Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Australians are paying thousands of dollars to overseas hackers to rid their computers of an unbreakable virus [Cryptolocker]. The deputy chairwoman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Delia Rickard, said over the past two months there had been a spike in the number of people falling victim to the scam. The commission has received 2,500 complaints this year and estimates about $400,000 has been paid to the hackers. Bad news for Australians: this is just one of many targetting the country.

beaverdownunder writes "A debate 'down under' has started to rage surrounding the importation of 'temporary' IT workers on so-called 457 visas, with the Prime Minister promising to bring in tough new restrictions on foreign workers in a pre-election pledge, despite evidence that there are insufficient numbers of Australians to fill the skills gap. Some quarters argue the foreign workers are necessary to drive growth in Australia's IT industry, while others have cited examples where large Australian companies have imported workers needlessly, displacing qualified Aussie personnel."

The city of Freiburg, Germany adopted OpenOffice back in 2007, mostly replacing the Microsoft Office software it had been using previously. Now, an anonymous reader tips news that the city council is preparing to abandon OpenOffice and switch back. "'In the specific case of the use of OpenOffice, the hopes and expectations of the year 2007 are not fulfilled,' the council wrote, adding that continuing use OpenOffice will lead to performance impairments and aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties. 'Therefore, a new Microsoft Office license is essential for effective operations,' they wrote. ... 'The divergence of the development community (LibreOffice on one hand Apache Office on the other) is crippling for the development for OpenOffice,' the council wrote, adding that the development of Microsoft Office is far more stable. Looking at the options, a one-product strategy with Microsoft Office 2010 is the only viable one, according to the council." The council was also disappointed that more municipalities haven't adopted OpenOffice in the meantime. Open source groups and developers criticized the move and encouraged the council to consider at least moving to a more up-to-date version of the office software suite.

splitenz writes "Expanding the field of complex event process software with another offering, Twitter will release as open source its software for analysing live large-scale data streams, called Storm. Although the software has been compared to Hadoop, Storm is best suited for analysing live data streams, such as millions of Twitter feeds."

splitenz writes "Hoping to unify the growing but disparate market of NoSQL databases, the creators behind CouchDB and SQLite have introduced a new query language for the format, called UnQL (Unstructured Data Query Language — .PS). It has Microsoft's backing."

splitenz writes "Google's other social networking site, Orkut, which has been around for about seven years and has tens of millions of users worldwide, will continue to operate alongside the new Google+ for now. However, Google is leaving its options open regarding the possibility of fusing the two through some sort of integration further down the road."

splitenz writes "Sophisticated voice commands will be the next big step for the development of smartphones, according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. 'We have gotten down to such tiny devices with amazing computers inside with all the human senses; vision, hearing, touch, location acceleration and movement. I don't want to click buttons anymore and I just want to do things without having to think about which buttons to click.' He was speaking at the Australian Chamber Business Congress. Wozniak also sees a continuing place for touchpads."

Okian Warrior writes "Since the rapture is tomorrow (May 21) at 6:00 pm local time (everywhere), I was just wondering: what plans does everyone have? I've got no specific plans for what to do. What will you be doing around 6:00 pm tomorrow?" If you're on the IT staff, you might want to consult this checklist of things to do or not do in the interim.

splitenz writes "Canonical's Ubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' may still be occupying much of the Linux world's attention, but at last week's Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, the next version of the free and open source Linux distribution began to take form. A number of decisions were reportedly made about Ubuntu 11.10, or 'Oneiric Ocelot,' at the conference, while numerous other questions are still being debated. ... Here's a roundup of what's been reported so far."

splitenz writes "A TV executive told a major Australian broadband conference that television audiences are slipping away into social media, gaming and other online subscription spaces. YouTube and online gaming is taking the traditional TV audience online and TV is struggling to fight back."

angry tapir writes "The Commodore 64 is getting a makeover, with a new design and some of the latest computing technologies, as the brand gets primed for a comeback. The revamped computer will be available through the Commodore USA online store, which is set to open June 1. The computer will be an all-in-one keyboard, with Intel's 64-bit quad-core microprocessors and 3D graphics capabilities."

Acidspew writes "The Australian Government's plan to filter the Internet has caused furore and has been met with vehement objection. Many people have put their opinions forward regarding this matter, but this time around, M86 Security — the vendor that provided many ISPs equipment during the initial filter trials — has finally weighed in on the discussion. Six of the nine ISP participants in the URL-based Internet filter trial last year used M86's R3000 filtering kit. According to ARN: 'Internet filtering won't prevent people deliberately looking for inappropriate material from accessing blocked content, according to security vendor M86 Security.' The company continues by saying its filter gear was designed to be implemented into schools and enterprise businesses, not for an entire country. The article also touches on M86's views on censorship."

nadiskafadi writes "Taiwanese researchers have shown off several flexible display technologies in an endeavor to promote e-readers and e-paper. One of the newest technologies from the Industrial Technology Research Institute was a flexible 4.1-inch color OLED (organic light emitting diode) display, which it claims is for the next era of portable devices."

oranghutan writes "A judge in a Texas court has given Microsoft 60 days to comply with an order to stop selling Word products in their existing state as the result of a patent infringement suit filed by i4i. According to the injunction, Microsoft is forbidden from selling Word products that let people create XML documents, which both the 2003 and 2007 versions let you do. Michael Cherry, an analyst quoted in the article, said, 'It's going to take a long time for this kind of thing to get sorted out.' Few believe the injunction will actually stop Word from being sold because there are ways of working around it. In early 2009, a jury in the Texas court ordered Microsoft to pay i4i $200 million for infringing on the patent. ZDNet has a look at the patent itself, saying it 'sounds a bit generic.'"

OrangHutan writes "Google's Android software source code has been offered up for those looking to create applications on MIPS32 chips, which are different from Intel's x86 architecture and used by companies such as Cisco (in its Linksys devices), Motorola (set-top boxes) and Sony (DVD players). MIPS Technologies made the announcement on Monday and is giving 'software developers an early access program for customers, which will give them access to MIPS engineers and specific hardware and software optimizations.' The article goes on to say that MIPS made waves at the 'Computex electronics exhibition in Taipei by showing off a home media player and a 10.4-inch LCD with a built-in computer both running Android. They were among the first non-phones to be seen running the Google-developed OS.'"

Condobolin sends in an update to the Australian government's ongoing efforts to implement ISP-level filtering. One of the hurdles they had to overcome was to build a system that would allow them to filter content without impairing other internet usage. A trial of the system has just concluded, and the results are positive — at least, for the government. Quoting: "More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government's ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems. Of the nine participating ISPs, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect told ARN they had seen no slowdowns in Internet speeds or problems with the filtering solutions in place. Of the remaining four ISPs, Tech2U and Highway1 were unable to respond by time of publication while Unwired and Optus refused to comment. ... 'From a technical perspective we're more than confident that if the government decided to roll out a mandatory Internet filter based on or around an Australian Communications and Media Authority blacklist or subset thereof, then it can be done without any impact whatsoever to the speed of the Internet,' [said Webshield managing director Anthony Pillion]."

SkiifGeek, pointing to our recent coverage of what the NSA went through to create SELINUX, wants to know just how effective system hardening is at preventing successful attack, and writes "When Jay Beale presented at DefCon 14, he quoted statistics (PDF link) that Bastille protected against every major threat targeting Red Hat 6, before the threats were known. With simple techniques available for the everyday user which can start them on the path towards system hardening, just how effective have you found system and network hardening to be? The NSA does have some excellent guides to help harden not only your OS but also your browser and network equipment."

^switch writes "Aussies at NICTA have developed a para-virtualized Linux called Wombat that they claim outperforms native Linux. From the article: 'The L4 Microkernel works with its own open source operating system Iguana, which is specifically designed as a base for use in embedded systems.'" Specific performance results are also available from the NICTA website.

rafael_es_son writes "The regional Health Service of Extremadura, Spain (Servicio Extremeño de Salud) prepares for what IBM describes as the country's biggest GNU/Linux rollout to date. IBM is to receive $33.8 million USD over a four year period for the development of systems which should enable some 14,000 doctors and other medical professionals access to patient health care data on a region currently described as underserved in comparison with the rest of the country." (Read more below.)

"The current biggest European implementation title-holder, German National Railway, cites 'continuous cost savings, greater flexibility and integration benefits' as reason for changing over to GNU/Linux-based solutions. The German National Railway GNU/Linux implementation currently boasts approximately 55,000 users, in comparison to the current Munich implementation of 14,000 desktops.

We of course know better: Interoperability and Open Source are not synonymous."

Following up on last July's complaint, Elektroschock writes that "The Open Source Group Victoria (OSV) made a second complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). In a similar case in Germany SCO Group received an injunction from the court, so SCO never sold Linux licenses in Germany (tarent vs. SCO, district court Munich). Competition police seems to be a strong weapon against SCO-like action."

Besides the recent action in Australia, lots of others are choosing to make affirmative statements denying SCO's claims to own the name and code of all things *nix. Read below for a wrap-up of some recent public reactions to the SCO claims from a wide range of potential litigants (if the SCO case gets that far): Japanese conglomerates, American department stores, Bruce Perens, kernel developer Richard Gooch via Mozillaquest, and Joe ("Citizen") Barr.

IpsissimusMarr writes "The Inquirer reports that 'The biggest computer manufacturers in Japan that build systems running Linux will hold out against blustering by SCO to extract license fees based upon unsubstantiated infringement claims, it has emerged.' Its nice to see more support from the business world denouncing SCO's tactics."

janda writes "ComputerWorld is reporting that several companies, including Coastal Transportation, Burlington Coat Factory, and Boscov's Department Store are taking a wait-and-see attitude towards SCO and their new 'Linux license' arrangement.

Best quote from the article:

'I don't remember signing anything with SCO saying I owe them any kind of licensing fees.' (Tom Pratt, Coastal Transportation)

I find it refreshing that companies are starting to stand up to SCO's blackmail attempts."

An anonymous reader points to this story at Mozillaquest according to which IBM says that SCO does not have a viable claim to JFS, NUMA, RCU, etc., writing "IBM says it owns the AIX code it contributed to the Linux kernel despite SCO claims that it has registered its Unix System V copyrights. A big problem for IBM and the GNU/Linux community might be the inclusion of JFS, NUMA software, RCU, etc into the Linux kernel. SCO claims it owns them. However, IBM, SuSE, and kernel.org's Richard Gooch reject SCO-Caldera and Darl McBride's claims that GNU/Linux contains SCO-owned or SCO-copyrighted code. ... The Linux kernel code is copyrighted under the GNU GPL. IBM owns its AIX additions and copyrights to Unix System V code and its development of JFS, RCU, and NUMA software code."

arilian writes "According to this article from ARNnet, SCO's new license may leave them open to litigation by other contributers to the Linux kernel." Bruce Perens and intellectual property lawyer Jim LaBarre are quoted in this one.

Finally, Joe Barr writes "I just filed a complaint against The SCO Group with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was easy. I used their online complaint form at:

www.sec.gov/complaint/cf942sec9570.htm.

The basis for my complaint is that SCO is using false and unsubstantiated claims of IP rights to UNIX and Linux in order to manipulate its stock price and force consumers to purchase SCO licenses.

Maybe someone else would like to do the same."