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Censorship

Submission + - Copyright law used to shut down anti-coal site

Submitted by driptray
driptray writes: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that an Australian mining industry group has used copyright laws to close a website that parodied a coal industry ad campaign. A group known as Rising Tide created the website using the slogan "Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining" in response to the mining industry's slogan of "Life: brought to you by mining". The mining industry claimed that the "content and layout" of the parody site infringed copyright, but when Rising Tide removed the copyrighted photos and changed the layout, the mining industry still lodged a complaint. Is this a misuse of copyright law in order to stifle dissent?
Linux Business

Submission + - Linux + Windows Storage Server 2003 nightmare

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm having some pain and would like to vent and maybe get some advice.

I joined this startup like 8 months ago. At first we had a cheap PC running Ubuntu with www+ldap+nfs server running. There was a small of centos cluster (TORQUE pbs) running h/w EDA stuff, and a few Ubuntu for s/w folks, all running off that server. For e-mail we decided to use Yahoo small business. All was well.

Few months later it was time to have our own e-mail server so we decided to use exchange server (pretty standard for non-dotcom companies around here). So we got an IT guy. He convinced us to go with Windows Storage Server 2003 and migrate to active directory so that we could have user based access control over NFS, and have centralized authentication for both unix and windows machines. I had my concern about running NFS off windows (symbolic link), but was told that it would work. I disagreed but conformed against my instinct.

First problem that came up before the migration: setgid/setuid doesn't work. MS confirmed that they broke it in the new SFU. This kind of screwed up our original access control plans. We went ahead without this feature.

Second problem that came up: filenames. Windows does not allow certain characters to be in the filename (and unix programs love to use some of these characters). Luckily there was some mapping function in SFU so we mapped the forbidden characters to > 256 (NTFS supports unicode).

After some short tests we scheduled for a night shutdown and went ahead with the migration. My torque PBS nodes went down, but I figured I can fix them later. After all these are just applications! So now we're up running, kind of.

User started to report slow login. It now takes 2-5 seconds to authenticate a user (name resolution is configured properly). So I started running nscd on the centos4.4 machines. This resolved the problem... except that nscd would crash like every two days on average. After some debugging I got this messasge ../../../libraries/liblber/sockbuf.c:91: ber_sockbuf_ctrl: Assertion `( (sb)->sb_opts.lbo_valid == 0x3 )' failed

Interestingly, after I got the TORQUE pbs nodes up running again, pbs_mom crash with similar frequency, with the exact same message!

While the IT guy is frantically installing any new patch releases from MS, I have two choices from the linux side:

1. create watchdog script to restart pbs_mom and nscd daemon
2. upgrade ldap related packages hoping that problem will go away.
3. gdb and start looking at some source codes

So I downloaded latest source of nss_ldap and compiled. Replaced the centos default .so and observed -> didn't fix the problem
Now I downloaded latest stable openldap source. It doesn't even compile when I tried it in the windows NFS mount. After moving it to /tmp all was well. I'm also building pam_ldap.so from latest source. Will report back after a few days.

That's it for me as far as venting is concerned. If anyone ever consider running Linux cluster with Active Directory.. please do me a favor and save the money. MS simply does not work in an unix environment no matter what they say. It was obvious that they did not spend any QA money on it.

If you guys have any tips or suggestions please post.

thanks

p.s. a few other "small problems" with MS's NFS implementation

1. centos "find" binary uses some optimization that does not work with NFS over NTFS. Now we have to use find -noleaf... argGGh!
2. once a while we'd get these weird files in the directory that we can't delete (related to locks probably). The only way to destroy them was to nuke the entire directory by "rm -rf" in the parent. Rebooting the windows server also works.....
3. sometimes (very rarely) files would disappear when you do ls in linux (but if you access them by name directly they'll still there).
The Media

Submission + - Net Neutrality: The only sustainable solution

Submitted by
embraceinsanity
embraceinsanity writes: "Net neutrality is an issue that is unlikely to go away. As the internet matures the threat of corporate interference if not wholesale takeover through monopoly of the "wires" that connect us will increase rather than decrease. Despite the seeming success of the net neutrality proponents, legislation is not the solution. Not only will this result in a fee-fest for lawyers and lobbyists but it only addresses the problem in the US. Are we going to try and get every government in world to pass the same laws?

The best and only way to counter this threat is by owning the "wires" on a collective, open source style basis. The gist of the idea is outlined www.embraceinsanity.com

Slashdotters tear this idea apart to help us better understand the challenge ahead."
Space

Submission + - Cassini Returns Amazing New Imagery from Saturn

Submitted by SeaDour
SeaDour writes: The Cassini spacecraft has recently entered a highly-inclined orbit around Saturn, revealing some never-before-seen images of the planet's ring system as seen from above and below the planet. "Finally, here are the views that we've waited years for," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute. "Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we've never seen before. It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breath-taking, it almost gives you vertigo." The spacecraft will eventually return to its standard orbit parallel to the ring plane in late June.
Power

Submission + - Does Global Warming Cause C02?

Submitted by
StealthyRoid
StealthyRoid writes: "A documentary set to air on BBC-4 on Thursday, March 8, makes the claim that the global warming alarmist camp has got the relationship between increasing C02 levels and global warming exactly backwards: That an increase in the Earth's temperature is the cause of elevated C02, and the slight uptick in global average temperature that we've been seeing is the result of cosmological effects, not human interference. The documentary also claims that the attempted "fixes" for global warming demanded by the alarmist movement (massive energy output reductions, de-industrialization, etc...) are going to end up hurting poor nations to the point where they're condemned to life in the stone age."
Microsoft

Submission + - Vista activation circumvented with BIOS emulation

Submitted by
Steve Kerrison
Steve Kerrison writes: "If a brute force Vista product key-gen won't work, then a tool to exploit the volume licensing used by OEMs might. HEXUS.net reports that a toolkit has been produced that emulates an OEM BIOS to make the system appear as a pre-activated machine. Combined with the correct certificate and OEM key, Vista won't perform any further activation."
Education

Submission + - Ocean Floor Crust Wound to Be Explored

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "A group of scientists are disembarking right now to study an open gash in the ocean floor where earth's mantle lays exposed without any crust covering it. The scientists describe these as similar to stretch marks that a person might experience on their skin from a growth spurt. Either that or the mantle was never covered by the crust and just has always been like this. From the article, "Regardless of how they formed, the exposed mantle provides scientists with a rare opportunity to study the Earth's rocky innards. Many attempts to drill deep into the planet barely get past the crust.""
Microsoft

Journal Journal: Office 2007 makes Outlook Express French. 2

Journal by twitter

The Register reports and Microsoft confirms, "Microsoft's Office 2007 switches Outlook Express spell-checkers to work only in French. Those disposed to communicate in other languages are being advised to use third-party programs." Incredibly, they use the occasion to promote their MVP program and search engine instead of offering a pa
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - RIAA Bashed in the Sunday Comics

Submitted by ryanduff
ryanduff writes: While reading the comics this morning, I had a good laugh as the comic Foxtrot (Bill Amend) bashes the Recording Industry Association of America for suing "single moms, widows, grandmothers, dead people, and children." Jason Fox attempts to get away with downloading by teaching his pet iguana Quincy how to use Bittorrent and someone at the RIAA puts their psychiatrist on hold because "someone named 'lizardlips' is downloading Metallica."
Education

Submission + - Monkeys Hug to Head Off Conflict

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A story on National Geographic says — Like Ari "Hug It Out" Gold on HBO's Entourage, spider monkeys reportedly use well-placed embraces to ease group tension. But unlike Jeremy Piven's slimy superagent, the monkeys use hugs — plus the occasional French-style cheek-to-cheek touch and a bit of mutual armpit sniffing — at the start of a large meeting, presumably to keep things from getting aggressive in the first place.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/07 0302-monkeys-hug.html

Looks like this hug is more like the "Jaadu ki jhappi" (the Magic Hug) as shown in "Munnabhai M.B.B.S.", than the "Let's hug it out" of Entourage fame :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munna_Bhai_M.B.B.S.
Windows

Submission + - It's official: Vista copy protection 100% cracked

Submitted by
Slinky Sausage
Slinky Sausage writes: "There's been a steady stream of 'sort of' cracks for Vista coming out of the piracy groups, but a crack has been released this morning by "Pantheon" which is doesn't avoid Vista's activation — it exploits it! Apparently despite the requirements for everyone including volume licence customers to activate, Microsoft built in the capability for OEM system builders to pre-install copies of Vista without activating it over the internet. The crack works on any Acer, HP, Lenovo, Hewlett Packard or custom machine (as long as you have the BIOS of that machine available)."
User Journal

Journal SPAM: Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us 5

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
Security

Submission + - Will secure streams be the finite solution to DRM?

Submitted by Spiff76
Spiff76 writes: The Secustream Technologies company was one of the head news on Norwegian national TV yesterday (2007-03-02). They state that it will take months to crack their secure streaming technology, and cracking it will only reveals a few seconds of content from a specific stream. The key idea is to use lots of lots of smaller locks rather than using one big lock. More or less all DRM systems yet have been defeated and has been very cumbersome for the user. In this perspective this technology claim to use a brand new approach. Will they succeed? All software used in a non trusted computing setting is crackable. Why won't this be feasible with this technology? They have even hired DVD-Jon to try to find security holes in their technology. http://www.secustream.com/?page=technology
Google

Submission + - Second Google Desktop vulnerability uncovered

Submitted by
zakkie
zakkie writes: "According to InfoWorld, Google's Desktop indexing engine is vulnerable to an exploit (the second such flaw to be found) that could allow crackers to read files or execute code. By exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on Google.com, an attacker can grab all the data off a Google Desktop. Google is said to be "investigating"."

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