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It looks like the FCC isn’t completely insane. After four months, they concluded that the now-infamous Desperate Housewives locker room promo isn’t indecent after all. “Although the scene apparently is intended to be titillating, it simply is not graphic or explicit enough to be indecent under our standard.”

I saw the spot—or at least something that matched the description exactly—and it was no more explicit than typical prime-time fare. I thought it was cheesy, but I honestly didn’t think any more about it, so when the controversy hit, I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.

But it took them four months to figure this out?

Ah, well, I suppose it’s fast for the FCC. I mean, it took them more than a year to clear a complaint against Angel, by which time the series had been off the air for nine months.

(Incidentally, I’ve never seen a single episode of Desperate Housewives. It just doesn’t look like my kind of show.)

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According to The Beat, a judge has thrown out about half the claims in Marvel’s lawsuit against City of Heroes.

Apparently several of the “infringing” works they cited were in fact made by Marvel, not by players. The judge also threw out claims that the game makers infringed trademarks directly and refused to issue a declaration that they are not a service provider (if they are considered a service provider, then they are shielded from liability under the DMCA as long as they take action quickly enough).

The post mostly reprints a press release from NCsoft, so it’s noticeably upbeat, but they do have precedent on their side—such as Sony vs. Betamax. Well, as long as none of the morons in Congress manage to force the Induce act through. That would basically declare that makers of pens and pencils are liable for any copyright or trademark infringement.

Follow-up post: The suit was settled in December.

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Found this in our mail server logs:

relay=OWNED.HACKED.BITE.ME [IP removed], reject=550 5.7.1 No mail accepted from known spam hosts or exploited systems

This was a connection we rejected because the sending IP was on the Spamhaus XBL list of exploited systems. (Everything from reject on is the error message we returned.) Apparently whoever wrote the spam tool decided to advertise that fact when sending mail.

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Two months later, 12,500 pages mention Apple’s “Do not eat iPod shuffle” joke.

Ironically, one page that doesn’t mention it is the one that started it all. Apple has removed the footnote from its iPod shuffle product page. Sure, the comparison to a pack of gum is still there, but I guess enough people thought it was a stupid-lawyer trick instead of, you know, a joke.

Something I didn’t notice at the time, though: the U.K. version was worded differently: “Do not chew iPod shuffle.” Perhaps reflecting the relative populations, this phrase only pulls 48 hits (soon to be 49, I expect).

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When I got in this morning I noticed that Mozilla had announced a Thunderbird 1.0.1 Release Candidate. While I was quite happy in the pre-1.0 days to help out with bug hunting (I can probably claim credit for identifying a number of problems with importing mail from Eudora’s arcane mailbox format, though I wasn’t the one who fixed them), I figured I’d pass on this and wait a few days for the final release.

A few minutes ago, this important notice popped up:

0 New Messages

Maybe I should try out that release candidate after all…