An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released the first version a new browser benchmark called Kraken. Mozilla's Robert Sayre writes on his blog, 'More than Sunspider, V8, and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and forward-looking applications. We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward. These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open web technologies today, and we want to have benchmarks that reflect progress against making these near-future apps universally available.' On my somewhat elderly x86_64 Linux system Google Chrome 6.0.472.55 beta completes the Kraken benchmark in 28638.1 milliseconds, Opera 10.62 completes it in 23612.4 milliseconds, and the current Firefox 4 nightly build completes it in 19897.5 milliseconds."

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton has written a piece on a new program called Collage that can circumvent censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The program demonstrates that a long-standing theoretical concept can be reduced to practice but Bennett wonders if anybody would actually need it, as long as they can exchange encrypted messages over Gmail and AIM. He begins "In a presentation delivered at USENIX, Georgia Tech grad student Sam Burnett and his colleagues described how their new program, "Collage," could circumvent Internet censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The short version is that a publisher uses the Collage system to break a message into pieces that are small enough to embed into a photograph using standard steganography, the photos are published according to some protocol (e.g. "all photos in the photostream of user xyz" or "all photos tagged with the 'xyz' tag"), and receivers who know the protocol for identifying the photos, can retrieve them and decode the message. According to the authors' paper, the system is general enough that it could be adapted to almost any site where user-generated content is published. (All of this can be done by hand using existing tools, but Collage automates the process to hide the individual steps from the user.)"

sgunhouse writes to let us know that, following a leaked internal build over the weekend, Opera Software has now released their official 10.5 pre-alpha. There are no Linux versions yet. And an anonymous reader adds, "Opera's 10.5 pre-alpha includes the Carakan JavaScript Engine. Benchmarks now show that Opera is competitive with Chrome, beating it in Sunspider and other tests. Safari, Firefox, and IE are all behind. This is still pre-alpha, so further speed gains should be expected."

The RIAA isn't just suing tens of thousands of music consumers; they've also begun filing lawsuits naming the directors of and investors in tech companies that they believe contribute to copyright infringement. NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "ZDNet urges the big recording industries to stop suing tech investors, and cites the draft legislation that I posted, which would immunize from secondary copyright infringement liability any work done by a director in 'his or her capacity as a member of the board of directors or committee thereof,' and any conduct by an investor based solely upon his or her having 'invested in any such corporation, including any oversight, monitoring, or due diligence activities in connection therewith.'"

A number of readers have sent word about Opera Software ASA's antitrust complaint against Microsoft filed with the EU. Here is Opera's press release on the filing. The company wants the EU to "obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop" and to "require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities." The latter request makes this a case to watch. Will the Commissioner take the Acid2 test using IE7?

AlanS2002 writes "Groklaw is hosting an article by Brendan Scott which looks at the misconceptions surrounding the BSD license. From the article: 'We observe that there exists a broad misconception that the BSD permits the licensing of BSD code and modifications of BSD code under closed source licenses. In this paper we put forward an argument to the effect that the terms of the BSD require BSD code and modifications to BSD code to be licensed under the terms of the BSD license. We look at some possible consequences and observe that this licensing requirement could have serious impacts on the unwary.'"

daria42 writes "A project to port Sun Microsystems' Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) tool to FreeBSD appears to have achieved some initial success. DTrace was open sourced last year and is one of the coolest features in Solaris 10."

Golygydd Max writes "A Techworld story reveals that the reason Yahoo email has delivery problems is that the company's mail servers mysteriously close once in a while." From the article: "According to trimMail's Email Battles site, which recently monitored 16 of the company's advertised email hosts 240 times over a half hour period, only 133 of its probes were answered. Many of the servers were closed and unavailable. Overall availability ranged from 25 percent to 75 percent over the admittedly short test period. The average availability was 55 percent, with the worst of the servers available only 7 percent of the time."

Don Church writes "DesktopBSD is reporting that the 1.0 Final of DesktopBSD was released today for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures. This cutting edge FreeBSD derivative now includes KDE 3.5.1 and a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices. The DVD release even includes Amarok, Firefox and other popular software ready to go. They are offering downloads via several mirrors or the official torrent."