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Comment Partial release rings alarm bells (Score -1, Troll) 69

Partial release is more dangerous than no release at all. Without the ability to compile the entire thing for yourself and check the checksums, there is no real way to know that this is the genuine source.

Just because you open the door a crack, doesn't mean the user can see the massive spike pit hiding behind the hinge.

Government

Submission + - Hackers neutralize two US energy labs (fcw.com)

jkhenry writes: Federal Computer Week reports that beginning July 1st two Department of Energy labs were compromised, resulting in officials pulling the plug on their internet connections.
Government

Submission + - Huge Attack Hits PNNL, Forces Lab Off the Web (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: An attack against the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has forced the lab to shut off access to the Internet, and the lab's external Web site also is inaccessible right now. The attack on the lab, which conducts national security and cybersecurity research among other things, is the latest in a series of such attacks against research facilities.

The attack has been ongoing for some time, and officials have severed all incoming anf outgoing Web traffic, including email. Security experts say the attack could be part of a larger operation against ESnet, the Department of Energy's high-speed network that connects more than 40 research facilities in the US.

Comment Re:Consciously opt out? (Score 1) 312

With a motto that reads "don't be evil" (perhaps with an appended "unless it's profitable"), perhaps the better method is to discern what you actually want to get from having a Google account.

Considering Google's primary source of revenue is advertisement -- the dissemination of data -- it doesn't take much foresight to see that vast swathes of user data is also a valuable commodity that could become a tangible profit for them.

Comment The problem with Linux Mint (Score 3, Informative) 622

I changed my mother from Ubuntu to Linux Mint around a year ago, and very quickly had to switch her back due to the endless cries of "it's doing something strange!". It was indeed doing something strange -- in around a 2 week period I came across at least two updates that insisted upon pushing Ubuntu branding to core parts of the system. What is the problem with this? Well, frankly -- some LM in-house programs broke, as they weren't expecting this change, but it was their own update system that allowed it to happen.

The main problems that I see with Linux Mint is that it has a very small development team, which appears to have led to significant oversights in the past, which have caused various issues requiring user intervention (for example, fsck on boot was completely broken in LM9, and would simply hang. This was on the tracker for a very long time, with the only message of hope being 'it will be fixed in LM10'.). This would be fine for someone who was more familiar with Unix problem solving, but frankly my mum and many others like her just want to sit down with the computer and have it work without need for troubleshooting. Sure, other distros (including Ubuntu) have messed things up in the past, but they have had a large enough vocal community to get a decent consensus on how to solve the problem. Linux Mint simply doesn't.

Linux Mint does a lot of things better than Ubuntu and in general seems to understand its demographic better (as it is, perhaps, a less diverse demographic). At the present time I would hesitate to recommend it for people who just want a works-out-of-the-box-and-stays-that-way experience, however, as the caveats are simply too numerous.

Google

Submission + - Google Deleting Private Profiles

An anonymous reader writes: Google announced that it will no longer support private Google Profiles after July 31. The move comes as Google is rolling out its latest social experiment, Google+. Those who have already been admitted to Google+ will see their Google+ profiles replace their Google Profiles. At the moment the only information Google requires users to reveal is their name and gender.

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