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Penguinisto writes "According to a somewhat jaw-dropping story in The Register, it appears that Microsoft has performed a trifecta of geek-scaring feats: They have joined the Apache Software Foundation as a Platinum member(at $100K USD a year), submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb, and have pledged to expand their Open Specifications Promise by adding to the list more than 100 protocols for interoperability between its Windows Server and the Windows client. While I sincerely doubt they'll release Vista under a GPL license anytime soon, this is certainly an unexpected series of moves on their part, and could possibly lead to more OSS (as opposed to 'Shared Source') interactivity between what is arguably Linux' greatest adversary and the Open Source community." (We mentioned the announced support for the Apache Foundation earlier today, as well.)

Ste sends along the cheery little story of Otto Moerbeek, one of the OpenBSD developers, who recently found and fixed a 33-year-old buffer overflow bug in Yacc. "But if the stack is at maximum size, this will overflow if an entry on the stack is larger than the 16 bytes leeway my malloc allows. In the case of of C++ it is 24 bytes, so a SEGV occurred. Funny thing is that I traced this back to Sixth Edition UNIX, released in 1975."

svefg cbfg

SourceForge, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to be blocked in Mainland China.

The current blocking may be related to the recent anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games, which will begin on 8 August. Some days before, a very popular free source code editor in SourceForge named Notepad++ start to boycott Beijing 2008. The project's developer said that the action is not against Chinese people, but against Chinese government's repression against Tibetan unrest earlier in this year.

SF.net has once been banned by China in 2002. However, the ban was lifted later in 2003.

Submitter's note: As a SourceForge user in Beijing, I can confirm this first-hand. I also tried traceroute to sourceforge.net, only to find the connection being dropped at a Beijing ISP's gateway router. It appears that the projects' respective homepages are available even if they are hosted by SF, but the summary and download pages are blocked.
http://www.moon-blog.com/2008/06/sourceforge-blocked-in-china.html

When the Linux kernel first supported multiprocessor systems, it was done with a single lock protecting access to all the kernel (the Big Kernel Lock); the kernel could still only do one thing at a time. Over time, most sections of the kernel have introduced their own fine-grained locking and moved out from under the BKL, allowing many parts of the kernel to be running at the same time on multiple processors. The BKL has shrunk over time, but it still exists over a chunk of the kernel. The kernel hackers recently tried to replace the hard lock with a preemptable lock, but that had some bad interactions with the scheduler (which determines what process/kernel thread runs when), so Linus switched back to the old-style BKL.

Now, a group is trying to see if it is possible to weed out all the remaining uses of the BKL and replace them with localized locking for specific sections of the kernel. This is tricky, as there are side-effects of the BKL that are not always obvious.

"So simple a grandmother can use it"

This is offensive. I am a grandmother, and a C programmer.

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes "Microsoft will increase its focus on making mobile phones part of its strategy to spread IT to people in developing nations, based partly on a prototype already developed for the purpose called Fone+.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080508/tc_pcworld/145633"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080508/tc_pcworld/145633

gzipped_tar writes "Opera released Dragonfly, the "foundations of Opera's upcoming Developer Tools". It can be used by Web developers to debug JavaScript or inspect CSS and the DOM, on the computer or other devices supporting Opera. It has now been integrated into the Opera brower version 9.5 beta 2.

Dragonflies are known to be good bug-hunters, hence the name of this new software.

The new release is still in alpha, and documentations are coming soon. Notably, it is released under the BSD license in contrast to Opera's main product, the browser, which is close-source."
http://www.opera.com/products/dragonfly/

It sounds like the setup for the movie Gattaca, but the United States has enacted a Federal law mandating the creation of a national "DNA Warehouse", with the President's signature on April 24, 2008. Described as a "national contingency plan", justification for the new law, S. 1858, known as The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007, is a preparation for any sort of "public health emergency." Twila Brase, president of the Citizens' Council on Health Care gives a detailed analysis (PDF) of the new law. Brase draws attention to provisions in the law that will build surveillance systems for tracking the health status and health outcomes of individuals diagnosed at birth with a genetic defect or trait, and use the newborn screening program as an opportunity for government agencies to identify, list, and study "secondary conditions" of individuals and their families. Given the very controversial nature of this bill and the privacy implications involved, it's remarkable that this could have passed with so little notice in the media.

Jacek Poplawski writes "We all have heard about Compiz Fusion. We all have seen rotating cube on youtube. But it's time to tell the world a truth. It's time to uncover the greatest Linux myth ever. The Compiz Fusion is a fake."
http://magicgarden.sourceforge.net/?q=node/146

gzipped_tar writes "According to multiple independent evidence observerd by Chinese netizens from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu as well as other places, the ban on Wikipedia has been lifted for Internet users in Mainland China. Except for the Chinese version, all locales had been able to be accessed before noon (Chinese local time). Still, there are reports saying that pages containing "sensitive" words could not be delivered.

Currently no infomation is known about the reason for this lift. It is speculated this could be at best temporary, as the Chinese authority has done multiple times. However, nothing from the officials could be heard as usual.

Most of Chinese Wikipedians are expressing their joy over the lift. But some consider this to be a (somewhat huge) April Fool's joke. This is not quite likely though, since April Fool's Day is not a Chinese tradition.

At the time I'm writing this, most of the reports are in Chinese so it's difficult to post some useful links here. Wikipedia has not confirmed this un-banning, while discussion has began on a Wikipedia talk page (The former link points to a static page of the discussion at the time of this writing).

By the way, I'm not joking."

gzipped_tar writes "Xandos has announced "a broad collaboration agreement based on a set of technical, business, marketing, and intellectual property commitments." The Linux-based system provider Xandos will make efforts on the interoperation in system management , server protocols, office document compatibility, and intellectual property assurance with Microsoft. Notably, Xandos will be building desktop apps which do the translations between OOXML and other document formats, and Microsoft will make available patent covenants for Xandros customers.

One thing still mysterious, among the whole shebang. In the Xandos announce it is said:

Over the next five years, Microsoft and Xandros will focus on five primary efforts:

and there's only four of them listed there. There must be one deep magic going on?"