I may have doubted your claim at time t0, I was justified in my doubt. Now I’m more than happy to admit that I was wrong, but you think that somehow that means you “won.”

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And here is the first picture from a jailbroken 1.1.2 iPod touch, courtesy of hacker planetbeing. Congratulations to all the iPhone/iPod team, including Pumpkin, Edgan, Dinopio, Drudge, Kroo, and all the rest. Details will be forthcoming as the method gets debugged and safety-features put in-place.

and here is the iPhone status.

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The legal crackdown and publicity blitz aimed at people who share music, videos and software online may be having an unintended consequence for the troubled record industry. The number of file-sharers disguising their BitTorrent activity with encryption is skyrocketing.

Figures from a large UK ISP obtained by The Register show that the portion of BitTorrent traffic encrypted by file-sharers has risen 10-fold in the last 12 months, from four to 40 per cent.

This time last year, unencrypted torrents accounted for about 500Mbit/s of bandwidth, while files that had been scrambled by uploaders swallowed just 20Mbit/s.

The latest data shows that bandwidth used by unencrypted torrents has fallen to 350Mbit/s. Sharing of masked music, video and software has meanwhile exploded to average more than 200Mbit/s.

Matt Phillips, spokesman for UK record industry trade association the British Phonographic Institute, told The Reg: “Our internet investigations team, internet service providers and the police are well aware of encryption technology: it’s been around for a long time and is commonplace in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.”

No fuckwit, it doesn’t hide activity, and that’s not why people encrypt their torrents. It merely makes it more difficult for the ISP to “traffic shape” torrents out of their network, because once they start dropping encrypted traffic, that’ll include ssh and more importantly https. And they can’t afford to drop https.

People aren’t encrypting torrents to hide them, they’re encrypting them to be able to use them at all. Know what I’m talking about, right, Comcast?

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You know about the Storm Trojan, which is spread by the world’s largest botnet. But what you may not know is there’s now a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow Storm away.

“We’re investigating a new peer-to-peer botnet that may wind up rivaling Storm in size and sophistication,” says Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering for startup Damballa, which tracks botnet command and control infrastructures. “We can’t say much more about it, but we can tell it’s distinct from Storm.”

It’s hard to imagine anything bigger and more complex than Storm, which despite its nefarious intent as a DDOS and spam tool has awed security researchers with its slick design and its ability to reinvent itself when it’s at risk of detection or getting busted. Storm changed the botnet game, security experts say, and its successors may be even more powerful and wily.

[..]

“A year ago, the traditional method for bot infections was through malware. But now you’re getting compromised servers, with drive-by downloads so prevalent that people are getting infected without realizing it,” says Paul Ferguson, network architect for Trend Micro. “No one is immune.”

Note that currently “no one” appears to be defined as a slowly growing subset of computer owners: people who don’t use Windows.