David Gerard - Slashdot User

+ - Internet Brands sues people for forking under CC by-sa-> 0

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David Gerard

on Friday September 07, 2012 @11:10AM

David Gerard writes "Internet Brands bought Wikitravel.org in 2006, plastered it with ads and neglected it. After years, the Wikitravel community finally decided to fork under CC by-sa and move to Wikimedia. Internet Brands is now suing two of the unpaid volunteers for wanting to leave. The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a declaratory judgement that you can actually fork a free-content project without permission. Internet Brands has a track record of scorched-earth litigation tactics."
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+ - Nvidia loses huge order due to binary blob-> 0

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David Gerard

on Saturday June 23, 2012 @12:50PM

David Gerard writes "Phoronix reports: The Chinese, who also developed the Loongson MIPS CPU, were looking to order at least ten million graphics processors. The problem is that the GeForce/Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). NVIDIA refused to release the source-code to their high-performance feature-complete cross-platform driver to the Chinese, and it would cost them millions of dollars to port the code-base, so they went to AMD for their GPU order."
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+ - Stuxnet/Flame/Duqu uses GPL code: release it!-> 0

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David Gerard

on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @03:42PM

David Gerard writes "It seems the authors of Stuxnet/Duqu/Flame used the LZO library, which is straight-up GPL. And so, someone has asked the US government to release the code under the GPL. (Other code uses various permissive licenses. As works of the US
federal government, the rest is of course public domain.) Perhaps the author could enlist the SFLC to send a copyright notice to the US government..."
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+ - Wikipedia dumps GoDaddy for MarkMonitor-> 0

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David Gerard

on Monday February 13, 2012 @06:44PM

David Gerard writes "You were wondering when WIkipedia was going to dump GoDaddy over SOPA — it'll be over the coming week, and the new provider is MarkMonitor."
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+ - Why MegaUpload Was Really Shut Down-> 0

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David Gerard

on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @09:50AM

David Gerard writes "In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core: MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label — "allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings.""
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+ - ICANN takes on timezone database-> 0

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David Gerard

on Sunday October 16, 2011 @06:08PM

David Gerard writes "ICANN has decided to be useful for something: it's taking on the timezone database. According to Astrolabe’s latest observations: "Conditions are confused and uncertain. Feelings run high. Perceptions are altered, leading to misunderstandings. Imagination, escapism, and gullibility are factors to contend with.""
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+ - Schmidt: G+ "identity service", not social network-> 0

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David Gerard

on Sunday August 28, 2011 @03:48AM

David Gerard writes "Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the "social network" bit is just bait. Schmidt says "G+ is completely optional," not mentioning that Google has admitted that deleting a G+ account will seriously downgrade your other Google services. As others have noted, Somewhere, there are two kids in a garage building a company whose motto will be "Don't be Google"."
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+ - Google+: Don't Be Evil, Just Racist-> 0

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David Gerard

on Monday July 25, 2011 @03:34AM

David Gerard writes "Google+'s pseudonym policy isn't just weird and capricious — it's now blatantly discriminatiory too. Hong Kong-based users are getting blocked for using the English form of their names — which is unlikely to be on any of the forms of ID Google+ claims to accept scans of. (Good thing no-one uses Photoshop or GIMP, hey.) Users consider this "a great disrespect to Hong Kong culture"."
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+ - Google+ deleting account en masse-> 0

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David Gerard

on Saturday July 23, 2011 @07:41PM

David Gerard writes ""Do, However, Be Stupid": In an attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Google+ is frightening off the geeky early adopters with a mass bonfire of accounts claimed to have fake names. As you might expect when your userbase goes beyond white male engineers inside a single dorporation, quite a lot of these people are indeed using their real names. Kirrily "Skud" Robert — whose account was shut six days after she stopped working at Google — is compiling a list of victims. Commenters hypothesise Google is using the AdSense detectors, and applying the customer service Google is famous for, i.e. none to speak of."
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+ - UN: Digital Economy Act is human rights violation-> 0

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David Gerard

on Thursday June 02, 2011 @09:06AM

David Gerard writes "The Open Rights Group reports that tomorrow, the United Nations Human Rights Commission will issue a report condemning the UK Digital Economy Act as a human rights violation. It "names the UK as violating Article 19 by allowing disconnection of Internet users in the Digital Economy Act.""
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+ - The three types of IDE-> 0

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David Gerard

on Saturday May 14, 2011 @09:51AM

David Gerard writes "MediaWiki developer Paul Houle explains (in the course of a discussion of integrated development environments for MediaWiki the three types of IDE: "1. IDEs that are actually useful for the languages that
they use. 2. Text editors. 3. People who use broken IDEs and (generally) don't realize their tools are broken.""
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+ - iFixit's FBI GPS Tracker Teardown-> 0

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David Gerard

on Monday May 09, 2011 @11:18AM

David Gerard writes "IFixit give us a fascinating peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. "The device was loaned to us by an unknown owner and is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car.""
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+ - Washington Post: attack Wikileaks with military 0

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David Gerard

on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @05:47AM

David Gerard writes "The old media is feeling the heat. The Washington Post has just run an op-ed from far-right US security hawk Marc Thiessen demanding that military strikes be called in upon Wikileaks. I bet the RIAA wish they'd thought of that one."

+ - Wine 1.2 released-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Friday July 16, 2010 @04:39PM

David Gerard writes "Stuck with that one Windows app you can't get rid of? Rejoice — Wine 1.2 is officially released! Apart from running pretty much any Windows application on Unix better than 1.0 (from 2008), major new features include 64-bit support, bi-directional text and translation into thirty languages. And, of course, DirectX 9 is well-supported and DirectX 10 is getting better. Packages should hit the distros over the weekend, or you can get the source now.wi"
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+ - Wine 1.2 released-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Friday July 16, 2010 @04:38PM

David Gerard writes "Stuck with that one Windows app you can't get rid of? Rejoice — Wine 1.2 is officially released! Apart from running pretty much any Windows application on Unix better than 1.0 (from 2008), major new features include 64-bit support, bi-directional text and translation into thirty languages. And, of course, DirectX 9 is well-supported and DirectX 10 is getting better. Packages should hit the distros over the weekend, or you can get the source now."
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