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Submission + - South Korea Begins To Deprecate ActiveX

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The reliance on proprietary technologies to deliver web services varies from country to country. South Korea's ActiveX problem has been in the news before. Yonhap brings us a short report that the government plans to finally start cleaning up this troublesome technology from public websites later this month, as Korea gears up to create a more friendly Internet environment. The country's online financial websites and shopping malls often use ActiveX to have their payments and identification programs securely downloaded to users' personal computers.

Submission + - Greenpeace co-founder: Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic (heartland.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dr. Patrick Moore is the co-founder, chair, and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

Submission + - DuckDuckGo Donates $100,000 Among Four FOSS Projects

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: As the search engine company's annual habit, DuckDuckGo has chosen to advance four open source projects by donating them. The primary focus this year was to support FOSS projects that bring privacy tools to anyone who needs them. $25,000 goes to The Freedom of the Press Foundation to support SecureDrop, which is an whistleblower submission used to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation was given $25,000 to support PrivacyBadger, which is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking your surfing habits. Another $25,000 arrives at GPGTools to support GPG Suite, which is a software package for OS X that encrypts files or messages. Finally $25,000 was donated to Riseup to support Tails, which is a live operating system that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.

Submission + - OEMs Allowed To Lock Secure Boot In Windows 10 Computers (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Hardware that sports the "Designed for Windows 8" logo requires machines to support UEFI Secure Boot. When the feature is enabled, the core software components used to boot the machine are verified for correct cryptographic signatures, or the system refuses to boot. This is a desirable security feature, because it protects from malware sneaking into the boot process. However, it has an issue for alternative operating systems, because it's likely they won't have a signature that Secure Boot will authorize. No worries, because Microsoft also mandated that every system must have a UEFI configuraton setting to turn the protection off, allowing booting other operating systems. This situation is bound to change now. At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft said that the setting to allow Secure Boot to be turned off will become optional when Windows 10 arrives. Hardware can be "Designed for Windows 10", and offer no way to opt out of the Secure Boot lock down. The choice to provide the setting or not, will be up to the original equipment manufacturer.

Submission + - Gabe Newell Understands Half-Life Fans, Not Promising Any Sequels

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Half-Life 3 is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated games in history. While Valve transitioned from the revolutionary series that brought the company most of its original success, to online games like Team Fortress, Dota and Left 4 Dead, people still desperately want to believe that there is more coming for Half-Life.

In a recent podcast interview he had with Geoff Keighley, Valve CEO Gabe Newell opens up the current situation a bit more: "I'm a fan of TV shows, I'm a fan of writers, I'm a fan of movies, I'm a fan of games and I certainly understand why people are like, you know, hey I remember this awesome experience and I'm starting to get worried that I'm never going to have it again. I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel. [...] We aren't going to go all retro because there are too many interesting things that have been learned. The only reason we would go back and do a 'super classic' kind of product is if a whole bunch of people internally at Valve said they wanted to do it, and had a reasonable explanation for why it was."

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