thodi - Slashdot User

Submission + - Theo de Raadt Responds to Linux Licensing Issues (undeadly.org) 1

Submitted by

bsdphx

on Saturday September 01, 2007 @12:35AM

bsdphx writes: "Theo has been known as "difficult," but this response to the recent relicensing controversy is thoughtful and well penned. Through this whole process I've learned some new things about both GPL and BSD licensing, and especially about combining the two."

Submission + - Open standards proposed as compulsory in Norway

Submitted by

Norwegian Anonymous Coward

on Friday May 11, 2007 @12:11PM

Norwegian Anonymous Coward writes: "In Norway a standards committee appointed by the government has proposed open standards in documents and web pages presented to the public by state and municipalities. In short, they want to make usage of PDF and ODF compulsory for document file types, and the character set ISO/IEC 10646, represented by UTF-8 for web pages. The minister overlooking usage of IT in government, Heidi Grande Røys, says that citizens should not have to rely on software from one supplier (Micros...) only when interacting with Norwegian autorities.

The documents are in Norwegian.

The IT-minister interviewed by Dagbladet (Norwegian newspaper) http://www.dagbladet.no/dinside/2007/05/11/500391. html

Proposal from the committee:
http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad/dok/Horinger/ Horingsdokumenter/2007/Horing — ODF.html?id=466498 "

Submission + - RIM make Blackberry software available

Submitted by

Jack Small

on Monday April 23, 2007 @02:44PM

Jack Small writes: "The BBC is reporting that Research In Motion (RIM) will be making software available that will allow other mobile devices to work as Blackberries, this is currently limited to those devices running Windows Mobile 6.0. While this announcement must have been some time in the planning, it must surely help deflect some of the bad PR resulting from the recent downtime. RIM's press release can be found here."

Bookmark Device Convert Carbon Dioxide to Fuel via Solar Energy (zecharyw.com)

by zack2007 on Saturday April 21, 2007 @06:26PM

Submission + - Whatever happened to superconductors?

Submitted by

AltGrendel

on Monday March 05, 2007 @04:25PM

AltGrendel writes: "Jonathan Fildes of the BBC wrote that 'In 1987, Ronald Reagan declared that the US was about to enter an incredible new era of technology. Levitating high-speed trains, super-efficient power generators and ultra-powerful supercomputers would become commonplace thanks to a new breed of materials known as high temperature superconductors (HTSC). "The breakthroughs in superconductivity bring us to the threshold of a new age," said the president. "It's our task to herald in that new age with a rush."

But 20 years on, the new world does not seem to have arrived. So what happened?'

He shares what he found in this article."

Submission + - WordPress download site cracked

Submitted by JavaRob on Monday March 05, 2007 @02:45PM

JavaRob writes: From the WordPress development blog: "If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately."

Fortunately, they got a tipoff, but it's not clear how long the altered download (the cracker altered a couple of files to add in remote execution capabilities) would have stayed up otherwise.

Note: the cracker did not sneak in code by posing as an OSS developer (the common FUD scare scenario...); they just managed to crack one of the site's servers, and altered the download directly.

Apparently, WordPress has taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. Personally, I'm wondering about ways browsers and/or operating systems might be improved to automate checksum validation for downloaded executables.

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