1957569
submission
RichiH writes:
Games usually need more patches than most other FLOSS software. Sometimes, they are not maintained by their original developers anymore, sometimes upstream does not care about Unix-compatibility or they won't accept the changes that are required to make games work properly. Traditionally, maintainers of every distribution had to create their own patches and fixes to provide similar funcionality. After successful collaboration between several major distributions, we decided to take this to the next level. Well over 50 members of Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Fink, FreeBSD, Gentoo, OpenSolaris, PC-BSD, NetBSD, Slackware, SuSE, Ubuntu and Yellow Dog as well as Gnome and KDE have decided to join forces and start working together on games@lists.freedesktop.org and #freedesktop-games on irc.freenode.net. Collaboration on upstream level is common these days, but distributions have largely remained islands and it's time to fix that. Thus, we want to invite everyone, upstream, maintainers and anyone else who might be interested to join us in this collaborative effort. To the best of our knowledge, this effort is unique. But if anyone could share experience or even start something like this in their own fields of interest, it would be great :)
1329865
submission
RichiH writes:
This is not an article. It is a plea for help!
With each and every redesign, you break /. for Konqueror users who use the text mode in various fun & unexpected ways.
Normally, I file bugs or sit it out, but that the moment, reading articles on the main page is impossible as the tags etc are overlayed over the text.
I know this is is unconventional and I expect this to get rejected in no time, but PLEASE for all that is holy (relative to $deity): Poke the weg dev guy(s) about Konqueror & text mode!
It's not _that_ hard to take a quick glance to see if the site is useable (I don't care about pretty. Just make it _useable_).
Thanks,
Richard
1230645
submission
RichiH writes:
Most of you will be the free IT staff of friends and family, just as I am. One of my largest headaches is backing up their data. What I am looking for allows for off-site storage on multiple server machines running Linux, has Linux & Windows clients that Just Work and require zero everyday effort (largish effort setting them up is just fine), allows for granular access control, is versioned and will, ideally, allow me to grab data automagically, as well (think photo pool for your family where your mother, sister, etc share each other's photos). This is something I have been looking for for years, but never found anything even closely resembling what I want. With the Wall Street Journal handing out its Technology Innovation Award to Cleversafe recently, I was once again reminded of this particular itch which needs scratching. Before I deploy it, I want to ask the /. community about its opinion on that piece of software and on potential alternatives. How do you solve this problem?
1215583
submission
RichiH writes:
Want to know how much you will pay in taxes once a new president is elected? Quantrix and Jeffrey Gramlich of the University of Southern Maine released an online tax estimator which makes an educated guess based on the positions & statements of the candidates. The short version: Under McCain, you will pay minimally less than under Bush. Under Obama, you will pay noticeably less.
1201439
submission
RichiH writes:
Off-site, versioned storage is great, but for some things, you just can't beat a thumb drive. While I don't needlessly abuse my gear, I will not pamper it, either. I gave various drives a try, but they all broke within weeks or months, sometimes even days. What I am looking for is an USB thumb drive that will fit onto a keychain and still be able to take a beating. Ideally, this drive has a metal keyring hole, a cap that will not come off too easily and thus protect the USB plug, is not much larger than an actual thumb and has 4 GiB of storage or more. What drives did you use over time and with what results? How long did they survive?
668408
submission
RichiH writes:
This is bad, real bad. From the Debian Security Announcement: Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's
openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect
Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a
result, cryptographic key material may be guessable. Long story short, everyone who used OpenSSL in the widest sense to generate within the last two years on either Debian or Ubuntu has a massive problem on their hands. If this is the case you must regenerate and replace your keys as soon as possible!
Read Debian's announcement and Ubuntu's announcement for further information.
627334
submission
RichiH writes:
thedailywtf.com has a real WTF today: An Oklohoma state agency using SQL queries in their URLS, allowing everyone to get at the personal data of thousands of people. After being contacted about it, they implemented minimal (read laughable) 'security' measures. Only after being told that the table named MSD_MONTHLY_MEDICAL_ACTIVITY, which lists employees of the agency, is world-readable as well did they take down the page. As of right now, the page is unavailable and bidding for creating a new system is is open.
349723
submission
RichiH writes:
On November 9th, the German parliament will most likely vote in favour of a law which will make logging of all connections, be they over Internet, landline or cellular phone, mandatory (German source). As an added bonus, the Cybercrime Convention of the European Union will ensure that a total of 52 countries will have access to this data without review by a judge, restriction of commensurability or even a mandatory expiration date for the prosecution of any and all actions that are against the law in the requesting country. This list includes countries with long-standing records in human rights like Azerbaijan, Russia or Moldova. If you live in Germany, hold a German passport or simply think your voice should be heard, please head over to this site and write an open letter to the members of the German parliament. In anticipation of the approval of the law, please also join the first ever German class-action law suit before Germany highest court by adding your personal data here.
Do not let this pass without action. It is that last chance you are likely to have.
303289
submission
RichiH writes:
By the time you are reading this, this link does not work any more as they just took the site in question down. But for quite some time, it showed what you fear it does. Here's to whoever thought of CRLs..
278635
submission
RichiH writes:
Daniel Baumann just did some math and it turns out that if Hewlett-Packard (Schweiz) GmbH, leanux.ch AG or Novell (Schweiz) AG had not voted in favour of fast-tracking the ISO process of OOXML, the 75% needed would not have been reached. It would be interesting to know how HP and Novell voted in other countries and how the infamous Novell-Microsoft agreement influenced Novell's decission.
234873
submission
RichiH writes:
German news site heise.de reports (Babelfish) that a court in Offenburg rejected the state attorney's request to get the private data of a file sharer because it was 'obviously unreasonable'. 'Based on logic', the study speaking of 5 billion traded files per year in 2001 and 2002 which the music industry in Germany often cites can not apply as the user in question uploaded only a single song that the music industry knows of. The court also said that many p2p users are not aware that the programs automatically starts hidden and mandatory upload of files it has access to, so that, unless proven otherwise, the person in question did not upload anything on purpose. Furthermore, the court said that the claim of high damages does not hold water as a song typically costs less than a Euro and 'at a price of 0, someone who will not even spend a single cent will still want to get a product', citing a study that shows no negative impact of p2p on revenues. Finally, the court said that the music simply wants the data of the person in question so it can sue them in civil court and that it did not have any right to the data trying 'via several tens of thousands of criminal charges' to 'get at information the law is explicitly keeping from them'. Several state attorneys said, under strict promise of anonymity, that they would now try to get similar rules so that they 'dedicate their time to more severe crimes'. Go ahead, tag this one 'haha' :)
192045
submission
RichiH writes:
Everyone knows that you should keep backups. A few of us actually even do so. But what about your parents? Your girlfriend's aunt? Anyone else you are privileged to do free IT services for? With hard disks too large for the average user and flatrates in almost every home, I was pondering having them mirror data to each other. Privacy concerns aside, programs like svn, git or rsync come to mind. None of these provide what I would want to see, though. The ideal solution does not require you to manually add files but simply backs up everthing in a few given folders. It should not require any clicking of buttons and run regularly. Bonus points if it is able to shape itself down or limit the monthly traffic amount. The client must run on Windows. Ideally, they would need no central server, but a server-based solution is fine as well as long as the server runs on Linux.