A dutch judge has just made it illegal to mention the *filename* of an upload to usenet, ruling that this is a violation of copyright law.

The article on the popular dutch tech site tweakers (in dutch!) quotes technology lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, who assisted FTD (the defendant) as completely stunned:

René Sommer is no longer. I got the message rather late, a few days ago I was exchanging some email with an associate at Logitech, and asked him to pass my regards to René, and to my surprise the answer came back that our friend had passed away.

René had died last year, October the 5th of 2009, way too young at 58. We were never close friends, but we did meet on several occasions and it made me appreciate him very much, read on to see why.

I think the ideal mobile computer interface is not a series of buttons, or a touch screen, multi-touch or single touch doesn't really matter, that's just a detail.

The European Union is usually heralded as a place where privacy still has some meaning, with the exception of England, which people seem to see in a different light because of the prevalence of surveilance cameras.

Today, while searching for something else I ran in to this page: (dutch) http://www.security.nl/artikel/30389/1/Overzicht_anti-privacy_maatregele... , which enumerates a series of anti-privacy measures that have been taken in the Netherlands since 2001.

- tapping requirement for internet traffic

I've been running my own companies since 1986. That's 24 years now, with some brief stints of employment if a contract was so time consuming that the dutch regulators took it as being equivalent to employment (they do that here to stop employers that try to avoid paying in to social security by hiring all their employees as free-lancers). At the high point of running 'TrueTech' we had about 20 full timers and partners, and a bunch of free-lancers.

It's been a long, very interesting and at times very stressful ride so far, and I wished I could say I never made any mistakes.

Andy, the guy that wrote the blog posting linked here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286391 detailing how he was banned from buying ipads 'for life' is not a scalper*.

That's my conclusion after emailing with him and trying to get to the bottom of how much money he charged his foreign buddies for buying the ipads in the US and then shipping them internationally.

A chair needs three legs to be stable. On two (or less) it can't stand by
itself, and it's funny but the same seems to hold true for businesses.

When you're relying on only one 'line of business', or even worse, just
a single or only two big customers for your survival then the first
hickup will immediately bowl you over.

It's possible to survive a hit to your income stream, but how much of
a hit you can survive depends on how much cash you have in the bank
and how big a portion of your total income that hit represents.

Technology gatherings seem to have a disproportional number of people that are true believers when it comes to anti-aging and 'uploading' your brain to a computer. One of these is to cheat death by increments, the other the technological equivalent of an afterlife. The first through direct intervention, reversing the normal process of aging, the second by decoupling the mind from the body and letting it continue to function in some kind of substitute substrate, usually presented as a computer.

Sorry folks, but I think it isn't going to happen, I'll try to explain why.

A typical case of me and my big mouth.

I figured that a basic analysis should reveal who wrote this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197027

Because of the size of the sample. So I wrote a bit of code to compare against other HN comments, and figured that that would turn up the user quickly.

But I was wrong, after two tries (Daniel Markham and John Graham-Cummings) I have to admit that my simple analysis has failed.

So, who will take up the challenge, can you identify this user somehow ?

Hey there HN'ers,

After my post a while ago about what I pay for bandwidth I got a bunch of
inquiries who my hosting party is.

I've asked them if I can go public with the numbers, the answer is yes,
so here is the deal that I'm getting with all the figures and specs of
the machine. Note that this is not the same as the offer on their
website, it is substantially better, both in payment terms as well
as in the monthly fee. This works out to about E 1.45 / Mbit / month
with a machine that has 36T local storage included. The catch is