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Government

Senate Bill Rewrite Lets Feds Read Your E-mail Without Warrants 403

Posted by timothy from the as-if-they-wouldn't-otherwise dept.
concealment writes "A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law. [Sen. Patrick] Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge."
Open Source

Video ARM Code for Raspberry Pi Goes Open Source (Video) Screenshot-sm 91

Posted by Roblimo from the more-open-than-ever-before dept.
"The Raspberry Pi project relies heavily on Open Source and Free Software — heck, it's targeted by more than one Linux distro. But some of the hardware stack that makes up the Pi itself needs closed-source code to run; the code that runs all kinds of low-level hardware is often closed source and closed off. I got wind from project instigator and lead Eben Upton that the system-on-a-chip at the Raspberry Pi's heart is about to get a lot more open. Says Upton: "We're about to open source all of the remaining closed source ARM code for the Pi. This will make BCM2835 the first ARM multimedia SoC with a fully-open-source ARM user and kernel implementation." I spoke for a few minutes with Alex Bradbury, who runs the Linux software work for the project, about licensing and what the new code means not only for Raspberry Pi but for users and other OS projects." (Note: the sound quality on this translantic Skype call is poor. We suggest reading the transcript.) Get the code while it's hot.
Open Source

Ubuntu Isn't Becoming Less Open, Says Shuttleworth 98

Posted by Soulskill from the frantic-flamingo dept.
sfcrazy writes "While the larger Ubuntu community was busy downloading, installing and enjoying the latest edition of Ubuntu yesterday, a post by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth ruffled some feathers. He gave the impression that from now on only select members of the community will be involved in some development and it will be announced publicly only after completion. There was some criticism of this move, and Shuttleworth responded that they are actually opening up projects being developed internally by Canonical employees instead of closing currently open projects. He also made a new blog post clarifying his previous comments: 'What I offered to do, yesterday, spontaneously, is to invite members of the community in to the things we are working on as personal projects, before we are ready to share them. This would mean that there was even less of Ubuntu that was NOT shaped and polished by folk other than Canonical – a move that one would think would be well received. This would make Canonical even more transparent.'"
SuSE

SUSE Slowly Shows UEFI Secure Boot Plan 190

Posted by Soulskill from the at-a-stately-and-majestic-pace dept.
itwbennett writes "One blog post at a time, SUSE is revealing its plan for getting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) to boot on machines with UEFI Secure Boot. The short version: 'For now, it seems, SLES will implement an approach similar to that used by Fedora,' writes Brian Proffitt. '[Director of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Olaf] Kirch's first blog entry on Tuesday merely introduced the problem of UEFI Secure Boot. Today's blog only specified the use of the shim bootloader.' Just dying to know what's next? Tune in to the SUSE blog."
EU

EU Commissioner Reveals He Will Ignore Any Rejection of ACTA 253

Posted by Soulskill from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept.
Dupple tips a story at Techdirt about comments from EU commissioner Karel De Gucht, who made some discouraging remarks to the EU International Trade committee about the opposition to ACTA: "If you decide for a negative vote before the European Court rules, let me tell you that the Commission will nonetheless continue to pursue the current procedure before the Court, as we are entitled to do. A negative vote will not stop the proceedings before the Court of Justice. ... If the Court questions the conformity of the agreement with the Treaties we will assess at that stage how this can be addressed." De Gucht also spoke about proposing clarifications to ACTA if Parliament declined to ratify it, which, as Techdirt points out, doesn't make much sense: "Remember that ACTA is now signed, and cannot be altered; so De Gucht is instead trying to fob off European politicians with this vague idea of 'clarifications' — as if more vagueness could somehow rectify the underlying problems of an already dangerously-vague treaty."
Government

Schneier Calls US Stuxnet Cyberattack a 'Destabilizing and Dangerous' Action 351

Posted by timothy from the excuse-me-while-I-pluck-out-your-eye dept.
alphadogg writes "Revelations by The New York Times that President Barack Obama in his role as commander in chief ordered the Stuxnet cyberattack against Iran's uranium-enrichment facility two years ago in cahoots with Israel is generating controversy, with Washington in an uproar over national-security leaks. But the important question is whether this covert action of sabotage against Iran, the first known major cyberattack authorized by a U.S. president, is the right course for the country to take. Are secret cyberattacks helping the U.S. solve geopolitical problems or actually making things worse? Bruce Schneier, whose most recent book is 'Liars and Outliers,' argues the U.S. made a mistake with Stuxnet, and he discusses why it's important for the world to tackle cyber-arms control now."

Comment Re:Improvements (Score 3, Insightful) 38

by Uncle Warthog (#40325245) Attached to: OpenSUSE Team Reworking Dev Model, Delays 12.2 Release

I'm not disappointed in a slower release cycle. It should improve the quality of each release.

I think so too. I've been using openSUSE since it was SuSE Linux Professional and, before that, just S.u.S.E. Linux. They had an approximately annual release schedule for the newer, pre-Novell, versions and didn't try to stuff in every single newest thing going. I like to think this gave them the time to make sure that the vast majority of what they did ship worked well.

Unfortunately, a combination of changing to the "me-too" scheduling of releases (IIRC, the original discussion of the release schedule was calling for 6-month releases so they could be just like Fedora; after an attempt or two to maintain that, they switched to the schedule they're on now) and turning it into a beta-test for unfinished and premature software (systemd, pulseaudio, KDE 4.0, and the disaster that was online updates starting in the 10.x versions) have really degraded the distribution from what it once was.

From what I can see this moved the emphasis from shipping a distribution with what I'd call good "fit and finish", a good selection of software almost all of which worked correctly, no nasty surprises in the base functionality of the OS, etc., to trying to ship to a schedule, ready or not and ignoring anything that didn't get them there. I know the majority of bug reports I've made in newer versions got marked "wont fix"; not "can't duplicate" or "working as designed", but "won't fix", i.e. "yes, we know about it and know that it's broken but won't do anything about it". Not a good sign for a distribution that had been previously known for its functionality and stability.

I'm hoping that this serves as a wake-up call to the developers and that the suggestions coolo and others in the discussion are making will get them back toward shipping a distribution that's closer to what the old SuSE Linux was known for. What I'm seeing in the discussion is looking good so far.
The Courts

Assange Loses Latest Round In Extradition Fight 296

Posted by timothy from the at-least-the-travel's-free dept.
Richard_at_work writes "After losing his appeal to the UK Supreme Court a couple of weeks ago, Assange's lawyer was given leave to seek a reopening of the case on particular grounds — the UK Supreme Court has now rejected those grounds and upheld its earlier ruling that Assange should be extradited, which could happen in the next few days."

Comment Because GNOME is too stupid and KDE is too slow. (Score 4, Interesting) 818

by Uncle Warthog (#40283903) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't You Running KDE?

I completely gave up on GNOME back in the 2.x range as I saw features get continually moved, removed, or just made harder to configure. I loved KDE3 and tolerated KDE4 between crashes (now, thankfully, gone in newer versions) until I realized that as KDE versions got newer and newer, they also got slower and slower on my, admittedly aging, hardware. I've since switched to XFCE and haven't looked back. Much.
Red Hat Software

Red Hat Clarifies Doubts Over UEFI Secure Boot Solution 437

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the there-goes-freedom-one dept.
sfcrazy writes "Red Hat's Tim Burke has clarified Fedora/Red Hat's solution to Microsoft's secure boot implementation. He said, 'Some conspiracy theorists bristle at the thought of Red Hat and other Linux distributions using a Microsoft initiated key registration scheme. Suffice it to say that Red Hat would not have endorsed this model if we were not comfortable that it is a good-faith initiative.'" Color me unimpressed, and certainly concerned: "A healthy dynamic of the Linux open source development model is the ability to roll-your-own. For example, users take Fedora and rebuild custom variants to meet personal interest or experiment in new innovations. Such creative individuals can also participate by simply enrolling in the $99 one time fee to license UEFI. For users performing local customization, they will have the ability to self-register their own trusted keys on their own systems at no cost." From what I can tell, the worst fears of the trusted computing initiative are coming true despite any justifications from Red Hat here. Note that the ability to install your owns keys is certainly not a guaranteed right.
Microsoft

Red Hat Will Pay Microsoft To Get Past UEFI Restrictions 809

Posted by timothy from the one-low-low-price-but-still dept.
ToriaUru writes "Fedora is going to pay Microsoft to let them distribute a PC operating system. Microsoft is about to move from effectively owning the PC hardware platform to literally owning it. Once Windows 8 is released, hardware manufacturers will be forced to ship machines that refuse to run any software that is not explicitly approved by Microsoft — and that includes competing operating systems like Linux. Technically Fedora didn't have to go down this path. But, as this article explains, they are between a rock and a hard place: if they didn't pay Microsoft to let them onto the PC platform, they would have to explain to their potential users how to mess with firmware settings just to install the OS. How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?" Note that the author says this is likely, but that the entire plan is not yet "set in stone."

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