Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay | TorrentFreak.
After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.
The world as I know it would be doomed if this actually happened.
Fedora 11 Beta release notes - FedoraProject.
The beta of Fedora 11, codenamed “Leonidas”, has been released to the world. Some of the most notable changes include the new Gnome 2.26, KDE 4.2.1, and Xfce 4.6.0 desktop environments, along with a new default filesystem, Ext 4, and an experimental release of a brand new filesystem, Btrfs.
There are lots more new features with Fedora 11, see the entire list here.
TomTom is now an official licensee in the OIN, which means they can take advantage of all patents owned by OIN, so long as they don’t “assert its patents against the Linux System.”
This comes a month after Microsoft filed a patent lawsuit against TomTom and it’s linux-based GPS systems. Although TomTom uses proprietary software on top of their linux-based GPS’s, the fact that they’re now a lincensee in the Open Invention Network could mean a step closer to a purely free GPS device.
This bill was introduced by Ron Paul on February 26, 2009 and is designed to bring more transparency to the Federal Reserve system. I’ll break the bill down to a friendlier version, so that you can understand what it asks for and what it does not ask for. Let’s get started with the very first sentence:
Section 2 (a) of the bill refers to section 714 of title 31, USC:
here is subsection (b) of section 714 of title 31, USC, before the proposed amendment:
Under regulations of the Comptroller General, the Comptroller General shall audit an agency, but may carry out an onsite examination of an open insured bank or bank holding company only if the appropriate agency has consented in writing. Audits of the Federal Reserve Board and Federal reserve banks may not include—
(1) transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;
(2) deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market operations;
(3) transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or
(4) a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to clauses (1)–(3) of this subsection.
Here is that same subsection if HR 1207 is passed:
Now here is Section 2 (b) of the Federal Reserve Transparency Act:
(e) Audit and Report of the Federal Reserve System-
(1) IN GENERAL- The audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks under subsection (b) shall be completed before the end of 2010.
(2) REPORT-
(A) REQUIRED- A report on the audit referred to in paragraph (1) shall be submitted by the Comptroller General to the Congress before the end of the 90-day period beginning on the date on which such audit is completed and made available to the Speaker of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the House of Representatives, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the committee and each subcommittee of jurisdiction in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and any other Member of Congress who requests it.
(B) CONTENTS- The report under subparagraph (A) shall include a detailed description of the findings and conclusion of the Comptroller General with respect to the audit that is the subject of the report, together with such recommendations for legislative or administrative action as the Comptroller General may determine to be appropriate.
This bill requires audits of the Federal Reserve and its board of governors, and requires that those audits be public knowledge. This legislation makes perfect sense considering the economic conditions at the moment.
Update: HR 1207 now has 39 cosponsors in the house, and an identical companion bill, SB604, in the senate. This thing is well on its way to a vote, let’s just hope it’s the right one.
open-source software development is like cooking. Let me explain.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you want to make an apple pie from scratch. You’ll need a recipe for the pie, that’s certainly easy to find, there are tons of pie recipes in one of the many cook books you own. Just find the apple pie recipe you like the most and set it on the counter.
Next you’ll need the dishes and utensils to manage all the ingredients you’ll have. You probably have a nice size bowl, and rolling pin, a wooden spoon, and a pie pan, but if not, I bet your neighbor has some, or your friend down the road. If not, then you can go to the store and buy the dishes and utensils.
Okay, now your ready to gather all the ingredients, which, if you don’t have yourself, you could borrow from a neighbor or friend, or buy them from the convenience store. Now comes the fun part, mixing all your ingredients together. Your following the recipe when, about halfway through the process, you decide to vary the recipe a bit. You put an extra block of butter in, a little more sugar then it calls for, and you mix some ground cinnamon into the dough. Why not right?
After forming something out of nothing, you stick it in your oven, set the timer, and wait. Images of gooey apple filling, and crisp, buttery, cinnamon crust float around in your head. You can smell the sweet concoction of cinnamon and apple in the air as it bakes into perfection.
When it’s done, you invite some friends over to share the pie, your excited when you tell them how you made it and you give them each a copy of your new recipe, which you derived from some strangers recipe. Your friends enjoy the pie and many of them want to make it for themselves, and some of them even said they would try vanilla instead of cinnamon in the crust.
You made this pie from scratch, you know exactly what its made from, so you know its perfectly safe to eat, and you know it tastes better than those store bought pies, and you like to think you improved upon the recipe you worked from.
developing software is the same way, and when you’re working with open-source tools or deriving your work from another open-source project, you can look at the source so that you know exactly what your working with, and just like making an apple pie, there is nothing stopping you from changing it up a bit (or completely). All the tools you need are there, for free, and when you finish the project, you are free to do with it anything you want.
Let’s say I want to download the source code for Ubuntu Linux. I could either go to archive.ubuntu.com and find what I need, or download the source from Synaptic or the terminal. It’s all there, I can customize it ’till my heart’s content.
This simile is the same when it comes to using open-source software. The cleanest and safest (though not the easiest) way to install an application is to compile it from the source code. Just download all the source (its usually packaged nicely in a .tar archive), and run a few commands from the terminal. Installing it this way, you can specify where to put the installation files, so that you know where all components of the program are, plus you have all the source code in a nice archive. You made this pie from scratch, you know exactly what its made from, so you know its perfectly safe to eat.
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Tags: cooking, development, open-source, pie, simile, software
When the new iPod Shuffle came out, I knew the proprietary control panel (wrapped around the cord) would be an inconvenience for customers. If it breaks, you have to buy a new set of headphones, or if you want to use headphones that are better than the standard earbuds, you’ll need Apples adapter to fit the controls.
Turns out, that method is even more inconvenienced by the presence of hardware DRM. Third party manufacturers will have to use an authentication chip if they want to interoperate with the new Shuffle.
In any normal case third parties would simply reverse engineer the technology to make it compatible, but thanks to the authentication chip, such reverse-engineering would be illegal under the DMCA. Apple is counting on that fact.
This is an anti-competitive system (as are all DRM systems) that puts innovation into the hands of a single corporation.
Apparently, Symantecs Norton Antivirus software contains a single exe called pifts.exe. This program is unsigned, which means firewalls can detect when pifts.exe accesses the internet.
And it does. Pifts.exe attempts to contact a server in Africa, and no one (except perhaps a select few Symantec employees) knows why. When a user on the Symantec Community Forums asked about the mysterious exe, his post was removed, and eventually, all posts regarding pifts were removed and the forums went into ¨maintenance¨ mode.
The forums are back up now, and users inquiring about pifts are directed here.
Norton insists that the exe is harmless, and claim that it was the incredible amount of spam on the forums that caused them to go down after hundreds of posts were deleted.
Conspiracy theories have emerged, some credible, most not. A popular theory is that pifts.exe is a program that allows the FBI to record user statistics.
Independent security ‘experts’ are fairly confident that the exe is not malicious in nature nor is it a government-sponsered spy tool, but rather, the exe is probably just a stat collection program used for Norton Live Update.
Either way, Symantecs secrecy on the matter makes no sense. (this wouldn’t happen if it were free software)
for more:
Internet conspiracy theories abound over Symantec Pifts.exe file
“What is PIFTS.exe?” or How Symantec Turned A Simple Mistake Into A Corporate Disaster
globeandmail.com: Art of playing nice.
If more parents would actively involve themselves like the Spencer family, they would prevent additional conflict in the real world. This is another great example of good parenting; not necessarily because the family is letting their child play video games, but because they understand how to teach and set boundaries for their child without completely removing the element of video games from his life. Everything in moderation.
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Tags: Call of Duty, Geneva Conventions, video game
Although Wikapedia is very mainstream, and is a commonly used some may still not know where the functionality, and ease of use comes from. The software for Wikapedia is actually available for free download and has a GNU license. Recently I had the chance to work on a project for work that allowed me to install, test, and observe the flexibility and ease of use of this software.
Starting with the good. The installation process only took 10-15 minutes. The majority of the time was spend setting up a folder with write privileges, and the MYSQL database, and users. Once installed it only required that the localsettings.php file be moved to the main directory.
Once up and running it is incredibly easy to just start throwing information and documents into the WIKI. I however recommend that you take a moment to first decide what additions to the main layout you may need in terms of user management, and extra functionality as it is much easier to add this prior to filling up your wiki with everything in your hearts desire. There is one other bonus to setting up all your preferences ahead of time, the oops I broke it rule is pretty much a given on the first time install of any new software.
In addition to ease of install, and use the wiki also allows for one of the best search features I have ever seen. The only issue found with searching was from sub name spaces (sub sections of the wiki) not searching for less that 4 characters.
For the bad the user management features are limited without adding additional extensions. This would not be a real issue if you have access to PHP files, and know how to edit them. With the theme of ease of use it is surprising that user management still required knowledge of PHP.
Overall the software is a great addition to any site that needs to store mass amounts of information provided by its users, or for any company looking to centralize their training documents, and other company information. Please feel free to visit the link below, and download a copy for yourself.
The Genivi Alliance is making progress on the development of a middleware platform for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems (GPS, iPOD connectivity, bluetooth recivers, satellite tv/radio setups, etc…).
It’s based on Wind River Linux, and the Intel Atom processor, and the middleware stack is due out this summer.
