Comment Re:Just for a browser? (Score 3, Interesting) 240
Because GTK2 is bit-rotting and GTK3 is bound to GNOME.
Comment Do Canonical? (Score 5, Insightful) 240
By saying that, do "the Free Software Community" mean making Linux accessible to many users that wouldn't have dreamt of using it before? Being the first ones to provide a distribution that you can actually recommend to a computer illiterate?
And then again, why should anyone have a say on what toolkit Google decide to use for their own browser? Did "the Free Software Community" have anything to say when it was slang vs ncurses, emacs vs vim, gtk vs qt, gnome vs kde? No, because exploring alternate solutions is good for the whole community in the long run. Please stop this poisonous attitude of finding "enemies of the people" among people who dare write free software.
Comment Today's standards (Score 2) 66
http://www.google.com/dashboar... draws a much more accurate depiction of every espect of my life, and it's just one piece of paper away from the government. Today the stasi espions would be unemployed.
Comment Re:Not a subsidy? (Score 2) 126
They got the subsidized fuel price, by mistake, even for private flights unrelated to NASA.
Comment Re:Not a subsidy? (Score 2) 126
In fact, arguably it's not NASA that got ripped. It's the federal government that lost money, between $3.3 million and $5.3 million according to TFA, in taxes that would be collected from that fuel, had Google execs bought it like everyone else does.
Basically what is happening here is poor people paying to let the richest people on Earth fly they own private jets. But the company that is benefiting from that is only in personal union with Google, so "don't be evil" doesn't apply here. IANAL.
NASA Admits It Gave Jet Fuel Discounts To Google Execs' Company 126
An anonymous reader writes "In a letter to Senator Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee, NASA 'admits the agency was selling jet fuel at below market rates to H2-11, a company owned by the founders of Google.' The agency has since raised its rates to reflect market prices but has informed the Senator that it would be impossible for NASA to recoup the money that tax payers have paid in order to subsidize Google's jet fuel discounts."
Comment Google itself is creepy... (Score 1) 341
...with its obsession for spying every personal detail of every individual of the world with every possible means and gathering the collected data into their archives forever. The only difference between Google glass and all the other products of Google is that glass makes the espionage physically evident.
YouTube Threatens To Remove Scientist's Account Over AIDS Deniers' DMCA Claims 268
First time accepted submitter EwanPalmer writes "YouTube is threatening to remove the account of a scientist who made a series of videos debunking claims made in an AIDS denialist movie over copyright infringement disagreement. Myles Power is claiming the producers of controversial 2009 documentary House of Numbers are attempting to censor him by submitting bogus DMCA claims against him. He says his movies do not breach copyright laws because his films are educational and therefore fair use. The 'AIDS denialist' documentary makers say they instead amounted to 'propaganda.'"
Krugman: Say No To Comcast Acquisition of Time Warner 187
nbauman writes "In his column, 'Barons of Broadband' New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says: 'Comcast perfectly fits the old notion of monopolists as robber barons, so-called by analogy with medieval warlords who perched in their castles overlooking the Rhine, extracting tolls from all who passed. The Time Warner deal would in effect let Comcast strengthen its fortifications, which has to be a bad idea. Comcast's chief executive says not to worry: "It will not reduce competition in any relevant market because our companies do not overlap or compete with each other. In fact, we do not operate in any of the same ZIP codes." This is, however, transparently disingenuous. The big concern about making Comcast even bigger isn't reduced competition for customers in local markets — for one thing, there's hardly any effective competition at that level anyway. It is that Comcast would have even more power than it already does to dictate terms to the providers of content for its digital pipes — and that its ability to drive tough deals upstream would make it even harder for potential downstream rivals to challenge its local monopolies.'"
New Encryption Scheme Could Protect Your Genome 78
sciencehabit writes "As the cost of genetic sequencing plummets, experts believe our genomes will help doctors detect diseases and save lives. But not all of us are comfortable releasing our biological blueprints into the world. Now cryptologists are perfecting a new privacy tool that turns genetic information into a secure yet functional format. Called homomorphic encryption, the method could help keep genomes private even as genetic testing shifts to cheap online cloud services."
Google's Definition of 'Open' 168
An anonymous reader writes "One of Android's biggest draws is its roots in open source. It enables a broad range of device manufacturers to work from the same code base, and provides app developers with more insight into the platform they're building on. But openness isn't a binary condition — there are many shades of gray. While Android is technically very open, from a practical standpoint it's much more difficult for device makers to distance themselves from Google, if that's their preference. 'Phone manufacturers and carriers that want to use Google's services must conform to Google's device standards, a stricter requirement than what basic AOSP requires. For some, this is a catch. For others, it's merely the cost of doing business. ... [Dianne Hackborn, one of Android's tech leads,] defends Google's right to include proprietary services, and to keep them proprietary, saying that its no different than any other proprietary app on Android. That's not entirely true, since Google does keep some API development to itself, but to its credit the company does open-source most of the new APIs introduced to Android.'"
Ubuntu To Switch To systemd 279
GuerillaRadio writes "Following the decision for Debian to switch to the systemd init system, Ubuntu founder and SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth has posted a blog entry indicating that Ubuntu will now follow in this decision. 'Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that's a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously.'"
Comment The use for the EU (Score 2) 88
The EU is losing the support of the masses even in the most euro-enthusiastic countries. As an institution in its whole, people feel that the EU is inexorable when it's time to demand new taxes, dismantle the welfare state, or regulate the length of cucumbers, but then is completely unhelpful, and sometimes harmful, when it's time to solve the problems of the citizens (migration, transportation, environment, defense, foreign policy...) instead of the problems of the banks. Each member state pursues exclusively its own interest with no vision watsoever of the long-term good of the whole continent.
As an EU supporter, I'm afraid that at the next european elections we'll see a triumph of every kind of populism / demagogy / nationalism, left-wing and right-wing, and the people who get elected will work exclusively to suppress the EU from the inside. And I have few arguments against them left. The EU can't carry on by having only the support of the "elite" who can understand the advantages of the common market. They need to conquer back the trust of regular people, or they will disappear.
IE Zero-Day Exploit Used In Attack Targeting Military Intelligence 58
wiredmikey writes "Security researchers from FireEye have discovered a new IE 10 Zero-Day exploit (CVE-2014-0322) being used in a watering hole attack on the US Veterans of Foreign Wars' website. According to FireEye, attackers compromised the VFW website and added an iframe to the site's HTML code that loads the attacker's page in the background. When the malicious code is loaded in the browser, it runs a Flash object that orchestrates the remainder of the exploit. Dubbed 'Operation SnowMan' by FireEye, the attack targets IE 10 with Adobe Flash. According to a recently-released report from CrowdStrike Strategic Web Compromises (SWC), where attackers infect strategic Websites as part of a watering hole attack to target a specific group of users, were a favorite attack method for groups operating out of Russia and China. FireEye believes the attackers behind the campaign, thought to be operating out of China, are associated with two previously identified campaigns: Operation DeputyDog and Operation Ephemeral Hydra. 'A possible objective in the SnowMan attack is targeting military service members to steal military intelligence,' FireEye said."
EU Parliament Rejects Asylum For Snowden 88
cold fjord writes "Euronews reports, 'MEPs have rejected a demand from the European Green Party that urged EU governments to grant asylum to whistleblower Edward Snowden. The move came during the adoption of a European Parliament committee inquiry into the NSA spying scandal. As Claude Moraes, a centre-left British parliamentarian, explains, member states have the final say over who they allow to remain inside their borders. "The European Union does not have the power to grant asylum as the European Union, so this is something for individual member states," he told euronews. "And the issue of asylum within this report therefore does not become a relevant issue for the European Union."'"
