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Submission + - U.S. Government Seeks to Keep Megaupload Money Because Kim Dotcom Is a Fugitive

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice told a Virginia federal judge that Kim Dotcom and cohorts have no business challenging the seizure of an estimated $67 million in assets because the Megaupload founder is evading prosecution. The government brought criminal charges against Dotcom in early 2012, but he's been holed up in New Zealand awaiting word on whether he'll be extradited. The government got antsy and this past July, brought a civil complaint for forfeiture in rem, a maneuver to firmly establish a hold over money from bank accounts around the world, luxury cars, big televisions, watches, artwork and other property allegedly gained by Megaupload in the course of crimes. Dotcom is fighting the seizures by questioning the government's basis for asserting a crime, saying "there is no such crime as secondary criminal copyright infringement," as well as challenging how the seized assets are tied to the charges against Dotcom. But according to the U.S. government, Dotcom doesn't get the pleasure of even making the arguments. In a motion to strike, the government cites the doctrine of fugitive disentitlement, which bars a person from using the resources of the court if that person is aware of prosecution and is evading it.

Submission + - CEO: Red Hat is the Kleenex of Linux (idgconnect.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A key decision Whitehurst made early on at Red Hat was to focus, taking the company away from side projects in favour of zeroing in on server operating systems and middleware.

“My general observation was that we were a single digit player in the server OS category. If it was Linux OS, we were doing well; it’s how you define the market. Red Hat is almost the Kleenex brand for Linux, the default. You rarely hear about a company failing for focusing too much.”

Whitehurst repositioned Red Hat to focus on the enterprise operating system opportunity together with JBOSS middleware, canning or reducing in scale other projects like the Exchange app store, Mugshot social network and the desktop projects he said the company was “toying with”.

“Today if JBoss were not part of Red Hat it would be the second-largest open source company by a lot, but at the time it was bumping along because we were doing too many things.”

Submission + - UNSW has collected an estimated $100,000 in piracy fines since 2008

Submitted by Jagungal
Jagungal writes: The SMH reports that The University of NSW says it has issued 238 fines — estimated to total around $100,000 - to students illicitly downloading copyright infringing material such as movies and TV shows on its Wi-Fi network since 2008.

The main issues are that the University is not returning any money to the copyright holders but is instead using the money raised for campus facilities and that it is essentially enforcing a commonwealth law.

Submission + - Amnesty releases anti-spying program for activists 1

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Amnesty International has released a program that can spot spying software used by governments to monitor activists and political opponents. The Detekt software was needed as standard anti-virus programs often missed spying software, it said. Amnesty said many governments used sophisticated spying tools that could grab images from webcams or listen via microphones to monitor people. Karl Zetterlund, a senior researcher at security firm Sentor, said the needs of law enforcement were understandably different to those of the average cyberthief. "Criminals are mainly interested in information that can somehow generate money. Law enforcement spyware may only need to collect a few pieces of identifying information, such as a net address, from the computer," he said. "Generally, policeware may be better at hiding, as normal malware often aims for strength in numbers and spreading is more important than passing under the radar." There had also been cases in the past, he said, when computer security companies collaborated with governments to ignore spyware they found planted on machines.

Comment Personally I still like the KDE Philosophy (Score 5, Interesting) 267

by Jagungal (#48089791) Attached to: GNOME 3 Winning Back Users

Personally I still like KDE's way of thinking about things, that you are far better off creating multiple workspaces all based on a common desktop environment that suit different types of hardware (Desktop, Netbook and future touch interfaces) rather than creating a monolithic interface that tries to bridge across all types of hardware it might be used on.

In any case anything is better than Unity and they both beat the rubbish Windows 8 interface.

Comment Good On Blizzard for doing this .. (Score -1) 252

by Jagungal (#47061259) Attached to: Blizzard Sues <em>Starcraft II</em> Cheat Creators

As an avid player I fully support them doing this kind of thing as one of the many things that they can do, such as doing mass bans on hacking accounts. Cheating really does put doubt into the game at times.

And ... in the next version they need to redesign the program so that information about what the other player is doing is not sent to your computer. I know some of the MOBA's do this and thus avoid this kind of cheat in their game. It would also allow them to offer a free game. The main problem now with offering a free option on ladder at least is that everyone will use hacks without worrying whether their account will be blocked.

Comment Interesting Concept (Score 1) 212

by Jagungal (#45866977) Attached to: First US Public Library With No Paper Books Opens In Texas

It is actually an interesting concept. Many Libraries that I am involved with in a support role are struggling to find a place in a modern world where the majority of people have the information that they need at their finger tips. People just do not visit Libraries in the way they used to.

They are often now becoming a community service operation for the disadvantaged and often have more people using the internet than people actually borrowing books but even then the level of visitation makes it hard to justify them staying open.

Submission + - New Vaccine May Protect People from Multiple Malaria Strains (jci.org)

Submitted by Jagungal
Jagungal writes: It is being reported that Researchers at Queensland’s Griffith University have had promising results with a new vaccine against Malaria. The malaria parasite is transmitted by mosquitoes and kills over 600,000 people each year. The vaccine which has been trialed in mice is the first to trigger an immune response to the whole malaria parasite. Past research on the development of vaccines have mainly focused on targeting specific parasite antigens. However, researchers said that many of these vaccines have failed because the antigen targets are highly variable.

Submission + - As a geek in the world of technology, do you ever envy non-tech/non-desk jobs? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Been doing this for as long as I can remember. Started with supporting end-users and workstations, advanced myself into building and supporting servers, from network infrastructures to ISPs and now designing private cloud networks. At no time through all these years I've defined what I do as a "job"; it has never been about money or benefits, but more of what I love and enjoy doing, which I can not stress on enough. I'm sure many of you already live a similar life style. However, For the past six months, I have been looking back at what I've done with my life and what I have contributed to society, trying to understand for what cause have I been doing all this work.

Unfortunately, nothing good came to mind. Nothing but uncountable hours spent sitting behind a desk staring at a computer or a laptop monitor for no less than 12 hours a day, missing out on this world, to which I have done nothing but build more and more computer networks that further contribute in eliminating the human touch, getting humanity to be more technology dependent, which we all know is man made and is prone to errors and failure.
  All this drove me crazy for six months in which I've been trying to think how I can change this. And one day, I saw a road construction worker.

Here is a man contributing into opening roads for people to get to places and be together. This got me thinking about all the networks I've worked on, with all the technology today that provides audio/video conferencing from the comfort of your couch, achieving a perfected version of what this man is trying to accomplish. Why is this man working on roads when we have advanced technology that gets humans together without the need to physically be together?

Then I looked around more and started noticing more and more people who do their daily jobs by not sitting behind a desk, getting their heads working 24/7 trying to design a virtual network that can not even be seen. They are preparing food, helping people by working at hospitals and care centers, getting people to places by driving cars and trains, educating generations by teaching.

This is the point where I thought to myself: "Jeez, it sure would be nice to do something different, and get back in touch with humanity".

At this point and age of my life, I will probably keep doing what I do, which is sad but true. However, if I'm asked, I always encourage younger generations to do something that is meaningful to them and to their society.

Oh, did I mention reading slashdot was part of all this for the past God knows how many 13+ years? heh

Kids: Stay away from drugs... and IT jobs.

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