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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 107 declined, 51 accepted (158 total, 32.28% accepted)

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Submission + - Creative Commons: 59 hours to reach $500k

Submitted by Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: CreativeCommons.org is appealing for donations to help support them in 2010. Lawrence Lessig, a familiar name to Slashdot readers and the founder of Creative Commons, writes: "[T]he White House, Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia all adopted CC licenses. That happened this year. And now that it has happened, we all have an even stronger obligation to make sure this thing that thousands helped build over the past 7 years continues to grow and succeed and inspire." Their goal is to raise $500,000 by December 31st to ensure funding for the coming year. They've got just $80,000 left to go. You can donate here.
The Courts

Submission + - FSF Settles Suit Against Cisco (fsf.org)

Submitted by
Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: "The Free Software Foundation has announced that they've settled their lawsuit with Cisco (reported earlier here). In the announcement, they say that Cisco has agreed to appoint a Free Software Director for Linksys, who will report periodically to the FSF; to notify Linksys customers of their rights; and to make a monetary donation to the FSF. An accompanying blog entry explains further: "Whenever we talk about the work we do to handle violations, we say over and over again that getting compliance with the licenses is always our top priority. The reason this is so important is not only because it provides a goal for us to reach, but also because it gives us a clear guide to choosing our tactics. This is the first time we've had to go to court over a license violation.""
The Media

Submission + - USENIX opens access to conference proceedings (usenix.org)

Submitted by
Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: "USENIX has announced that is is opening up public access to all of its conference proceedings. Previously, these had been restricted to USENIX members until one year after publication. From LISA to FAST, from WOOT to USENIX' own eponymous conference, if you're in any way working in, for, near or around IT you want this information. Kudos to USENIX for doing this!"
Privacy

Submission + - Letter casts doubts on Yahoo! China testimony (duihua.org)

Submitted by
Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: "A hand-written letter, believed to be from Chinese police, has surfaced that sheds new light on the case of Chinese reporter Shi Tao. The letter "is essentially a standardized search warrant making clear that Chinese law enforcement agencies have the legal authority to collect evidence in criminal cases. This contradicts Yahoo's testimony to Congress in 2006 that they "had no information about the nature of the investigation." "One does not have to be an expert in Chinese law to know that 'state secrets' charges have often been used to punish political dissent in China," says Joshua Rosenzweig, manager of research and publications for The Dui Hua Foundation. Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his reporting on the Tianamen Square massacre."
Security

Submission + - OpenBSD: Now 2 remote holes in more than 10 years

Submitted by
Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: "CoreLabs released an advisory today about a remote hole in OpenBSD. The vulnerability, which affects versions 3.1, 3.6, 3.8, 3.9, 4.0 and the upcoming 4.1 release (for code obtained prior to Feb 26th; the upcoming CD is fine), comes from the way OpenBSD's IPv6 code handles mbufs. Theo's terse announcement is an interesting counterpoint to Core Security's timetable, which details their efforts to convince the OpenBSD team of the flaw's seriousness. The workaround is to block IPv6. Discussion continues on Undeadly.org, and a short discussion of the flaw's details can be found here."
Unix

Submission + - OpenBSD netboot problems - unknown error code 72

Submitted by Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: While trying to get a Sparc machine to boot disklessly so I could install OpenBSD on it, I kept getting these errors:
Boot: bsd.rd
Automatic network cable selection succeeded : Using TP Ethernet Interface
Using BOOTPARAMS protocol: ip address: 192.168.23.25, hostname: roark
root addr=192.168.23.10 path=/home/aardvark/openbsd-sparc64/chroot
open /sbus@1f,0/ledma@e,8400010/le@e,8c00000/bsd.rd: Unknown error: code 72

tcpdump showed that the machine was trying to contact the NFS server (192.168.23.10) by udp on port 0; the server kept responding with an ICMP port unreachable error. Googling turned up one other person back in '99 (!) who had the same problem, but no fix.

The problem? PEBCAK: I'd symlinked the bsd.net file to the IP address in hex (ie, ln -s bsd.net C0A81719) but had neglected to append the architecture after that. So after I did this:

ln -s bsd.net C0A81719.SUN4

everything worked.
Media

Submission + - History "Unavailable for reasons of copyright&

Submitted by
Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: "When, in 1992, US Vice-President Dan Quayle accused the TV show Murphy Brown of 'mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice'", the clip showed up in many TV news shows. And when the show replied, that reply was broadcast to millions of viewers. Yet, as Lawrence Lessig complains, "the part of our culture that is recorded in the newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on videotape is not". A researcher who decided to see just how hard it would be to get the video clips of this debate verified this recently: Quayle's speech was forbidden from being distributed digitally "for reasons of copyright", the Murphy Brown episode is "not currently available to the public", and he had to pay $111 for four brief clips of news broadcasts on the brouhaha. His final report says that "the resulting gap between our expected ability to review public discourse and our ability to do so was surprising, and suggests that much public debate about access to the historical record, and the need to prevent off-air taping, is based on false assumptions.""
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Theo de Raadt: OLPC "Morally Bankrupt"

Submitted by
Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: "As reported by Undeadly.org, Theo de Raadt has written an open letter to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project criticizing their willingness to sign NDAs in order to write drivers for Marvell's wireless chipset. Claiming strong agreement from RMS, he wrote: "I've heard claims that you (OLPC members, Red Hat employees) think this relationship with Marvell will eventually prompt/teach them to be more open in time. Do you not realize how much of a DELUSION the history of free/open operating systems shows that point of view to be?" He also cited part of a a private reply from Jim Gettys, VP of Software Engineering for OLPC saying that "Free and open software is a means to an end, rather than the sole end unto itself for OLPC," and agreed with a fellow developer that OLPC's stance was "morally bankrupt". In return, Gettys wrote: "At anything like this price and power point, there simply isn't anything else on the market that remotely resembles that particular Marvell part. There are no other alternatives given our constraints on power and cost....Marvell is not in a position to open their wireless firmware as it is currently dependent on the third party operating system kernel [for the chipset's embedded ARM processor] that they do not own. A GPL Linux device driver for the Marvell wireless chip, the Libertas driver, still under development but also fully functional can be found in our GIT tree.""

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