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Submission + - Munich Starts Distributing Free Ubuntu CDs to Windows XP Users

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: Windows XP is going to officially die and stop receiving support from Microsoft in April, 2014. After that very moment, it is said to become a gold mine for hackers all over the world that will exploit “zero-day” vulnerabilities. The municipality of the German city of Munich wants to stop that from happening as it obviously cares for its people. Thus, it has decided to distribute free CDs with Ubuntu 12.04 to users of the almost extinct Windows XP. The Munich City, through its Gasteig Library, will prepare around 2000 CDs with Ubuntu 12.04 to offer to their city residents affected by Windows XP’s end of support. Previously, it was believed that Munich city’s authorities were going to offer Lubuntu 12.04, which would have required lower system requirements with the same support period.

Submission + - New operating system sets out to replace Linux on the cloud

Submitted by urdak
urdak writes: Today in CloudOpen in New Orleans, KVM veterans Avi Kivity and Dor Laor revealed their latest venture, a new open-source (BSD license) operating system named OSv. OSv can run existing Linux programs and runtime environments such as a JVM, but unlike Linux, OSv was designed from the ground up to run efficiently on virtual machines. For example, OSv avoids the traditional (but slow) userspace-kernel isolation, as on the cloud VMs normally run a single application. OSv is also much smaller than Linux, and breaks away from tradition by being written in C++11 (the language choice is explained in in this post).

Submission + - Flies see the world in slo-mo, say scientists (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "The smaller an animal is, and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower time passes for it, scientists found.
This means that across a wide range of species, time perception is directly related to size, with animals smaller than us seeing the world in slow motion."

No wonder it took so long to grow up!

Submission + - Chinese DRAM Plant Fire Continues to Drive Up Memory Prices (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Damage from an explosion and fire in SK Hynix’s Wuxi, China DRAM fabrication plant will drive up global memory prices for PCs, servers, and other devices, according to new reports. Most of the damage from the Sept. 4 fire was to the air-purification systems and roof of the plant, according to announcements from parent company SK Hynix, which predicted the fab would be back to full production in less than a month. The Wuxi plant makes approximately 10 percent of the world’s supply of DRAM chips; its primary customers include Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, Dell and Sony. SK Hynix is the world’s second-largest manufacturer of memory chips, with a market share of 30 percent, lagging behind Samsung Electronics with 32.7 percent. In an update published Friday, market-research firm DRAMeXchange reported that damage from the fire, smoke and power outages left at least half the plant inoperable or at reduced capacity. The plant is designed to isolate damage in case of disaster so that at least one of its two parallel production facilities can remain online. The facility itself restarted production Sept. 7, according to a statement from the company.

Submission + - UK Cryptographers Call For UK, US Gov to Out Weakened Products

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A group of cryptographers in the UK has published a letter that calls on authorities in that country and the United States to conduct an investigation to determine which security products, protocols and standards have been deliberately weakened by the countries’ intelligence services. The letter, signed by a number of researchers from the University of Bristol and other universities, said that the NSA and British GCHQ “have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.”

The appeal comes a couple of weeks after leaked documents from the NSA and its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, showed that the two agencies have been collaborating on projects that give them the ability to subvert encryption protocols and also have been working with unnamed security vendors to insert backdoors into hardware and software products. Security experts have been debating in recent weeks which products, standards and protocols may have been deliberately weakened, but so far no information has been forthcoming.

“We call on the relevant parties to reveal what systems have been weakened so that they can be repaired, and to create a proper system of oversight with well-defined public rules that clearly forbid weakening the security of civilian systems and infrastructures," the letter says.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Stepping down from an office server to NAS-only

Submitted by rawket.scientist
rawket.scientist writes: I'm a full time lawyer and part time nerd doing most of the IT support for my small (~10 person) firm. We make heavy use of our old Windows Server 2003 machine for networked storage, and we use it as a DNS server (by choice, not necessity), but we don't use it for our e-mail, web hosting, productivity or software licensing. No Sharepoint, no Exchange, etc. Now old faithful is giving signs of giving out, and I'm seriously considering replacing it with a NAS device like the Synology DS1512+ or Dell PowerVault NX200. Am I penny-wise but pound foolish here? And is it overambitious for someone who's only dabbled in networking 101 to think of setting up a satisfactory, secure VPN or FTP server on one of these? We've had outside consultants and support in the past, but I always get the first "why is it doing this" call, and I like to have the answer, especially if I was the one who recommended the hardware.

Comment Re:Try to get the license changed to GPL (Score 2) 115

by Silk (#37626508) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Spreading the Word About At-Risk Open Source Projects?

You don't know much about the GPL, do you? You were almost right about one thing: "nobody can take the code private." Only the copyright holder has the right to change the license. Anyone else, however, can make changes to the software, not provide those changes back to the copyright holder AND make money by selling GPL software. Any modifications you make to the software are also licensed under the GPL and you are not required to share the source code with anyone except the people that use your modifications. If you sell object code (binaries) of the software to customers, you are required to provide the source code to your customers upon request. The price you charge for the software is only limited by what your customers are willing to pay and you can't charge anything more for the source code.

It's not difficult. Reading the GNU project's philosophy on selling GPL software might help you better understand how it works. Looking up "selling GPL software" on Google is also an option.
Microsoft

Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191

Posted by samzenpus from the messy-verdict dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."
Games

Palm Pre and WebOS Get Native Gaming 49

Posted by Soulskill from the break-out-your-rocket-launcher dept.
rboatright writes "WebOS developers have been waiting, and with the 1.3.5 release, Palm's open source page suddenly listed SDL. Members of the WebOS internals team took that as a challenge and within 24 hours had a working port of Doom running in SDL on the Pre, in a webOS card. 48 hours later, they not only had Quake running, but had found in the latest LunaSysMgr the requirements to launch a native app from the webOS app launcher from an icon just like any other app. At the same time, the team demonstrated openGL apps running. With full native code support, with I/O available via SDL, developers now have a preview into Palm's future intent with regard to native code SDK's, and a hint of what's coming."
Quickies

Submission + - Who Writes Linux: Big Business (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "This Computerworld blog reports The Linux Foundation's report (portable document format/PDF) on who writes Linux — "... Linux isn't written by lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' basements. It's written by people working for major companies — many of them businesses that you probably don't associate with Linux. To be exact, while 18.2% of Linux is written by people who aren't working for a company, and 7.6% is created by programmers who don't give a company affiliation, everything else is written by someone who's getting paid to create Linux. From top to bottom, of the companies that have contributed more than 1% of the current Linux kernel, the list looks like this: ..." Seen on Linux Today."
NASA

Submission + - SPAM: NASA probe blasts 461 gigabytes of moon data daily 1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "On its current space scouting mission, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is using a pumped up communications device to deliver 461 gigabytes of data and images per day, at a rate of up to 100 Mbps. As the first high data rate K-band transmitter to fly on a NASA spacecraft, the 13-inch-long tube, called a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier, is making it possible for NASA scientists to receive massive amounts of images and data about the moon's surface and environment. The amplifier was built by L-3 Communications Electron Technologies in conjunction with NASA's Glenn Research Center. The device uses electrodes in a vacuum tube to amplify microwave signals to high power. It's ideal for sending large amounts of data over a long distance because it provides more power and more efficiency than its alternative, the transistor amplifier, NASA stated. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Hardware Hackers Create a Modular Motherboard (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of hardware hackers have created a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules.The design, called the Illuminato X Machina, is vastly different from the separate processor,memory and storage components that govern computers today.
Media

Submission + - Open source tech used to monitor Afghan election

Submitted by chrb
chrb writes: BBC News is reporting on how the Alive in Afghanistan project is helping to oversee the Afghan elections using open-source technologies. The site was set up by Brian Conley, who is also responsible for Alive in Baghdad, Alive in Mexico, and who was arrested for filming protests in China last year. The Afghan site uses FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi to process and visualise SMS texts from Afghani citizens, allowing reports from all over the country to be rapidly collated and re-distributed globally.
The Internet

Submission + - IPv6: Practical Challenges and Opportunities (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by
1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: "Opinions differ on when the Internet will run out of IPv4 addresses, prompting a wholesale transition to IPv6. In recent videos, John Curran of ARIN provides an overview of issues involved in the IPv6 transition, while Martin Levy of Hurricane Electric discusses his company's view that early-mover status on IPv6 readiness can be a competitive advantage for service providers. Levy's company has published an IPv4 DeathWatch app for the iPhone to raise awareness of the transition."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Nokia leaks phone with full GNU/Linux distribution 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: It is now clear why Nokia has been so slow with S60 updates: the upcoming N900 just left everything else in the dust. Unlike Google's Linux platform, Nokia is not intentionally breaking compatibility with real distros, choosing instead to bring you the unmatchable power of GNU/Linux on your phone. This is the most awesome device I have ever seen.

OMAP3 CPU/GPU, 3,5" 800x480 touchscreen, keyboard, wifi, hspa, gps
5 MP camera, CZ lens, 32GB storage, SD slot
X11 window server, VT100 terminal emulator, APT package manager
Price without credit: est. 550e/$780 (N.5800: 280e/$390, iPhone 3GS: 530e/$750)

Developers should note that even though the current desktop is still GTK+, Qt will be standard across all Nokia platforms in the near future (less powerful phones will use Qt on the Symbian kernel). Users can download flashing software from Nokia, and patches can be submitted at the Maemo site.

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