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Comment Zimbabwe and Democracy? (Score 1) 669

by viralMeme (#34709466) Attached to: Wikileaks and Democracy In Zimbabwe
Yea, without Wikileaks Mugabe would never have moved against the opposition ..

"On 11 March 2007 a day after his 55th birthday, Tsvangirai was arrested .. His wife .. reported that he had been heavily tortured by police, resulting in deep gashes on his head and a badly swollen eye" link

"ZANU-PF has implemented a strategy of reciprocity in the negotiations, using Western sanctions as a cudgel against MDC. He would like to see some quiet moves, provided there are acceptable benchmarks, to 'give' some modest reward for modest progress .. He also acknowledged that his public statements calling for easing of sanctions versus his private conversations saying they must be kept in place have caused problems" link

"He [Tsvangirai] is the indispensable element for opposition success, but possibly an albatross around their necks once in power. In short, he is a kind of Lech Walesa character: Zimbabwe needs him, but should not rely on his executive abilities to lead the country's recovery" link

"Grace Mugabe sues Zimbabwe newspaper over Wikileaks diamond story" link
Google

Submission + - Who will win control of the web? (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: Control of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote, as does the world’s biggest creative software company, Adobe. And HTML itself is changing, too. PC Pro examines the case for each of the contenders in the war of the web and, with the help of industry experts, assess which – if any – is most likely to emerge as victor.
The Internet

Submission + - Google, Microsoft Cheat on Slow-Start. Should You? (benstrong.com) 1

Submitted by kdawson
kdawson writes: Software developer and blogger Ben Strong did a little exploring to find out how Google achieves its admirably fast load times. What he discovered is that Google, and to a much greater extent Microsoft, are cheating on the 'slow-start' requirement of RFC-3390. His research indicates that discussion of this practice on the Net is at an early, and somewhat theoretical, stage.Strong concludes with this question: 'What should I do in my app (and what should you do in yours)? Join the arms race or sit on the sidelines and let Google have all the page-load glory?'
News

Submission + - BP ignored safety modeling software to save time (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes: BP ignored the advice of safety critical software in an attempt to save time before the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to a presentation slide prepared by US investigators.

The slide in question briefly appeared on the Oil Spill Commission’s website in error, but was quickly retracted.

Advanced cement modelling software, provided by BP’s cement contractor Halliburton, had highlighted serious stability concerns with the well...
Programming

Submission + - 60 years of Hamming codes (cio.com.au)

Submitted by swandives
swandives writes: In 1950 Bell Labs researcher Richard W. Hamming made a discovery that would lay an important foundation for the modern computing and communications industries — coming up with a method for performing computing operations on a large scale without errors. Hamming wrote about how self-checking circuits help eliminate errors in telephone central offices. He speculated the “special codes” he proposed — which became known as Hamming codes — would only need to be applied to systems requiring unattended operation for long periods or “extremely large and tightly integrated” systems where a single failure would incapacitate the entire installation.

Hamming code was the first discovery in an immense field called coding theory. This article looks back on the history of Hamming codes, their applications, and includes interviews with Todd Moon, Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Utah State University and David MacKay, Professor of natural philosophy in the department of Physics at the University of Cambridge and chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. An interesting read, about a little-known but fundamental element of information theory.

Submission + - My GPL code has been... patented! 4

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: Back in 2001, I coded HeapCheck, a GPL library for Windows (inspired by ElectricFence) that detected invalid read/write accesses on any heap allocations at runtime — thus greatly helping my debugging sessions. I published it on my site, and got a few users who were kind enough to thank me — a Serbian programmer even sent me 250$ as a thank you (I still have his mails). After a few years, Microsoft included very similar technology in the operating system itself, calling it PageHeap. I had more or less forgotten these stuff, since for the last 7 years I've been coding for UNIX/Linux, where valgrind superseeded Efence/dmalloc/etc. Imagine my surprise, when yesterday, Googling for references to my site, I found out that the technology I implemented, of runtime detection of invalid heap accesses, has been patented in the States, and to add insult to injury, even mentions my site (via a non-working link to an old version of my page) in the patent references! After the necessary "WTFs" and "bloody hells" I thought this merrits (a) a Slashdotting, and (b) a set of honest questions: what should I do about this? I am not an American citizen, but the "inventors" of this technology (see their names in the top of the patent) have apparently succeeded in passing this ludicrous patent in the States. If my code doesn't count as prior art, Bruce Perens's Efence (which I clearly state my code was inspired from) is at least 12 years prior! Suggestions/cursing patent trolls most welcome.

Submission + - Code-stealing drone vendor settles with devs (narconews.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: An explosive lawsuit alleging that Boston-area tech company Netezza Corp. sold computer hardware loaded with âÅ"hacked,â faulty software to the CIA for use in the agencyââs Predator Drone program has now disappear from public view.

The parties to the lawsuit, which include Netezza and software developer Intelligent Integration Systems Inc. (IISI), announced last week that they had reached a settlement in the case. A day after that announcement, corporate giant IBM closed on a $1.7 billion deal to purchase Netezza.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Which is the best netbook OS: Windows or Ubuntu? (pcpro.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, PC Pro has revisited a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook?. The magazine has run a series of benchmarks on a Asus Eee PC 1008HA running Windows XP Home, two versions of Windows 7 (with and without Aero switched on) and Ubuntu Netbook Edition. The operating systems are tested for start-up performance, Flash handling and video, among other tests. The results are closer than you might think.
Microsoft

Submission + - Internet Explorer 9 Caught Cheating In SunSpider (digitizor.com) 2

Submitted by dkd903
dkd903 writes: A Mozilla engineer has uncovered something embarrassing for Microsoft – Internet Explorer is cheating in the SunSpider Benchmark. The SunSpider, although developed by Apple, has nowadays become a very popular choice of benchmark for the JavaScript engines of browsers.
Security

Submission + - New Rootkit Bypasses Windows Code-Signing Security (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: In recent versions of Windows, specifically Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft has introduced a number of new security features designed to prevent malicious code from running. But attackers are continually finding new ways around those protections, and the latest example is a rootkit that can bypass the Windows driver-signing protection.

The functionality is contained in TDL4, which is the latest version of an older rootkit also known as TDSS. TDSS has been causing serious trouble for users for more than two years now, and is an example of a particularly pernicious type of rootkit that infects the master boot record of a PC. This type of malware often is referred to as a bootkit and can be extremely difficult to remove once it's detected. The older versions of TDSS--TDL1, TDL2 and TDL3--are detected by most antimalware suites now, but it's TDL4 that's the most problematic right now.

TDL4 has a specific function that is designed to bypass a protection in Windows 7 and Windows Vista that requires kernel-level code loaded onto a machine to be signed. The Windows kernel-mode code signing policy is mainly applicable on 64-bit machines.

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