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Making Quantum Crypto Actually Work
Encryption Posted by Hemos on Wednesday April 25, @04:27PM
from the up-quark-down-quark dept.
There's a piece on the newest breakthrough in quantum crypto on Feed. It goes over some of the background that we've all read before, but the implication of actually making it somethig useful beyond the current short distance is pretty darn cool.

( Read More... )

Worlds.com Patents Quake-like Games? Kinda.
Patents Posted by Hemos on Wednesday April 25, @02:33PM
from the gonna-get-squashed dept.
Eddie Edwards writes "This story over at Gamasutra details how Worlds.com have been awarded US patent 6,219,045 for - well, for more-or-less exactly the client-server architecture used in Quake. As the article says, "the company believes the patent may apply to currently in-use multi-user games" (!) and Worlds.com "will also review other 3D sites who may be using [their] technology to ensure [they] are fully compensated". " Of course, Worlds.com will prolly get squashed on the prior art issue - but wow. From what I can see, IANAL, it's not so much Quake-like games, but more like 3D chat-game-type environment.

( Read More... | 131 of 228 comments )

Ask Slashdot: GNU and the General Public Employment Contract?
GNU is Not Unix Posted by Cliff on Wednesday April 25, @01:45PM
from the stuff-to-discuss dept.
adubey asks: "We all know and love the GNU General Public Lisence. Some have argued that the availability of a standard lisence such as GPL along with hard lobbying work by Richard Stallman and others are both among the many forces that helped push free software forward. However, there is still a big laundry list of things holding free software back. Included on this list are restrictive employment contracts that forbid many developers from contributing to free software projects, even if some contributions could help them on the job. Rather than simply write off these people as being stupid for signing one-sided contracts, could we do something to pursuade managers to be more open to free software development? What if there was a standard contract available, between employers and employees, that spefically gave employees the right to contribute to free software projects so long as it benefits the company they work for?" An interesting idea and one that I hope will spark some interesting discussion. Would such a thing be the answer to this problem?

( Read More... | 486 bytes in body | 56 of 112 comments | Ask Slashdot )

BSD: xMach Announces Core Team
News Posted by nik on Wednesday April 25, @12:10PM
from the these-are-the-hardest-things-to-come-up-with dept.
Joseph Mallett writes "xMach today announces our brand new Core Team . We've also (finally) added a CVS server, as well as a CVSweb front-end so people can browse the source. Since the first Slashdot post, we've accomplished one of our major goals of being GPL-free (and thus fully BSD License'd), as well as added two mailing lists and fixed the wishlist code. Due to Mach's history with Multiprocessing, we are currently looking more and more and the ideas of distributed processing. The code base is now cleaned up, so that everything should compile out of box. Some of our more abitious goals are to move to a multiserver format, and do a major update of the filesystem interfaces, short term. And like the HURD, it's software that's here right now, and isn't vapourware."

( Read More... | 95 of 216 comments | BSD )

Features: The Borg Box and Convergence Fantasies
Technology Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday April 25, @11:10AM
from the wouldnt-it-be-nice dept.
Gather round kids and let me tell you a story. A story of "Convergence": a nasty buzzword many of us have dreampt of in hot lusty dreams that we wouldn't admit to our mothers. The dream is the borged media box: combining the functionality of your Tivo, your MP3 Box, DVD Player, CD Player, and so much more. It's not here yet despite lots of trying, but its getting closer.

( Read More... | 16944 bytes in body | 191 of 274 comments | Features )

New Mail RFCs Released
The Internet Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 25, @10:49AM
from the sequels-are-judged-harshly dept.
Anonymvs Cowardvs writes "Well, it looks like after their 20-year reign, RFCs 821 (SMTP) and 822 (mail message format) are history. The replacements, RFCs 2821 and 2822 are available now (2822 was just released). Apparently they reserved the numbers, no cosmic coincidence here."(Read on for more.)

( Read More... | 598 bytes in body | 117 of 170 comments )

Science: New Horizon For Nanotech
Technology Posted by Hemos on Wednesday April 25, @09:29AM
from the everyday-things-are-getting-smaller dept.
UserID 3.14 writes "It looks like faster chip-building tehnology is coming, and it may usher in the next wave of MEMS and nanotechnology with it. This article from Science Daily talks about a new electron-beam photolithography machine at JPL that rasterizes 10 times faster than the previous standard with a beam imprint that's half the size. Chip prototyping will go faster and the researchers there will be able to deal with features that are molecule-sized. Best of all, if you want to use the machine, they give a contact for further info."

( Read More... | 24 of 88 comments | Science )

BSD: TrustedBSD Supports Windows NT ACLs With Samba
Microsoft Posted by nik on Wednesday April 25, @09:04AM
from the rwxr-xr-x dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Chris Faulhaber, one of the TrustedBSD developers, announced on the trustedbsd-discuss mailing list that Samba's POSIX.1e ACL support is now working on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT, and even has a screen shot. This has been a high-demand feature, apparently, and could be a big selling point for sites currently running Windows NT as their enterprise operating system.

( Read More... | 793 bytes in body | 69 of 163 comments | BSD )

EFF Releases Public Music License
Music Posted by Hemos on Wednesday April 25, @08:14AM
from the promote-the-freedom dept.
Robin Gross, one of the very nice people at the EFF[?] wrote to us about their new public music license . As the press release states: "...EFF's Open Audio License allows anyone to freely copy, share, perform, and adapt music in exchange for providing credit to the artist for her gift to humanity. EFF's Open Audio License enables musicians and society to build upon and share creative expression, creating a rich public commons. Artists who chose to release a song under the public license can build their reputation by offering unfettered access to their original works in exchange for recognition. Open Audio works are designated as "(O)" by the author and may be lawfully traded on file-sharing systems such as Napster or played by traditional and Web DJs royalty-free. Numerous musicians have traditionally taken advantage of super-distribution of their music, such as the Grateful Dead, a band that attributes much of its success to its encouragement of fans to freely copy and share its music. "EFF's Open Audience License hopes to use the power of copyright to protect copyright's ultimate objectives: a vibrant and accessible public domain, incentivising creativity, and promoting the free exchange of ideas," said EFF Staff Attorney for Intellectual Property Robin Gross. "EFF's public music license strikes a new deal between creators and the public, granting more freedoms to the public to experience music while ensuring the artist is compensated." You can read more details in the FAQ and more about their Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression.

( Read More... | 174 of 254 comments )

Dueling Distros - It's All Good, Apparently
Linux Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 25, @07:26AM
from the insert-disk-into-drive-zero dept.
An Anonymous Coward points to a review listed on osfaq.com, summarizing: "Red Hat's latest release is here with the much improved 2.4 kernel. Its new features make it a compelling upgrade for both server and workstation installation. In addition, there has been more of an emphasis on security in this release than in previous Red Hat releases." Similarly, another nameless reader writes: " The Duke of URL has given Libranet a favourable review. It looks like Libranet may be heading toward becoming one of the big players in the Linux distributions game." I'm still looking for a good review of Mandrake 8.0, which seems to have generated few reviews so far. (Or distro reviews willing to be a little harsher in general.)

( Read More... | 151 of 246 comments )

Happy Birthday Hubble
Space Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 25, @03:12AM
from the and-many-more dept.
NeoCode writes: "It's been 11 years already and the stats are mind boggling. Hubble is celebrating its 11th birthday and it sent another beautiful image. Stories here (CNN) and here (Space). A lot of these images have been called "space-art". The image bank can be found here."

( Read More... | 95 of 191 comments )

Greenspun On ArsDigita
The Almighty Buck Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 24, @10:03PM
from the informative-words dept.
Eponymous, Showered writes: "Following up on the depressing tale of ArsDigita and its takeover by nursery school miscreants, Philip Greenspun gives his take on the recent turn of events recently covered on Slashdot. He even provides a nice aD history in a nutshell for those of us who were vacationing on Uranus for the last several years."

( Read More... | 93 of 208 comments )

BSD
  • xMach Announces Core Team
  • TrustedBSD Supports Windows NT ACLs With Samba
  • NetBSD/Alpha goes multiprocessor
  • FSMLabs announces RTL/BSD
  • FreeBSD 4.3 Released
  • BSDi EMEA Closing Operations
  • NetBSD Ported to Motorola Sandpoint
  • FreeBSD 'zine - April Issue
  • xMach GPL Free
  • BSDi's Software Divisions Acquired by Wind River
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    Book Reviews

    Steven Levy's Crypto traces the human and technological developments which have brought strong encryption from the high towers of secretive (or wholly secret) government agencies and esoteric academic studies to anyone with a personal computer. Unlike Code Breaking's WWII emphasis, Crypto's main focus is on the latter half of the 20th century.

    With help from Manuel Castells and Linus Torvalds, Pekka Himanen has written a modern manifesto about the impact that hackers have had simply by living, working and playing as they do, and appropriately enough, he called it The Hacker Ethic, by way of contrast to earlier attitudes toward work which for a lucky subset of people need no longer apply. See Jon Katz's review of Rebel Code by Glyn Moody, or timothy's review of Free For All by Peter Wayner to read about the concrete changes that ethic has wrought.

    Delving where angels fear to tread, Sue Wilcox reviewed Steve Grand's Creation: Life and How to Make It, an exploration of the idea that not only is artificial life possible, but is already extant in the controlled environments of digital systems all over the world.

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