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Comment Re:Irony (Score 5, Informative) 527

by flimm (#42507223) Attached to: Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions

That's not what Tivoization is. Tivoization is when you put copyleft software on a piece of hardware, but then lock down the hardware so that the users can modify the software in practise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

What you are describing is legal even under GPLv3. You can distribute non-free programs along with free ones: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
Communications

SSL Certificate Authorities vs. Convergence, Perspectives 127

Posted by timothy from the with-moxie-marlinspike-as-guy-fawkes dept.
alphadogg writes "With all the publicity about breaches of SSL certificate authorities and a hack that exploits a vulnerability in the supposedly secure protocol, it's time to consider something else to protect Internet transactions. If only there were something else to turn to. Protecting SSL and its updated version TLS is vital because they support most e-commerce transactions by setting up end-to-end encrypted sessions that are authenticated, and that requires certificates that are verified by certificate authorities. One new model for authentication is called Convergence, and it similar to one being trialed at Carnegie Mellon University called Perspectives. Rather than trusted third parties whose trust can't be assured, SSL/TLS authentication would rely on a reputation system of verification."

Submission + - Freedom of Speech at risk in Italy, again (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Another attempt by the italian government to censor the internet.
A new law says that is enough to feel offended by any content, to have it deleted or replaced by a "correction" chosen by the offended; this has resulted in Wikipedia threatening to delete all its italian contents in order to comply.
Windows

Nokia Sells Qt 193

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yeah-who-needs-it dept.
Google85 writes "Now that Nokia has shifted to a Windows Phone-centric smartphone strategy, it's only natural for the company to divest itself of responsibility with regard to the Qt framework. It has been announced Digia will acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business from Nokia, including the transfer of some 3,500 desktop and embedded customers actively using Qt today."
Google

Submission + - Google To Drop Support For H.264 In Chrome 1

Submitted by Steve
Steve writes: oogle just made a bold move in the HTML5 video tag battle: even though H.264 is widely used and WebM is not, the search giant has announced it will drop support for the former in Chrome. The company has not done so yet, but it has promised it will in the next couple of months. Google wants to give content publishers and developers using the HTML5 video tag an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their websites.

Here's the current state of HTML5 video: Microsoft and Apple are betting on H.264, while Google, Mozilla, and Opera are rooting for WebM. Although Internet Explorer 9 supports H.264, excluding all other codecs, Microsoft says it is making an exception for WebM, as long as the user installs the corresponding codec. Google developed WebM, but made an exception for H.264, until today's announcement. Meanwhile, Mozilla and Opera refuse to provide support for H.264 because the H.264 patent license agreement isn't cheap.

http://www.techspot.com/news/41936-google-to-drop-support-for-h264-in-chrome.html
Operating Systems

The Recovery Disc Rip-Off 551

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-get-what-you-don't-pay-for dept.
nk497 writes "The chances of finding a recovery disc at the bottom of a PC box is getting slimmer, as vendors instead take the cheaper option of installing recovery software on a hard disk partition, leaving the buyer with no physical copy of the operating system they paid for if (or when) the hard disk fails. Users can burn a backup disc, but many aren't as diligent as they should be. While some PC vendors will offer a free or cheap disc at the time of purchase, buying one — or even tracking one down — after the fact can be expensive and take weeks to arrive. 'I've had a lot of people that have had this problem,' said David Smith, director of independent maintenance company Help With Your PC. 'One customer recently found his hard drive had gone, but by the time he'd paid £50 for the recovery disc, paid for a new hard drive and paid for the labour of installing the device, it made more sense to buy a new machine.'"
Piracy

Swedish Pirate Party To Run Pirate Bay From Parliament 288

Posted by kdawson from the criminalizing-dirty-tricks dept.
rdnetto sends in this clip from TorrentFreak. To pursue these plans the Pirate Party needs to win 4% of the seats in Parliament in an election coming up in September. "After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament. ... The party has announced today that they intend to use part of the Swedish Constitution to further these goals, specifically Parliamentary Immunity from prosecution or lawsuit for things done as part of their political mandate. They intend to push the non-commercial sharing part of their manifesto, by running The Pirate Bay from inside the Parliament, by Members of Parliament."
Privacy

Yahoo Treading Carefully Before Exposing More Private Data 107

Posted by kdawson from the can-you-say-buzz dept.
crimeandpunishment writes "Yahoo hopes to turn on a new sharing option without turning off its users. The company is trying to avoid the privacy backlash that has befallen Facebook and Google. It's advising its email account holders, all 280M of them, to review their privacy settings in advance of Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books, unless they take steps to prevent it."

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