Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission Summary: 0 pending, 8 declined, 7 accepted (15 total, 46.67% accepted)

×
Privacy

Submission + - Wiretapping law sparks rage in Sweden

castrox writes: This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA — Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order. Further more, by law, the sitting Government will be able to instruct the wiretapping agency on what to look for. It also nullifies press tip or whisle blowing anonymity.

Many heavy agencies within Sweden have weighed in on this, with very hefty critic, e.g. SÄPO (akin to FBI in the U.S.), the Justice Department, ex. employees of FRA, and more. None the less, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote Yes to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents.

The new proposed law has given rise to a MASSIVE people uprise which will likely result in huge street protests on Wednesday. People have been completely surprised since this law has not gotten any media uptake and for the most part been kept in the shadows.

After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens and street protests the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources.

There is more information on the Swedish (in English) newspaper, The Local. Specifically, see here, here and here.
Media

Submission + - Prince, Village People to sue The Pirate Bay (thelocal.se)

castrox writes: YMCA to all! It appears the long since famous artists Prince and The Village people are getting ready to sue The Pirate Bay, if only they can figure out who to sue.

The Local:

Sandberg has been hired on behalf of the US musicians by British law firm Web Sheriff, which wants to claim "several million dollars" in damages in both Sweden and the United States, he said.
It's unclear how many tracks of Prince and Village People are being swapped via TPB at this moment. They are to seek damages nonetheless, of course..

Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told The Local that Giacobbi [Web Sheriff president] had "no clue" what he was doing but that he was welcome to try to sue the file sharing site.
You might remember TPB taunting Web Sheriff multiple times in their much appreciated legal threats section.

Google

Submission + - Gmail backdoor vulnerability (theregister.co.uk)

castrox writes: From the article on The Register:

The technique comes courtesy of Petko D. Petkov, a researcher at GNU Citizen, who writes in a blog post that the backdoor is installed simply by luring a victim to a specially crafted website while logged in to Gmail. The naughty site uses a slight of hand known as a multipart/form-data POST, which writes a filter to Gmail that causes all email with attachments to be forwarded to collect@evil.com.
Looks like a nasty "POST injection" from a malicious site you're visiting while logged into Gmail is all it takes to alter your Gmail settings. Apparently, Google is investigating and has no further comments at this time.

Operating Systems

Submission + - Dell considers bundling virtualization on mobos (arstechnica.com)

castrox writes: "Ars Technica is reporting on a rumor at The Register that Dell is considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? Quoting Ars Technica:

Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this.
Though it looks like more than a rumor, considering the following quote from The Register:

Dell CTO Kevin Kettler today confirmed these plans during a speech here at LinuxWorld, saying the company expects to see major performance and power-saving improvements by dumping a hypervisor in flash.
"

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft patent infringement suit tossed (arstechnica.com)

castrox writes: "Ars Technica reports on the just tossed verdict on the claimed Microsofts patent infrigement concerning MP3 compression, filed by Alcatel-Lucent. Quoting Ars:

A judge has overturned a jury's $1.52 billion award in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft. Ruling that Microsoft had not violated one of the two patents in question after all, Judge Rudi Brewster threw out the verdict and indicated that the second patent was on shaky ground as well.
The future of software patents, it seems, will be dominated by people in courtrooms."

Intel

Submission + - EU slaps Intel with formal antitrust charges (arstechnica.com)

castrox writes: "Quoting Ars Technica

Intel faces a long and costly legal battle in Europe after the European Commission formally lodged antitrust charges against the world's leading CPU manufacturer.

Seems Intel has been playing dirty. A suit filed by AMD last year includes Intel making at least one sell-only-Intel deal in Germany. Sort of interesting since this is what e.g. Microsoft does on a daily basis?"

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft to simplify downgrades from Vista to XP

castrox writes: It seems Microsoft have taken a notice that users may want to run XP instead of Vista. The new deal is to simplify downgrading for the OEMs. Currently, all OEMs must call Microsoft whenever a downgrade is done. After this "simplification" OEMs may submit batches of keys to Microsoft which will save time.

According to the Microsoft blog on ZDNet, the "downgrade software" will still need to be supplied by the end user. The deal is rather perplexing — it does not seem like you can convert the license since the only eligible versions for downgrading is Ultimate and Business.

Effectively, it seems nothing has changed. More on the downgrade "rights" (warning: PDF) here.

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao doesn't take sides; it gives birth to both wins and losses. The Guru doesn't take sides; she welcomes both hackers and lusers.

Working...