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Submission + - German goverment warns of Windows 8 (www.zeit.de)

An anonymous reader writes: The German newpaper "Die ZEIT" has published an article, saying the German Government has officially warned from using Windows 8. (No, this is no joke.) The warning was more issued towards the official agencies. The main reason quoted was that Windows 8 has NSA backdoors for espionage.
"Windows 8 is an unacceptable security risk for companies and authorities, experts warn the government. The so-called Trusted Computing is a back door for the NSA."
(translation).

Just last year the German Government has given an official warning not to use MS Internet Explorer, for similar reasons, that it was not secure.

Submission + - Is that really the source code for this software? (kde.org) 1

oever writes: Software freedom is an interesting concept, but being able to study the source code is useless unless you are certain that the binary you are running corresponds to the alleged source code. It should be possible to recreate the exact binary from the source code. A simple analysis shows that this is very hard in practice, severely limiting the whole point of running free software.

Comment Re:That explains things (Score 2) 91

The dance needed to avoid an event from propagating is quite occult.

function claimEvent(evt) {
        "use strict";
        if (evt) {
                if (evt.preventDefault) {
                        evt.preventDefault();
                }
                if (evt.stopImmediatePropagation) {
                        evt.stopImmediatePropagation();
                }
                if (evt.stopPropagation) {
                        evt.stopPropagation();
                }
        }
        return false;
}
ontouchstart = function (event) { .......
            return claimEvent(event);
}

Submission + - Plane of Amelia Earhart possibly found (tighar.org)

oever writes: The fate of skypioneer Amelia Earhart is still unknown, but the Earhart Project thinks that it has spotted her plane on sonar data taken near Nikumaroro.

Comment Re:I have a better idea... (Score 1) 649

That's also why Stallman's solution is ridiculous. When companies are too big to fail, their single-customer suppliers are too vital to fail, regardless of which division they supply. Splitting up a big company doesn't do anything to the risk, but it makes hippies happier.

The suppliers will only fail if the single-customer fails. The single-customer will not have significant problems if one of their suppliers fail. Stallman's suggestion is excellent!: Large companies will pay a percentage of their income as tax. The percentage increases with the global gross income of the company. This will force these companies to have good long term business strategies.

Comment Re:You can apparently get GIMP on Android (Score 4, Informative) 415

Gimp is getting some good competition from Krita now. The image editing application that is part of Calligra Suite with a focus on painting is very active with many releases. It has CMYK support, tons of filters and brushes and an active community of artists. And there is a tablet version called Krita Sketch.

Comment Re:PDF.js (Score 2) 220

No, I'm not being paid. I work on a similar project: WebODF. I wrote the post so someone (thank you) would ask me what is in it for me and I could plug this project.

Seriously: my experience is that PDF.js works acceptably for most PDFs I threw at it. That included large PDFs with designer layout and scientific papers. Granted, poppler (okular, evince) is still way faster in rendering, but I enjoy PDF.js because it is good enough and I know the work it took to make it and can see the improvements they are making still. Trying to write a desktop type application in the browser makes one appreciate a good one like PDF.js.

Comment PDF.js (Score 4, Informative) 220

The PDF viewer in Firefox, PDF.js is an amazing piece of software. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the same sandbox in which a webpage runs. So it is very safe. The layout accuracy and speed of PDF.js are simply amazing. Text selection happens just like it does in the browser. Some PDF viewers only allow you to draw a rectangle on which to do OCR. PDF.js simply lets you select the glyphs.

This viewer has been available as an add-on for a while already.

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