It seems that Dell Computers is putting the brakes on their new lines of Linux-equipped computers. They've changed their minds, and instead of selling machines with SUSE Linux preinstalled they are actually certifying three models (the Optiplex desktops, Latitude notebooks, and Precision workstations) for use with Linux. If they are going to sell machines running Linux, it's not going to be anytime soon.
I hate to tell Dell spokescritter Jeremy Bolen, but the Linux community has already certified Dell's hardware under Linux - we've been doing it for years and posting our results.
Not too long ago, a woman named Debbie Foster was sued by Capitol Records (RIAA) for copyright infringement because someone was using her network access account to exchange music on $peer_to_peer_network. As it turned out during the investigation phase, someone had cracked the passphrase on her account and was using it without her knowledge. Thus, the lawsuit had to be dropped because the RIAA was suing the wrong person (which has never stopped them in the past). The RIAA was commanded by the court to pay her legal fees, which topped $50kus in total. The RIAA in turn filed a …
It seems that the bird flu, which has a disproportionate number of people scrambling for grey market antibiotics and sterile facemasks (a rant that you can be sure I've been prepping for a while) is making financial and networking industry high ups wonder what would happen to the Net in the event of a real outbreak. Their reasoning seems simple enough: In the event of an outbreak of the avian flu that posed a serious threat to people in the US, many thousands would want to work from home to minimise their chances of being infected. However, it is also …
A bill recently introduced to the California legislature would require all female children to be vaccinated for HPV (human papilloma virus, which causes some forms of cervical cancer and genital warts). Parents, however, are outraged by this bill because the vaccine would protect against a virus that is technically a sexually transmitted disease. Some are going so far as to say that it encourages teenage sex and promiscuity.
I hate to tell them (well, no, I don't, but allow me the figure of speech) but women are not exposed to HPV solely through sex; it is not uncommon for rape …
The good news is that Lyssa is all right; as I alluded to yesterday, she's been in a considerable amount of pain over the past couple of days. Rialian was nice enough to drive her to the doctor's office yesterday afternoon and it's been determined that she might have temporomandibular joint dysfunction. We're working on getting her to a dentist who specialises in such things to find out for certain, and thus set a course of treatment. She now has a prescription for painkillers that can actually cut the pain caused when the trigeminal nerve, which carries a large amount …
Lyssa pointed me at an article that brought up something that never occurred to me - how libraries manage the limited amount of space they have for all of their materials. This is to say, they keep track of how often each book is checked out (much easier to do since card catalogues and patron records went digital in the mid 1990's) and if it isn't touched for longer than a certain time, they either throw the books out (dumpster diving at the local library is how I got most of my books when …
This should be enough to give anyone pause: Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General of the United States of America argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Constitituion does not grant habeas corpus rights, but only says that they can be suspended. Let's think about this a little: Saying that a right can be suspended implicitly states that there is a right that can be suspended to begin with. Senator Arlen Specter, who headed up the committe, nearly went into a fitof apoplexy when he heard this after asking if Gonzalez's logic took a wrong turn at Albequerqe: "The Constitution …
I was wrong, things can get more weird. Malware researcher Joe Stewart has been working on a new infective agent called SpamThru, and discovered some very unusual things about it: It goes to incredible lengths to ensure that it is the only infection on the machine in question, namely, it downloads and installs a pirated copy of Kaspersky Antivirus, hacks it so that it doesn't check for a valid license key, and scans the infected machine to get rid of every other piece of malware that isn't SpamThru. Control of zombied machines is done with a peer-to-peer protocol that can …
Just when you thought travelling by air couldn't get any more harrowing, along comes confiscation of laptop computers when re-entering the United States. Some are never seen again; from anecdotal evidence, the hard drives are imaged for analysis. US Customs has the authority to detain people carrying portable computers and confiscate the hardware without giving a good reason, or any reason at all, for that matter. The matter of what, exactly, happens to proprietary information contained therein (encrypted or not) is still up in the air. The standard advice here is to encrypt any sensitive data, but if the folks …
It seems that LA police completely missed something shady happening that was not only reported by the public but recorded by a securicam: J. Random Stranger poured a bottle of mercury out on a subway platform, and the hazmat crew arrived eight hours later to clean up the spill. The Joint Terrorism Task Force says that this wasn't even a criminal act, which it probably wasn't but for future reference it actually is because mercury is toxic, and in fact there are special procedures that must be followed to clean it up. However, the guy who spilled the mercury hunted …
