Landmark case: ISP wins against Hollywood

The giants of the film industry have lost their case against ISP iiNet in a landmark judgment handed down in the Federal Court today.

The decision had the potential to impact internet users and the internet industry profoundly as it sets a legal precedent surrounding how much ISPs are required to do to prevent customers from downloading movies and other content illegally.

But after an on-and-off eight-week trial that examined whether iiNet authorised customers to download pirated movies, Justice Dennis Cowdroy found that the ISP was not liable for the downloading habits of its customers.

In a summary of his 200-page judgment read out in court this morning, Justice Cowdroy said the evidence established that iiNet had done no more than to provide an internet service to its users.

He found that, while iiNet had knowledge of infringements occurring and did not act to stop them, such findings did not necessitate a finding of authorisation.

Source: The Age

Presentation: A Crash Course in Modern Computer Hardware

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click discusses the Von Neumann architecture, CISC vs RISC, the rise of multicore, Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP), pipelining, out-of-order dispatch, static vs dynamic ILP, performance impact of cache misses, memory performance, memory vs CPU caching, examples of memory/CPU cache interaction, and tips for improving performance.

Source: InfoQ

Site's terms still enforceable even if users never read them

We're all guilty of skipping over a site's terms and conditions, but don't go crying to the courts if there's something in there that comes back to bite you. Another US court has upheld a site's "browserwrapped" terms of use, saying that they were displayed prominently enough that it's the user's fault for not reading them.

Source: Ars

Google's book scanning technology

An interesting article on Google's book scanning technology and how it works.

Source: Scitedaily

Happy New Year

I haven't posted in a while, but I just wanted to share well wishes to everyone out there. May 2010 bring you greater certainty, happiness and fulfilment in the New Year.

Domain name disputes with Google

Here's an interesting article looking at how two domain operators stopped Google from shutting them down: www.froogles.com and www.groovle.com

However, Google does win the majority of cases.

Source: Ars

Autonomous TTS coupe to compete at 2010 Pikes Peak

A remote control car that can drive itself will take part in one of the world's most challenging - and treacherous - motor races.


Using advanced electronics and a sophisticated internet link the driverless Audi TT is set to compete as a technological showcase in motorsport races next year, including America's renowned Pikes Peak Hill Climb.


The Autonomous Audi is currently controlled by a computer fitted inside its boot, and from 2010 will run using Java real-time programming updates received via telemetry from up to 32km away.

Source: Drive.com.au