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Submission + - Court Victory Gives Blogger Same Speech Protections As Traditional Press (reuters.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Reuters reports, " A blogger is entitled to the same free speech protections as a traditional journalist and cannot be liable for defamation unless she acted negligently, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. Crystal Cox lost a defamation trial in 2011 over a blog post she wrote accusing a bankruptcy trustee and Obsidian Finance Group of tax fraud. A lower court judge had found that Obsidian did not have to prove that Cox acted negligently because Cox failed to submit evidence of her status as a journalist. But in the ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Cox deserved a new trial, regardless of the fact that she is not a traditional reporter. "As the Supreme Court has accurately warned, a First Amendment distinction between the institutional press and other speakers is unworkable," ... Eugene Volokh, a ... Law professor who represented Cox, said Obsidian would now have to show that Cox had actual knowledge that her post was false when she published it. ... "In this day and age, with so much important stuff produced by people who are not professionals, it's harder than ever to decide who is a member of the institutional press," ..." — More at Courthouse News Service

Submission + - Adware Vendors Buying Chrome Extensions, Injecting Ads (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ars reports that the developers of moderately popular Chrome extensions are being contacted and offered thousands of dollars to sell ownership. The buyers are then adding adware and malware to the extensions and letting the auto-update roll it out to end users. The article says, 'When Tweet This Page started spewing ads and malware into my browser, the only initial sign was that ads on the Internet had suddenly become much more intrusive, and many auto-played sound. The extension only started injecting ads a few days after it was installed in an attempt to make it more difficult to detect. After a while, Google search became useless, because every link would redirect to some other webpage. My initial thought was to take an inventory of every program I had installed recently—I never suspected an update would bring in malware. I ran a ton of malware/virus scanners, and they all found nothing. I was only clued into the fact that Chrome was the culprit because the same thing started happening on my Chromebook—if I didn't notice that, the next step would have probably been a full wipe of my computer.'

Submission + - Nagios Plugins web site taken over by nagios (monitoring-plugins.org) 1

Submitted by hymie!
hymie! writes: Holger Weiß , formerly of nagios-plugins.org, announced that "Yesterday, the DNS records [of nagios-plugins.org] were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications) by . Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission. This means we cannot use the name 'Nagios Plugins' any longer." Announcement here, discussion here

Comment Re:You're one of the few who like it (Score 1) 470

> Our secretaries learnt it in a week.
Wow, that's a fuckload of wasted time. Why would any business ever want to use Windows 8, knowing it will cost them so much?

Exactly. I've seen people go for 3 hour courses on Win 2000 and XP, starting with "this is a mouse".
Obviously Windows 8 is much more difficult/confusing to use than previous versions if your secretaries needed a week.

Mate and XFCE on Linux both look so similar to Win XP and 7 that someone used to Windows (Such as my father, in his 70's) can get used to either of them in minutes. Not even a few hours.
So for a normal Windows user Linux is much easier to convert to than Windows 8. Admins have some learning to do though :-).

Comment Re:You're one of the few who like it (Score 1) 470

lol.. why the fuck would anyone copy an OS that nobody uses?

ROLFMHO You're showing your ignorance. Lots of people use desktop Linux, including development teams where I work, which has MS Gold Partner banners draped around. They only had to get one copy of Linux of course, so as usual lots of people are counted as one. In mobile, guess what kernel is used for Android? Best you stop now while you still have some credibility.

Two months to learn a UI? Our secretaries learnt it in a week. Nice lie though.

No lie. They were productive in an hour, but much slower than on Win 7 for two months. One of them told me it took three months to get fully used to it. I guess to unlearn what they knew from previous versions, and to stop getting confused about what corner does what, and all the differences between metro and their smartphone. So they hadn't fully learned it for three months. I hope that's clear.

Notice I haven't had to swear yet. I'll bet that really annoys you :-)

Comment You're one of the few who like it (Score 1) 470

I did not write any of the parent posts. But I happen to agree with the parent of yours.

Pretty easy to reach the control panel, which you would rarely visit once your machine is set how you like. Move your mouse to the upper right side of the screen, click "Settings". From there you can go to the old familiar Control Panel window or use the net Metro interface. Or, just start typing "Control Panel" from the Start Screen for an instant search. Not hard.

Once you realise that this is the corner to move the mouse to. What tells you that? Nothing.

The Start button was removed, which I admit seemed like a bad choice, but the new Start Screen is a vast improvement. Idiots never bothered to customize their Start Menu by deleting unnecessary icons and grouping all their shortcuts into custom folders. The new Start Screen makes customization easer, and I think works much better. I don't miss the old Start Menu one bit.

You're only the third person I've met so far who thinks so. Out of around 20 that I've asked. And how many idiots are going to customise their start screen by creating folders? About as many as did in previous windows versions.

The design changes, as with all changes over the years, were backed by studies Microsoft conducted to see how people were using computers and what improvements could be made. For example, the ability to pin applications to the Task Bar and move them around was conceived by actually observing users who not only kept programs open when they weren't using them, but often closed one program and then reopened it later for the sole purpose of having them ordered how they wanted on the Task Bar.

That ability to move things on the task bar was fixed for me in XP by installing a free app a couple of years ago. Linux has had this ability for many years. Interesting that it took so long for MS to catch up, considering that they have had a Linux lab for years so they could have innovated it from Linux long ago.

I've had no problem with Windows 8. I think it's great. I know others who also share my high opinion of the new OS.

You're the 4th person out of about 20 I've asked, who thinks so. There are people where I work who have required 2-3 months to learn how to use it, and they are intelligent people who learn quickly. Win 8 is counterintuitive.

However, since the dawn of home computing, there have always been assholes like you who simply can't cope with new ways of doing things. [yada yada insult insult]

I've been a developer since before MS Windows existed. I've used all versions from 3.1 to 7, including most server versions. I tried 8 briefly and (once you switch out of Metro) there's no noticeable improvement except startup time. I only start it once per week, and shut down at the end of the week, so that doesn't matter. I develop in VMs. So there's no reason to switch, and there are things you have to learn for no benefit. E.g. all of the Metro crap, which is fine for mobile and the worst thing possible to inflict on a desktop machine. So I won't be switching unless I'm told to.

Comment Re:lolwut? (Score 1) 165

by B5Fan (#45289429) Attached to: Spy Expert Says Australia Operating As "Listening Post" For US Agencies

I really don't care if Russia or New Zealand spy on every single citizen in their respective countries.
I do care if my government is reading my email.

Seriously, your government probably isn't reading your email. Think about the number of emails sent each day, excluding spam. But, assuming you live in the USA, your government is storing your emails, and if you ever become interesting to them they can read your emails (including where they were sent from, who to/from, etc), listen to most of the phone calls you made (it's digital, and not much data), txts you sent/received, see where your phone went and who was nearby, etc. Obviously they have your Facebook data, so they know everyone you claim to know. That's why they need a new data centre that can store exabytes of data. And of course if one of their computers notices something potentially interesting about what you say or do online including on your smartphone, or where your mobile goes, a human might take a look. They would love everyone to carry a smartphone with GPS turned on, and to actively use something like Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. It would make their metadata so much richer. If you become interesting to them, they hope you still use Windows because they'll have easy access. It's more effort to break into iOs or Linux. So when you start to encrypt as much as possible to slow them down, be careful about the encryption tools that you use. Check what the experts say.
I don't live in the USA and my government assures me that they don't spy on me or get my data from another country. Now. But I assume that the USA, China, and probably England are storing as much data about me as possible. Especially the data that goes outside my country. And some of that might come back to my government.

Our government should be spending its resources preventing foreign governments from accessing our
mail, tapping our calls, and tracking our communications, and generally hardening our internet.

Good luck with that. If you can still use it easily, it can be accessed/tapped/tracked. And BTW my government should be preventing your government from accessing my mail, calls and communications. I hope that's okay?

Comment Re:Sharepoint (Score 2) 228

by B5Fan (#42487067) Attached to: US Military Signs Modernization Deal With Microsoft

Seriously, Sharepoint? Does anyone actually like SharePoint?

Yes, Microsoft. It locks people into Office, which locks them into Windows, which is the only thing keeping Microsoft from a steep downward spiral.
Like a 747 in the air and without working engines, but in a powerful updraft.

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