Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Your Rights Online

Submission + - BPI Threatens to Sue The UK Pirate Party over Proxy (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Techmeology
Techmeology writes: The BPI has threatened to sue the Pirate Party for allowing people access to The Pirate Bay through its proxy service. The leader of the Pirate Party UK, Loz Kaye said his party would go to court over the issue. Kaye said that he was determined to defend his party's principles even in the face of an expensive legal battle.

Comment Re:Nothing wrong with him (Score 4, Informative) 529

by TrueSatan (#42237469) Attached to: Ubuntu Community Manager: RMS's Post Seems a Bit Childish To Me
You might consider Trisquel...it is FSF endorsed as a distribution that meets its guidelines: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html Trisquel is akin to a Ubuntu with the non-free elements removed so it shouldn't be too much of a culture shock for you should you opt to use it. Further distributions with FSF approval are on the following link as is the link to obtain Trisquel: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

Comment Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize. (Score 1) 245

by TrueSatan (#42235995) Attached to: FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50%
I can understand this in terms of setting a top priority but wouldn't each element being removed affect the short and long term viability of the project? If funding can't be provided what would be the short term and long term effects of less/no events/summits be and even if some were to be held what would be the effect of developers whose personal situation, or company support, wouldn't otherwise allow them to go then not getting a grant and, thus, not attending?

Submission + - FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50% (freebsdfoundation.org)

Submitted by TrueSatan
TrueSatan writes: Perhaps a sign of our troubled times or a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs: the FreeBSD project has sought $500,00 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers but with the end of this year fast approaching it has raised just over $280,000...far short of its target.

Submission + - Pirate bay Founder Released From Solitary Confinement (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by TrueSatan
TrueSatan writes: Pirate bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm is set to be released from solitary confinement but is still to serve the remainder of a 1 year sentence relating to Pirate Bay activities. 5 months remain of that sentence and they are to be served in a normal prison with far less restrictions on his confinement...assuming no new charges are brought against him.

He had been accused of involvement in the hacking of Swedish IT firm Logica but no charges have been substantiated in this case. He was later implicated in a second case but, once more, no charges have been substantiated against him http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-arrested-again-on-suspicion-of-new-hacking-fraud-offenses-121110/ . Given that his solitary confinement has not resulted, thus far, in additional charges and that it is far and above the intended sentence in the original case one might have thought that some reduction in sentence or other leniency was more than his due but this doesn't appear to be forthcoming.
Space

Submission + - Death of Sir Patrick Moore (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Coisiche
Coisiche writes: Breaking news on the BBC news site reports the death of Sir Patrick Moore, renowned broadcaster and astronomer who will probably be most familiar to UK readers. He might be known outside of the UK for being the presenter of the long running TV show, "The Sky at Night".



When I was growing up just about every space related news I saw was presented by him. As well some of his books on astronomy I also read a series of fictional books he wrote for a juvenile audience that featured some travels around the solar system.
Google

Submission + - Bloomberg Report Apple and Google Joining Forces on Kodak Patents Bid (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by TrueSatan
TrueSatan writes: Bloomberg report that Apple and Google have partnered to make a more then $500 million bid for the Kodak patent portfolio. The bid relates to Kodak's 1,100 imaging patents.

Kodak obtained commitments for $830 million exit financing last month, contingent on its sale of the digital imaging patents for at least $500 million.

  This is likely to be an opening bid with the final figure being far larger...by comparison a group including Apple, Microsoft Corp. and Research in Motion Ltd. bought Nortel Networks Corp.’s more than 6,000 patents for $4.5 billion out of bankruptcy last year. Google lost the auction for those patents after making an initial offer of $900 million.
Iphone

Submission + - Steve Jobs patent on iPhone declared invalid (fosspatents.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple's most famous multitouch software patents are increasingly coming under invalidation pressure. First the rubber-banding patent and now a patent that Apple's own lawyers planned to introduce to a Chicago jury as 'the Jobs patent'. U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949 covers a method for distinguishing vertical and horizontal gestures from diagonal movements based on an initial angle of movement. For example, everything up to a slant of 27 degrees would be considered vertical or horizontal, and everything else diagonal. The patent office now seems to think that Apple didn't invent the concept of 'heuristics' after all.

Submission + - Everyone in USA Under Virtual Surveillance (rt.com)

Submitted by TrueSatan
TrueSatan writes: While not shocking news to most reading this site...perhaps not even mildly surprising...it is nonetheless of note to find that we have confirmation of US actions against its own citizens.

  The spying on emails is in violation of the Us constitution. And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is, and that was signed by President Obama. Also President Bush signed it earlier as an executive order, a very similar one. It appears that the US government is seeking to prevent the matter from coming before the Supreme Court less that body finds their actions to be unconstitutional.

Personally I'll put more reliance on email encryption than on US constitutional lawyers.
Linux

Submission + - Secure Bootloader for Distributions Now Available (dreamwidth.org)

Submitted by TrueSatan
TrueSatan writes: Matthew Garrett, formerly of Red Hat, is providing a shim bootloader that will allow installation/booting of secure boot enabled computers. The shim is designed to chain boot GRUB (Grand Universal Bootloader) without the need for a distribution to obtain a key from Microsoft.

Garrett asks that further contacts regarding the shim be made to him and not to Red Hat as he no longer works there and they may not have knowledge of the product.

Submission + - Bradley Manning (Wikileaks Source) Given Hearing After 2 Years In Jail (npr.org)

Submitted by TrueSatan
TrueSatan writes: Finally Bradley Manning's military court case starts and he's only had to wait 2 years to be heard. Manning claims that while remanded in custody in Iraq he "passed out due to the heat" and "contemplated suicide" The United Nations special rapporteur on torture found Manning's detention was "cruel and inhuman." Manning wants the case against him to be dismissed because his pre-trial punishment was so severe. Manning's attorney, David coombs, has released an 11 page letter detailing the conditions of Manning's confinement. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/11/stripped-naked-bradley-manning-prison.

Manning offered guilty pleas to minor charges but not to spying, aiding American enemies or treason and those pleas have been accepted by the judge.

Submission + - Aakash tablet unveiled at U.N. (thehindu.com)

Submitted by neo12
neo12 writes: Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of Datawind, presented U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon an Aakash2 tablet during a meeting at the United Nations headquarters on Wednesday. They were accompanied by India's U.N. Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri.
Piracy

Submission + - British Pirate Party Asked To Pull Pirate Bay Proxy (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "The British Pirate Party has been asked by the music business organisation BPI to pull the plug on the Pirate Bay proxy it has been running. The Pirate Party provides a way round the court-ordered ban on ISPs providing connections to the file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay. So far the Pirate Party says the proxy is a "legitimate route" to the site, but the BPI says the Pirate Bay is "not above the law"."

Submission + - UK Governement mandate the teaching of evolution as scientific fact (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is a sotory on the BBC website that the Governement has put an extra clause in a funding bill to ensure that any new "free schools" (independant schools run by groups of parents or organisations but publically funded) must teach evolution rather than creationism or potentially lose their funding

The new rules state that from 2013, all free schools in England must teach evolution as a "comprehensive and coherent scientific theory".

The move follows scientists's concerns that free schools run by creationists might avoid teaching evolution.

Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said it was "delighted".

Sir Paul told BBC News the previous rules on free schools and the teaching of evolution versus creationism had been "not tight enough".

Submission + - Man Arrested At Airport for Unusual Watch (depletedcranium.com)

Submitted by TrueSatan
TrueSatan writes: Geoffrey McGann is in custody at Santa Rita Jail, charged with possession of materials to make a destructive device. As justification for the arrest the TSA made the following statement:

”The watch had on it a toggle switch, a series of fuses, a series of wires protruding from it, a circuit board,” Alameda County Sheriff’s Sgt. JD Nelson said. Even though the TSA found no explosives, Nelson says the bomb squad determined that McGann had all the ingredients to make a timing device for a bomb.

Additionally, Nelson says there were other strange things about McGann; his boots were two sizes too big and they were stuffed with layers of insoles, something the shoe bomber Richard Reed did, “They also had what appeared to be a homemade cavity in them,” Nelson said.

It’s a place where he could have hidden something. Nelson says his attire was also strange, “He was wearing a military style shirt which has a built-in tourniquet in the sleeves.” Soldiers learn how to tighten the tourniquet to stop bleeding if they receive an arm injury.

Nelson says it was the totality of everything they found that made them suspicious, and that led to his arrest.

He may have been wearing big shoes with insoles in them, but they did not have explosives in them. Perhaps he liked the look of big shoes or maybe he had a back problem. In either case, simply having insoles and big shoes is certainly not a crime. Although some reports say that there “appeared to be a homemade cavity” in the shoes, they are not clear as to whether there actually was one or if it just “appeared” to exist. The watch was a form of art project and further TSA claims that he covered the watch with his jacket are clearly spurious...the order of placement of items in a tray to be x-rayed is hardly proof of guilt. The shirt is a red-herring too as it is a fashion shirt that may have been inspired by something military but is hardly a proof of guilt.

While the artwork on his watch may have been illadvised in the circumstances of going through an airport does this really justify incaceration and a media blitz from the TSA aimed at character assasination so as to justify their actions?

Slashdot Top Deals

"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai

Close