pmee - Slashdot User

How To Hijack an EU Open Source Strategy Paper 112

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 27, 2009 @01:22PM from the lobbyists-at-the-policy-table dept.

Glyn Moody writes "Thanks to the indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to see how an organization close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write — and hijack — an important European Union open source strategy paper, currently being drawn up. Analyzing before and after versions visible in the document demonstrates how the Association for Competitive Technology, a lobbying group partially funded by Microsoft, is trying to widen the scope of open source to include 'mixed solutions blending open and proprietary code.'" And reader Elektroschock adds some detail on EU processes: "The European Commission lets ACT and CompTIA participate in all working groups of the European Open Source Strategy, which defines Europe's future open source approach. A blue editor questions the objectives: 'Regarding the "Europe Digital Independence" our [working] group thinks it is, in general, not an issue.' 'European digital independence' is a phrase coined by EU Commissioner V. Reding, that is what her European Software Strategy was supposed to be about. She didn't reveal that lobbyists or vendors with vested interests would write the strategy for the Commission."

Submission + - Nasa details shuttle's retirement (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz on Wednesday July 09, 2008 @02:11AM

schliz writes: Nasa has announced that it intends to officially retire the aging space shuttle fleet by 2010, four years before it has a replacement craft ready. The space shuttle fleet will make ten more flights, mainly to add modules to the International Space Station and carry out repairs and upgrades to the Hubble orbital telescope. The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years, until the Ares booster programme is complete. European and Russian launchers will service the space station in the meantime.

Comment Re:Is that so? (Score 5, Insightful) 685

by pmee on Tuesday July 01, 2008 @12:26AM (#24011739) Attached to: Some Developers Leaving Google For Microsoft

Very few Google teams do anything as rigorous as XP and I doubt that many write unit tests. And as another poster noted, developers often get frustrated because they never actually get to ship anything.

A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies 330

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 21, 2008 @10:27PM from the careful-what-you-let-go-viral dept.

eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."

Comment Re:Linux Support (Score 4, Funny) 140

by jandrese on Saturday June 21, 2008 @05:03AM (#23881039) Attached to: NVIDIA To Enable PhysX For Full Line of GPUs

And hopefully some Linux game/app will come out that can use it.

Submission + - Safari "Carpet Bomb" Attack Still a Risk (zdnet.com)

Submitted by

SecureThroughObscure

on Saturday June 21, 2008 @04:28AM

SecureThroughObscure writes: "Just a short time after Apple's recent acknowledgement of and patch of the Safari Carpet Bomb "blended" IE flaw, blogger Nate McFeters of ZDNet's Zero-Day blog has pointed to research by Billy Rios of Microsoft that shows that the attack is still useful in a "blended" attack, this time with Firefox 2/3. Rios claimed that he is able to use the Safari Carpet Bomb attack, despite the recent patch, to steal arbitrary files from victims who also have Firefox 2/3 installed.

McFeters pointed out that Apple, which took some heat for not originally patching the issue, actually did a good job of addressing the issue, as it was not originally understood that code execution was possible (the details came out later). Rios seemed to echo a positive response by Apple in addressing the original issue, despite the media's portrayal.

Details of Rios's specific attack vector have been withheld until Apple has had time to patch or respond to this issue, but both researchers (McFeters and Rios) commented on the new attack threat that these blended types of attacks provide, and questioned who's responsibility it is to test for and fix these issues.

SecureThroughObscure"

The P.G. Wodehouse Method of Refactoring 133

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 23, 2008 @04:02AM from the on-the-wall dept.

covertbadger notes a developer's blog entry on a novel way of judging progress in refactoring code. "Software quality tools can never completely replace the gut instinct of a developer — you might have massive test coverage, but that won't help with subjective measures such as code smells. With Wodehouse-style refactoring, we can now easily keep track of which code we are happy with, and which code we remain deeply suspicious of."

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