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Politics

Submission + - Pre-computer Laws Blamed for UFO Hacker's Plight (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou
Stoobalou writes: The extradition laws under which hacker Gary McKinnon has been ordered before a US court were made before politicians had thought how they would apply to computer crime, said David Blunkett, the home secretary who put the US/UK Extradition Treaty through Parliament.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Defense Department is using PlayStation consoles t (cleveland.com)

Submitted by captainkoloth
captainkoloth writes: What do you get when you string 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 video gaming consoles together? You get the Condor Cluster — the biggest, fastest interactive computer the Defense Department has, according to the Air Force
Because there hasn't been a story about a PS3 supercomputer in a few months. This one is being used for surveillance analysis and face recognition.

Submission + - Linus on branching practices (blogspot.com)

Submitted by rocket22
rocket22 writes: Not long ago Linus Torvalds made some comments about issues the kernel maintainers were facing while applying the "feature branch" pattern. They are using Git (which is very strong with branching and merging) but still need to take care of the branching basics to avoid ending up with unstable branches due to unstable starting points. While most likely your team doesn't face the same issues the kernel development does, and even if you're using a different DVCS like Mercurial, is worth to take a look at the description of the problem and the clear solution to be followed in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. The same basics can be applied to every version control system with good merge tracking, so let's avoid religious wars and focus on the technical details.
Open Source

Submission + - Red Hat Acquires Makara To Expand Cloud Offerings (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Red Hat today announced that it has acquired Makara, a Redwood City, California based developer of deployment and management solutions for applications in the cloud.

Makara provides solutions to help organizations deploy, manage, monitor and scale their applications on both private or public clouds. By integrating the JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara's Cloud Application Platform, Red Hat will be able to offer a PaaS solution that allows organizations to quickly transition their applications to both public and private clouds with minimal modifications.

Submission + - Forbes Interview With Julian Assange (forbes.com)

Submitted by bl8n8r
bl8n8r writes: Forbes interviews the man behind Wikileaks: Julian Assange. In the interview, Assange states he has upcoming leaks concerning a certain U.S. Bank along with Industrial Espionage, BP and Tech. Industry scandals. When asked about what Assange gets out of it, his reply was: "It’s tremendously satisfying work to see reforms being engaged in and stimulating those reforms. To see opportunists and abusers brought to account." Sounds good to me.
Businesses

Submission + - Linux Foundation Makes Open Source Boring (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: According to Glyn Moody:

In the early days of free software, the struggle was just to get companies to try this new and rather unconventional approach, without worrying too much about how that happened. That typically meant programs entering by the back door, surreptitiously installed by in-house engineers who understood the virtues of the stuff — and that it was easier to ask for forgiveness after the event than for permission before.

[The Linux Foundation tries] to take all the fun out of free software. They are about removing the quirkiness and the riskiness that has characterised free software in business for the last decade and a half, and seek to replace it with nice, safe systems that senior management will instantly fall in love with. In a word, they seek to make open source boring for the enterprise. That's not only good news for companies, it's a really important step for the Linux Foundation.
Ubuntu

Submission + - "Ubuntu Server" launches world-dominantion map app (ubuntu.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Ubuntu Server team is celebrating the anticipated release of 10.04.1 by launching a world domination map web application. For the impatient, you can click here here to see the current state of the map. Basically this is a world map showing an Ubuntu logo on each city where Ubuntu server has been spotted. Ubuntu server users are encouraged to hit that web application and click a link causing the web application to use the visitor's IP address to record their city and put an Ubuntu logo on top. The process is fully anonymous however. For cool command line based methods to register your Ubuntu server, check out this blog post by a Canonical employee. Ubuntu server 10.04.1 is expected to be released around mid next week

Submission + - patching the linux desktop

Submitted by jjohn_h
jjohn_h writes: If you believe Phoronix

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQ3Mw

the Linux desktop is going to become responsive. They say it isn't responsive right now in respect to high work loads.

I say it is not responsive under any workload — on the basis of experience with Gnome in Ubuntu, current and previous, on sundry PCs. (I cannot remember KDE 3.5 and I have dumped KDE4.)

Thunderbird, Firefox, Opera, OpenOffice, file managers are sluggish under Gnome, although they (or equivalents) are not under Windows XP on the same hardware. Maybe the applications are to blame and not the desktop? But what about Gnome's Help? That's a help feature that takes seconds to launch and has a latency on each and every click.

After years of usage, I dare say: for common tasks on the same hardware Windows XP is snappy and Gnome is not. Phoronix is expecting relief from a kernel patch for high loads. I wouldn't mind getting relief from any patch for low loads.
Government

Submission + - Is Europe building Big Brother? (csmonitor.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Everyone knows governments are interested in collecting citizens' internet data but it's not just the US and UAE. The European Union is pulling in both directions on the issue, arguing both for and against automated surveillance and imposing an onerous data retention regime, reports the CS Monitor. One Irish group, Digital Rights Ireland is suing its own government on the issue and plans on taking the matter to the European Court of Justice.
Microsoft

Submission + - Salesforce Seems to Pay Patent Royalties for Linux

Submitted by FlorianMueller
FlorianMueller writes: The Register reports on a "strangely worded statement" according to which Microsoft and Salesforce.com have settled their patent dispute, with the net effect that Salesforce pays Microsoft an undisclosed amount of royalties for patents "in the areas of operating systems, cloud services and customer relationship management software." The reference to "operating systems" suggests very strongly that Salesforce joins Amazon.com, HTC, TomTom, Samsung and who-knows-how-many-others in paying royalties to Microsoft for using Linux. The Open Invention Network (created by IBM, Red Hat and others five years ago) claims that it shields Linux from patent claims. But where is the OIN when it's actually needed? Apparently large companies like Amazon and Salesforce determined that the OIN couldn't help them and decided to pay. One can only wonder what the OIN's agenda actually is.
Security

Submission + - Feds storing checkpoint body scan images (cnet.com) 2

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: The US Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."
It turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images.
The U.S. Marshals Service admitted that it had saved ~35,314 images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
The images where stored on a Brijot Gen2 machine. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction to stop the TSA's body scanning program.

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