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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 65 declined, 61 accepted (126 total, 48.41% accepted)

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Idle

Submission + - Stupid Burglar Nabbed by Backup Program (perens.com)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "A Berkeley, California, burglar engineered his own arrest, and that of his girlfriend, when he stole a laptop and used it as his personal computer. He didn't realize that the laptop had an automatic backup program, and that the photos he took were being copied to his victim's backup repository. Berkeley police recognized him, and his location, from the photos."
Biotech

Submission + - Swine Flu To Be Renamed - After Colbert! (perens.com) 1

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "The World Health Organization will no longer refer to Virus A(H1N1) as "Swine Flu", citing ethnic reactions to "swine", for example among middle-eastern cultures who feel that swine are unclean. Or, is it because meat packers are concerned that people might stop eating pork in fear of the virus? WHO suggests that the public select a new name for the virus. I suggest that we all start calling it The Colbert Flu, after the commedian and fake pundit who asked his audience to stuff a NASA poll so that a Space Station module would be named after him. What can we do to make the name stick?"
Security

Submission + - A Cyber-Attack on an American City (perens.com)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes in the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. So I decided to change that."
Networking

Submission + - A Vertical Market Seeks Open Standards (earthweb.com)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Of all the critical industries crying out for Open Standards, who is campaigning for them in their own industry today? Is it the manufacturers of voting machines, who must establish high standards to safeguard democracy? Or the medical records system vendors?

Nope, it's the makers of casino slot machines.

Bruce Perens writes about how WMS Gaming (Williams, the old pinball manufacturer) has retained him to promote and drive Open Standards in their industry."
Linux Business

Submission + - Microsoft and Apache: What's the Angle (earthweb.com)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Microsoft and Apache, What's the Angle? is a piece I've written for Datamation, exploring the new relationship of Microsoft and the Apache project, how it works as an anti-Linux move on Microsoft's part, and what some of the Open Sourcers are going to do about having Microsoft as a rather untrustworthy partner. — Bruce"
Space

Submission + - Did Genetic Material Come From The Stars? (technocrat.net)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "An important component of early genetic material, found in meteorite fragments, has been confirmed to be extraterrestrial in origin.

The materials they have found include the molecules uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the molecules that make up DNA and RNA, and are known as nucleobases. The team discovered the molecules in rock fragments of the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in Australia in 1969."
Linux Business

Submission + - Nokia and Linux: How They Can Live Together (technocrat.net)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Ari Jaaski of Nokia is concerned that the Linux developers need to learn to live with DRM, SIM-locking, and "IPR". But they won't. Fortunately, Nokia can do all that it wants with Linux, while being GPL2 and even GPL3-compatible.

The key is knowing how to draw bright lines between different parts of the system. That's a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is "bright" in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side."
Linux Business

Submission + - Nokia Wants to Educate Linux Developers (technocrat.net)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Ari Jaaksi of Nokia wants to educate the Linux developers: "There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."

Of course Jaaksi's concerned that developers are unsympathetic to technologies that attempt to shackle the customer. He acknowledges that such technologies "aren't the Open Source way". And those developers have put their preference in writing, with the GPL and especially GPL3, which requires that there be means to change the software in embedded devices without disabling any of the functionality.

Here's how two communities with radically different desires can live together."
Linux Business

Submission + - Red Hat Settles Patent Suits (technocrat.net)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Red Hat has settled patent suits with Firestar Software, Inc., Amphion, and Datatern on a patent covering the Object-Relational Database Model, which those companies asserted was used in the jBoss Hibernate package — not in Red Hat Linux. The settlement is said to protect upstream developers and derivative works of the upstream software, thus protecting the overall Open Source community. Full terms of the settlement and patent licenses are not available at this time."
GNOME

Submission + - Above My Pay-Grade: Miguel de Icaza and Novell-MS (technocrat.net)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Miguel de Icaza's recent speech at the MIX 08 convention is a revelation. Finally, a year after Novell entered a patent deal with Microsoft that was widely perceived as a betrayal of the company's Open Source partners, Miguel has mustered some public criticism of the deal:

I'm not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community.
At the same time he bemoans the the betrayal of a community that Miguel actually led, he shows the problem attitude among engineers and programmers like Miguel that makes such bad faith possible: The decision was above my pay grade."
Editorial

Submission + - Bruce Perens Tears Into Mitt Romney (technocrat.net)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "Bruce Perens tears into Mitt Romney over proposing to send USD$20 Billion in tax dollars to Detroit automakers, and Romney's preference for American cars. Perens reminds Romney that the biggest automotive factory in Northern California builds Toyotas, as is true in many other states. Perens tells Romney how Detroit automakers masterminded the purchase and destruction of over 100 mass transit systems around the country, putting our societies in worse shape, dirtying the very air we breathe, and causing global warming."
Software

Submission + - Web Services Without Pain: gSOAP Writes Your XML (technocrat.net)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "The downside to web services is that they look as if they were designed by Bertrand Russell and Donald Knuth, from first principles as if they were a theorem in Principia Mathematica. Their rampant anal-retentiveness enables machine analysis and machine generation, at the cost of making any human who writes them work like a machine. But now we are freed from this toil: there's Open Source software that will write them for us."

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