Earthquake Retrofit - Slashdot User

Canonical: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07, @07:33PM

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Kenyon, the VP of sales and business development for Canonical, just spoke this afternoon at the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit about what Canonical does with OEMs and ODMs. He also tossed out some rather interesting numbers about the adoption of Ubuntu Linux. Namely, Ubuntu will ship on 5% of worldwide PC sales with a number of 18 million units annually."
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Reddit Co-founder Refuses To Invest In Facebook, Cites CISPA 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07, @06:01PM

An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend we heard how Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett won’t be buying Facebook shares as part of the company’s initial public offering (IPO). Now we’re hearing how Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian won't be buying Facebook stock either, but for a different reason. Ohanian has a problem with the fact that Facebook supports the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)."

India $45 Android tablet from Datawind falls to corruption-> 1

Submitted by symbolset on Friday May 04, @10:16PM

symbolset writes "The first Aakash tablet proposed for India schools has failed. Datawind managed to deliver the $45 Android tablet as reported here previously, but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to reset the project. Facing a loss in revenue it's turning into a disaster for the small Canadian company as they are now proving unable to deliver both the Aakash tablet and the parallel retail product.

Senior executives have begun to flee. The company has presold a great many tablets, and delivery failure reports are beginning to mount. Is this the Phantom console of this decade?"
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Yahoo Warns Facebook May Infringe 16 Patents With Open Source 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 04, @07:59PM

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo has warned Facebook that the social networking giant allegedly infringes on 16 more patents. This time, the patents are about open source technology used in Facebook data centers and servers."

Usage of copyleft licenses on the rise-> 0

Submitted by paxcoder on Friday March 02, @08:54PM

paxcoder writes "John Sullivan, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, spoke at FOSDEM 2012 a few days ago about free software licensing trends. For his talk titled Is Copyleft Being Framed?, Sullivan researched publicly available Debian packages' information, and found that the usage of copyleft licenses is rising, compared to the usage of permissive licenses. Despite dedication to permissive licenses by organizations such as Apache, Google and Mozilla, the percentage of packages using licenses in the GPL family rose steadily from 71% in 2005 to a surprisingly high 93% last year, with (L)GPLv3 usage rising as much as 400% between the last two Debian versions."
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NASA: Hackers Had 'Full Functional Control' 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 02, @08:34PM

An anonymous reader writes "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has finally revealed how badly it was attacked by hackers last year. The space agency’s Inspector General Paul Martin explained in a testimony to Congress how NASA’s computer network was penetrated by hackers at least 13 times in 2011."

Robots Mimic Snakes' Use of Friction to Ascend Inclined Planes-> 0

Submitted by

benonemusic

on Tuesday February 28, @11:30PM

benonemusic writes "Mechanical engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have designed robots that mimic the way snakes use friction in navigating challenging environments such as moving up an inclined plane. Rescue robots based on such designs might be more efficient and effective in locating survivors in rubble after a disaster strikes. Snakes’ bodies create friction in different directions — less friction towards the front of the body than towards the back of the body in order to move forward. Presenting their results at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Boston, the researchers showed video of their Scalybot moving up a plane with a ruler marking its distance underneath it. Since developing the first robot, they have built a more advanced model, called Scalybot2, that has a built in acceleration sensor to help monitor its movements, and separately, its scale-like teeth can sweep through many possible angles until the robot finds the right amount of grip."
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Interpol Arrests 25 Suspected Anonymous Hackers-> 0

Submitted by PatPending on Tuesday February 28, @09:37PM

PatPending writes "LYON, France — Interpol has arrested 25 suspected members of the Anonymous hackers group in a swoop covering more than a dozen cities in Europe and Latin America, the global police body said Tuesday."
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Largest ISP in the Netherlands KPN is hacked-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, @04:13PM

An anonymous reader writes "KPN, the Netherlands largest ISP has been hacked. After several days of downplaying the hackers have published some of the data stolen. In the hack the usernames, telephone numbers, and passwords (unhashed) have been made available on pastebin. After trying to downplay the story in the media for a few days, the provider, faced with the pastebin publication has taken down its webmail service for ALL its clients (roughly 2 million). The ISP has stated in the media several times that no data had been taken in the hack. The pastebin proves otherwise. The dutch Rapid Response government IT-responce team (GovCert) has been involved in the downplaying of the story so far. It appears that the Koninklijke Ptt Nederland is not quite worthy of the 'koninklijke' (Royal) in its name. ( The only reason KPN has even acknowledged the hack appears to be that they could no longer deny the story. Unconfirmed sources state that even more info (such as credit card, bank details etc) also have been copied; in Webwereld.nl a hacker stated they are in possession of 16 GB of data of the paying customers of KPN. So far the KPN has not tried to contact their customers. This is the latest 'hack' in the netherlands, after the popular tech-website Webwereld had their 'hack of the day' month Lektober ('leaktober') exposing how the government in the netherlands is unable to follow the most basic security practices. The system that was hacked was a linux system that was unpatched. This allowed the hackers free access to other servers in use by the KPN for their internal network. KPN stated they formed a 100-man team working day & night to stop the hack; but only after intervention of the FOX-IT security firm were they able to stop the unauthorised access to the compromised server. KPN stated they acted as fast as they could; after it became apparent that the hackers were able to theoretically take down the emergency telephone number in the netherlands, 112 (911 in the USA) . Since maintaining this number is regulated by law in the netherlands, KPN als have informed the dutch equivalent of the SEC."
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Slashdot joins SOPA protest in last minute decisio-> 2

Submitted by eparker05 on Tuesday January 17, @07:43PM

eparker05 writes "The well known tech news aggregator Slashdot made a late Tuesday decision to join the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest. Readers of the site overwhelmingly support the decision and see it as a necessary step to prevent pervasive censorship. Slashdot is known for it's continued support of anonymous posting by users and has come out strongly in opposition of internet censorship in the past. Still, this is the first time that Slashdot has closed it's doors in protest of a piece of legislation.

Note: this has not happened yet! Vote this story up and show the editors that we want them to show solidarity against SOPA/PIPA !"
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