CNET: “A teenage computer hacker who defaced Web sites was sentenced Friday to nine months behind bars–and was ordered to help program the jail’s computers.”

Nik Mokhnatov writes “Softilium Development Group has released SVA 2.15, a program that lets you distribute your software over many Internet public software archives with minimal efforts and minimal time wasting.

http://www.softilium.com/sva

SVA (Software’s Vendor Assistant) is powerful tool for any shareware and freeware developers and software vendors. With auto-filled forms feature you can submit your product info to many software sites as your defined. SVA shipped with collection contains more that 170 sites definitions. You can build your own collection. Up-to-date sites collection update is available for free at http://www.softilium.com/sva/sa.shtml

SVA fully supports PAD files generating. PAD is a new extensive format for software distributions created by ASP. SVA can save ALL related information (your personal login data, your subjective rating and any remarks about each site in collection).

With SVA you can check and analyze your submissions results. And SVA can take into account all your customers and registrations info.

This product is designed to work on all Win32-compatible platforms, such as Windows 9x, NT, 2000, Me. SVA is XML-compliant application.

SVA 2.15 costs $35.99 for single-user license. For more information, visit our site http://www.softilium.com or mail us: support@softilium.com”

Ireland Times asks if the Internet might be another overhyped gadget that’s little more than a tool as the steam engine was when it was invented.

Anthony writes: “Recently I encountered a problem when I ftped to my server, I was trying to upload a file
that already existed under my username on the server, and I kept getting a 550 error.
Which for you newbies out there is a file permission error, telling me that I do not have
rights to write over or delete those files under my username. That made me mad, I didn’t
know what was going on I thought my ftp server was messed up. Then we figured out
that the problem could have been who owned the files. Surly enough, the files were owned
by root instead of pinehead which was the username I was under. If your files under your
username are owned by root then that will allow your file permissions to be limited and
you not to be in control of them. So how do we fix all this?”

The story in at Pinehead.com.

Slashdot brings us another tidbit, this time about reducing X’s bandwidth usage.

– By Grant Gross
–

A pair of MIT programmers have
written a seven-line perl code that descrambles DVDs, a
cousin of the DeCSS code that the Motion Picture
Association of America has been fighting so strenuously. The
shortened code is small enough to include in an email
signature, which could give the MPAA headaches in trying to
put a lid on its distribution.

Let’s all have a moment of silence for those poor,
overworked MPAA lawyers.

Someone is starting to get the message that U.S. copyright
laws aren’t exactly working. U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va.,
speaking at a conference recently, called
for changes to the fair use doctrine in digital and
Internet media. In other words, the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act is too restrictive, Boucher says.

If a change in the law doesn’t work, the co-founder of
fairtunes.com has another idea. Matt Goyer wants to move
the Napster -clone offshore, potentially to HavenCo
Ltd., located in the Atlantic on an ocean platform called
Sealand.

Big Blue backlash?

OK, so not everyone in the Open Source community is fully
buying IBM’s
new advertising campaign that focuses on “peace, love
and Linux.” A LinuxPlanet columnist doesn’t
fault IBM but suggests there’s not a lot of peace in the
Open Source community these days, with a lot of infighting
and backstabbing going on.

The IBM ad campaign’s only fault may be that it’s a bit
naïve, but there are other signs that Big Blue isn’t quite
up to speed on everything Open Source. NewsForge editor in
chief Robin Miller reported that an IBM recruiter sent
out spam email to people as lowly as Linux journalists
while searching for programmers. NewsForge news editor Tina
Gasperson pointed out that IBM.com
doesn’t work with popular Open Source browser Konqueror
1.9.8, and Linux Journal noted
that the Linux ad at IBM.com was not exactly Linux
friendly.

Diplomatic ties

Tim O’Reilly of bookmaker O’Reilly and Associates reports
that it ain’t easy trying to mediate between Microsoft
and the Free Software Foundation in the recent round of
name-calling. OK, maybe it was a “round” to O’Reilly, but we
thought it was mostly a one-sided assault by Microsoft on
free software.

New in NewsForge this week

Stories you may have passed by:

• Hardware reviewer (OK, in this case he’s doing software)
  Jeff Field takes
  a look at VMware 2.0. He says it’s a nice alternative to
  the not-quite-finished Wine.
• Gasperson checks
  out Userlocal.com, a site dedicated to Slackware users.
  She says the site needs some more stuff, but it’s a good
  start at a useful resource for Slackware.
• We also report that Eazel
  people confirm that version 1.0 of their groundbreaking
  Nautilus file and system manager will be available sometime
  this week.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted
on our discussion
page.

Alan Cox has released 2.4.2ac18 (thanks to lwn).

The program XPDF respects copyprotection bits in PDF files, but a patch has been written to work around it. Would it be moral patch the program and distribute?

The OSI group has modified its definitions of what qualifies as OpenSource in responce to changes in the industry. Slashdot has the full details of this.

Slashdot brings back a bit of nostalgia with a history of Pong.