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Comment What is happening with the world? (Score 5, Interesting) 268

by castrox (#26104621) Attached to: 20-Year Copyright Extensions Coming To Europe

What is happening with the world? Seriously..?

It seems the politicians are just having a nervous BREAKDOWN all over the place. If it's not about increasing surveillance, it's fighting terrorism, increasing copyright timespan and frankly, just about anything that's NOT BENEFICIAL OF CITIZENS AT ALL.

I'm so tired of all this. I was seriously thinking of giving up the fighting but instead I joined the Pirate Party (Sweden). They push their core ideas such as integrity, freedom of expression and freedom to fileshare copyrighted works (that one I don't care that much about).

I absolutely have lost interest of the politics concerning e.g. healthcare, economics, welfare, defense, infrastructure and what have you. I'm 100% focused on the integrity issues - because, if we have no private life, what the fuck do we have exactly?

Each and every one party in Sweden is pushing their agenda on the surveillance except for the Pirate Party which is non-negotiably against. Parties traditionally very concerned with integrity issues have been completely HIJACKED and are now pro-surveillance. Just the past year Sweden is about to:
1) Let the state wiretap the entire country (with un-supportable claims that this will only be done to connections crossing the border)
2) Give copyright-holders the privilege to ask an ISP for the identity behind an IP-address (what the FUCK? Swedish RIIA)
3) Implement the EU directive to store traffic data (SMS, MMS, E-mail, web, telephone, cellphone) at the very least 6 months. By the way, this includes position data - now everyone carrying a cellphone can be tracked (at least 6 months back - do you remember where you were 6 months back??). Brilliant! Swedish politicians wants to go further than this and require 1-2 years of storage.

I've had it. The politicians are so fucking ignorant that I just want to vomit. This state is in a state of hijack and it's fucking time to revolt. The Pirate Party is gaining voters.

Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Swedish Security Police (something akin of an investigative police concering itself with e.g. terrorism) asking its head judicial if they have completely lost their mind. Haven't received an answer yet.

This whole surveillance thing makes me queasy. I cannot for the life of me begin to understand the politicians reasoning for fucking up this (past) democracy like this. :-((
Mars

Mars Lander Faces Slow Death 212

Posted by Soulskill from the this-lander-will-self-destruct-in-five-months dept.
Riding with Robots writes "It's the beginning of the end for the Phoenix Mars Lander. As winter approaches in the Martian arctic, NASA says it's in a 'race against time and the elements' in its efforts to prolong the robotic spacecraft's life. Starting today, mission managers will begin to gradually shut the lander's systems down, hoping to conserve dwindling solar power and thereby extend the remaining systems' useful life. 'Originally scheduled to last 90 days, Phoenix has completed a fifth month of exploration in the Martian arctic. As expected, with the Martian northern hemisphere shifting from summer to fall, the lander is generating less power due to shorter days and fewer hours of sunlight reaching its solar panels. At the same time, the spacecraft requires more power to run several survival heaters that allow it to operate even as temperatures decline.'"
Government

Submission + - Documentary About Swedish Wiretapping Released (wiretappingsweden.com)

Submitted by
Praedon
Praedon writes: "Recently covered here on slashdot, was about a law that was passed to engage in warrantless wiretapping called the FRA Law in Sweden. It has encouraged a group called Urban Lifestyle to release a documentary expressing the views of Swedish residents on the impact that the law will have on their rights to privacy. More information about the making of the documentary, the people involved in it, and their views on the law can be found on their blog."
Google

Google Revs Android, FCC Approves First Phone 259

Posted by kdawson from the dream-machine dept.
Cycon writes "Google has announced, 'We're releasing a beta SDK. You can read about the new Android 0.9 SDK beta at the Android Developers' Site, or if you want to get straight to the bits, you can visit the download page.' A new Development Roadmap has also been released to help developers understand the direction the software is taking (as this is still only a Beta release). In addition, the FCC has approved the HTC Dream, and it is believed Google and T-Mobile will launch the phone in the US on November 10, since a confidentiality request attached to the application asks the FCC to keep details secret until that date."
Privacy

Submission + - Wiretapping law sparks rage in Sweden

Submitted by castrox
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.
The Internet

A New Kind of Science Collaboration 96

Posted by kdawson from the science-two-point-oh dept.
Scientific American is running a major article on Science 2.0, or the use of Web 2.0 applications and techniques by scientists to collaborate and publish in new ways. "Under [the] radically transparent 'open notebook' approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication... The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration." One project profiled is MIT's OpenWetWare, launched in 2005. The wiki-based project now encompasses more than 6,100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. Last year the NSF awarded OpenWetWare a 5-year grant to "transform the platform into a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT... the grant will also support creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that other research communities can use." The article also gives air time to Science 2.0 skeptics. "It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert.
Microsoft

ODF Editor Says ODF Loses If OOXML Does 268

Posted by kdawson from the strange-bedfellow dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The editor of the Open Document Format standard has written a letter (PDF) that strongly supports recognizing Microsoft's OOXML file format as a standard, arguing that if it fails, ODF will suffer. 'As the editor of OpenDocument, I want to promote OpenDocument, extol its features, urge the widest use of it as possible, none of which is accomplished by the anti-OpenXML position in ISO,' Patrick Durusau wrote. 'The bottom line is that OpenDocument, among others, will lose if OpenXML loses... Passage of OpenXML in ISO is going to benefit OpenDocument as much as anyone else.'"
Media

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

Submitted by castrox
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.
The Internet

Submission + - Prince and Village People to sue Pirate Bay 1

Submitted by newcaribou
newcaribou writes: It's a sign o' the times — Prince and the Village People are planning to take The Pirate Bay to court in Sweden for allowing users to download their songs without permission. The artists' lawyer, acquired with the help of the Web Sheriff, does however admit that the Purple One and the Macho Men haven't quite worked out who to sue yet.
Google

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

Submitted by castrox
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)

Submitted by
castrox
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.
"
Software

Submission + - Logging System Changes 1

Submitted by whiggy
whiggy writes: I am trying to find a suitable application to use for logging changes to the systems that I manually make, e.g., change an IP address on a server, reinstall an application, change config, etc. We have a helpdesk system, but I do not find the format suitable. Does anyone have any recommendations for an application suitable for this? Preferrably some changelog-type FOSS :-)
Thanks.
Software

Submission + - The Economics of Open Source

Submitted by
Alice White
Alice White writes: "Mayank Sharma has put together an article discussing the economics of open source and what the projects do with their donations.

"So why are donations important? Since it seems to bother so many people, I thought I'd ask someone in the know. Fabio Erculiani, lead-developer of the two-man development team that churns out the popular Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux lists some common expenses of running a FOSS project. "We have hosting bills," explains Erculiani who has passed on a job offer by Google to complete his studies,"backup systems such as NASs, RAID arrays (hard drives tend to break often here... I had two breakages in around 6 months)..."

Taken from http://www.packtpub.com/article/the-economics-of-o pen-source-donations"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft fine overturned

Submitted by ddrichardson
ddrichardson writes: Following up on an earlier story, Microsoft's $1.5bn fine in the case with Alcatel-Lucent has been over turned. Microsoft are claiming a "victory for consumers". From the article:

A US court has overturned a decision ordering Microsoft to pay phone firm Alcatel-Lucent $1.52bn (£777m) for infringing music patents. The federal judge in San Diego reversed a jury's decision which had ruled that Microsoft's Media Player software infringed on two Alcatel patents.

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