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Space

Colbert Wins Space Station Name Contest 471

As we speculated a couple of weeks back, it has come to pass. Reader mknewman writes to tell us that comedian Stephen Colbert has won the vote to have his name immortalized (or at least until it crashes) as the moniker on NASA's newest addition to the International Space Station. We can but wonder what NASA will do now. "NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, 'The Colbert Report' to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The Big Takeover (rollingstone.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Rolling Stone posted a fairly in-depth article on the recent US government bailouts. It provides a history of what lead up to the economic collapse and how it is being used to prop up selected groups using highly secretive lending procedures from the Feds. RTFA, its lengthy but well worth it. Here is an excerpt: "Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market."
Security

Submission + - Pwn2Own 2009: IE8, Firefox, Safari Exploited 1

growing PAINS writes: ZDNet's Zero Day blog is reporting that Charlie Miller exploited a zero-day flaw in Apple's Safari browser to take control of a MacBook at this year's CanSecWest Pwn2Own contest. Miller performed the attack in a matter of seconds in a repeat of last year's contest win. Later in the day, a hacker named "Nils" exploited Microsoft's IE 8 running on Windows 7 to claim a new Sony Vaio machine. Nils also exploited Firefox and Safari for the trifecta.
Government

Diebold Admits Flaw In Voting Software 281

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "At a public hearing in California, Diebold's western region manager has admitted that the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fails to record the wholesale deletion of ballots, even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards."
The Almighty Buck

Choruss Pitching Bait and Switch On P2P Music Tax 119

An anonymous reader writes "A few months back, Warner Music Group started pitching universities on the idea of a new program where they would pay a chunk of money to an organization named Choruss to provide 'covenants not to sue' those students for file sharing, leading many in the press to claim that the record labels are looking to license ISPs to let users file share. Even the EFF has called it a 'promising new approach.' However, the details are quite troubling and suggest that the plan is really a bait-and-switch idea." (More below.)
Privacy

UK Gov't May Track All Facebook Traffic 204

Jack Spine writes "The UK government, which is becoming increasingly Orwellian, has said that it is considering snooping on all social networking traffic including Facebook, MySpace, and bebo. This supposedly anti-terrorist measure may be proposed as part of the Intercept Modernisation Programme according to minister Vernon Coaker, and is exactly the sort of deep packet inspection web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned about last week. The measure would get around the inconvenience for the government of not being able to snoop on all UK web traffic."
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Big Blue SUN?

NotQuiteReal writes: Does the Slashdot crowd have any opinions on Why IBM wants SUN? I am sure they do. Would this combo be even more competition for Microsoft?
Microsoft

Submission + - Cloudless Sky, M$'s Azure Down All Day. (boycottnovell.com) 1

twitter writes: "Boycott Novell investigates an outage that few other sites bother to mention.

An hour or so offline may be tolerable at times, but how does it feel for Microsoft to be offline for just under 24 hours? ... There are a few points worth making here: Microsoft can use beta as an excuse; Microsoft gives a bad reputation to such clouds, which may work to its advantage by reducing confidence in SaaS; Almost nobody uses Azure, so reporters neither notice nor care.

Shorter outages at Google have been harped on all the way back to their "Beta" beginning, so it's curious no one reported this outage."

Image

Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional 2nd Ed Screenshot-sm 232

r3lody writes "An extremely large amount of the information we get on a daily basis comes from what we see. Imagery is therefore very important to those who want to communicate with us. When computers had advanced enough to be able to process images in a digital fashion, the market opened up for programs that could manipulate them in many ways. While many professionals would opt for the paid programs, there is a free alternative: GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). The only stumbling block is learning how to use it properly. That is where Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Akkana Peck comes in." Read below for the rest of Ray's review.
Software

Submission + - Indian PM Candidate Promises $200 Laptop (networkcomputing.in) 2

gubm writes: "The leader of India's main opposition party said that if he's elected prime minister he'll spend the equivalent of $2 billion to procure laptops costing less than $200 each for 10 million Indian students.
The catch: To meet the affordability test, the laptops must be free of pricey applications and operating systems, such as Windows Vista or Windows 7, from commercial software vendors like Microsoft."

Movies

Submission + - Linux Foundation video contest voting begins (linuxfoundation.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone has seen Apple's clever "I'm a Mac" ads, and Microsoft's attempted responses, first with Jerry Seinfeld, and next with "I'm a PC". The Linux Foundation tries to fire back with its community-generated "We're Linux" video contest: all of the eligible videos have now been submitted and are ready to be voted on. Thankfully, the quality of Linux is much higher than the quality of some of these entries: entries range from the hilarious but inappropriate, to the well-made but creepy, to the "I'm sure it sounded good in your head". Thankfully, there are one or two that could actually be real commercials.
Software

Submission + - Microsoft Office 2007 in Linux with WINE (programmerfish.com)

Kenneth Reitz writes: "Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."
Microsoft

Submission + - Indian PM Candidate Pledges Microsoft-Free Laptops

Preedit writes: The leader of India's main opposition party said that if he's elected Prime Minister this year he'll spend the equivalent of $2 billion to procure laptops costing less than $200 each for ten million Indian students. The catch, according to this story in Infoweek: To meet the affordability test, the laptops must be free of pricey applications and operating systems, such as Windows Vista or Windows 7, from commercial software vendors like Microsoft. Instead, LK Advani, leader of India's BJP party, wants open source systems.

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