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Submission + - French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL (heathermeeker.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violated the GPL, ordering Orange to pay €500,000 in compensatory damages and €150,000 for moral damages. This case has been ongoing for many years. Entr’ouvert is the publisher of Lasso, a reference library for the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol, an open standard for identity providers to authenticate users and pass authentication tokens to online services. This is the open protocol that enables single sign-on (SSO). The Lasso product is dual licensed by Entr’Ouvert under GPL or commercial licenses.

Submission + - Vast majority of cranes at U.S. ports have designed in vulnerabilities (twitter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Subcommittee Chairman Rep Carlos asked if China could access our port infrastructure through ZPMC cranes, which comprise the vast majority of cranes at U.S. ports:

Rear Admiral Vann: "We have found openings, vulnerabilities, that are there by design."

Submission + - Helium Discovery In Northern Minnesota May Be Biggest Ever In North America (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists and researchers are celebrating what they call a "dream" discovery after an exploratory drill confirmed a high concentration of helium buried deep in Minnesota's Iron Range. Thomas Abraham-James, CEO of Pulsar Helium, said the confirmed presence of helium could be one of the most significant such finds in the world. CBS News Minnesota toured the drill site soon after the drill rig first broke ground at the beginning of February. The discovery happened more than three weeks later at about 2 a.m. Thursday, as a drill reached its depth of 2,200 feet below the surface. According to Abraham-James, the helium concentration was measured at 12.4%, which is higher than forecasted and roughly 30 times the industry standard for commercial helium. "12.4% is just a dream. It's perfect," he said.

Now that helium is confirmed to be underground in Babbitt, Abraham-James said the next phase of the project is a feasibility study by an independent third party to study the size of the well and whether it could support a full-service helium plant. "It's not just about drilling one hole, but now proving up the geological models, being able to get some really good data that wasn't captured in the original discovery," he explained. "It has the potential to really contribute to local society." The company said the feasibility study could take until the end of the year to complete.

Submission + - Communications of the ACM is Now Open Access

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "CACM [Communications of the ACM] Is Now Open Access," proclaims the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in its tear-down-this-CACM-paywall announcement. "More than six decades of CACM's renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library."

Ironically, clicking on Google search results for older CACM articles on Aaron Swartz currently returns page-not-found error messages and the CACM's own search can't find Aaron Swarz either, so perhaps there's some work that remains to be done with the transition to CACM's new website. ACM plans to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when its five-year transition to full Open Access is complete (January 2026 target date).

Submission + - Fired NY Fed Regulator's Secret Audio Recordings Inside Goldman Sachs 2

Submitted by maynard
maynard writes: Carmen Segarra used to work as a regulator for the New York Federal Reserve Bank, one of twelve regional banks that make up the US central banking system. In her capacity as regulator, Ms. Segarra was assigned to a team overseeing investment banking giant Goldman Sachs. There, while investigating a case of Goldman having advisied a client about a buyout offer by another company in which the firm held significant investment holdings, she determined that Goldman didn't even have a conflict of interest policy. Her supervisor initially backed the investigation, until it became clear she meant to file a written report detailing her findings of fact. Then they abruptly fired her.

And all this would have been another unfortunate case of 'she-said / institution-said' ineffective whistleblowing were it not for the fact that Ms. Segarra saw what was coming and had bought a keychain audio recorder. With it, she collected 46 hours of internal discussion and meetings, including statements by Goldman Sachs principles admitting the firm didn't have a conflict of interest policy and that the deal under investigation had been "shady." Additionally, she collected reams of documents and testimony. She thought her case iron clad.

However, when it came time to reveal her findings in full to superiors, though initially supportive of the investigation, her boss quickly shifted gears and worked to squelch the report. This culminated in a recorded meeting where her boss made clear his supervisors at the Fed insisted she downplay those findings. Then, a week later, before she could formally file the report, they fired her.

While bits of the story have been out in print for about a year, the radio show This American Life just published actual excerpts from those audio recordings. They make for harrowing listening. As the producer says in the introduction, her recordings show: "Repeated examples of pervasive regulatory capture by the industry regulators are meant to oversee."

In other words, whereas before we could all surmise just how bad banking regulation must be, what with the Financial Crisis having nearly tanked the world economy and all, with this audio we can hear first hand and in minute detail what it's like for an honest regulator to try to do the job properly: You get fired. Quickly. Then your embarrassing work is buried and reputation smeared. And if she'd just kept her mouth shut, she coulda gotten rich! This, at the very heart of the global financial system.

Is it any wonder why the public has lost faith in our political and economic institutions?

Submission + - Police ask blogger to remove tweet about Ukip (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Police have asked a blogger to remove a tweet that fact-checked Ukip policies but did not break any laws after receiving a complaint from a Ukip councillor, prompting concern over attempts to stifle debate.

Michael Abberton was visited by two Cambridgeshire police officers on Saturday. He was told he had not committed any crimes and no action was taken against him, but he was asked to delete some of his tweets, particularly a tongue-in-cheek one on 10 reasons to vote for Ukip, such as scrapping paid maternity leave and raising income tax for the poorest 88% of Britons.

Comment Re:After 30 years of programming (Score 1) 598

by peccary (#45077021) Attached to: What Are the Genuinely Useful Ideas In Programming?

A big reason why estimates tend to be low is that when you make your best estimate, then you add 100% buffer for "all the little problems", your management insists that you must be goldbricking and surely that's not a reasonable estimate. So you learn to make your estimates "what you think your management will accept without busting your balls over", and then about half the time they're too low.

Comment Re:What does IT run on .. (Score 1) 516

by peccary (#45076915) Attached to: Administration Admits Obamacare Website Stinks

No, the designers of HTTP were dumb - they totally ignored the state of the art of distributed applications design, and set the Internet back by at least a decade. In their defence, they really were trying to solve a dumb problem, and people abused it to do things it was never meant to do. It was meant to deliver mainly static content, not to be a glorified terminal service for remote applications, but that's what it's become.
Science

Submission + - Rats Ate Easter Island (wsj.com)

Submitted by kgeiger
kgeiger writes: The Wall Street Journal reviews a new book about Easter Island. Contrary to Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo's The Statues that Walked (Free Press, 2011) posits that brown rats deforested Rapa Nui, that slavers decimated the population, and that the phosphate-poor soils limited both agriculture and population. Because palm trees are soft and fibrous, they make poor rollers; the moai were in fact "walked" into position the same way one person can move a heavy, upright refrigerator by rocking and shifting it.

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