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Comment Re:The petition is still open, everyone(!) can sig (Score 1) 420

by moeffju (#28354601) Attached to: A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany

The petition has closed with 134.014 signatures. These will now be validated and dupes, obvious fakes etc. will be sorted out, but nevertheless, the petition was overwhelmingly successful - the most successful online petition in Germany so far, in fact!

However, it is fairly certain that the law will be passed anyway, despite it being unconstitutional. The fight will go on ...

Keep checking Twitter: http://twitter.com/FranziskaHeine http://twitter.com/netzpolitk http://twitter.com/Mitzeichner http://twitter.com/saschalobo http://twitter.com/moeffju

Germans: There will be demonstrations etc., keep an eye around. It's not over yet.

Comment The petition is still open, everyone(!) can sign (Score 2, Interesting) 420

by moeffju (#28353195) Attached to: A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany

By law, everybody(!) can sign, regardless of age, nationality, place of residence, etc.

There's a step-by-step guide plus video (in English) on how to sign the petition if you don't understand German: http://www.piratenpartei-bayern.de/Signing_the_e-petition_for_Non-Germans - also some more info is on the digg article: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Official_Petition_against_German_Internet_censorship

Also, the petition system's servers suck, and the system is badly implemented. They barely sustained random link traffic, Slashdot will probably reduce it to a smouldering pile of ash. But, post away!

More information can also be found on Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=netzsperren+OR+Zensursula+-RT

The main petitioner twitters at http://twitter.com/FranziskaHeine

Petition statistics are available at http://sejmwatch.info/petition-internet-zensur.html (in German)
Cellphones

Palm Pre Does Not Get US Tethering Either 232

Posted by kdawson from the cutting-the-cord dept.
fermion writes "The Register is reporting that Palm has sent a note to the Pre Dev Wiki asking it to stop discussing tethering. Palm is worried that its US carrier partner, Sprint, is none too eager to have users tether the game-changing tetherable smart phone. While the communication was informal, not legal, the development forum is evidently eager to avoid any possibility of lawsuits, so has rapidly agreed. Perhaps, like the iPhone, the Pre is going have a vigorous underground. What is interesting is that the Pre, like the iPhone (allegedly), can be tethered outside of the US; but even those customers are being denied apparently lawful information to satisfy the US exclusive agents."
Science

Buckyballs Polymerized Into Buckywires 71

Posted by kdawson from the buck-for-your-thoughts dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Scientists have found a way to join buckyballs together so that they form buckywires. The wires form when buckyballs are dissolved in an aromatic hydrocarbon called 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene. The solvent links the balls together to make wires shaped like a string of pearls, which then precipitate out. This relatively simple procedure opens the door to industrial-scale manufacture. Buckywires ought to be efficient light harvesters because of their great surface area and the way they can conduct photon-liberated electrons. But perhaps the area of greatest interest is drug delivery. The researchers suggest that buckywires ought to be safer than carbon nanotubes because the production method is entirely metal-free. This contrasts with the production of nanotubes, which are formed in a reaction catalyzed by metallic nanoparticles."
Censorship

A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany 420

Posted by kdawson from the sun-going-down dept.
Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."

Comment Everybody can sign, regardless of nationality, age (Score 1) 2

by moeffju (#28347843) Attached to: The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany

By law, everybody(!) can sign, regardless of age, nationality, place of residence, etc.

There's a step-by-step guide plus video (in English) on how to sign the petition if you don't understand German: http://www.piratenpartei-bayern.de/Signing_the_e-petition_for_Non-Germans - also some more info is on the digg article: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Official_Petition_against_German_Internet_censorship

Also, the petition system's servers suck, and the system is badly implemented. They barely sustained random link traffic, Slashdot will probably reduce it to a smouldering pile of ash. But, post away!

More information can also be found on Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=netzsperren+-RT

The main petitioner twitters at http://twitter.com/FranziskaHeine

Petition statistics are available at http://sejmwatch.info/petition-internet-zensur.html (in German)
Censorship

Submission + - The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany (netzpolitik.org) 2

Submitted by
tmk
tmk writes: "Germany is on the verge of censoring its Internet. On Thursday the German parliament Bundestag will adopt a law to block Internet sites in order to fight child pornography. In the last months the German net community tried to stop the new law, spreaded the word from Twitter to the mainstream media that the new law won't help against child abuse. The netizens started the biggest parlamentary petition in Germany which was supported by 130000 citizens and fought with wikis and internet memes against the established political structures. Activists even helped to remove over 60 websites containing child pornography in 12 hours — proving that internet blocking is an ineffective method to fight child pornography. But the net community didn't succeed at last. The German Federal Police will soon begin to distribute a blacklist to German providers."
Censorship

China's Green Dam, No Longer Compulsory, May Have Lifted Code 116

Posted by timothy from the when-the-levee-breaks dept.
LionMage writes "Much has been made previously of how China's Green Dam software must be installed on all new PCs in China, and of more recent revelations that the software may create exploitable security vulnerabilities or even provide the Chinese government with a ready-made botnet to use for potentially nefarious purposes. (One of those prior articles even discusses how Green Dam incorporates blacklists from CyberSitter.) Now the BBC is reporting that Solid Oak's CyberSitter software may have had more than just a compiled blacklist lifted from it. Solid Oak is claiming that actual pieces of their code somehow ended up in Green Dam. From PC Magazine's article: 'Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates.'" Relatedly, reader Spurious Logic writes that Green Dam won't be mandatory after all, according to an unnamed official with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Programming

Erlang's Creator Speaks About Its History and Prospects 48

Posted by timothy from the still-coy-on-the-meaning dept.
Seal writes "Erlang, originally created at Ericsson in 1986, is a functional programming language which was released as open source around 10 years ago and flourished ever since. In this Q&A, Erlang creator Joe Armstrong talks about its beginnings as a control program for a telephone exchange, its flexibility and its modern day usage in open source programs. 'In the Erlang world we have over twenty years of experience with designing and implementing parallel algorithms. What we lose in sequential processing speed we win back in parallel performance and fault-tolerance,' Armstrong said. He also mentions how multi-core processors pushed the development of Erlang and the advantages of hot swapping."
Google

Google Sued Over Deceptive Search Results 246

Posted by CmdrTaco from the we-come-from-a-land-down-under dept.
biggles266 writes "Internet goliath Google claims to rank search results by relevance, but the search engine engages in deceptive conduct by selling off the top positions to commercial partners, a Sydney court has heard. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is taking world-first legal action in the Federal Court against Google Inc over allegedly deceptive conduct related to sponsored links on its websites. The ACCC has brought a two-pronged case against Trading Post and Google — including subsidiaries Google Australia and Google Ireland — for potentially misleading consumers. The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate "organic" search results — those ranked by relevance — from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page."

GCC 4.2.1 Released 449

Posted by Zonk from the licensing-with-drama dept.
larry bagina writes "GCC 4.2.1 was released 4 days ago. Although this minor update would otherwise be insignificant, it will be the final GPL v2 release; all future releases will be GPL v3. Some key contributors are grumbling over this change and have privately discussed a fork to stay as GPL v2. The last time GCC forked (EGCS), the FSF conceded defeat. How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?"
OS X

iPods Don't Run OS X 164

Posted by kdawson from the all-you-need-is-an-undocumented-ls-option dept.
Redrum writes "Everyone thinks that Apple's iPod runs an OS called Pixo, and that the iPhone ushered in a brand new epoch based on OS X. That myth has been busted: the iPod runs Apple's own Mach/BSD kernel, and Pixo is only used as a graphics layer. Daniel Eran outlines the story behind Pixo and what OS X means for Apple. It's no joke; the story was confirmed by Tim Monroe, a member of Apple's QuickTime engineering team, as is easy to verify yourself." Update: 07/15 19:48 GMT by KD : Turns out to be an April Fools joke.

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