103718271
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Undoubtedly in response to this politically motivated sort of claptrap, SQLite has released their own Code of Conduct. From the preamble:
Having been encouraged by clients to adopt a written code of conduct, the SQLite developers elected to govern their interactions with each other, with their clients, and with the larger SQLite user community in accordance with the "instruments of good works" from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict. This code of conduct has proven its mettle in thousands of diverse communities for over 1,500 years, and has served as a baseline for many civil law codes since the time of Charlemagne.
27532738
submission
Tootech writes:
The online auction of the righthaven.com website domain name got under way Monday, with bidders having until Jan. 6 to submit offers.
A judge has authorized a receiver to auction the intellectual property of Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC, the newspaper copyright infringement lawsuit filer.
The auction is aimed at raising money to cover part of Righthaven’s $63,720 debt to a man who defeated Righthaven in court.
The man, Wayne Hoehn, and his attorneys defeated Righthaven when a judge threw out Righthaven’s lawsuit against him over Hoehn’s unauthorized post on a sports betting website message board of a Las Vegas Review-Journal column by columnist and former Publisher Sherman Frederick.
Hoehn was a defendant in one of Righthaven’s 275 lawsuits filed since March 2010.
27530370
submission
kulnor writes:
Hexagon, a cold war secret project around spy satellites to monitor USSR was declassified last Septembre. "For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored. They spoke in code."
As more and more WWII and cold war secrets are declassified, we learn about amazing technological feats involving hundreds of people working in secrecy. I was awestruck a while ago by the Bletchley Park story around cryptography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park), including Alan Turing's involvement. I wonder what will emerge in a few decades around modern IT, the Internet, hacks, and the likes. Or will they leak before their time?
16546358
story
skids writes
"Coders hate having to rush code out the door before it's ready. They also hate it when the customer starts making unreasonable demands. What they hate even more is when the customer reverse engineers the product and starts selling their own inferior product. But what really ticks them off is when that buggy, knockoff product might be used by targeting systems in military unmanned drone attacks, and the bugs introduce location errors of up to 13 meters. That's what purportedly happened to software developer IISi, based on an ongoing boardroom/courtroom drama that will leave any hard-pressed coder appreciating just how much worse his job could get. The saddest part? The CIA assumed the bug was a feature. The tinfoil-hat-inducing part? The alleged perpetrators just got bought by IBM."
