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Submission + - Robin Williams makes sure advertisers can't use his image for 25 years (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by EwanPalmer
EwanPalmer writes: Prior to his death, Robin Williams made sure his image could not be used in any film or advertisement for at least 25 years.

Before he died in August, the actor signed over his name, signature, photograph and likeness to the Windfall Foundation, a charitable organisation set up by his legal representatives, which meant Williams will not be featuring in any advert or digitally inserted into any film until at least 11 August 2039.

It is believed the ruling is an updated form of a privacy contract and could be seen as a landmark model for how celebrities control use of their image after their death.

Submission + - Indiana University computer science grad explains why new law hurts (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Indiana University (IU) Bloomington computer science grad Patrick Kozub, class of 2014, explains why the big data business he is creating with three other grads won’t be located in Indiana. "I won't go to a place and contribute economically when my interests are not protected, and my interests do not hurt anybody else," he said. "I never had issues of people not accepting me," said Kozub, who came out as gay while a high school student in Indiana. "I'm very proud of the fact that I was there and made so many wonderful friends and learned so many good things." He said he knows no one who would approve of such discrimination he believes is allowed under the state’s “religious freedom” law. Meanwhile, an Indy Big Data conference in May has lost seven sponsors, including Oracle and EMC, in response to the law. “This law is having an immediate and definite negative impact on technology in the state of Indiana,” said conference organizer Christine Van Marter.

Submission + - systemd team forks the Linux kernel (distrowatch.com)

Submitted by Celarent Darii
Celarent Darii writes: The systemd developers have occasionally bumped heads with developers working on other projects, perhaps most notably Linus Torvalds, lead developer of the Linux kernel. Since systemd's init software works to bring the operating system on-line at boot time, systemd needs to work closely with the kernel and this can cause problems. In fact, some conflict and proposed solutions have resulted in at least one systemd developer getting banned from contributing to the Linux kernel.

Now it appears as though the systemd developers have found a solution to kernel compatibility problems and a way to extend their philosophy of placing all key operating system components in one repository. According to Ivan Gotyaovich, one of the developers working on systemd, the project intends to maintain its own fork of the Linux kernel. "There are problems, problems in collaboration, problems with compatibility across versions. Forking the kernel gives us control over these issues, gives us control over almost all key parts of the stack."

Submission + - MS undecided on suing users of its open source .NET

Submitted by ciaran2014
ciaran2014 writes: With Microsoft proudly declaring its .NET runtime open source, a collegue and I decided to look at the licensing aspects. One part, the MIT licence, is straight forward, but there's also a patent promise. The first two-thirds of the first sentence seems to announce good news about Microsoft not suing people. Then the conditions begin. It seems Microsoft can't yet bring itself to release something as free software without retaining a patent threat to limit how those freedoms can be exercised. Overall, we found 4 Shifty Details About Microsoft's "Open Source" .NET.

Submission + - 1,000 year old eye salve recipe kills golden staph (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientist at the Univeristy of Nottingham use a recipe from an ancient medical text to successfully kill the golden staph bacteria. Bald's Leechbook calls for leeks, garlic, brass, wine and other ingredients to create an eye salve for curing an infected eyelash. The salve has been found to be effective in killing the superbug staphylococcus aureusat at least as well any modern remedy.

Submission + - Carbon nanotube fiber stimulates the brain neuron

Submitted by Jeba Qpt
Jeba Qpt writes: Rice University researchers invented carbon nanotube fibers which tested to treat patients with neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease.These fibers have high-strength, softness and high-conductivity.
The paper appeared online in the journal ACS Nano.

Submission + - China's national firewall hijacks JavaScript to DDoS GitHub (solidot.org) 3

Submitted by wzyboy
wzyboy writes: Twitter user @yegle discovers that HTTP requests to a certain JavaScript is being hijacked to some attack code, which will make reqeusts to GitHub. Since the JavaScript is used on many Chinese websites, GitHub is in fact being DDoSed. This trick is discovered by users when GitHub starts to return alert("WARNING: malicious javascript detected on this domain") in response to these DDoS requests. This will pop up a alert dialog with English text on those Chinese websites.

Submission + - Rebuilding the PDP-8...with a Raspberry Pi (hackaday.io)

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: Hacker Oscarv wanted a PDP-8 mini computer. But a buying a real PDP-8 was horribly expensive and out of the question. So Oscarv did the next best thing: use a Raspberry Pi as the computing engine and interface it to a replica PDP-8 front panel, complete with boatloads of fully functional switches and LEDs.

Submission + - Facebook invites developers to monetize Messenger at F8 conference (networkworld.com)

Submitted by smaxp
smaxp writes: For the last two years, a Facebook buy button has been expected. The company did recently introduce Payments to Messenger, foreshadowing Facebook's evolving ecommerce capabilities. At F8, ecommerce became a development platform. The large community of Facebook developers, given open access to the Messenger platform, are more likely to produce a killer Facebook ecommerce app than the company is to do so on its own.

Submission + - What evil can you actually do with a hacked wearable? (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite security companies' keenness to exploit paranoia about sports/health wearables, this article contends that hackers have relatively little to gain by concentrating on the enticingly lax security of such devices, due to their extremely limited connection range, passive functionality models and habit of dumping any usable victim data into the cloud every hour in order to clear their low-spec buffers. In effect most hackers would need to be so close to their intended targets, that they might as well take 'direct action' instead of pursuing a cyber-attack.

Submission + - Live Migrating QEMU-KVM Virtual Machines

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Live migrating virtual machines is one of the key reasons to use virtualization. It's easy to spread load around, and bring servers down for maintenance. A Red Hat developer has written an in-depth article on how live migration works, on the challenges and constraints, and how they problem is being solved.

Comment Re:Why systemd took over (Score 1) 765

by jbernardo (#49222869) Attached to: Ubuntu To Officially Switch To systemd Next Monday

Nice straw man you got there. I didn't even talk of init scripts vs binary crap in my message. But I'll bite.

Init scripts have been the best solution for over 20 years, not because distro maintainers need to maintain them, but, unlike huge binary hydras obscuring the functionality, they are easy to debug and fix by a sysadmin with only small, standard and tested tools, like vi, cat, etc. When systemd breaks, you are on your own. Either you can take out the disks from the machine and try and open the obfuscated logs in another PC, or you can boot a full distro on a usb stick and do the same. In both cases, pray that the logs haven't been corrupted, as it usually happens when systemd fails to shutdown or reboot. But worst, and more important - if it is a bug in systemd or some of your use cases that isn't supported by the devs, you are well and truly fucked.

You can fuck things up with scripts, sure. The power they give might be misused by some "windows admin". But real system administrators prefer scripts to a unfixable blob with init files, because they know that scripts allow them to be in control of their systems and of being able to support their use cases, instead of having to beg to some rude, conceived developer, for a fix that most of the times will be refused because said developer doesn't see the use. And even if the request is gracefully granted by the magnanimous dev, then the sysadmin will have to wait for months until the package is available for the distribution he is running. A really good idea...

Replacing an (imagined) attack vector with a huge, real one, and losing functionality in the way can only appeal to those who have never known anything else than windows and are afraid of the complexity and the power of a truly configurable system. Really, replacing a simple init with a great collection of scripts by a huge monster, which has everything from process management to IPC to time and date to networking to binary logging inside or tied up to it? Can anyone who is not deluded or a liar claim that it isn't a huge security disadvantage?

Comment Re:KDE is only soft-depending on systemd (Score 1) 765

by jbernardo (#49204117) Attached to: Ubuntu To Officially Switch To systemd Next Monday

KDE will hard depend on systemd (logind and timedated, which according to some marketeers isn't the same as depending on systemd) in less than 6 months, in KDE 5.6. David Edmundson says so very discreetly in his blog, in a comment.

Gnome seems to have gone back a little in their objective of tying directly to logind, but they link libsystemd, so yes, they have a hard dependency on systemd. A marketeer will soon claim that depending on libsystemd is not the same as depending on systemd, but I think that is one of the reasons they keep the definition of the init daemon and the project so fluid and easy to mix, so that they can have credible denial of everything, either claiming the init doesn't do that or that the project should do that but doesn't completely mandate the init (for now).

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