An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla launched Firefox 41 yesterday. Today, Adblock Plus confirmed the update "massively improves" the memory usage of its Firefox add-on. This particular memory issue was brought up in May 2014 by Mozilla and by Adblock Plus. But one of the bugs that contributed to the problem was actually first reported on Bugzilla in April 2001 (bug 77999).

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Alvin, Simon…. Sith Loooord

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Lately, Justin Timberlake has shown up a few times in comedy bits for his old buddy Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show, including the recent return of their blockbuster "History Of Rap" franchise. And now, Timberlake has ventured onto one of the other floors at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to do a sketch with Fallon's NBC neighbor … More »

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

Just a collection of random animal gifs

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

Toilet Paper Tube Art

Different fistbumps

September, 19th

September, 17th

blottsie writes: In a new interview, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) says the Cyber Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA) may put more Americans at risk because the U.S. government has failed to learn the right security lessons from the attack on the Office of Personnel Management. He says, in part: "I've been watching as this goes forward—there's this phrase going around the cybersecurity community, 'If you can't protect it, don't collect it.' Now, there is never going to be a system that's 100 percent safe. But what I'm going to start [saying] on the floor as we get to this [CISA debate], is, you give the government a huge new trove of personal information about Americans before you've addressed the problems that were documented all the way back to 2007—those security holes—before you address those, [before] you plug them, that's like responding to a bear attack by stockpiling honey. That's going to be how I open the debate."

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Phoenix666 writes:

What began as a nod to conservation by a state government ended as a surprising discovery of Washington's 10,000-year human history.

Salmon conservation is not normally the business of a state's transportation agency, but in Washington, the State Department of Transportation tries to restore areas near large projects. Nine such projects are underway now, and one of them has caught the attention of the archaeological community.

Archeologists found stone tools buried deep under the river bank slated for a salmon conservation project. The discovery offers new evidence of earlier history of Washington's ancient humans than researchers knew existed. It also reveals the presence of greater cultural diversity than archaeologists had previously thought the area had, according to an article in the journal PaleoAmerica. This all came from "a region notoriously lacking" significant sites such as this.

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To The Rescue

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September, 13th

September, 9th

September, 12th

Before the FCC passed new net neutrality rules, countless ISP consultants, think tankers, and various other sockpuppets desperately proclaimed that the rules would totally destroy the Internet and stifle all network investment. Now months after the rules took effect, everything seems to be operating as it was before -- if not better. Google Fiber continues to deploy to a growing number of underserved cities, municipal broadband providers and smaller ISPs continue to push gigabit upgrades, and even Comcast has announced it's deploying two gigabit service to around 18 million subscribers before the end of the year.

While the broadband industry still suffers from a lack of overall competition, it appears completely unbothered by what many claimed was "draconian regulation for a bygone era" that we were repeatedly told would "utterly crush innovation" and "stifle network investment." In fact, we've seen several instances where the rules already have put big ISPs on their best behavior, most notably on the interconnection front. Granted, numerous ISP execs predicted there'd be no issues, not that anybody heard them under the din of AT&T and Verizon fear mongering.

Of course, these folks can't just admit they were wrong and were motivated to make shit up to scare people away from net neutrality, so they're now trying to retroactively claim they were right -- despite the total absence of any real evidence. Case in point is FCC Commissioner (and former Verizon regulatory lawyer) Ajit Pai, who this week proclaimed that net neutrality chicken littles were right all along, and the FCC's use of Title II net neutrality rules has utterly depressed broadband investment:

"As evidence, Pai pointed to research that showed a decline in capital expenditures by the major wireless companies of 12% in the first half of 2015 compared to the same time period in 2014—when the FCC was still expected to restore open Internet rules without reclassifying broadband.

"In my statement dissenting from the Commission’s Title II decision, I warned that '[b]roadband networks don’t have to be built. Capital doesn’t have to be invested here,'" Pai said. "'Risks don’t have to be taken. The more difficult the FCC makes the business case for deployment—and micromanaging everything from interconnection to service plans makes it difficult indeed—the less likely it is that broadband providers big and small will connect Americans with digital opportunities.' And that I fear is what we are now witnessing."

Right, except we're not witnessing that at all. Pai can't be bothered to show his math, but it appears he pulled the 12% number from a recent editorial by industry-linked think tanker Hal Singer, whose work has been the backbone of a decidedly pointed attempt to mislead the public over the last few weeks. Singer's the same guy who was widely criticized for manipulating statistics for the broadband industry to help them claim that net neutrality would result in $15 billion in new taxes. You'll be shocked to learn that most of his worst-case-scenario predictions supporting these numbers show no indication of being true.

In his Forbes editorial, Singer makes these specific claims:

"They said it wouldn’t happen. They offered assurances from three Wall Street analysts, who insisted that Internet service providers (ISPs) would continue to invest at the same levels regardless of the regulatory climate...AT&T’s capital expenditure (capex) was down 29 percent in the first half of 2015 compared to the first half of 2014. Charter’s capex was down by the same percentage. Cablevision’s and Verizon’s capex were down ten and four percent, respectively. CenturyLink’s capex was down nine percent. (Update: The average decline across all wireline ISPs was 12 percent. Including wireless ISPs Sprint and T-Mobile in the sample reduces the average decline to eight percent.)

Except, causality does not equal correlation. If you bother to look at AT&T SEC filings, you'll note that AT&T already planned to scale back capex because it was already winding up an upgrade initiative dubbed "Project VIP," which had nothing to do with net neutrality. Indeed, Verizon and AT&T (which comprise the lion's share of the capex cuts) were already dramatically scaling back their fixed-line network investments, which also had absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Charter, meanwhile, just finished up its all-digital network upgrade, and its declines too have nothing to do with net neutrality.

On the wireless side, AT&T and Verizon have acknowledged winding down massive LTE network upgrades, and all of the wireless carriers have been engaged in a little belt-tightening as they deal with the disruptive behavior of T-Mobile. There are about a million reasons for capex cycles, including a lack of competition resulting in muted network upgrades, completed projects, to numerous ISPs in holding patterns as they wait for mergers and acquisitions. But there's absolutely no data that directly links these capex reductions to net neutrality or the FCC's implementation of Title II to govern ISPs. And, meanwhile, just a few days before Pai claimed that companies like Verizon were no longer investing in wireless... Verizon announced that it was ramping up its schedule for 5G deployment (the next big upgrade after LTE), which will lead to the next big round of capital expenditure in wireless. So, apparently the new rules did not scare off Verizon -- arguably the biggest opponent of net neutrality in the United States.

So basically you've got a revolving-door regulator who used to work for the broadband industry, citing statistics from a think tanker with ties to the broadband industry, both hoping that a wish, a dream, some out-of-context data and a little make believe will fool people into thinking these guys weren't utterly full of crap all along.

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Just under four years ago, Techdirt reported that Jamaica was planning something extremely foolish: a retroactive extension to its copyright term. As that article noted, when the European Union did something similar, the European Commission's own figures showed that the move would cost the EU public around one billion Euros, and it was inevitable that the Jamaican people would also lose out if the move went ahead.

The fact that we've heard nothing for four years might have nourished the hope that the Jamaican government had come to its senses, and thrown out any plans it had to short-change its own people in this way. No such luck, of course. Indeed, a depressing post from the EFF reveals that the recently-passed legislation is down there with the worst:

The copyright term in Jamaica is now 95 years from the death of the author, or 95 years from publication for government and corporate works. This makes it the third-longest copyright term in the world, after Mexico and Côte d'Ivoire respectively with 100 and 99 years from the death of the author.

But there's more:

The extension was made retroactive to January 1962. Besides being the year when Jamaica attained independence, 1962 also just so happens to have been the year when Jamaican ska music (a popular genre in its own right, but also a precursor of the even more popular reggae) burst onto the international music scene. The parallels with the extension of the U.S. copyright term in the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" are quite eerie. But, worse than what happened into the U.S., the retrospective effect of the law means that works that have already passed into the public domain in Jamaica are now to be wrenched back out again.

Under the new copyright law, foreign users of Jamaican copyrights are not bound by the extended copyright term, and yet Jamaicans are obliged to honor foreign copyrights for the full extended term. As the EFF notes:

all that this measure has accomplished is that citizens of Jamaica, a developing country, will be paying more money into Hollywood's coffers, while Jamaica's own rich cultural heritage draws in not a penny more in return.

What's especially ridiculous here is that Jamaica's own ska and reggae success owed much to the lack of copyright protections at the time. It was that lack of copyright enforcement that allowed the music to spread and become a global phenomenon.

This law is so bad that you might hope a future Jamaican government would simply repeal it. After all, there is no rule that says copyright can only be extended, never shortened -- that it is subject to an irreversible ratchet. But imagine what would happen if this were proposed. Copyright companies and artists would be apoplectic, and doubtless start screaming that their rights and property were being being "stolen," because something they had would be taken away from them under the change.

But the same logic applies to situations where copyright is extended, and the passage of works into the public domain delayed, especially if works that are already in the public domain are actively removed from it. In this case, the public has inarguably had something taken away from it -- a right to use a huge number of works in any way without needing to obtain a license from somebody. And that, of course, is exactly what has happened in Jamaica, thanks to the introduction of this retroactive 45-year term extension. It's a perfect example of real copyright theft, not the fake kind claimed so often by fans of a greedy intellectual monopoly that always wants more.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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September, 8th

The SkeleTour is an all instrumental trek featuring Spokane's prog metal outfit Odyssey as well as Flannel Math Animal and Isthmusia. The tour is focusing on Western Washington and Oregon from September 25th - October 2nd, with full dates available below. Odyssey is also gearing up to release the impending "Voids" album, with pre-orders availabl... Read More/Discuss on Metal Underground.com

takyon writes with an article from TorrentFreak:

The Norwegian Pirate Party has made a big statement by launching a free DNS service which allows Internet users to bypass the local Pirate Bay blockade. The party advocates a free and open Internet for everyone and believes that the recent website blockades set a dangerous precedent.

Last week Norway became the latest country to block access to The Pirate Bay.

A local court ordered Internet providers to block users' access to several large 'pirate' websites in the hope that it will decrease online copyright infringement.

The local Pirate Party is now vigorously protesting the ruling and has decided to fight back. Since the sites will be blocked on the DNS level the party is countering by providing their own DNS servers.

"We want a free and open Internet for everyone. The copyright industry's fight for control over culture has put us in a situation where this is no longer the case in Norway," Pirate Party co-chairman Øystein Middelthun tells TF.

"The censorship is easy to bypass, by simply changing your name server, so we decided to practice what we preach and offer such a service to all those affected by the problem," he adds.

Indeed, since the sites' IP-addresses are not blocked the blockade can be easily circumvented by changing the DNS settings on one's device or computer. The Pirate Party is not the only company offering alternative DNS, OpenDNS and Google have a similar service.

The Pirate Party's DNS has added benefits though, as it supports additional Top Level Domains including .geek or .pirate, and the Namecoin based .bit. In addition, it operates from Norway with minimal logging to guarantee users' privacy.

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