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the_leander writes "Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days. There is talk of compensation packages available for the falsely accused. The chances of you getting that money however are slim to none, lets not forget, this is the same country that charges prisoners who have been falsely accused for bed and boarding costs."

Steve Pepper writes "The former Chairman of the Norwegian ISO committee, who resigned two weeks ago in protest against his country's vote of Yes to OOXML, tells the inside story of how the decision was reached: how a single bureaucrat from Standards Norway sidelined the overwhelming majority of Norwegian technical experts and changed Norway's vote from No to Yes. The story is so surreal it's hard to believe." It's as depressing as it is brief.

Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about the US government's plan to reduce the roughly 4,000 active internet connections used by its civilian agencies to a mere 50 highly secure gateways. This comes as part of the government's response to a rise in attacks on its networks. "Most security professionals agreed that the TIC security improvements and similar measures are long overdue. 'We should have done this five years ago, but there wasn't the heart or the will then like there is now,' said Howard Schmidt, a former White House cyber security adviser. 'The timetable is aggressive,' he said, but now there is a sense of urgency behind the program. Small agencies that won't qualify for their own connections under TIC must subcontract their Internet services to larger agencies."

Marcion writes "The EU today peel back another layer of the onion that is Microsoft anti-competitive behaviour, fining Microsoft for unreasonable terms in accessing accessibility information. Microsoft says the smell is from past behaviour, "past issues that have been resolved and the company was now working under new principles to make its products more open". Meanwhile the EU will press on with peeling back the next layer."
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1717528,00.html

An anonymous reader brings us a whitepaper from Codenomicon which discusses the state and future of wireless security. They examine Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and also take a preliminary look at WiMAX. The results are almost universally dismal; vulnerabilities were found in 90% of the tested devices[PDF]. The paper also looks at methods for vendors to preemptively block some types of threats. Quoting: "Despite boasts of hardened security measures, security researchers and black-hat hackers keep humiliating vendors. Security assessment of software by source code auditing is expensive and laborious. There are only a few methods for security analysis without access to the source code, and they are usually limited in scope. This may be one reason why many major software vendors have been stuck randomly fixing vulnerabilities that have been found and providing countless patches to their clients to keep the systems protected."

Petey_Alchemist writes "With Super Tuesday coming up and the political field somewhat winnowed down, the process of picking the nominees for the next American President is well underway. At the same time, the Internet is bustling through a period of legal questions like Copyright infringement, net neutrality, wireless spectrum, content filtering, broadband deployment. All of these are just a few of the host of issues that the next President will be pressured to weigh in on during his or her tenure. Who do you think would be the best (or worst) candidate on Internet issues?"

BobB-nw writes with word that this April will be the trial date for SCO's financial reckoning. Novell will discover via the courts how much (if anything) SCO is going to be compelled to pay in compensation for the lengthy trial over Unix code rights. The NetworkWorld piece also offers an overview of the case. "In September, The Wall Street Journal described the ruling against SCO as 'a boon to the open source software movement.' But experts say Unix is filled with technology that carries copyrights tied to many different companies and that it would be a nightmare to open source the Unix code collectively. Instead, Novell would have to pick and choose pieces to open-source, a process that could begin once the trial has ended."

An anonymous reader writes "National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is currently helping to draft a new Cyber-Security Policy that could make the debate over warrantless wiretaps seem like a petty squabble. The new policy would allow the government to access to the content of any email, file transfer, or web search."

An anonymous reader writes "The British government's educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 'are significant and the benefits remain unclear.' Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org."

Just when you thought punitive protection of minors could not get any more stupid, South Africa outlaws kissing between minors:

Twelve to 15-year-olds fall under the new legislation, which covers acts that it describes as "consensual sexual violation". ... Among the acts defined as "sexual violation" in the bill include "direct or indirect contact... between the mouth of one person... and the mouth of another person".

Don't blow kisses in South Africa.

Stony Stevenson alerts us to a US Department of Homeland Security program in which subcontractors have been examining FOSS source code for security vulnerabilities. InformationWeek.com takes a glass-half-empty approach to reporting the story, saying that for FOSS code on average 1 line in 1000 contains a security bug. From the article: 'A total of 7,826 open source project defects have been fixed through the Homeland Security review, or one every two hours since it was launched in 2006 ...' ZDNet Australia prefers to emphasize those FOSS projects that fixed every reported bug, thus achieving a clean bill of health according to DHS. These include PHP, Perl, Python, Postfix, and Samba.

zeromemory writes "The Financial Times reports that " Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers' recent backing of Sony's Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end." According to the Times, Warner Brother's recent defection to Blu-Ray allowed Paramount to terminate their exclusive relationship with HD DVD. Universal Studios remains the only major studio to exclusively support the HD DVD format, though rumors have surfaced that their contract may also contain a termination provision similar to that exercised by Paramount."

So the Beeb reports that Low-energy light-bulbs are full of toxic mercury dust that can get lodged into my brain (as if it wasn't full enough of chemicals as it is).

Typical, I recently changed all the bulbs in my house from cheap normal bulbs to these expensive ones, saving the planet and all that. So what now? Go back to the old ones? LCDs? Candles? Sit in the dark?

Robert Scheck writes "http://rpm5.org/ — 2008-01-05 — After seven months of comprehensive development, the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was released as stable version 5.0.0. The relaunch of the RPM project in spring 2007 and today's following availability of RPM 5 marks a major milestone for the previously rather Linux-centric RPM. RPM now finally evolved into a fully cross-platform and reusable software packaging tool.

WHAT IS NEW IN RPM 5.0.0

The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was completely revamped from scratch and as one major result mostly all third-party libraries now can be linked externally and in a very flexible way. Support for the ancient and obsolete "rpmrc" files was completely removed, as everything is now configured through RPM "macros" under run-time only.

The RPM code base was ported to all major platforms, including the BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin. Additionally, the code base was heavily cleaned up and now can be compiled with all major C compiler suites, including GNU GCC, Sun Studio and Intel C/C++.

The RPM packages, in addition to the default Gzip and optional Bzip2 compression, now support also LZMA compression. Additionally, initial support for the XML Archive (XAR) file format was added where the implementation establishes a wrapper archive format for mapping the four sections used in RPM format packages (Lead, Signature, Header and Payload) to files with the same name in a XAR format package. Finally, support for the old RPMv3 (LSB) package format was removed to cleanup and simplify the code base. RPM 5, with respect to RPM format packages, now supports RPMv4 format only.

Additional features for use in package specifications (.spec files) were added, including new standard and even custom tags, new standard sections, etc. Most notably, RPM is now able to automatically track vendor distribution files with its new vcheck(1) based "%track" section and now can automatically download the vendor distribution files, too.

ABOUT RPM

RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating Unix software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. There is also a library API, permitting advanced developers to manage such transactions from programming languages such as C, Perl or Python.

Traditionally, RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Mandriva Linux, and many others. But RPM is also used for software packaging on many other Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS X by the cross-platform Unix software distribution OpenPKG. Additionally, the RPM archive format is an official part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB). RPM is released as free software under the GNU LGPL distribution license.

HISTORY OF RPM

RPM was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing for use in the Red Hat Linux distribution. Later the development of RPM became a classical free software community effort, now lead since many years by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson. In spring 2007 the RPM project was relaunched by Jeff Johnson on a new infrastructure provided by the OpenPKG project and its Ralf S. Engelschall. With the RPM 5 milestone, RPM finally evolved into a fully portable and vendor-agnostic packaging tool, which especially is no longer tied to its historical Linux roots."
http://www.rpm5.org/

terrymaster69 writes "The New York Times reports that the National Academy of Sciences has just published their third book outlining guidelines for the teaching of evolution. 'But this volume is unusual, people who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.'"