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Anti-Globalism writes: "To discuss the cheap-talk challenge, I imagine bringing together a panel in openDemocracy's office whose members have a modest track-record on debate: Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. I will use "Cmdr Taco" as the alias of web-savvy pragmatism in the discussion. Cmdr Taco founded the techno-libertarian community and forum, Slashdot in September 1997. Slashdot is still the best example of a web-made community, so I feel that Cmdr Taco should be the mouthpiece for the web in this imaginary conversation. But almost everything I have Cmdr Taco say here is made up by me. (Plato, like Cmdr Taco, also uses an alias. Plato was actually the name of an Athenian champion wrestler in the games of 406 bce. Adopting the name would be like posting in the openDemocracy forums calling myself Mohammed Ali.)
graviplana writes: From the article: " Everex, a longtime personal computer vendor, has unveiled its latest PC featuring Ubuntu Linux-based open-source productivity software and Google-based Web 2.0 applications, for a mere $198....The Everex Green gPC TC2502 includes popular applications from Google, Mozilla, Skype and OpenOffice.org. It runs gOS Initial G, which in turn is based on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 The gOS operating system features a simple and intuitive Linux Enlightenment E17 desktop interface with a Google-centric theme."
graviplana writes: From the article: "A malicious Trojan Horse has been found on several pornography web sites, claiming to install a video codec necessary to view free pornographic videos on Macs....This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via the scutil command, to change the Mac's DNS server (the server that is used to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites."
graviplana writes: From the Article: "In an often heated exchange, Torvalds accused security programmers of being too concerned with theoretical problems and not enough with practical applications.
Smack uses Linux Security Modules (LSM) which some researchers believe could be used to aid attacks on systems using the code. The researchers would prefer to see Security-Enhanced Linux as the option of choice.
"If LSM remains, security will never be a first class citizen of the kernel, " said Linux developer James Morris.
But this set Torvalds off on a rant about the impossibility of satisfying the demands of security researchers.
"You security people are insane. I am tired of this 'only my version is correct' crap," he wrote."
gasmanpopey writes: "Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire is to become the headquarters of a global plan to co-ordinate the next generation of radio telescopes...."
dm42 writes: "New Scientist is reporting that scientists in the U.S. have created the first true invisibility cloak.
From the Article: "The world's first true invisibility cloak — a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum — has been created by physicists in the US.... Their breakthrough comes just a year after US and British physicists created an invisibility cloak that worked in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. At that time, a visible light cloak was thought to be years away because of the much shorter wavelengths produced in the visible spectrum.""
MojoKid writes: "When DirectX 10 was first introduced to the market by graphics
manufacturers and subsequently supported by Windows Vista, it was generally
understood that adoption by game developers was going to be more of a slow
migration than a quick flip of a switch. That said, nearly a year later, the
question is how far have we come? This
in-depth
HotHardware article showcases many of the most popular DX10-capable game
engines, like
Bioshock,
World In Conflict, Call of Juarez, Lost Planet, and
Company of Heroes, and features current image quality comparisons versus DX9
modes with each. The article
also details
performance levels across many of the more popular graphics
cards, from both the mid-range and high-end. You be the judge. Are we there yet?"
Malarky999 writes: Oddflower is a radical new link and news sharing webapp based on self-organizing principles. It's a place for keeping links, reading webfeeds and sharing them. Oddflower uses traffic flows on the site to connect peoples' changing interests to each other and then shares related links & news items between them. Chaos theory meets spam. Should be interesting!
Marilyn Miller writes: Popular open-source blogging engine WordPress has been upgraded to 2.3 — with some unexpected nasties in the mix. As of version 2.3, WordPress now periodically (every 12 hours) sends personally-identifying information (blog name & URI) to the mothership, along with an alarming amount of information including $_SERVER dumps, a list of installed plugins, and your current PHP/MySQL settings. Most unfortunately, it does not provide _any_ way of disabling this functionality, and WordPress does not have any privacy policy protecting this information. In a 100-message thread about the issue, lead developer Matt Mullenweg defends his actions and staunchly refuses to add an opt-in interface, telling users to "fork WordPress" if they aren't willing to put up with this behavior.
rinkjustice writes: "For a behemoth juggernaut like Yahoo with buckets of cashmoney and cube farms by the acre to not understand the importance of a good subject heading is shocking, but for them to write such bad copy it rends the very fabric of reality is quite another..." Link to Original Source