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Editorial

Encryption? What Encryption? 500

Posted by Soulskill from the these-are-not-the-files-you're-looking-for dept.
Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton writes with his take on the news we discussed early this morning about the UK government's prosecution of two people who refused to disclose their encryption keys: "Is it possible to write a program that enables you to encrypt files without drawing suspicion upon yourself if anyone ever seizes your computer? No; a program by itself, no matter how perfectly written, couldn't do this because you'd still attract suspicion just for possessing the software. You'd need a social element driving the program's popularity until it gets to the point where people no longer look suspicious just for having the program installed. Here are some theories on how that could happen — but it would be a high bar to clear." Hit the link below for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.
Games

Submission + - ioquake3 1.36 Gold

Submitted by
Time Doctor
Time Doctor writes: "The de-facto standard in Quake 3 engine technology, ioquake3, has hit version 1.36 recently. It includes a garbage bag full of improvements: in-game VOIP; optional external Mumble (voip); OpenAL; IPV6; Anaglyph stereo rendering; Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; New SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; Improved console command auto-completion; Persistent console command history; Improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; Colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems; Multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders); PNG format support for textures. Of course there are even more fixes for security holes and other bugs in there. So if you don't like ads and queues in your Quake 3 experience, get a copy off of Steam and copy your data files and key into your ioquake3 directory."
Perl

Perl Migrates To the Git Version Control System 277

Posted by Soulskill from the git-on-up dept.
On Elpeleg writes "The Perl Foundation has announced they are switching their version control systems to git. According to the announcement, Perl 5 migration to git would allow the language development team to take advantage of git's extensive offline and distributed version support. Git is open source and readily available to all Perl developers. Among other advantages, the announcement notes that git simplifies commits, producing fewer administrative overheads for integrating contributions. Git's change analysis tools are also singled out for praise. The transformation from Perforce to git apparently took over a year. Sam Vilain of Catalyst IT 'spent more than a year building custom tools to transform 21 years of Perl history into the first ever unified repository of every single change to Perl.' The git repository incorporates historic snapshot releases and patch sets, which is frankly both cool and historically pleasing. Some of the patch sets were apparently recovered from old hard drives, notching up the geek satisfaction factor even more. Developers can download a copy of the current Perl 5 repository directly from the perl.org site, where the source is hosted."
United States

Submission + - US Border Guards Enforcing Copyright, Trademark an (pressrepublican.com) 1

Submitted by
twitter
twitter writes: "A Fordham University artist was detained and accused of copyright violations by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers because she had a sketchbook.

"U.S. citizens who've traveled to the places I've been need to be looked at. A half hour at the computer gave the agent cause to put me into another suspicious category, meriting a full car search. She (the agent) took my keys and went through my car."

"After going through my (laptop) computer, digital camera, cell phone, business cards, suitcase, reading materials, boxes of yarn and crochet tools, she returned with my sketchbook. I was taken to a room and told to sit on a bench with handcuffs at both ends."

"My sketchbook puzzled her," Zempel said. "It was a cartoon sketch. They couldn't understand what I was doing. She said, 'just what were you doing in Canada? We think you're engaged in some kind of copyright infringement'."

Producing a University ID saved her from arrest and further detention but she's understandably intimidated and upset. She renamed her project, "Homeland Security Blanket."

So now you know, the US Border patrol has been turned into a Federal copyright cop and the quality of such work. As Customs and Border Protection spokesman Theodore Woo said, "Time is set aside for intellectual-property-rights training." We already knew that your political beliefs could keep you from being able to cross the border from this previous abuse. Now we know that original artwork can get you arrested there for "piracy".

My feeling is that this was in part due to her political leanings as well. She does not know what the second trigger was for her search but too many people have been added to these "terrorist" lists for political reasons. Besides the CodePink case above there's Republican National Convention pacifist arrests before protests, which have lead to charges and the recent Maryland State Police abuse. The US is in dire need of regime change."

IBM Ships Fastest CPU on Earth 410

Posted by Zonk from the glixchip-of-tau-alpha-ceti-still-beats-it-in-lab-tests dept.
HockeyPuck writes "The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. 'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. 'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.'"

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