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Submission + - Polish prime minister is offitialy anti-ACTA since now (tvn24.pl)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "- I sent a letter today to all the party leaders who cooperate with the Platform and the Polish Peasant Party [goverment coalition parties in Poland] in the so-called, European People's Party, the prime ministers, the chancellor, the presidents of some countries and the authorities of European People's Party, with a proposal to reject ACTA in shape, which was negotiated by the European Commission — said Tusk"
The link is in polish I'm sorry.

Comment Re:Take this with a grain of salt (Score 1) 617

by microphage (#39062037) Attached to: 300k Organic Farmers To Sue Monsanto For Seed Patent Claims
"Good call. You're right. If you actually look into this thing, you'll see that the lawsuit represents only 60 farmers . ChromeAeonium

"The large group of 83 Plaintiffs in OSGATA v. Monsanto is comprised of individual family farmers, independent seed companies and agricultural organizations. The total number of members within the plaintiff group exceeds 300,000 and includes many thousands of certified organic farmers.

The Plaintiffs are not seeking any monetary compensation. Instead, the farmers are pre-emptively suing Monsanto and seeking court protection under the Declaratory Judgment Act, from Monsanto-initiated patent infringement lawsuits.

co-plaintiff Food Democracy Now! has collected over 100,000 signatures on it’s petition supporting the rights of family farmers against Monsanto" link

Submission + - Monsanto opposes open-source seeds (rt.com)

Submitted by microphage
microphage writes: Monsanto went after hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patented seed after audits revealed that their farms had contained their product — as a result of routine pollination by animals and acts of nature. Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few years as a result. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually during that span with a so-called “seed police.”
Wikipedia

Submission + - The 'Undue Weight' of truth on Wikipedia (chronicle.com) 1

Submitted by EricTheGreen
EricTheGreen writes: The Chronicle of Higher Education details one scholar's attempt to perform a fact-based correction of a Wikipedia article on the Haymarket Riot ... and how his efforts are defeated by a editorial policy supporting what can apparently best be described as a "truth in numbers" policy, facts of the matter be damned. One particularly telling quote from a Wikipedia editor, cited in the article:

If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.'

Submission + - Hackers tear down NASDAQ (rt.com) 1

Submitted by microphage
microphage writes: The website of stock exchange operator NASDAQ is offline after being attacked by an onslaught of distributed denial of service, or DDoS attacks.

Comment Nortel and Chinese flood plain (Score 1) 178

by microphage (#39043321) Attached to: Chinese Hackers Had Unfettered Access To Nortel Networks For a Decade
"nortel built a plant over there with the promise of getting some of the chinese telecom market share. the chinese sold them a plot of land in a flood plain so they could not use the first floor for about half the year ..

Not that I don't believe you, but do you have any verifiable source for that?
Education

Submission + - Microsoft Continues Assault on Education in Washington State (microsofttaxdodge.com)

Submitted by
reifman
reifman writes: "Washington State has cut more than $693 million in education funds in the last two years to offset its growing $5 billion biennial deficit. Last month, Microsoft General Counsel and Senior Vice President Brad Smith wrote in The Seattle Times that "steady declines in public resources now threaten our ability" to provide for the public education of all children but Smith didn't disclose his management of the company's lobbying efforts and Nevada tax dodge which have cost the state more tha $4.3 billion in revenues. The company has tried to discredit this blogger but recently refused to release tax data that would prove its claims. For the first time, we've published audio of Smith acknowledging and defending the company's Nevada tax dodge."

Comment The Ron Paul effect (Score 1) 775

by microphage (#39022089) Attached to: Is Santorum's "Google Problem" a Google Problem?
Mitt Romney wins the Maine Republican caucuses

"The Associated Press is reporting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has won the Maine Republican caucuses to defeat rival Ron Paul by a small margin. According to Reuters, 95 percent of the votes have been counted, and Mr. Romney has 39 percent of the votes thus far with Mr. Paul currently sitting at 36 percent."
Security

Submission + - Hacker Demos Easy Wireless Credit Card Fraud (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: At the Shmoocon hacker conference, security researcher Kristin Paget aimed to indisputably prove what hackers have long known and the payment card industry has repeatedly downplayed and denied: That RFID-enabled credit card data can be easily, cheaply, and undetectably stolen and used for fraudulent transactions. With a Vivotech RFID credit card reader she bought on eBay for $50, Paget wirelessly read a volunteer’s credit card onstage and obtained the card’s number and expiration date, along with the one-time CVV number used by contactless cards to authenticate payments. A second later, she used a $300 card-magnetizing tool to encode that data onto a blank card. And then, with a Square attachment for the iPhone that allows anyone to swipe a card and receive payments, she paid herself $15 of the volunteer’s money with the counterfeit card she’d just created. (She also handed the volunteer a twenty dollar bill, essentially selling the bill on stage for $15 to avoid any charges of illegal fraud.)

The payment industry often claims that contactless credit cards are more safe than traditional cards, and that any data a hacker could wirelessly read from them can't be used for fraud. But with 100 million of the RFID-enabled credit cards now in circulation, Paget wanted to undisputably show that's not the case. A stealthy attacker in a crowded public place could easily scan hundreds of cards through wallets or purses.

Comment What exactly is open-license technology? (Score 1) 182

by microphage (#38863939) Attached to: Gates Paying Murdoch For System To Track U.S. Kids' School Progress
“In addition to making instructional data more manageable and useful, this open-license technology, provisionally called the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), will also support a large market for vendors of learning materials and application developers to deliver content and tools that meet the Common Core State Standards and are interoperable with each other and the most popular student information systems” link

Submission + - How to manage a commercial source-code sale for a (pldaniels.com) 2

Submitted by
inflex
inflex writes: "I have a software suite that has been running for well over a decade and sold to companies such as Nashua, VirginBlue and NationalFoods. Many components are now OpenSource. I want to focus on my wife's career (Independent novelist) and am considering selling the source/rights to my commercial software and letting someone else take the reins. I'm looking for advice on how best to approach the situation — should I go through the 250k LoC and clean it up a bit, or just hand it over as it's currently running. Would it be advisable to bring in an escrow/3rd-party? I have no heavy emotional attachment to it, tens of thousands of people use the OpenSource components,of which will naturally remain that way but obviously the commercial version will diverge over time."

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