will_edit_for_food - Slashdot User

Submission + - How the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is using open source

Submitted by Esther Schindler on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @03:14PM

Esther Schindler writes: When you handle trillions of dollars a year in transactions and manage the largest known vault of gold in the world, security and efficiency are top priorities. Open source reusable software components are key to the New York Fed's successful operation, explains Colin Wynd, vice president and head of the bank's Common Service Organization.
The nearly 2,000 developers across the Federal Reserve System used to have a disparate set of developer tools. Now, they benefit from a standard toolset and architecture, which also places limits on which applications the bank will consider using. “We don’t want a third-party application that isn’t compatible with our common architecture,” said Wynd.

But the advantages are more than technical. Among them: "Developers can now take on projects or switch jobs more easily across Federal Reserve banks because the New York Fed uses a lot of common open source components and a standard tool set, meaning retraining is minimal if needed at all."

Submission + - The Internet Blueprint wants you to crowdsource digital laws (forbes.com)

Submitted by will_edit_for_food on Tuesday February 28, 2012 @05:05PM

will_edit_for_food writes: Are you fed up with piracy acts with scorched-earth tactics like SOPA and PIPA—or secretly negotiated agreements like ACTA? Do you wonder why we the people don’t propose our own laws, rather than just react whenever these bills slouch toward Congress to be born? Wouldn’t you like a place where you and a few like-minded amateur lawmakers could get together and do it right? Today Public Knowledge has debuted the Internet Blueprint (www.internetblueprint.org), a site for those technologically and politically inclined to gather ideas...and eventually submit them to sympathetic politicians.

Submission + - Paypal Forces E-Book Sellers to censor Erotic Content. (zdnet.com)

Submitted by hey! on Tuesday February 28, 2012 @04:16PM

hey! writes: On February 18 of this year, global giant payment processor PayPal sent eBook publisher Smashwords an ultimatum: if Smashwords didn't remove all eBooks with certain erotic content from its catalog in the next several days, PayPal would immediately stop handling payments.

Smashword's TOS already precluded child pornography, but now PayPal wants them to also censor depictions of consenting, non-related adults acting out incest fantasies. Likewise fantasy novels in which human characters transform into non-humans are affected if those characters have sex. ZDNet has a summary of the impact of these changes, which would among other things ban Vladmir Nabokov's *Lolita*.

As outrage mounts, finger pointing is in full swing. Smashwords blames PayPal, and PayPal blames the banks it deals with. The crux seems to be that erotica buyers have a higher rate of "chargebacks" — customers who buy stuff then demand their money back. Fair enough, but is a customer really more likely to return a book because it depicts one kind of fantasy between consenting adults vs. another? Perhaps the problem is just the quality of writing.

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