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Submission + - NSA Posts Opening For 'Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer' (thehill.com)

cold fjord writes: The Hill reports, "The National Security Agency has posted a job opening for a privacy and civil liberties officer. The position was first mentioned last month, when President Obama outlined his plans to bring more transparency to the NSA surveillance programs. A White House press release said the agency was “taking steps to put in place a full time Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer.”" — From the NSA job posting: "The NSA Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer (CLPO) is conceived as a completely new role, combining the separate responsibilities of NSA's existing Civil Liberties and Privacy (CL/P) protection programs under a single official. The CLPO will serve as the primary advisor to the Director of NSA for ensuring that privacy is protected and civil liberties are maintained by all of NSA's missions, programs, policies and technologies. This new position is focused on the future, designed to directly enhance decision making and to ensure that CL/P protections continue to be baked into NSA's future operations, technologies, tradecraft, and policies. The NSA CLPO will consult regularly with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence CLPO, privacy and civil liberties officials from the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, as well as other U.S. government, private sector, public advocacy groups and foreign partners. "

Submission + - Oracle discontinues free Java time zone updates (oracle.com)

Noel Trout writes: For a long time in the Java world, there has been a free tool called the "tzupdater" or Time Zone Updater released as a free download first by Sun and then Oracle. This tool can be used to apply a patch to the Java runtime so that time zone information is correct. This is necessary since some time zones in the world are not static and change more frequently than one might think; in general time zone updates can be released maybe 4-6 times a year. The source information backing the Java timezone API comes from the open source Olson timezone database that is also used by many operating systems. For certain types of applications, you can understand that these updates are mission critical. For example, my company operates in the private aviation sector so we need to be able to display the correct local time at airports around the world.

So, the interesting part is that Oracle has now decided to only release these updates if you have a Java SE support contract. See the following link:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/tzupdater-download-513681.html
Being Oracle, such licenses are far from cheap.

In my opinion, this is a pretty serious change in stance for Oracle and amounts to killing free Java for certain types of applications, at least if you care about accuracy. We are talking about the core API class java.util.TimeZone. This begs the question, can you call an API free if you have to pay for it to return accurate information? What is the point of such an API? Should the community not expect that core Java classes are fully functional and accurate? I believe it is also a pretty bad move for Java adoption for these types of applications. If my company as a startup 10 years ago would have been presented with such a license fee, we almost certainly could not have chosen Java as our platform as we could not afford it.

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