The "highly restricted" spec is meant to catch suspicious combos like in the mybank example - but does not catch full-ascii (which is an even more restrictive level) trickery like tvvitter.com (notice the two "v" chars). that combo in particular is now known, but goes to demonstrate that trickery does not need charsets larger than 7-bit... some people simply get caught by hsbc.net...

From a user's perspective, three sources: the Linux Action Show podcast highlghts fun/useful items once a week.

Then there's tuxmachines.org which talks about.... well pretty much anything, you'll have to sift through the deluge...

Then just following what's generally popular, and using alternativeto.net to find open source counterparts...

In the original article an ArretSurImages.fr, the blogger details in her interview that she decided not to hire a lawyer, instead simply complied immediately and did not defend her position. She was not required by the court to remove her post, but she did so of her own accord.

A commenting lawyer interviewed for the article indicated that the case shows more the necessity of getting legal advice, rather than any evolution of rights on the Internet.

Yes it's sad that she was attacked for her criticisms, but it's sadder that she did not take responsibility, or stand her ground.

This is sounding like a LOIC - but that issues DMCA requests instead of network requests :-p

Hm. I would say "there goes my preference for not associating my phone with an online account" but that would actually be incorrect. Though I would indeed prefer not to have to have an account to install apps.

I guess I still treat my phone like a computer in many respects and I'm trying my darndest to keep it away from any form of remote kill at all for the sake of a "no remote please" blanket stance...

Still, I'm pretty sure I prefer to be slightly on the neurotic side.

Whilst all this may be valid and true, how are we going to prevent the "wrong people" from using this kill switch? Will it be hardware based, in which case, how will we be sure it won't be triggered/used remotely if we install a different OS on the device? Or if some script kiddie found a way of activating it by exploiting an insecure app?

(new hollywood armaggedon scenario: terrorists threaten to detonante a phone bomb that would activate kill switches around the world, bringing down entire civilizations)

Yes, a technological solution might exist for the problem; question is, is this one the right one? Are we going to stop looking for alternatives?

No, they meant Ctrl-X , Y

The main thing that is wrong with the Internet is that it's still an academic plaything.

It was invented for use in a lab, and extended for use by trustable peers across the country. Then someone opened the floodgates.

What we need is a base infrastructure that is paranoid by design, not trusting by nature.

Oh and one that is capable of handling bazillions of entities on it.

Reading the original article on Les Echos.fr, it seems to me this is not law but an agreement between a coalition of enterprise owners and the unions - they've signed an agreement to implement this.

La semaine dernière, après six mois de négociation, le patronat des sociétés d’ingénierie et de conseil et des bureaux d’études (Syntec et Cinov) a signé avec la CFDT et la CGC (56% de leurs salariés à elles deux) un avenant à l’accord de 1999 sur les 35 heures qui pourrait avoir valeur d’exemple.

"Last week, after six months of negotiation, [ a union of ] bosses of engineering, consulting and design departments (Syntec and Cinov) signed with CFDT and CGC [workers' unions] (56% of their joint workforce) an ammendment to the 1999 agreement on the right to 35 hour working week which could set an example [to the rest of the country?]."

A third union that didn't sign, the CGT, is actually deploring the fact that it still has a loophole allowing it to be ignored, and a previous agreement between the two camps to try and improve working conditions was struck down by a court of law:

Cela suffira-t-il à convaincre les juges? L’avenant est un nouvel épisode du feuilleton juridique, que les signataires espèrent être le dernier dans leur profession. En avril 2013, la Cour de cassation avait invalidé le précédent dispositif, jugeant le contrôle de l’amplitude et de la charge de travail insuffisant.

Will it be enough to convince the judges? The amendment is a new episode in this jurisdiction saga, which the signatories hope to be the last in their profession. In April 2013, a high court rejected their last attempt, judging that the control of the amplitude and amount of work insufficient.

French journalistic style is not as easy to decipher as English-language journalism -- the French style is very fond of appearing as literary as possible. I'll post extra translations at some point if anybody wants.

Anybody who has tried to put a bog-standard user on Free Software Only laptops (Yeelong or X60 exclusively) with only Free Software and no proprietary.... knows that the user runs screaming back to the motherly proprietary vendors with reinforced assurance that the FSF are nuts. And we all lose.

I'd phrase it like this:

If the advice you gave was too difficult to follow, you didn't take your audience into account. / If the advice they need requires extra knowedge/effort, be there to help them implement.

On the whole however I think the idea is spot on. Could do with some <h1> and <h2> lines to help the TL;DR crowd.

TDF should be pushing their scriptable LibreOffice, and point out the benefits of not having to purchase it either now or in the future, the freedom of open formats, and also the benefits from a "smart kids" point of view to giving them an open-sourced office suite they can tinker with.

If companies see value in using Microsoft's full suite and stack, more power to them both. In the mean time, from an educational, budget and general open formats point of view, LibreOffice is the way to go.

Heck, if it's about kids' programming skills, and if the kids think they can improve the scriptability of the application itself, they could even submit their own patches and features to LO. Not so with MSO.

I know you've said you're trying to avoid screwing it up, but if you want, the CentOS wiki is pretty good for explaining what and why, and since it's a kernel firewall, it applies to Ubuntu too. In fact, I suspect all other "firewall tools" are basic GUI frontends to iptables. If you are indeed concerned about firewalling (though not quite as concerned as crypto-specialists), you probably at least want to have a go at it manually with some easy to understand notes

When in doubt, try it on a virtual machine of course.

I put together a general, documented, script that I run on all my new installs; comment out any lines you don't need. nixCraft has some notes on restarting the Ubuntu iptables/firewall under what I assume is upstart.

Indeed, by physical standards he stole nothing as the owner (licensor) of the software still has it.

Normally software theft can be counted in lost sales due to leakage...

.... and let's face it. Microsoft lost nothing from the leak itself.

Where have we seen in consumer space the ability to rollback an uncompleted install? Once it's installed, the only way back is to find a previous installer, nuke, and reinstall.

Indeed, and since way before too.

It used to be that you never went for the x.0. Nowadays, we have to be wary of getting any x.y.0