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Censorship

Submission + - HardOCP bans IPs for mere mention of Adblock 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: HardOCP is a place for hardware enthusiasts to gather and exchange computer wisdom, populated with over 100,000 users and six million posts. However, mere mention of Adblock in any context on HardOCP's extensive forums is rewarded with a permanent IP ban. The Editor-in-Chief Kyle Bennett has taken a hardline stance on a site that includes subforums specifically dedicated to software discussion and even has monetary subscription forums as well. Everyone knows many sites only exist because of funding from advertising, but is this really a rewarding stance for an administrator to take?
Censorship

Submission + - Industry Canada Edits Minister's Wikipedia Article (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Lucky
Lucky writes: Michael Geist reports that the head of Industry Canada, Jim Prentice, has had his Wikipedia anonymously amended multiple times over the past week with regular attempts to remove any copyright criticism. The IP address of most of the anonymous edits trace back to Industry Canada. Industry Canada is in part responsible for Canada's copyright laws. Jim Prentice has repeatedly tried to introduce copyright reform in Canada to bring it in line with American-style copyright, public and industry backlash has delayed him each time.
The Internet

Submission + - Open Source Cloud Infrastructure - EC2 compatible (ostatic.com)

Submitted by ruphus13
ruphus13 writes: UC Santa Barbara's Computer Science department has released Eucalyptus — "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". From the article, "It turns out that [Professor] Rich and a group he works with have recently released an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. The system is called Eucalyptus, and it's available for you to use." in addition, "[Professor Rich] Wolski adds: "The goal of the project is to promote open-source community development of cloud computing services and features as well as to foster cloud computing research in the computer science and computational science research communities." " The interesting point to note is that the software is interface compatible with EC2 and uses the EC2 tools directly, so you can develop on your own hardware clusters. The software is available for download now from UCSB's Computer Science Department
The Courts

Submission + - Judge to RIAA: No more "ex parte" (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In Arista v. Does 1-33, a new RIAA case in Manhattan targeting 33 Columbia University students, the judge has refused to sign off on the RIAA's "ex parte" discovery application seeking the identity of the students. Instead, in a brief handwritten order (PDF) 'endorsed' on an adjournment request submitted by the RIAA, Judge Colleen McMahon ordered the RIAA to 'Please notify chambers when you have served defendants. Case on suspense until then.' Putting a case on 'suspense' means the case is on hold, and in this context means that nothing will happen unless and until the RIAA gives the defendants prior notice. The judge underlined the word 'when', apparently signalling that she does not even want to hear about 'if'. Perhaps judges refusing to sign off on RIAA 'ex parte' applications is starting to catch on. By the way, if the name 'Colleen McMahon' rings a bell, it might be because she was the judge presiding over the Patti Santangelo case."
Government

Submission + - City of Vienna back to Windows 2

Submitted by
bkingaut
bkingaut writes: "Slashdot readers might remember the story about the City of Vienna choosing Linux back in 2005. Now they decided to migrate back to Windows and even worse: to Windows Vista! The migration of 720 computers used in kindergartens will cost about 8 million Euros. The alleged reason for all this is a language test application for the kids that only works with MS Internet Explorer and won't be made compatible (by the producer) with firefox before 2009. Read the full story (in german) here."
The Military

Submission + - US accused of holding terror suspects on prison sh (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by 0111000001100100
0111000001100100 writes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights/print

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Does anyone else feel like the US government is pulling the wool over the sheeple's eyes?
Security

Submission + - Leaning Tower of Pisa Secure for 300 More Years

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Medieval architects only got as far as the third floor of the tower of Pisa before it began to lean in 1178 and by 1990 it had tilted more than four meters off its true vertical, with conservationists estimating that the entire 14,500-ton structure would collapse "some time between 2030 and 2040." Now the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been stabilized and declared safe for at least another three centuries after it was anchored to cables and lead counterweights while 70 tons of soil was removed from the north side — away from the lean — and cement was injected into the ground to relieve the pressure. The tilt has now returned to where it was in the early 19th century and architects say there was never any intention to straighten the 56m tower, only to stop it sinking further. Nicholas Shrady, author "Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa" says that the tower was destined to tilt from the outset because of the decision to build the tower "on what is essentially a former bog" and that the tower has previously come close to collapsing in 1838, 1934, and 1995. Although Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped cannon balls from the tower in a gravity experiment, Shrady says the myth is the "result of the overripe imagination of Galileo's secretary and first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Venezuela Appeals OOXML Decision (groklaw.net)

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "The appeals just won't stop, now Venezuela has appealed the OOXML decision, as well, which leaves us with four official appeals and a letter of protest. Of course, they have to decide whether the appeals 'conform to directives' in the next 30 days, so we can probably expect even more twists and turns. One wonders if this is the ISO's idea of consensus, or if the ISO needs to make sure standards are satisfactory before approving them, rather than after."
Censorship

Submission + - Paper's legal threats shut down community forums

Submitted by
Linker3000
Linker3000 writes: "When the Irish local newspaper "Mayo Echo" published an article (readable online as a set of PDFs through the link) referring to gays as "perverts", it sparked lively debate in the forums at castlebar.ie , one of the region's most active online communities, but things took a turn for the worse when the paper's editor objected to some of the comments and contacted the site's editors. Under threat of legal action, the site's editors bowed to pressure and all material referring to the Mayo Echo was removed and an apology published, but then the newspaper's editor decided to not accept the apology and is maintaining his threat of legal action.

In light of this, the entire castlebar.ie site has been shut down and replaced with a one page commentary [Coral Cache] on the situation, stating: "...The view of the moderators was that it is no longer possible to have a reasonably robust discussion where opinions are expressed such as people stating that they do not like the slant of a particular article or newspaper as in this case without opening themselves up to legal action. The bulletin boards were effectively the heart of the site generating the bulk of over 3.8 million hits to Castlebar.ie last month for example.

Castlebar.ie has therefore ceased operating as a direct result of this ongoing threat of legal action and the possibility that under the current Irish legal system the same thing could happen at any stage. It is no longer possible to run a voluntary website such as Castlebar.ie on a server based in Ireland regardless of where the moderators actually live..."

Regrettably it's not possible to see any of the allegedly offending forum material (unless someone wants to unearth cached copies!?), but according to one moderator, although some of the reaction to the newspaper's article were 'passionate' — on both sides of the argument — all material specifically referred to in the newspaper's correspondence was removed upon request.

Is shutting down the entire site a wise precaution or totally unnecessary and extreme? And how does the editor of the Mayo Echo — a member of the estate that champions 'freedom of the press' — justify the threat of legal action against public commentary on one of their published articles, especially since the site's editors more than complied with the takedown request irrespective of whether they were obliged to or not?"
Security

Submission + - Obama uses Linux (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "ZDNet's website posted an article about Obama's search for a security expert to plug in the holes that allowed a hacker to redirect his site (Linux/Apache, hosted by godaddy) to Hillary Clinton's (Windows/IIS hosted by rackspace)."
Databases

Submission + - MagLev: Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB Wows RailsConf (infoq.com)

Submitted by
murphee
murphee writes: "InfoQ reports: Gemstone demoed their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM to an ecstatic audience. Gemstone's Smalltalk VM allows OODBs of up to 17 PetaBytes, with none of the old ActiveRecord nonsense: the data is persisted transparently. The Gemstone OODB also takes care of any distribution, allowing the Ruby VM and data to scale across many servers (Cheerio, memcached!). There's also an earlier quite technical interview with Gemstone's Bob Walker and Avi Bryant about MagLev."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Pringles can designer dies, buried in Pringles can

Submitted by n3hat
n3hat writes: From the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles potato crisps that he asked his family to bury him in one. His children honored his request. Part of his remains was buried in a Pringles can — along with a regular urn containing the rest — in his grave at Arlington Memorial Gardens in Springfield Township.

Dr. Baur, a retired organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble, died May 4 at 89. He developed many products, including frying oils and a freeze-dried ice cream, for P&G. But the Pringles can was his proudest accomplishment, his daughter said. He received a patent for the package as well as the method of packaging Pringles in 1970.

Here's the full obit.
United States

Submission + - Obama Campaign Seeks LAMP Developers (barackobama.com)

Submitted by
kgamiel
kgamiel writes: "The Obama campaign's CTO is hiring LAMP-biased geeks to help elect the Senator in the fall (geeks for hire). What if he instead announced a Source Forge project toward the same end? Anecdotally, it seems most folks in our respective fields support Obama over the remaining field and would be willing to help for free (i.e. massive free resources), but what would such a project look like? Tools that both sides could use "equally" would not achieve the desired end. Philosophically, could the Open Source community support one side in a competition such as this? What other issues does this raise?"
Censorship

Submission + - TSA investigages former air marshal for e-mail (brucefwebster.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Jeffrey Denning used to work as a Federal Air Marshal (FAM) for the US Transportation Security Agency (TSA). He quit the TSA last year, then was called up in the US Army Reserve and went over to serve in Iraq. This past March, while still in Iraq, he received (on his private e-mail account) an e-mail addressed to current and former FAMs which suggested they contact CNN, which was preparing a report on problems with the TSA; Denning thinks he may have forwarded that e-mail on to a few more FAMs. When he got home from Iraq earlier this month, he discovered that the TSA had launched an investigation to find out who sent that original e-mail to him. Needless to say, he is not amused."
Google

Submission + - Google App Engine Pricing Announced

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "On Google I/O eve, a press release was issued with some pricing details for Google App Engine, Larry and Sergey's cloud offering. The first 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month are on-the-house. After that, CPU will cost you $0.10-$0.12 per CPU core-hour, storage will be $0.15-$0.18 per GB-month, outgoing bandwidth is $0.11-$0.13 per GB, and incoming bandwidth will set you back $0.09-$0.11 per GB. For comparison purposes, check out Amazon's EC2 prices."

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C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]

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