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Submission + - The Fight to Save MySQL: Monty Widenius Speaks Out (earthweb.com)

Submitted by jammag
jammag writes: MySQL developer Monty Widenius is pessimistic about the database's future under Oracle. In this interview, he essentially describes it as a corporate takeover of an open source project, where it will languish without proper support. Even worse, he suggests that if Oracle's acquisition isn't overturned — highly unlikely at this point — the GPL itself will be jeopardized. "That means the laws that you have for commercial products, that you can't buy a competing commercial product to kill it, doesn't apply to open source," he says. "They will just think about MySQL being under the GPL, and the GPL not being enough to save MySQL."
Security

Insecure Plugins Ding IE, Safari, Chrome, Opera 141

Posted by kdawson from the black-powder-in-the-sandbox dept.
krebsonsecurity writes "The Web browser wars often focus on which browser is more secure, but the dirty secret is that insecure plugins are a serious threat to all browsers, from the perspectives of both stability and security. Krebsonsecurity.com features an informative look at the administration page for a popular browser exploit kit called Eleonora, which suggests that plugins like Adobe Reader and Java are leading to successful compromises for users surfing not just with Internet Explorer, but also with Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera."
Intel

Submission + - Why Microsoft Needs to Be More Interoperable (groklaw.net)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Pamela Jones (PJ) at Groklaw is recounting a buried history lesson on why Microsoft should strive to be more interoperable. Her evidence is a more than humorous email exchange (2002) between none other than Bill Gates, his minions and Intel representatives in which Gates is trying to coax Intel off of Linux — the solution they've already chosen to satisfy their needs. The problem is that Intel finds Linux too damn interoperable which sets it ahead of Windows. Internally Gates writes, 'Where are we on this Jihad? Do I need to be calling and emailing Ottelini to get this back on track?? Every day that goes by is a bad one for us on this. Despite the difficulty we need to draw the line in the sand on this one for a lot of reasons.' I guess eight years later not a whole lot has changed. As PJ notes in summary, Microsoft essentially courted Intel and held their hand to making changes to Windows just to bring it up to 'acceptable' for their compatibility needs. Intel would have been working for Microsoft by giving them the requirements people needed for interoperability. All of this specifically to get Intel off of Linux and back into Microsoft's pocket. If Intel had gone with Windows you'd have to be questioning the business sense of open source versus being nickeled and dimed forever.
Privacy

Submission + - TSA Nominee Withdraws after Privacy Violations

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that Erroll Southers, the Obama administration's choice to lead the struggling Transportation Security Administration, has withdrawn his name from consideration just weeks after revelations that he had provided misleading information to Congress about incidents two decades ago in which he inappropriately accessed a federal database to obtain information about his estranged wife's new boyfriend, possibly in violation of privacy laws. In a statement released by the White House, Southers blamed congressional critics motivated by "political ideology" for the troubles that overshadowed his nomination. "It is apparent that this path has been obstructed by political ideology," says Southers. "My nomination has become a lightning rod for those who have chosen to push a political agenda at the risk of the safety and security of the American people." Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid had promised to rally votes to overcome a hold on Souther's nomination and force his nomination through but such a battle would have added to the political distractions caused by the outcome of Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts, in which Republican Scott Brown won a surprise victory to capture the seat long held by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy — and deal a shocking blow to the Obama administration's domestic agenda by eroding the Democratic majority in the Senate."
Image

NASA Finds Cocaine In Space Shuttle Hanger Screenshot-sm 17

Posted by samzenpus from the doing-lines dept.
SpuriousLogic writes "NASA is trying to sniff out which employee brought a baggie of cocaine into the hangar that houses Space Shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. The space agency is preparing the shuttle for a launch to the International Space Station in March. Spaceport officials said an employee found the bag Thursday morning outside a bathroom in the restricted shuttle hangar, Orbiter Processing Facility No. 3. The employee notified security, which conducted tests confirming that a 'small amount' of cocaine remained in the bag."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 and Early Fedora 13Benchmarks (phoronix.com)

Submitted by
ScuttleMonkey
ScuttleMonkey writes: "Given that early benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx were less than encouraging, Phoronix decided to take the latest alpha out for a spin and has set it side-by-side with an early look at Fedora 13. "Overall, there are both good and bad performance improvements for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 in relation to Ubuntu 9.10. Most of the negative regressions are attributed to the EXT4 file-system losing some of its performance charm. With using a pre-alpha snapshot of Fedora 13 and the benchmark results just being provided for reference purposes, we will hold off on looking into greater detail at this next Red Hat Linux update until it matures.""

Submission + - How could Airnergy actually work? (engadget.com)

Submitted by dan_lurie
dan_lurie writes: At CES last week, RCA announced Airnergy, a system which supposedly gathers enough power from existing WiFi signals to charge your gadgets. Common sense (and some rough calculations) suggest the signal strength required to induce sufficient power in an Airnergy device is way beyond any WiFI router/AP I've ever heard of. Despite this, one assumes RCA wouldn't announce a product that's entirely made up. How could this thing actually work?
Censorship

Submission + - Canadian censorship takes down 4500 sites (theyesmen.org) 2

Submitted by
uncadonna
uncadonna writes: "According to activist group "The Yes Men", the government of Canada has shut down two parody websites criticizing Canada's poor environmental policy. The article goes on to claim that "In response to Environment Canada's request, Serverloft immediately turned off a whole block of IP addresses, knocking out more than 4500 websites that had nothing to do with the parody sites or the activists who created them. Serverloft was shown no warrant, and never called the web hosting company about the shutdown.""

Submission + - Prevent my hosting provider from rooting my server (gnu-designs.com) 3

Submitted by
hacker
hacker writes: "I have a heavily-hit public server (web, mail, cvs/svn/git, dns, etc.) that runs a few dozen OSS project websites, as well as my own personal sites (gallery, blog, etc.). From time to time, the server has "unexpected" outages, which I've determined to be the result of hardware, network and other issues on behalf of the provider. I run a lot of monitoring and logging on the server-side, so I see and graph every single bit and byte in and out of the server and applications, so I know it's not the OS itself.

When I file "WTF?" style support tickets to the provider through their web-based ticketing system, I often get the response of "Please provide us with the root password to your server so we can analyze your logs for the cause of the outage." Moments ago, there were 3 simultaneous outages, while I was logged into the server working on some projects. Server-side, everything was fine. They asked me for the root password, which I flatly denied (as I always do), and then they rooted the server anyway, bringing it down and poking around through my logs anyway. This is at least the third time they've done this without my approval or consent.

Is it possible to create a minimal Linux boot that will allow me to reboot the server remotely, come back up with basic networking and ssh, and then from there, allow me to log in and mount the other application and data partitions under dm-crypt/loop-aes and friends?

With sufficient memory and CPU, I could install VMware and run my entire system within a VM, and encrypt that. I could also use UML, and try to bury my data in there, but that's not encrypted. Ultimately, I'd like to have an encrypted system end-to-end, but if I do that, I can't reboot it remotely without entering the password at boot time. Since I'll be remote, that's a blocker for me.

What does the Slashdot community have for ideas in this regard? What other technologies and options are at my disposal to try here (beyond litigation and jumping providers, both of which are on the short horizon ahead)."
NASA

Submission + - Voyager Makes an Interstellar Discovery (nasa.gov)

Submitted by azoblue
azoblue writes: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.
The Courts

Submission + - woman ordered to provide facebook history to court (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by innocent_white_lamb
innocent_white_lamb writes: A woman who is suing for her inability to return to work as an administrative clerk after a traffic accident has been ordered to provide her Facebook history to "possibly provid[e] a window into what physical capacity the plaintiff has to keyboard, access the internet and communicate with family friends and associates on Facebook and thus what capacity she may have to work."

Submission + - BBC's plan to kick free/open source out of UK TV (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by bluec
bluec writes: Generally speaking, the BBC isn't allowed to encrypt or restrict its broadcasts: the licence fee payer pays for these broadcasts. But the BBC has tried to get around this, asking Ofcom for permission to encrypt the "metadata" on its broadcasts – including the assistive information used by deaf and blind people and the "tables" used by receivers to play back the video. As Ofcom gears up to a second consultation on the issue, there's one important question that the BBC must answer if the implications of this move are to be fully explored, namely: How can free/open source software co-exist with a plan to put DRM on broadcasts?

Submission + - Best filesystem to use for external drives? 1

Submitted by rufey
rufey writes: I've recently embarked on a project to rip my DVD and CD collection to a pair of external USB drives. One drive will be used on a daily basis to access the rips of music and DVDs, as well as store backups of all of my other data. The second drive will be a copy of the first drive, to be synced up on a montly basis and kept at a different location. The USB drives that I purchased for this are 1 TB in size and came pre-formatted with FAT32. While I can access this filesystem from all of my Windows and Linux machines, there are some limitations. Namely, the filesize on a FAT32 filesystem is limited to 4 Gb (4 Gb less 1 byte to be technical). I have some files that are well over that size that I want to store, mostly raw DVD video. I'll primarily be using these drives on a Linux based system, and initially, with a Western Digital Live TV media player. I can access a EXT3 filesystem from both of these, and I'm thinking about reformatting to EXT3. But on Windows, it requires a 3rd party driver to access the EXT3 filesystem. NTFS is an option, but the Linux kernel NTFS drivers (according to the kernel build documentation) only has limited NTFS write support, only being safe to overwrite existing files without changing the file size). The Linux-NTFS project (www.linux-ntfs.org) may be able to mitigate my NTFS concerns for Linux, but I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable. At some point I'd like whatever filesystem I use to be accessible to Apple's OS-X.

With those constraints in mind, which filesystem would be the best to use? I realize that there will always be some compatability problems with whatever I end up with. But I'd like to minimize these issues by using a filesystem that has the best multi-OS support for both reading and writing, while at the same time supporting large files.

Comment Re:Prescriptions are.... (Score 1) 215

by maxfresh (#30517180) Attached to: Virtual Visits To Doctors Spreading
That's not correct. Not all prescription medications are controlled substances. Controlled substances are a subset of prescription medications that have a high potential for abuse, such as narcotics, for example. They are specified in the Controlled Substances Act, and are regulated by the DEA. Controlled substances have much tighter controls placed on their prescriptions than other prescription drugs, such as limits on the number of pills that can be prescribed at one time, the number of refills permitted, requiring the use of special prescription forms, etc. In addition, prescriptions written for controlled substances are monitored, and prescribers can face investigation if they appear to be over prescribing them.

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