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Government

WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code 161

Posted by kdawson
from the of-by-for-and-to-the-people dept.
schliz writes "The White House has released four custom modules for the Drupal content management system. The modules address scalability, communication, and accessibility for disabled users, and the release is expected to benefit both the Drupal community and the WhiteHouse.gov site as the code is reviewed and improved by the open source community." Reader ChiefMonkeyGrinder adds an opinion piece with a somewhat envious view from the UK: "Open source is treated as something akin to devil-worshipping in some parts of government. So, the idea that a major project in the government backyard would be based on something as basic as Drupal is pretty far-fetched. No, this side of the Atlantic would have involved a closed-tender process; a decision made [behind] closed doors based on proprietary software and we'd be completely in the dark about costs, about delays, and about functionality."

Comment: Managerial On Call? (Score 1) 410

by md27 (#30371376) Attached to: Saying No To Promotions Away From Tech?
On call for what, emergency meetings about requirements documents or SLAs? :D But seriously, if you enjoy the tech don't move away from it, not everyone wants to go sit in meetings all day, and they should find a way to let you advance and stay in the technical realm, or at least keep giving you raises/random title upgrades to keep things interesting.
The Courts

Judge Excludes 3 "John Does" From RIAA Subpoena 225

Posted by kdawson
from the sue-doe-actions dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In one of the RIAA's 'John Doe' cases targeting Boston University students, after the University wrote to the Court saying that it could not identify three of the John Does 'to a reasonable degree of technical certainty,' Judge Nancy Gertner deemed the University's letter a 'motion to quash,' and granted it, quashing the subpoena as to those defendants. In the very brief docket entry (PDF) containing her decision, she noted that 'compliance with the subpoena as to the IP addresses represented by these Defendants would expose innocent parties to intrusive discovery.' There is an important lesson to be learned from this ruling: if the IT departments of the colleges and universities targeted by the RIAA would be honest, and explain to the Courts the problems with the identification and other technical issues, there is a good chance the subpoenas will be vacated. Certainly, there is now a judicial precedent for that principle. One commentator asks whether this holding 'represents the death knell to some, if not all, of the RIAA's efforts to use American university staff as copyright cops.'"
United States

Barack Obama Wins US Presidency 3709

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the enough-of-that-now-this dept.
Last night, around 11pm, all the major networks announced that Senator Barack Obama had won the election. Soon after, Senator McCain conceded. There were no crazy partisan court hearings, just a simple election. This is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.
The Courts

Ted "A Series of Tubes" Stevens Found Guilty 565

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the now-a-series-of-cells dept.
techmuse writes "According to a series of tubes sites, Senator Ted Stevens has been found guilty of lying about free home renovations that he received from an oil contractor. He faces up to 5 years in jail, and the outcome of his current reelection bid is now in doubt. 'The conviction came after a tumultuous week in the jury room. First there were complaints about an unruly juror, then another had to be replaced when she left Washington following the death of her father. Finally, jurors on Monday discovered a discrepancy in the indictment that had been overlooked by prosecutors. Jury deliberations in this historic trial have at times been as contentious as some of the proceedings The Justice Department indicted Stevens on July 29, and the Alaska Republican took a huge legal gamble and asked for a speedy trial in order to resolve the charges before Election Day. Judge Emmet Sullivan complied with Stevens' request, and in less than three months from the time of his indictment, Stevens was found guilty.'"
Businesses

Should You Break TOS Because Work Asks You? 680

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the just-don't-crawl-this-domain-please dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My boss recently assigned me a project that was all his idea, with two basic flaws that would require me to break multiple web sites' Terms of Service (TOS). Part requires scraping most of the site, parsing the data and presenting it as our own without human intervention. While we're safe on copyright issues, clearly scraping like this is normally not allowed. At times it might also put a load on those sites. The other is, for lack of better words, a 'load balancing' part that requires using multiple free accounts instead of purchasing space and CPU time for less than $2,000 USD per month. The boss sees it as 'distributed' computing when in reality it's 'parasitic.' My question is: am I wrong about the ethics? If I do need to walk, how best can I handle it without damaging my reputation and future employment opportunities?"
Data Storage

Why RAID 5 Stops Working In 2009 803

Posted by kdawson
from the back-'em-up-rawhide dept.
Lally Singh recommends a ZDNet piece predicting the imminent demise of RAID 5, noting that increasing storage and non-decreasing probability of disk failure will collide in a year or so. This reader adds, "Apparently, RAID 6 isn't far behind. I'll keep the ZFS plug short. Go ZFS. There, that was it." "Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we'll have 2 TB drives. With a 7-drive RAID 5 disk failure, you'll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an [unrecoverable read error]. So the read fails ... The message 'we can't read this RAID volume' travels up the chain of command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your carefully protected — you thought! — data is gone. Oh, you didn't back it up to tape? Bummer!"
Java

+ - Metronome: Realtime Garbage Collection in Java

Submitted by sproketboy
sproketboy (608031) writes "IBM is develping a new techology Metronome which allows Java to be used for realtime application development.

Called Metronome, this new technology has already been adopted for use by the US Navy.

An article from acmqueue.com describes the technology that makes it possible to develop realtime systems, even those that have extremely demanding timing requirements"
Security

+ - DDoS Attack on Root Servers Thwarted

Submitted by
jimbojw
jimbojw writes "On Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of "Safer Internet Day", three of the 13 DNS root servers were temporarily browned out by a well orchestrated DDoS attack. Details surrounding the originators of the attack are vague, but some believe it may have originated in Asia.
Brian Krebs reports:

Among the apparent targets was a root server controlled by the Department of Defense Network Information Center. There is also evidence to suggest the attackers targeted the servers responsible for managing the stability of the ".uk" and ".org" domains.
He goes on to quote Paul Levins, vice president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), who said:

This is a fact based community, and we're waiting for the facts to come in after the analysis before we can make committed statements about what the origins were, and its intended targets.
Why would attackers target the root-servers? No demands were received, no ransom paid."
Media

+ - BBC On-Demand to exclude Apple and Linux users

Submitted by startling
startling (717697) writes "The BBC Trust has published its provisional conclusions regarding DRM for its On-Demand content. From a PDF on the BBC website:
"The BBC Executive proposes a digital rights management solution which would require consumers to be using Windows XP (or above) and Windows Media Player 10 (or above) to be able to access seven-day TV catch-up over the internet... Our understanding is that the BBC Executive aspires to offer an alternative DRM framework, which would enable Apple and Linux users to access the service, but has yet to identify a satisfactory solution. In either case, we will expect this to have been addressed within 24 months."
That means the BBC would effectively be giving Microsoft a monopoly for up to two years! More information on the BBC website."

"Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries." -- William George Jordan

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