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Submission + - Open Source and Amazon 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As most Slashdot readers are aware, Amazon tends to take open source products, package them into a service and sell them as a service on Amazon Cloud. I have a few questions about this:
1. Have open source products benefited from this? Is Amazon investing back into the open source company, and how?
2. I heard that some open source products changed their licensing to prevent this — what products have done this?
3. Is this a future business model for open source software? Big companies are some of the major contributors to Linux, is that happening to other open source software that is being "service-ized" as well?

Comment Re:Rocky, Springdale, minor releases (Score 1) 137

by bofkentucky (#60868590) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Long Should a Vendor Support a Distro?
With a huge exception of an ass-backwards security fix model. If there is an embargoed CVE, it gets fixed in rhel first, embargo is lifted/updated packages available for RHEL, but the work to port that change to CentOS stream is done after the embargo is lifted. SuSE, Debian, and Ubuntu both participate in security fix embargoes so there is zero delay from publishing to fixes available. CentOS (and Oracle) typically did have a minimal delay due to needing to wait for the redhat srpm's to be released and rebuilt for their systems, but at least the work is consumable immediately. CentOS stream may be slightly easier to release fixes for instead of the longer delays seen in fedora, but Redhat committing to ensuring Stream fixes are ready at the time of embargo lift would go a long way to easing a lot of our minds.

Submission + - Why haven't we moved to PKI based voting yet? 17

Submitted by t0qer
t0qer writes: Hello Slashdot, Given the current state of affairs with elections, why haven't we gone to an open source, PKI based voting system? SSL.com has a pretty interesting piece on using PKI in voting. There's also a github project that leverages PKI and IBM blockchain technology.
Looking all the way back to the 2000 election with Gore, it just seems like paper at this point has outlived its secureness. A closed sourced voting system doesn't really seem like the kind of thing slashdot would really get behind. (As a side note, my very introduction to the world of OSS came from this site) I'm fairly well versed in PKI technology, and quoting this site, it would take traditional computers 300 Trillion years to break RSA-2048 for a single vote. I just don't understand why the US can demand countries it "Democratizes" into using these types of voting systems, but we do not.

Submission + - Thunderbird 78.2.1 closes 21 year old request for OpenPGP support (ghacks.net)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The team that works on the Thunderbird email client has released Thunderbird 78.2.1 to the client's stable channel on August 29, 2020. One of the big new features of Thunderbird 78 was support for PGP encryption baked into the client directly. Thunderbird users had to install extensions such as Enigmail to integrate PGP support. The release of Thunderbird 78 integrated OpenPGP support in the email client, but it was not enabled by default because of issues that still needed to be resolved. The release of Thunderbird 78.2.1 enables OpenPGP support by default in Thunderbird. Thunderbird users may select Tools > OpenPGP Key Manager to get started. The window that opens displays available keys that have been generated previously or imported, and options to generate new keys that can then be used to encrypt email conversations.

Comment Re:We need to save the browser (Score 1) 46

Firefox (perceived) performance has been horrible for seemingly a decade now. Every time i click the orange button to cross-check something against chrome I regret it. Firefox used to have an edge as they were more efficient if you had more tabs open but that hasn't been the case for a long time now.

Submission + - A redcoat solution to government surveillance (latimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Efforts to halt the government's mass surveillance of ordinary citizens have taken two forms: urging Congress to do the right thing (something it rarely does anymore) or suing spy agencies under the 4th Amendment (which prohibits most warrantless searches and seizures). Neither strategy has been particularly effective.

Perhaps another route is available, using an amendment so rarely cited that the American Bar Assn. called it the "runt piglet" of our Constitution. It's the 3rd Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from lodging military personnel in your home.

Many Americans know that the 1st Amendment protects free speech and religious freedom, that the 2nd protects the right to bear arms and that others establish the right to a jury trial and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Very few know what the 3rd Amendment does, and understandably so. Since colonial times and the early days of the republic, no one has been routinely forced to feed and house soldiers. There has never been a Supreme Court case primarily based on the 3rd Amendment.

But let's examine whether a case may be made. The National Security Agency is part of the Department of Defense and therefore of our nation's military. By law, the NSA director must be a commissioned military officer, and per its mission statement, the NSA gathers information for military purposes. That's strong evidence that NSA personnel would qualify as soldiers under the 3rd Amendment.

And why did the framers prohibit the government lodging soldiers in private homes? Besides a general distaste for standing armies, quartering was costly for homeowners; it was also an annoyance that completely extinguished a family's sense of privacy and made them feel violated. Sound familiar?

The British could spy on American colonists by keeping soldiers among them. Today, the government can simply read your email. Centuries ago, patriots wrote angry letters about soldiers observing the ladies of the house at various stages of undress. Now, as John Oliver joked, the NSA can just view your intimate selfies.

Submission + - New way for Spys to listen in on us (informationweek.com)

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: Sound is just vibrating air. When it hits glass, it vibrates the glass and it is well established that a laser aimed at the glass can detect those vibrations and computers can turn it back into sound. Now, we don't need the glass or the laser. Researchers at MIT, Microsoft and Adobe have shown that by analyzing a video that contains something vibrating — say a bag of chips — a computer program can work figure out what noise caused those vibrations, even to the point of reconstructing speech.

Submission + - HP gives OpenVMS new life and path to x86 port (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Hewlett-Packard has changed its direction on OpenVMS. Instead of pushing its users off the system, it has licensed OpenVMS to a new firm that plans to develop ports to the latest Itanium chips and is promising eventual support for x86 processors. Last year, HP put OpenVMS on the path to extinction. It said it would not validate the operating system to its latest hardware or produce new versions of it. The move to license the OpenVMS source code to a new entity, VMS Software Inc. (VSI), amounts to a reversal of that earlier decision. VSI plans to validate the operating system on Intel's Itanium eight-core Poulson chips by early 2015, as well as support for HP hardware running the upcoming "Kittson" chip. It will also develop an x86 port, although it isn't specifying a timeframe. And it plans to develop new versions of OpenVMS

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