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Submission + - LibreOffice 4.2 with GPU mantle support is out (libreoffice.org) 4

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: A basic summary of the new features are listed here. In catching up with MS Office the new LibreOffice 4.2 now has full Windows 7/8 integration including aero peak, thumbnails, jumplists, and recent documents all from the taskbar. In addition one weak area for LibreOffice has been enterprise network support and the lack of active directory tools. LibreOffice now has GPO and active directory support for system administrators to deploy and manage Libreoffice over corporate networks. Libreoffice also includes an expert configuration Window to assist power users and system administrators when deploying to hundreds of workstation at a time as well.

Also of particular interest is AMD/ATI is expecting to finally release Mantle in the next coming hours for games like Battlefield 4. Surprisingly LibreOffice also supports mantle as well according to the release notes. However you will need the 14.1 driver which is being compiled and uploaded at the time of this writing to utilize this feature. Mantle will accelerate lower end cpus by up to 300% in some tasks while having modest improvements for those with more recent powerful CPUs. A real niceties for those like myself on AMD phenom II's with the later 7000 series cards.

The only issue (some on slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI. However, for recent articles about governments considering openoffice this release addresses shortcomings with the new active directory and GPO support.

Submission + - Congressmen Say Clapper Lied to Congress, Ask Obama to Remove Him

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A group of six Congressmen have asked President Barack Obama to remove James Clapper as director of national intelligence as a result of his misstatements to Congress about the NSA’s dragnet data-collection programs. The group, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said that Clapper’s role as DNI “is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs”.

Clapper is the former head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and has been DNI since 2010. In their letter to Obama, the group of Congressmen calling for his ouster said that he lied to Congress and should no longer be in office.

“The continued role of James Clapper as Director of National Intelligence is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs and ensuring the highest level of transparency. Director Clapper continues to hold his position despite lying to Congress, under oath, about the existence of bulk data collection programs in March 2013. Asking Director Clapper, and other federal intelligence officials who misrepresented programs to Congress and the courts, to report to you on needed reforms and the future role of government surveillance is not a credible solution,” the letter from Issa, Ted Poe, Paul Broun, Doug Collins, Walter Jones and Alan Grayson says.

Submission + - Google Lets Chrome Microphone Bug Go 4+ Months

Submitted by phmadore
phmadore writes: I had an idea to implement into Chrome this morning (for personal purposes), and figured I'd peek at the source to see if I could even make sense of it (new to coding). So I Googled for it, and on the results page was an article from the BBC, a source I hardly ever read otherwise. It detailed how Israeli developer Tal Ater, who is working on speech recognition software, discovered a(n) (already-discovered and supposedly patched) bug which allows "malicious" sites to listen in to conversations, apparently with or without a user's permission. Now, I'm sure that none of us are surprised the "bug" (LOL NSA) existed in the first place. But for what reason has Google not fully patched this?

Despite Google finding a way to fix the bug in October 2013 the update has yet to be rolled out to Chrome, he said.

Comment Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... (Score 5, Informative) 270

by msclrhd (#46040213) Attached to: Great Firewall of UK Blocks Game Patch Because of Substring Matches

Actually, the last election result was such that no party had enough votes to secure power. It was a hung parliament as a result (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2010). The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a Coalition, gaining the required combined majority to form a government.

Conservatives: 36.1%
Labour: 29%
Liberal Democrats: 23%

Submission + - Great Firewall of UK blocks game patch because of substring matches

Submitted by Sockatume
Sockatume writes: Remember the fun of spurious substring matches, AKA the Scunthorpe problem? The UK's advanced "intelligent" internet filters do. Supposedly the country's great new filtering regime has been blocking a patch for League of Legends because some of the filenames within it include the substring "sex". Add one to the list of embarrassing failures for the nation's new mosaic of opt-out censorship systems, which have proven themselves incapable of distinguishing between abusive sites and sites for abuse victims, or sites for pornography versus sites for sexual and gender minorities.

Submission + - Valve's Steam Machines Are More About Safeguarding PCs Than Killing Consoles (eurogamer.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CES has come and gone, and we've gotten a chance to see many different models of Valve's Steam Machines. They're being marketed as a device for a living room, and people are wondering if they'll be able to compete with the Big-3 console manufacturers. But this article argues that Valve isn't going after the consoles — instead, Steam Machines are part of a long-term plan to keep the PC gaming industry healthy. Quoting: 'Over the years, Valve has gone from simply evangelising the PC platform — it once flew journalists in from around the world pretty much just to tell them it was great — to actively protecting it, and what we're seeing now is just the beginning of that push. Take SteamOS. To you and me, it's a direct interface for Steam based on Linux that currently has poor software support. To Valve, though, it's a first step in levering development, publishing, gameplay and community away from their reliance on Windows and DirectX (and to a lesser extent Mac OS), systems that cannot be relied upon in the long term. ... As for Steam Machines, they are a beachhead, not an atom bomb. They are meant to sell modestly. ... The answer is that Valve is thinking in decades, not console generations.'

Submission + - Kazakh Professor claims solution of another Millennium Prize Problem (bnews.kz)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Kazakh news site BNews.kz reports that Mukhtarbay Otelbaev, Director of the Eurasian Mathematical Institute of the Eurasian National University, found the solution to another Millennium Prize Problems. His paper, which is called “Existence of a strong solution of the Navier-Stokes equations" and is freely available online (in Russian), may present a solution to the fundamental partial differentials equations that describe the flow of incompressible fluids for which, until now, only a subset of specific solutions have been found. So far, only one of the seven Millennium problems was solved — the Poincaré conjecture, by Grigori Perelman in 2003. If Otelbaev solution is proven, not only it might be the first time that the U$1mi offered by the Clay Millennium Prize will find a home (Perelman refused the prize in 2010), but also engineering libraries will soon have to update their Fluid Mechanic books, and Kazakhstan will find a new reason to be remembered by the public (other than mockumentaries).

Submission + - MPAA joins W3C; bigger anti-DRM push needed (zdnet.com) 2

Submitted by ciaran_o_riordan
ciaran_o_riordan writes: The W3C has announced a new member: the MPAA. Oh. Which makes this a good time to see whatever happened to last Summer's campaign against DRM in HTML5. It's still there. W3C took a lot of criticism, but the plan hasn't changed. DRM ("Encrypted Media Extensions") was still there in the October 2013, and in the January 2014 drafts. Tim Berners-Lee is still defending DRM. For the technical details, there are many good pages. What's at stake? It'd be like Flash or Silverlight websites, but instead of being really hard to make free software viewers/browsers, it'll be almost impossible, not to mention possibly illegal in the many countries which prohibit "bypassing technical protection mechanisms". And our work to get governments to use open standards will end up used against us when free software can't tick all the boxes in a public tender that specifies a "W3C HTML5 based" DRM system. More pressure is needed. One very small act is to sign the no DRM in HTML5 petition. A good debate is: "What's more effective than a petition?" But please sign the petition first, then debate it. It's also worth considering giving to the annual appeal of FSF, the main organisation campaigning against this.

Submission + - TPP Fast-Track Bill Hits US Congress

Submitted by Crayz9000
Crayz9000 writes: Slashdot previously covered the unwanted elements of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Now a bill has hit the floor of the US Congress which would grant Congress the ability to fast-track it and future trade agreements into becoming law. Fight for the Future has a tool to allow US citizens to look up and contact their Congressmen. Full text of the bill is available on the Senate site. From the Senate brief:

WASHINGTON — Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) joined together today to introduce legislation that will establish strong rules for trade negotiations and Congressional approval of trade pacts, to deliver trade agreements that boost U.S. exports and create American jobs.

"Create jobs", of course, being the catch-all euphemism for enriching Big Media.

Submission + - Security Experts Call for Boycott of RSA Conference in NSA Protest

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: ZDNet reports that at least eight security researchers or policy experts have withdrawn from RSA's annual security conference in protest over the sponsor's alleged collaboration with the National Security Agency. Last month, it was revealed that RSA had accepted $10 million from the National Security Agency to implement an intentional cryptographic flaw, commonly called a backdoor, in one of its encryption tools. The withdrawals from the highly regarded conference represent early blowback by experts who have complained that the government's surveillance efforts have, in some cases, weakened computer security, even for innocent users. Jeffrey Carr, a security industry veteran who works in analyzing espionage and cyber warfare tactics, took his cancellation a step further calling for a boycott of the conference, saying that RSA had violated the trust of its customers. "I can't imagine a worse action, short of a company's CEO getting involved in child porn," says Carr. "I don't know what worse action a security company could take than to sell a product to a customer with a backdoor in it." Organizers have said that next month's conference in San Francisco will host 560 speakers, and that they expect more participants than the 24,000 who showed up last year. "Though boycotting the conference won't have a big impact on EMC's bottom line, the resulting publicity will," says Dave Kearns. "Security is hard enough without having to worry that our suppliers — either knowingly or unknowingly — have aided those who wish to subvert our security measures."

Submission + - EU Copyright Reform: Your input is needed! (copywrongs.eu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The European Commission has finally (as of last month) opened its public consultation on copyright reform. This is the first time the general public can influence EU copyright policy since fifteen years back, and it is likely at least as much time will pass until next time. In order to help you fill out the (enlish-only, legalese-heavy) questionnaire, some friendly hackers spent some time during the 30c3 to put together a site to help you. Anyone, EU citizen or not, organisation or company, is invited to respond (deadline fifth of February). Pirate MEP Amelia Andersdotter has a more in-depth look at the consultation.

Submission + - Facebook tracks the Status Updates and Messages You Don't Write too. (slate.com) 1

Submitted by Jah-Wren Ryel
Jah-Wren Ryel writes: Do you think that facebook tracks the stuff that people type and then erase before hitting (or the “post” button)? Turns out the answer is yes. If you start writing a message, and then think better of it and decide not to post it, Facebook still adds it to the dossier they keep on you.

Submission + - UK Goverment sedates a pregant woman and takes baby from womb (metro.co.uk)

Submitted by metrix007
metrix007 writes: The UK Goverment as part of it's onward march to becoming a full police state has reached a new low. British Social Services received a court order to sedate a woman and perform a ceasarian section to take custody of the unborn child. The woman was an Italian citizen who was in the UK for training. Her family stated the "breakdown" was due to her not taking her mediccation for her bi-polar condition. This is a new low...not only did they deprive a mother of childbirth and bonding with her child, they did it with little cause to someone who was not even a British citizen, but a visitor. Appaling.

Submission + - DHS Now Censoring Imported Videos (google.com) 6

Submitted by Jah-Wren Ryel
Jah-Wren Ryel writes: J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Thor, He-Man) reports that US Customs now requires a Video Declaration Form be completed for any imported DVDs. The form requires that you "declare the the films/videos contain no obscene or immoral matter, nor any matter advocating or urging treason or insurrection against the United States, nor any threat to take the life of or inflict bodily harm upon any person in the United States."

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