Julie188 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google to pay $500M over fake drug ads (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @12:22PM

Julie188 writes: "Regulators will announce Wednesday that Google will pay $500 million to settle government charges that it has illegally shown ads for online pharmacies that operate outside the law. Web sites are liable for ads on their sites from advertisers that break federal criminal law."

Submission + - OIN fights to limit Nortel patent sale (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Monday August 22, 2011 @01:42PM

Julie188 writes: "The leader of the Open Invention Network has put out an all-call to help it fight the pending sale of Nortel's patent portfolio to a consortium of vendors led by Apple and Microsoft. Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN, wants developers and users to step up and share their viewpoints and stories with the Department of Justice investigating the sale. The consortium hopes to get regulatory OK and close the deal in the third quarter. At issue is if the new owners of the patents would use the patents to sue for patent infringement in order to hinder the growth of Android and other up-and-coming open source mobile devices. Bergelt hopes that the DOJ can be swayed to rule on this sale the way it ruled on the purchase of Novell's patents. In April, the DOJ limited the sale of Novell's patents by making the patents subject to both the GPL and the OIN license, among other restrictions."

Submission + - Can the SPDX spec stop FOSS license violations? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Thursday August 18, 2011 @05:06PM

Julie188 writes: "Ever since Verizon was sued by BusyBox and the Software Freedom Law Center over GPL violations in its FiOS devices (in 2008), an entire industry has sprung up to help enterprises and developers avoid inadvertent license violations. Many of those vendors, and a host of other industry bigwigs, have been working on a method to share license information on open source packages as bits and pieces of code get used and modified. On Wednesday, the Linux Foundation and FOSSBazaar released a new specification they hope will do just that. The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is a data exchange specification that tracks license information in a standardized way and allows it to travel across the software supply chain."

Submission + - Most enterprises plan to be on IPv6 by 2013 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @12:18PM

Julie188 writes: "More than 70% of IT departments plan to upgrade their websites to support IPv6 within the next 24 months, according to a recent survey of more than 200 IT professionals conducted by Network World. Plus, 65% say they will have IPv6 running on their internal networks by then, too. One survey respondent, John Mann, a network architect at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said his organization has been making steady IPv6 progress since 2008. "Mostly IPv6 has just worked," he said. "The biggest problem is maintaining forward progress with IPv6 while it is still possible to take the easy option and fall back to IPv4.""

Submission + - Microsoft lost 35% marketshare since releasing WP7 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Julie188 on Friday July 08, 2011 @06:45PM

Julie188 writes: The release of Windows Phone 7 hasn't diminished the downward spiral for Microsoft in the smartphone market, according to figures released by comScore. Despite generally good reviews for WP7, Microsoft's U.S. smartphone market share has dropped by 35 percent since it went on sale last November. You think that's bad? Research in Motion lost an even bigger chunk.

Submission + - Harmony project pushes lawyers off FOSS's back (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Friday July 08, 2011 @04:23PM

Julie188 writes: "Harmony is an effort that was begun and shepherded by Amanda Brock, the general counsel at Canonical. The intent was to create a small collection of consistently-worded contribution agreements (both licenses and assignments) for free and open source projects to use to reduce the friction such agreements can cause when they’re encountered for the first time by corporate counsel unfamiliar with FOSS licensing. Version 1.0 of the documents have launched. As court cases involving software copyrights and patents continue to sprout forth, we don’t have the liberty of ignoring the changes brought on by the law. Neither do we get to follow Dick the Butcher’s suggestion in Henry the Sixth and kill all the lawyers."

Submission + - Microsoft uses social networks to find spammers (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday June 29, 2011 @08:06PM

Julie188 writes: "Do you believe in the theory that only good people have lots of social media friends, while "bad people" don't have friends and don't leave many traces of themselves online? According to recent Microsoft Research, a spammer email account can be identified by the lack of connectivity to other people. They developed a social graph so online service security could differentiate spammer email accounts from legitimate users' accounts."

Submission + - Users angered over frequent Microsoft cloud outage (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday June 22, 2011 @03:16PM

Julie188 writes: "On the cusp the launch of the next-generation Office 365 cloud, Microsoft's BPOS flaked out again. BPOS is Microsoft's hosted Exchange, SharePoint and instant messaging service. Office 365 is the successor to BPOS and is supposed to launch sometime in June. The outage is the fourth in two months, frustrated users say. To add a layer of insult, the application's Health Dashboard was also down, leaving IT administrators completely in the dark. Microsoft blamed a hardware failure for the outage (not sure what that says about the cloud's failover, cluster capabilities, but obviously Microsoft wouldn't be likely to blame the software for the problems). Interestingly, with the Health Dashboard down, Microsoft alerted and informed users of the progress of the outage via Twitter. This BPOS outage lasted for about two hours."

Submission + - LexisNexis open sources Hadoop competitor (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Friday June 17, 2011 @01:04PM

Julie188 writes: "Look out Hadoop, there is a (sort of) new kid in town that promises to handle the big data problem better than you can. HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster) Systems from LexisNexis has been evolving over the past 10 years in the pressure cooker environment of LexisNexis, handling terabytes and sometimes petabytes of data. Now that engine is being open sourced by LexisNexis and made available to everyone."

Submission + - AT&T builds battery friendly smartphone apps (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @01:54PM

Julie188 writes: "Who doesn't love Pandora Radio? But listening to it on a smartphone, especially an Android phone, seems like the fastest way to kill the battery. A group of researchers at AT&T Labs are calling on app makers to fix such problems by building more energy-aware apps. Not surprisingly, Pandora is one of their test subjects. (Facebook is another). They have developed a tool that helps app developers figure out when their apps really need full power connections (download speeds of around 7.1 Mbits/sec) or when the app can by on a proposed "intermediate state", which consumes half the power and transmits less data at a slower speed, typically by sharing a low-speedchannel, (typically 16 kbps)."

Submission + - Oracle releases RHEL 6.1 clone (channelregister.co.uk)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Tuesday June 07, 2011 @11:53AM

Julie188 writes: "From the "that didn't take long" category, Oracle has already released a clone of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 6.1, despite Red Hat's efforts to stop the cloning of its flagship distro. Oracle's "unbreakable Linux" is not CentOS, which is still back at the RHEL 5.6 level. In the Oracle Linux 6.1 release notes, Oracle notes that it tweaked 61 packages from Red Hat's code. Of course some of those tweaks were to remove a few Red Hat-specific items and logos."

Submission + - SpamCop irresponsibly blocking Yahoo e-mail? (networkworld.com) 2

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday June 01, 2011 @01:01PM

Julie188 writes: "SpamCop has decided to block all e-mail coming from Yahoo servers, even if the e-mail is legit and part of Yahoo's business cloud services. Many service providers or ISPs are using SpamCop. The email user often has no idea that they are using it and also no idea that email is getting blocked. The attitude at SpamCop seems to be that if a company wants to use a free, "spammy" mailserver for important business mail then the business gets what it deserves. But that's a fallacy. Many businesses are paying for Yahoo's cloud e-mail services."

Submission + - Oracle to give OpenOffice.org to Apache Incubator (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Wednesday June 01, 2011 @12:36PM

Julie188 writes: "Oracle has finally officially spilled the beans: It's proposing OpenOffice.org as an Apache Incubator project — and not handing it to The Document Foundation. Oracle had announced earlier this year that it would be passing the torch to the community, but failed to provide any specifics about the ultimate destination. The Document Foundation is the organization behind the OpenOffice fork, LibreOffice."

Submission + - EEF pressed Apple to indemnify developers (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Friday May 20, 2011 @04:55PM

Julie188 writes: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is calling on Apple to indemnify its developers from Lodsys — a patent troll that's alleging patent infringement on the in-app purchasing used by iOS apps. (That's the technology developed by Apple and forced on many of its developers.) The letters Lodsys has been sending out came to light on May 13th, and apparently developers have been asking Apple for help to no avail."

Submission + - Paralyzed Man Walks Thanks to Spinal Implant (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

Julie188

on Friday May 20, 2011 @02:21PM

Julie188 writes: "A young man paralyzed by an injury to his spinal cord has regained the ability to stand for short periods, take steps with help and move his legs and feet at will, with the help of an electrical stimulator implanted in his lower back. Researchers from the University of Louisville, UCLA and California Institute of Technology collaborated to help the man, as part of a study to gauge how continual direct electrical current may impact the spinal cords of paralyzed patients."

Slashdot Top Deals