0rbit4l - Slashdot User

Submission + - Why are free-desktop developers wedded to Linux?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @03:48PM

An anonymous reader writes: We have been hearing promising predictions like "This year will be the year of Linux on the desktop" for the last decade. But Linux today seems to be as far away as ever from realizing the explectations of mass adoption we once had for it, without significant growth in home usage since the late 90s. Clearly, if Linux is unable to reproduce a third of Firefox's end user uptake over a much longer timeframe, there are deficiencies with the direction the GNU/Linux/X/Gnome/KDE system has taken. But almost all free software and desktop efforts and development remain unquestioningly oriented around Linux. Other free-desktop operating system projects which take different and innovative approaches like ReactOS, AROS, Mona and Syllable remain comparitively starved of developers and interest. An often cited reason for using a non-Microsoft OS is to avoid a monoculture, but free-desktop efforts have created a total monoculture around developing and promoting Linux, despite a decade of failure in supplanting Microsoft's properterial OSes with it. Why are free-desktop developers neglecting to consider an alternative to the penguin?

Germany Searches Credit Cards For Child Porn Payments 283

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @03:45PM from the variable-pricing-coming-soon dept.

narramissic writes "According to an ITworld article, police in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt have teamed with credit card companies to sift through the transactions of over 22 million customers looking for those who may have purchased child pornography online. To date they have identified 322 suspects." From the article: "German data privacy laws allow police to ask financial institutions to provide data about individuals but only if the investigators meet certain conditions, including a concrete suspicion of illegal behavior and narrowly defined search criteria, according to Johann Bizer, deputy director of the Independent Center for Privacy Protection... In the case under investigation, police were aware of a child pornography Web site outside of Germany that was attracting users inside the country. And they asked the credit-card companies to conduct a database search narrowed to three criteria: a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account."

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