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Now.Imperfect writes "In its last day of session, the Supreme Court has definitively clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment. The confusion is whether the Second Amendment allows merely for the existence of a state militia, or the private ownership of guns. This ruling is in response to a case regarding the 32-year-old Washington DC ban on guns." This is one of the most-watched Supreme Court cases in a long time, and Wikipedia's page on the case gives a good overview; the actual text of the decision (PDF) runs to 157 pages, but the holding is summarized in the first three. There are certainly other aspects of the Second Amendment left unaddressed, however, so you can't go straight to the store for a recently made automatic rifle.

Richter X writes "The newest update to the Nintendo Wii's Menu, version 3.3, contains code specifically designed to find and kill the popular Twilight Hack used by homebrewers to play unauthorized code on the Wii. The update also prevents the Freeloader software used to play imported games on the Wii. However, it does not seem to affect the Homebrew Channel in Wiis that already have it installed. The updated code is currently being researched in order to find what code has been changed. So far it has been confirmed that Nintendo included specific instructions to target the Twilight Hack. Work is also being done to update the Twilight Hack in order to bypass this new code."

I disagree completely. In most ways, the nominees from the Democratic and Republican parties are incredibly similar. In fact, it's quite difficult to find any substantial differences in the campaign promises of either Obama or McCain, once you get past the different tones they use to the actual meat of what they say they will do. Clearly, there is a large number of Americans that feel poorly represented by both candidates, and this leaves an opportunity for the formation of serious alternative political parties. When we factor in the revolution taking place in media distribution, it's quite possible that we are in for some serious changes in American politics.

Paul has a heavy economist and foreign relations background from the committees he's been a member of in Congress, combined with little hesitation to speak out without fear of ruffling feathers, and this has allowed him to articulate proposed radical technical changes to the structure of our country which get at the heart of the situation we currently find ourselves in. Those types of ideas would not have come from most party apparatchiks, and while it's easy to argue that they are impractical and beyond the scope of the powers granted a US president, they have illuminated some of the fundamental problems this country must wrestle with, and exposed a large number of people to some of the workings of our government, which is never a bad thing.

The fact that we're having discussions on monetary policy, the US's role in the world, and other serious issues often glanced over in most political debate is worth a great deal to this country, and anything that helps more people get involved in their government can only be to our advantage, regardless of ideology. Politics as usual as covered in classic media has been extremely shallow and limited up to this point, and we're witnessing a great shift as populism controls the distribution of information on the internet. If the Democratic and Republican parties can't tell which direction the wind is blowing, and fail to adjust their trajectory, then it is entirely possible that they might start losing support in favor of new groups.

Either way, with such a fundamental change in information distribution taking place at the national and global level, it's foolish to count on historical trends alone to predict future outcomes.

xhosa999 writes "A new vulnerability in Debian's OpenSSL implementation that means for the last 18 months any keys created on Debian-based systems can be considered compromised. Effectively, there is no such thing as randomness..."
http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00152.html

cloude-pottier writes "AMD has released has made available a technology called CAL — the Compute Abstraction Layer, a part of AMD's Stream Computing SDK. CAL makes it quick and painless to take advantage of the computational power available in ATI's latest line of GPUs. Along with a Brook+ implementation targetted for ATI GPUs, it also includes a low-level shader compiler. The real bonus with this though? AMD has also thrown in a complete low-level shader specification for the r600 series, including the rv670 and rv680. This seems to include instruction encodings, so perhaps this will pave the way for accelerated open source drivers. The catch is that the documentation is included as a part of an MSI installer, so you'll need Windows to extract the documentation. However, this does seem to show that AMD is keeping true to their promise to open up the specifications for the ATI hardware."
http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/sdkdwnld.html

yo_cruyff notes a Computerworld article on Google's recent annual shareholder meeting, which was dominated by argument over the company's human rights policies. Google's shareholders, on advice from their board, have voted down two proposals on Thursday that would have compelled Google to change its policies. "Google [has been] coming under fire for operating a version of its search engine that complies with China's censorship rules. Google argues that it's better for it to have a presence in the country and to offer people some information, rather than for it not to be active in China at all... [S]hareholders and rights groups including Amnesty International... continue to push Google to improve its policies in countries known for human rights abuses and limits on freedom of speech... Sergey Brin, cofounder and president of technology for Google, abstained from voting on either of the proposals. 'I agreed with the spirit of these proposals,' Brin said. But he said he didn't fully support them as they were written, and so did not want to vote for them."

boogi78 writes "Remember ASCII art? This is the Web 2.0 CSS version of ASCII art featuring Homer Simpson. Here is a CSS G.W. Bush. There's also an program that automatically converts jpegs into 'CSS images,' but it's a Windows executable. I found no sources for it, but I got it to work with WINE."

evanbro writes "ZDNet is reporting on ksplice, a system for applying patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting. ksplice requires no kernel modifications, just the source, the config files, and a patch. Author Jeff Arnold discusses the system in a technical overview paper (PDF). Ted Ts'o comments, 'Users in the carrier grade linux space have been clamoring for this for a while. If you are a carrier in telephony and don't want downtime, this stuff is pure gold.'" Update: 04/24 10:04 GMT by KD : Tomasz Chmielewsk writes on LKML that the idea seems to be patented by Microsoft.

FreedomToThink writes "The complete Church of Scientology collected Operating Thetan documents have now been released by Wikileaks in PDF form, including both the original and the new versions of all OT levels I to VIII.

The documents were previously released online by the collective known as Anonymous but they were only available via bittorrent.
The complete collection of Scientology's Operating Thetan levels normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to access by working your way through the Scientology system. The Church of Scientology denies the information exists, but the authenticity of these documents can be verified by any former OT level members of the Church of Scientology such as Jesse Prince (former No.2 of the 'Church'), Michael Pattinson (OT VIII), Tory Christman (OT VII) and 10 year Scientology member turned renowned critic, Arnie Lerma, who's home was raided at the bequest of the church of Scientology in 1995, to recover copies of the OT texts which had been legally obtained via the court release of them during the Fishman case.

Though these texts have appeared online before, they have always been rapidly hit with copyright claims and lawsuits by the church of Scientology, despite at the same time denial of the existence, or authenticity of the documents.

Older versions of these texts, versions of OT levels I to VII were once made available to the public for under 100 dollars as exhibits attached to a declaration by Steven Fishman on 9 April 1993 as part of Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz. The text of this declaration and its exhibits were collectively known as the Fishman Affidavit. These exhibits were eventually sealed by a judge after petitioning by the Church of Scientology, as their contents were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per reader to them.

This is the third major Scientology leak on Wikileaks spawned by the Anonymous campaign against what it calls "the corrupt business known as the 'Church of Scientology'". Previously there was :

Citizens Commission on Human Rights exposed as a Scientology front Which holds proof of political lobbying that is in violation of it's 501(c)(3) Tax Exempt status
The 'Frank Oliver' documents as discussed on slashdot recently in Wikileaks Airs Scientology Black Ops"
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_collected_Operating_Thetan_documents

The 2008 Google Summer of Code(TM) is on! As previously covered before and now in its fourth year running, Google announces that they will once again be hosting a program that gives computer science students a $4500 stipend to work on open source software projects. Last year, Google funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries. As noted in the program FAQ, this year they hope to do even more. The #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode is already buzzing with activity.
http://googlesummerofcode.blogspot.com/2008/02/sounds-like-summer.html

jcrouthamel writes "Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. We show that this phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. We use cold reboots to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterize the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques. We offer new algorithms for finding cryptographic keys in memory images and for correcting errors caused by bit decay. Though we discuss several strategies for partially mitigating these risks, we know of no simple remedy that would eliminate them."

thisnukes4u writes "A local root exploit proof-of-concept for linux has been released to the public via milw0rm. One for the most recent 2.6.24 kernels is also available."
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/5092

Amit Klein from Trusteer has found serious weakness in OpenBSD PRNG (pseudorandom number generator), which allows an attacker to predict the next DNS transaction ID. The same flavor of this PRNG is used in other places like OpenBSD kernel network stack. Interestingly enough several other BSD operating systems copied the OpenBSD code for their own PRNG, so they're vulnerable too. This is particularly so with Apple's Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server and Darwin, but also with NetBSD, FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD. The interesting part here is that all the above mentioned vendors were contacted November 2007. FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD committed a fix to their respective source code trees, Apple refused to provide any schedule for such fix, but OpenBSD decided not to fix it. OpenBSDs coordinator stated, in an email, that OpenBSD is completely uninterested in the problem and that the problem is completely irrelevant in the real world. This is in direct contrast to statements and opinions made by the OpenBSD team recently.

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, $31 per share "massively undervalues" Yahoo, according to the same source. The logic is that the offer doesn't take into account risks Yahoo would go through (that is, if regulators overturned the deal) by entering into an agreement with Microsoft. Here's Yahoo's reasoning for rejecting the offer: http://www.techconsumer.com/2008/02/09/yahoo-board-to-reject-microsoft-bid-wants-more-or-help-from-google/"