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Government

Sen. Bond Disses Internet 'Kill Switch' Bill 171

GovTechGuy writes "Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) has introduced his own cybersecurity legislation with Sen. Orrin Hatch, and he had some harsh words for a competing bill sponsored by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. Bond said that bill, which has been criticized for allegedly giving the president a 'kill switch' over the Internet, weighs down the private sector with mandates and puts too much on the plate of the already overburdened Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Bond's bill would create a new position in the Pentagon, reporting directly to the president, in charge of coordinating all civilian cybersecurity. Any private-sector involvement would be voluntary and free from legal challenge, rather than mandated."

Comment Re:EOL XP already... (Score 1) 458

One way it can directly hurt other people is by allowing the computer running it to be exploited and turned into a node in a crap spewing botnet.

It also indirectly harms other users because while it maintains a considerable user share people either have to develop for it as a baseline (a way to degrade to this), ensure some sort of compatibility (read: essentially develop two applications), or limit development to the capabilities of IE6.
IE6 having the capacity to slow down the of HTML5 "revolution" scares me.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 757

Windows XP is the worlds most widely deployed Desktop operating system. Because of its design, most users run as "Administrator" because that is the default, and it is a pain in the ass to do otherwise. UNIX was developed from the ground up as a multiuser operating system with a clearly defined separation of powers where running as a normal user is fine until you need root, at which point you can easily and temporarily gain privileges when you need them. (Vista has made inroads on this problem, but still has issues.) This means that when you download a file off the net, to install it you have to present a password, which forces the (intelligent) user to think about the repercussions of running code that you just downloaded from *somewhere*. Also, most UNIX-like operating systems (Linux, *BSD, and there is an implementation for OSX [but it isn't as widely used]) use some form of software repository system (apt, yum, ports, etc...) where there is a reasonable expectation that you are getting the 'legitimate' version of the software sans trojans. Honestly, I am having a hard time remembering the last time I needed to 'just download' a binary package since moving to Linux; sure there is the occasional ./configure, make, make install that I have to go through, and sure there could be a trojan in the source, but again it is usually downloaded from mostly trusted repositories that have restrictions on who has commit access. In the Windows world you are forced to download binary packages and hope for the best (Is every rapidshare uploader of that application really out to help you?)
Mozilla

Firefox Gets Massive JavaScript Performance Boost 462

monkeymonkey writes "Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts. Ars Technica interviewed Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (the original creator of JavaScript) and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver. They say that tracing optimization will 'take JavaScript performance into the next tier' and 'get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language.' The eventual goal is to make JavaScript run as fast as C code. Ars reports: 'Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. ...They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.' Mozilla has also published a video that demonstrates the performance difference." An anonymous reader contributes links the blogs of Eich and Shaver, where they have some further benchmarks.

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