Technology

If you’ve been alive for the past year, there has been quite a bit of noise about MIT’s proposed $100 laptop to be used by children around the world.

Now you can participate by pledging to purchase one laptop for $300 which would enable this project to give away two other laptops.

The latest and greatest browser, Firefox, has been updated to version 1.5. Please get it from Mozilla as soon as possible.

I recommend dumping Internet Explorer and getting Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It is a free download and the source code is available if you’re inclined to hack it. What are the benefits?

• Open Source
• Multiplatform (runs on different types of computers)
• Free
• No worms, viruses, or popups
• Doesn’t use technology from 2001, like Microsoft.
• Standards Compliant

Get it here!

I have yet to see anything about this in any TV or newspaper, so I decided to send this to all of you to hopefully get some of you to take action!

A new bill has been introduced into the US Senate (S.2560), dubbed the “INDUCE Act”. This bill is sponsored by both the Majority and Minority leaders in the Senate. This act is supposed to protect children from the dangers of ‘free music’, but most likely it is being introduced because these Senators have been bought by the entertainment industry. There are only 35 days left in session for Congress to work on new bills so this may not make it to vote, but they have passed things like the PATRIOT Act in a few days, and it lets the FBI search your library and purchase records, so you never know what can happen.

Basically, the INDUCE Act would make it illegal to use the following devices:

1) VCR
2) iPod or other MP3 player
3) Xerox machine
4) Camcorder
5) Digital Camera
6) CD-R/DVD-R drives
7) the computer you are using right now anything that can be used to reproduce copyrighted material, even if there are substantial non-infringing uses.

It would effectively stop any new products to come out that may be used to duplicate copyrighted material, like a new Tivo, or a DVD recorder.

The text of the Bill is a few sentences long and can be viewed directly on the Library of Congress website:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.2560:

Nobody thought that the Senate would even bring this to committee, but it is now. You can read the “Honorable” Senator’s comments here:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r108:1:./temp/~r108wVLpRa:e127125:

To find articles on this issue, search Google News here:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&ie=ascii&q=INDUCE+Act&btnG=Search+News

If you want to see analysis of the bill and why the main sponsors of this bill are for it, please visit here to see how much money they have been given from various entertainment companies:

http://savethe.org/

TAKE ACTION: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has set up an informational website where you can SEND FAXES FOR FREE to your Congressional Representative. Just fill out your name and address and it takes care of it.

http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2918

Something from multiple IPs registered to Microsoft has been crawling my site with the following user agent:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )

Not the typical MSN agent…