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Submission + - Lavabit Founder Explains Why He Was Forced To Shut It Down (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit that shut down last year because of friction with U.S. government data requests, has an article at The Guardian where he explains the whole story. He writes, 'My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company's network. ... I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the U.S. government access to all of the messages – to and from all of my customers – as they travelled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet. But that wasn't enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company's private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords – which were sent securely – so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company's encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my "noncompliance".) ... What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days, ending not only my startup but also destroying, bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it – that we all have a right to personal privacy.'

Comment Kids that were born in a free software age (Score 1) 356

by I+AOk (#43993995) Attached to: Your License Is Your Interface

It's simple, really,

Most of the kids who were born to a free software world, where access to the source is ubiquitous, don't have an idea of what a license does for them.

Never bothered to read the LICENSE files, because they all say (practically) the same thing, that they are free to improve and share. And that's what they do.

When they start their own projects, they 'default' to the same (mixed-oss/fs) license they grew up with, because that's the 'context' of the society they grew up in.

Submission + - Kepler Watches White Dwarf Warp Spacetime (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: The Kepler space telescope’s prime objective is to hunt for small worlds orbiting distant stars, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to detect some extreme relativistic phenomena along the way. While monitoring a red dwarf star — designated KOI-256 — astronomers detected a dip in starlight in the Kepler data. But it wasn't caused by an exoplanet. After some careful detective work, the researchers found that the red dwarf was actually in orbit around a binary partner — a white dwarf. As the white dwarf passed in front of the red dwarf, the starlight was enhanced by microlensing — a phenomenon caused by an intense gravitational field focusing light from behind. This had the counter-intuitive result of causing the starlight to dim when the white dwarf passed behind the red dwarf and then brighten as the white dwarf passed in front. This is one of the first discoveries of a binary partner through microlensing. "Only Kepler could detect this tiny, tiny effect," said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "But with this detection, we are witnessing Einstein’s theory of general relativity at play in a far-flung star system."

Comment Re:why? (Score 1) 311

by I+AOk (#42854527) Attached to: Moving the Linux Kernel Console To User-Space

At boot up, the BIOS redirects the PC text screen to the serial port (emulating an ANSI console, I think). Then, there's a setting in the bios telling it when to stop redirecting -- after POST, after boot loader, or never. It only works while the display hardware is in text mode, by the way.

In my case I stop redirecting before the boot loader (grub), and tell Linux it's console is ttyS0.

Wait... here it is: /boot/grub/grub.cfg:
serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal_input serial
terminal_output serial

Linux:
# cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.2.0-37-generic root=UUID=73441761-9587-45c1-a901-63fbb9cac1ff ro console=ttyS0,115200n8 console=tty0

All done in /etc/default/grub, on Ubuntu (IIRC):
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="console=ttyS0,115200n8 console=tty0"
GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

Comment Re:why? (Score 2) 311

by I+AOk (#42838637) Attached to: Moving the Linux Kernel Console To User-Space

VT is a virtual terminal running on the VGA hardware. On a serial console you just get a getty over a standard tty (i.e., serial device). Work great for managing remote servers to which you get via a BMC (HP ILO), with serial port redirection.

Comment Re:Looks like I better act soon (Score 1) 172

by I+AOk (#42454045) Attached to: TSMC Preparing To Manufacturer A6X Chip As Apple Looks to Ditch Samsung

Seeing that "bumpgate" only affected NVidia, and NVidia's and ATI's GPUs produced at TMSC don't show reliability problems, it's more of a problem of *assembly* and not in the production of chips themselves.

That, along with complaints of low yields by NVidia but not ATI/AMD, says that the problem lies not at TMSC...

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