The inventor of the “Electric Slide,” an iconic dance created in 1976, is fighting back against what he believes are copyright violations and, more importantly, examples of bad dancing.

Kyle Machulis, an engineer at San Francisco’s Linden Lab, said he received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice about a video he had shot at a recent convention showing three people doing the Electric Slide.

“The creator of the Electric Slide claims to hold a copyright on the dance and is DMCAing every single video on YouTube” that references the dance, Machulis said. He’s also sent licensing demands to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Machulis added.

Indeed, Richard Silver, who filed the copyright for the Electric Slide in 2004, said on one of his Web pages that the DeGeneres Show had been putting up a legal fight as he tried to get compensation for a segment that aired in February 2006 in which actress Teri Hatcher and other dancers performed the popular wedding shuffle.

Source: News.com

The NYT reports on a Harvard and MIT study, which finds that the SiteKey authentication system employed by Bank of America is ineffective at prevent phishing attacks. SiteKey requires users to preselect an image and to recognize this image before they login, but users don’t comply.

‘The idea is that if customers do not see their image, they could be at a fraudulent Web site, dummied up to look like their bank’s, and should not enter their passwords. The Harvard and M.I.T. researchers tested that hypothesis. In October, they brought 67 Bank of America customers in the Boston area into a controlled environment and asked them to conduct routine online banking activities, like looking up account balances. But the researchers had secretly withdrawn the images.

Of 60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns.

Source: Slashdot

Three paedophiles who used internet chat rooms to plot to kidnap and rape two sisters were jailed for a total of 27 years at Southern Crown Court on Monday.

Police said it was the first time chat room logs alone had been used to prove conspiracy to rape charges.

David Beavan, 42, of Bransgore, Hampshire, Alan Hedgcock, 41, of Twickenham, and Robert Mayers, 42, of Warrington, had never met. Hedgcock, who was given an eight year sentence, used an incest-themed chat room to tell Beavan, who was handed 11 years imprisonment, of his plan to abuse sisters aged 13 and 14. Beavan indicated he wanted to join the attack, and the pair later recruited Mayers via the internet too.

Source: The Register

Mark Little has announced that JBossEJB 4.0 is generally available, with some feature updates but with focus on the user experience.

Features:

* support for general notification framework. Transports supported include JMS (JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging and MQSeries), email, database or file system.
* trailblazer example.
* many quickstart examples to get you going.
* support for data transformations using Smooks or XSLT.
* listeners and action model to support loose-coupling of interaction steps.
* content based routing using JBoss Rules or XPath.
* support for registries, using JAX-R and jUDDI out-of-the-box.
* gateways to allow non-ESB aware traffic to flow into the ESB.
* high performance and reliability (in use by a large insurance company for 3 years).

Source: The server side

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are concerned about a different kind of virus: a computer one.

Hackers broke into the CDC’s Web site last week and planted a virus that could have infected visitors’ computers. CDC officials said the hacking was concentrated to the agency’s podcast site — which has audio and video clips on a variety of public health topics — and they do not think any sensitive information was compromised.

Source: wsbtv.com

Apple Inc. has reached an agreement with Apple Corps Ltd., the record label started by The Beatles in 1968, concerning the use of the name “Apple” and related logos.

Under the terms of the agreement announced Monday, Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer) will own all trademarks and logos related to the name “Apple” and will license them accordingly to the Apple Corps Ltd. music company.

This marks an end to the long-running copyright feud between the two similarly named companies. Additionally, it replaces a pre-existing agreement, signed in 1991, which forbade Apple Inc. from distributing music through physical media like CDs and cassette tapes–an agreement that, needless to say, predated the advent of the digital music market. Apple Inc. has stated that both companies will bear their existing legal costs.

Source: News.com