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Submission + - UK Security Research Blocked By Injunction (scmagazineuk.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A lecturer from Birmingham's research has received a high court injunction in favour of volkswagen stopping him from publishing vulnerabilities in their immobiliser at this year's Usenix. This is the first time such an injunction has been used to stifle security research, and has far reaching implications for British security researchers.

Submission + - Microsoft's Math-Challenged STEM Education Contest

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As noted earlier, Microsoft is tackling the CS education crisis with a popularity contest that will award $100K in donations to five technology education nonprofits that help make kids technically literate. Hopefully, the nonprofits will teach kids that the contest's voting Leader Board is a particularly good example of what-not-to-do technically. In addition to cherry-picking the less-pathetic vote totals to make its Leader Board, Microsoft also uses some dubious rounding code that transforms the original voting data into misleading percentages. Indeed, developer tools reveal that the top five leaders in the Microsoft STEM education contest miraculously account for 130% of the vote. Let's hope the quality control is better for those Microsoft Surface voting machines!

Submission + - Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is (guardiannews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

Submission + - UPDATED EDIT: A Circular New York City Subway Map to Straighten Things Out (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The U.K.'s Max Roberts, a mapmaker and critic, has created a map that sees this problem and then solves it by adopting a similar distortion strategy to the MTA map, but to a far greater degree. The map heads in the direction of a diagram and away from a map representing features. It may be the most lucid reinterpretation of the New York City subway map I've seen yet.

Submission + - Oracle takes down Solaris clones, Illumos.org, withcopyright/DMCA (sunhelp.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Oracle has taken on the Solaris clones — Illumos.org is now down per court order because it "violates" Oracle copyrights, citing they are violating the license agreement which prohibits 3rd-party OS support!
Oracle doesn't care that it, or better SUN, gave away the sources under the CDDL copyleftin the first place.

Submission + - Obama's promise to "Protect Whisleblowers" disappears from the web

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Obama administration's campaign site Change.gov has been removed, a possible reason Sunlight Foundation comments may be that a statement from the Administration that outlined the protection of Whistleblowers, "Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government." when the exact opposite has occurred and Obama is threatening trade sanctions against countries who give Edward Snowden asylum.

Submission + - UK "Porn Filter" Will Likely Blacklist Non-Porn Websites As Well (infowars.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The blacklist of banned websites set to be included in the UK’s new “porn filter,” which will be managed by a company with close ties to the Communist Chinese government, will also censor content that has nothing whatsoever to do with pornography. The British government has demanded that the porn filter, which is being justified as a means of protecting children against harmful online content, be automatically enforced by ISPs from the end of next year. Customers will have to contact their service providers to opt out of the system. The risk of controversial websites being caught up in the porn dragnet mimics how Internet censorship has been applied in other countries, including Australia where activist websites were blocked as a result of being included on a government blacklist. After liaising with Internet Service Providers who will be mandated to implement the “pornwall” system, the Open Rights Group has confirmed that the blacklist of websites will by no means be restricted to pornography. Under HomeSafe, a version of which is likely to be used as a template for the UK blacklist, numerous categories of websites are automatically blocked until a user unticks the option. The graphic below illustrates how websites related to file sharing, social networking and “weapons & violence” will also be blocked. The term “violence” is so generic that it could easily include political websites which feature news content.

Submission + - Oracle sues companies it says provide Solaris OS support in illegal manner (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Oracle is continuing to crack down on companies it claims are providing support services for its products in an illegal fashion. Last week, Oracle sued IT services providers Terix and Maintech, alleging they have "engaged in a deliberate scheme to misappropriate and distribute copyrighted, proprietary Oracle software code" in the course of providing support for customers using Oracle's Solaris OS. Oracle's allegations are similar to ones it has made in lawsuits against other Solaris service providers, such as ServiceKey, as well as Rimini Street, which provides third-party support for Oracle and SAP applications.

Comment Re:Sad, if true (Score 1) 376

by msclrhd (#44370755) Attached to: The Last GUADEC?

Qt3 to Qt4 required you to change your code to support Qt4.

There will also be porting needed for Qt4 to Qt5 (e.g. QtWidgets being a separate module, changing QtGui include to QtWidgets). See http://qt-project.org/wiki/Transition_from_Qt_4.x_to_Qt5 for the full list of changes.

I used QAudioFormat from QtMultimedia in a project I was developing, This got moved from the QtMultimedia package to the qtmobility-dev package and from the QtMultimedia folder to the QtMultimediaKit folder.

Are you going to use the Qt Q... variants or the KDE K... variants of the different classes? Oh, and you cannot use them interchangeably (e.g. the file open/save dialogs).

Also, there is more emphasis in Qt on the QtQuick platform which is another moving target. Even then, are you going to use pure QtQuick, or use the new Ubuntu Phone/Tablet APIs they are creating?

Comment Re:Foreshadowing (Score 1) 376

by msclrhd (#44370411) Attached to: The Last GUADEC?

How about pizza vs chips [http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=android%2C+linux#q=pizza%2C%20%20chips&cmpt=q]. The search for "chips" is flat and a lot lower than the growing trend for pizza.

Conclusion: no one likes chips anymore, so all chip shops, McDonalds, etc. are going to die out!

Comment Re:KDE and Gnome are still comparable (Score 2) 376

by msclrhd (#44370327) Attached to: The Last GUADEC?

These Google trends are only part of the picture.

Once you have found what you are looking for (e.g. Qt or Gtk+ documentation), you are likely to bookmark it and go directly to it, so your search result will only apply once even if you visit the Gtk+ docs a lot. Also, if you have downloaded and installed the Gtk+/Qt/KDE documentation, you don't need to search Google to find it!

Q: What are the Debian, et. al. popularity contest stats for the Gtk+, Qt and KDE libraries? What about the dev packages? Documentation packages? Applications making use of these libraries?

A user is not likely to search for Gtk+ or Qt (and maybe not even KDE or GNOME). They are more likely to search for things like "Amarok", "Natilus" or even more likely things like "PDF viewer for Linux". Even then, if they are looking for a specific application they are likely to go through something like the Ubuntu Software Center, or follow the instructions to install a cool new app from a blog/review site like http://www.webupd8.org./

A developer is also not likely to perform a generic search for the UI framework or desktop environment either. They will either search for a specific query mentioning APIs or packages such as "How do I set the value of a GtkProgressBar?", "gtk_label_set_text HTML styling" or "libqt5-gui". Even then, they are likely to try sites like stackoverflow first. They are also likely to ask questions on the relevant forums, IRC channels, etc.

Q: What are the search/question trends for gtk+/gnome and qt/kde tagged questions on stackoverflow?

Q: What are the visitor stats like and comment counts like on the various Qt/KDE/Gtk+/GNOME pages, blogs and wikis (e.g. Allen Day's GNOME blog).

Q: What are the trends for the number of commits and developers to the Gtk+/GNOME/KDE/Qt source code repositories?

Submission + - British Porn-Censoring MP Has Website Defaced With Porn

Submitted by twoheadedboy
twoheadedboy writes: Claire Perry MP, who has been the main driver of the UK government's plans for default blocking of pornography, has had her website plastered in porn by hackers. But the story only just begins there. Notable blogger Guido Fawkes, otherwise known as Paul Staines, posted on the matter, only to later be accused of sponsoring the hacking himself. During some back and forth over Twitter, it appeared Perry was "confused", as she said Fawkes had posted a link to the defaced page, when he had only shown a screenshot of the site. Given the backlash against the government's plans to censor porn and its technical fallacies, the event could be particularly embarrassing for Perry. She is not commenting on the matter, whilst Staines has threatened to sue unless Perry offers a retraction of her claim he had anything to do with the hack.

Submission + - Is the 9 to 5 developer looked down upon? (headhuntable.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On many interviews these days and with many companies when interviewing you might hear “this is not a 9 to 5 job” or “expect late nights”. It seems that in our industry the concept of a 9 to 5 job is scarce but is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Some would argue that if you love what you do then why count the hours that you work and leave when the work is done but is the 9 to 5 developer something to stride for or something that we should avoid?

Submission + - NSA Says It Can't Search Its Own Emails (propublica.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request by Justin Elliot, blogger and journalist at ProPublica.com, the NSA regretfully informed him:

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

Maybe a little extra could be included in the next NSA budget for an Outlook license?

Submission + - The dirty little secret of iOS 7 - some devices won't get killer new features (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rjupstate
rjupstate writes: iOS 7 will run on a range of iPhones and iPads, but not every device will have access to all the new features, including AirDrop file sharing, which is one of the most notable new capabilities. Confusing the matter is the Apple practice of selling older iPhone and iPad models as lower-cost options meaning that even a device bought at the iOS 7 launch won't be fully supported.

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