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unr3a1 writes to tell us that Time Warner Cable has responded to the massive criticism of its new plan to cap user bandwidth with a new pricing model. Users will be given a grace period in which to assess their pricing tier. The "overages" will be noted on their bill, allowing them to change either their billing plan or their usage patterns. "On top of a 5, 10, 20, and 40-gigabyte (GB) caps, the company said this week that it would offer an additional 100GB tier for heavy users. Prices (so far) would range from $29.95 to $75.00 a month, with users charged an extra dollar for every GB more they download, although that charge is also capped at $75. An 'unlimited' bandwidth plan, therefore, tops out at $150."

FreedomFighter writes "In a Cloud Standards breakthrough, the FSF is teaming up with major cloud computing vendors to form the Free and Open Cloud Alliance (FOCA), a trade marketing association supporting Free(TM) and Open Cloud Computing (FOCC). The new CloudLeft Public License (CPL) is based on the ideas that data wants to be Free(TM) and all your Cloud(TM) are belong to us. It closes the 'user data loophole' by requiring the release of not only the source code for a CloudLeft platform but also the data passing through it. This renders most security issues void while appropriately setting the users' expectation of privacy. 'In the past, I've said that "cloud" is complete gibberish, but while discussing fashion during my weekly squash game with Stallman he convinced me that this was a great opportunity.' said Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. RMS, who previously said that 'cloud' is worse than stupidity was also pleased about the return of the advertising clause, requiring the use of the 'GNU/Cloud' name, as he is 'tired of haranguing the GNU/Linux community about this.' Full details will be available next Monday, including the first marketing and outreach program — 'FOCC: IT in 2009.'"

theodp writes "Not to apologize for an industry that charges $27,000 to catch a Chicago Bears game, but will the huge spectrum fees charged by the government block the emergence of low-cost cellular service? In the most recent FCC spectrum auction, carriers paid nearly $20 billion to grab a swath of the 700MHz spectrum. And now under President Obama's proposed budget, wireless carriers would be hit with huge annual fees — eventually reaching $550 million per carrier per year — for the right to hold a spectrum license. Critics say the carriers will simply pass these fees through to consumers."

thethibs writes "eWeek is reporting that just as everyone is buzzing about the latest Adobe vulnerability, someone poisoned ads hosted by Ziff-Davis with an older Adobe exploit (affecting versions 8.12 and earlier, and long since patched). Z-D fixed the problem less than 24 hours after its first appearance. The interesting bit of this is that a bunch of people probably got hit with the old Trojan when they browsed to a story about the new one."

xufem writes "Millions of Brazilian schoolchildren will soon be 'brought up right' running Linux on over 350,000 seats each using PC sharing hardware and software from Userful and KDE. This is world's largest virtual desktop deployment and probably also the world's largest Linux deployment, and seems to have been selected over OLPC by Brazil. Definitely a moment to celebrate — and just in time for Brazilian Carnival which starts tomorrow!"

David Burnett recommends an eWeek article on the leading contenders to make an iPhone out of an iPod Touch. Of course your newly phone-capable iTouch needs no activation and no binding carrier contract, just Wi-Fi. One of the companies working in this space, JaJah, is bundling the software with back-end services such as billing, so that carriers — or anyone really — can offer free-calling iTouch phones.

mikesd81 writes "Eweek reports that notebook sales have surpassed desktop sales for the first time in history. 'In the third quarter of 2008, notebook PC shipments rose almost 40 percent compared with the same period of 2007 to reach 38.6 million units. Conversely, desktop PC shipments declined by 1.3 percent for the same period to 38.5 million units. "Momentum has been building in the notebook market for some time, so it's not a complete surprise that shipments have surpassed those of desktops," said iSuppli principal analyst for computer platforms Matthew Wilkins. "However, this marks a major event in the PC market because it marks the start of the age of the notebook." ... The FBI's National Crime Information Center reported that the number of reported laptop thefts increased almost 48 percent over the last two years, to nearly 109,000 from 73,700.'"

It appears that the exploit in IE briefly mentioned a few days ago is causing a serious reaction: SteveAU writes "Microsoft has begun flooding media outlets with information advising users to switch to an alternate browser while a serious security flaw is being patched. The flaw, which affects all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, is manifested via malware and has infected over 6,000 sites thus far. Microsoft states: 'The vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference in the data-binding function of Internet Explorer. When data binding is enabled (which is the default state), it is possible under certain conditions for an object to be released without updating the array length, leaving the potential to access the deleted object's memory space. This can cause Internet Explorer to exit unexpectedly, in a state that is exploitable.'" According to the BBC report, though, Microsoft itself is only asking that users be "vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch"; it's outside experts who say to dump IE (at least for now).

Update: 12/16 21:11 GMT by KD : Microsoft will issue an emergency critical update for IE tomorrow.

narramissic writes "Lenovo plans to announce on Tuesday a service that allows users to remotely disable a PC by sending a text message. A user can send the command from a specified cell phone number — each ThinkPad can be paired with up to 10 cell phones — to kill a PC. The software will be available free from Lenovo's Web site. It will also be available on certain ThinkPad notebooks equipped with mobile broadband starting in the first half of 2009. 'You steal my PC and ... if I can deliver a signal to that PC that turns it off, hey, I'm good now,' said Stacy Cannady, product manager of security at Lenovo. 'The limitation here is that you have to have a WAN card in the PC and you must be paying a data plan for it,' Cannady added."

pisadinho writes "eWEEK's Chris Preimesberger explains how Sun Microsystems has completely discarded RAID volume management in its new Amber Road storage boxes, released today. Because it uses the Zettabyte File System, the Amber Road has eliminated the use of RAID arrays, RAID controllers and volume management software — meaning that it's very fast and easy to use."

soliptic writes "The jQuery blog today announced that 'Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform.' So the open-source javascript framework will be shipped with Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman notes: 'It's Open Source, and we'll use it and ship it via its MIT license, unchanged. If there's changes we want, we'll submit a patch just like anyone else.'" There's also a story at eWeek about the decision.

Danny Rathjens writes "In the continuing trend of big companies buying out small companies with open source products, Cisco has announced that they are buying Jabber. The press release doesn't really talk about the open source aspect of Jabber, and Jabber's website doesn't mention the news yet. I'm sure the question many of us have is whether Jabber's open source status will be changed in any way due to the purchase." Reader Eddytorial had this to contribute: "eWEEK offers a good look into how Jabber's messaging client will fit into Cisco Systems' overall 'presence' strategy in its market wars with Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel, and others. Cisco, which already had a basic instant messaging option, but one that didn't scale for an enterprise nearly as well as Jabber's, has just about everything else in place." It's also worth noting that Cisco open-sourced Etch in recent months.

Eddytor takes us to eWeek for a look at the FAA's air-traffic control system, which, after 20 years of continuous operation, is in desperate need of an overhaul. Recent crashes have caused major delays, but the system's scope and importance make it difficult to test upgrades and improvements. "Many technologies are used in air traffic control systems. Primary and secondary radar are used to enhance a controller's 'situational awareness' within his assigned airspace; all types of aircraft send back primary echoes of varying sizes to controllers' screens as radar energy is bounced off their skins. Transponder-equipped aircraft reply to secondary radar interrogations by giving an ID (Mode A), an altitude (Mode C) and/or a unique callsign (Mode S). Certain types of weather also may register on a radar screen."

Eddytor takes us to eWeek for a look at the FAA's air-traffic control system, which, after 20 years of continuous operation, is in desperate need of an overhaul. Recent crashes have caused major delays, but the system's scope and importance make it difficult to test upgrades and improvements. "Many technologies are used in air traffic control systems. Primary and secondary radar are used to enhance a controller's 'situational awareness' within his assigned airspace; all types of aircraft send back primary echoes of varying sizes to controllers' screens as radar energy is bounced off their skins. Transponder-equipped aircraft reply to secondary radar interrogations by giving an ID (Mode A), an altitude (Mode C) and/or a unique callsign (Mode S). Certain types of weather also may register on a radar screen."

theodp writes "If you checked out Google-wannabe Cuil, you learned that mapping search results to relevant images isn't a trivial task. But even Big Dog Google isn't immune to embarrassing graphics gaffes. Readers of Google News were shown that Russian troops are thrusting into the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, thanks to the Google Maps graphic accompanying a story about Russian incursions into Georgia — the nation-state in the Caucasus, not the Caucasian-pride-ridden state in the southern US. Yahoo! Answers also had some fun with the GA-Georgia mix-up — 'I live in georegia but i dont see rusia no where not even sound but they says theres tanks should i be worrie' (Google cache) — before a spoilsport deleted the question."

ruphus13 writes "Ubuntu and Canonical have been very active at OSCON this year. They showcased a new distro, announced improvements to their code-hosting platform, and made Mark Shuttleworth available for a couple of talks and panel sessions. Quoting: 'Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a complete distribution designed to run on Atom-based Netbook PCs. The main difference that sets it apart from its big brother Hardy Heron is the Ubuntu Mobile Edition (UME) Launcher, a user interface created specifically for use on the teensy screens and keyboards of today's popular ultra-portable computers.' Canonical also announced Version 2.0 of Launchpad, their code-hosting platform. Enhancements include 'a planned API that'll allow third-party applications to authenticate, query and modify data in the massive Launchpad database, without a user needing to manually access the system via a browser.' Mark Shuttleworth went on to state that Linux's market share will grow when it has better eye-candy than Apple's."

An anonymous reader links to an eWeek story which says that Microsoft's "fastest-yet homegrown supercomputer, running the U.S. company's new Windows HPC Server 2008, debuted in the top 25 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers, as tested and operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. ... Most of the cores were made up of Intel Xeon quad-core chips. Storage for the system was about 6 terabytes," and asks "I wonder how the uptime compares? When machines scale to this size, they tend to quirk out in weird ways."

CommanderData writes "PC World reports that Google's Android phone rollout is facing delays. Originally expected to have handsets on the market and in consumers' hands this summer, it appears that Q4 2008 or even sometime in 2009 is more likely. Software developers are also complaining that programming is difficult on the Android platform due to regular changes being made by Google." Update 21:14 GMT by SM: Google has (via Google Watch) refuted widespread claims that Android will be late, so I guess only time will tell.

eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."

eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."

sasserstyl writes "eWeek reports that Microsoft's Silverlight platform will support Ruby client-side scripting, enabling ARAX — or Asynchronous Ruby and XML. Would be cool to have the option to script client-side in something other than Javascript. 'In essence, using ARAX, Ruby developers would not have to go through the machinations of using something like the RJS (Ruby JavaScript) utility, where they write Ruby code and RJS generates JavaScript code to run on the client, Lam said. "Sure, you could do it that way, but then at some point you might have to add some JavaScript code that adds some custom functionality on the client yourself," he said. "So there's always that sense of, 'Now I'm in another world. And wouldn't it be nice if I have this utility class I wrote in Ruby...' Today if I want to use it in the browser I have to port it to JavaScript. Now I can just run it in the browser."'"

An anonymous reader lets us know about a recent analysis of retail computer sales numbers that shines a spotlight on Apple's sales growth as the PC market has flattened. In the lucrative >$1,000 PC segment, in the first quarter of 2008, Apple's retail market share was 66%. This includes a 64% market share for laptops and a market share for desktops of 70%. The article attributes the bulk of this success to Apple's stores. Fortune picked up this report and pointed out the somewhat obvious fact that the >$1,000 PC segment is Apple's by default, since Dell, HP, and Lenovo sell the bulk of their machines in the $500-$750 range, and Apple has only one model selling for less than $1,000. As the analyst said, "If you don't give people a choice [in the Apple stores], people will spend more."

Rebecca Bug writes "Several Web sites (Wired, eWEEK, The Washington Post) are reporting on Dan Kaminsky's Toorcon discussion of a serious security risk introduced when major ISPs serve ads on error pages. Kaminsky found that the advertising servers are impersonating, via DNS, hostnames within trademarked domains. 'We have determined that these injected servers are, in fact, vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. Since these servers are being injected into your trademarked domains, their vulnerability can be used to attack your users and your sites,' Kaminsky said, identifying EarthLink, Verizon and Qwest among the ISPs."

Alternative Details brings news that PayPal is developing a plan to stop users from accessing its financial services if they aren't using browsers with anti-phishing protection. PayPal is recommending the use of blacklists, anti-fraud warning pages, and EV SSL certificates. Browsers without anti-phishing features will be considered "unsafe." It seems likely Safari will be included in this category given PayPal's warning about the Apple browser last month. "'At PayPal, we are in the process of reimplementing controls which will first warn our customers when logging in to PayPal of those browsers that we consider unsafe. Later, we plan on blocking customers from accessing the site from the most unsafe--usually the oldest--browsers,' he declared. Barrett only mentioned old, out-of-support versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer among this group of 'unsafe browsers,' but it's clear his warning extends to Apple's Safari browser, which offers no anti-phishing protection and does not support the use of EV SSL certificates."

eWeekPete writes "Is the pipe half full or half empty? Not surprisingly, the talk at the second annual Tech Policy Summit was decidedly mixed. 'The US is still the most dynamic broadband economy in the world,' said Ambassador Richard Russell, the associate director of the White House's Office on Science and Technology Policy. 'As opposed to being miles ahead, though, we're only a little ahead.' But Yale Law School's Susan Crawford called Russell's position 'magical thinking. We're not doing well at all.' She proceeded to call the White House's effort 'completely inadequate on broadband competition.'"

An anonymous reader points out an eWeek story about researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are designing a new web browser based on security. The new software, code-named OP for Opus Palladianum, will separate various components of the browser into subsystems which are monitored and managed by the browser kernel. Quoting: "'We believe Web browsers are the most important network-facing application, but the current browsers are fundamentally flawed from security perspective,' King said in an interview with eWEEK. 'If you look at how the Web was originally designed, it was an application with static Web pages as data. Now, it has become a platform for hosting all kinds of important data and businesses, but unfortunately, [existing] browsers haven't evolved to deal with this change and that's why we have a big malware problem.' The idea behind the OP security browser is to partition the browser into smaller subsystems and make all communication between subsystems simple and explicit."

eWeekPete writes "Ringside Networks tomorrow will formally launch as a company and also launch what it calls the first open-source social application server that seamlessly integrates Facebook applications with any Web site. The Ringside Social Application Server includes a Social Application Engine that enables Web site developers to quickly build, customize, and deploy their own social applications as well as the included set of standard social applications such as user profiles, friends, groups, comments, ratings, favorites, and events. Ringside also delivers support for federated social graphs for integrating Ringside-based social graphs with other social networks, such as Facebook. In addition, the product features an extensible API and tag library to enable developers to extend Facebook's API and markup language, as well to as define their own application-specific APIs and tags to handle custom behavior and improve Web site integration." Matt Asay had an advance look at Ringside a few days back.

eweekhickins writes "Feds and public interest groups are taking seriously accusations that someone tampered with the wireless spectrum auction process. The block of spectrum that was supposed to go to emergency responders failed to get close to the reserve price, raising suspicions that someone was trying to make money off the Sept. 11 national tragedy. But that would never happen, right?" This is a follow up to last week's allegations.

eweekhickins writes "Feds and public interest groups are taking seriously accusations that someone tampered with the wireless spectrum auction process. The block of spectrum that was supposed to go to emergency responders failed to get close to the reserve price, raising suspicions that someone was trying to make money off the Sept. 11 national tragedy. But that would never happen, right?" This is a follow up to last week's allegations.

eweekhickins writes "A public interest group is saying that a consulting firm hired to help the government hand over the D-block spectrum may have acted improperly and discouraged potential bidders by suggesting that any winning bid would have to pay $50 million in annual fees, in addition to the auction price. Any wonder the D-block didn't meet the reserve price?"

eweekhickins writes "A public interest group is saying that a consulting firm hired to help the government hand over the D-block spectrum may have acted improperly and discouraged potential bidders by suggesting that any winning bid would have to pay $50 million in annual fees, in addition to the auction price. Any wonder the D-block didn't meet the reserve price?"

bored-at-IETF-ntp-session writes "In an article at eWeek Larry Seltzer examines the supposed hacking war between the US and China. He surmises 'Even if you can't prove that the government was involved ... it still bears some responsibility'. He quotes Gadi Evron who advised the Estonians during the Russian attacks. 'I can confirm targeted attacks with sophisticated technologies have been launched against obvious enemies of China ... Who is behind these attacks can't be easily said, but it can be an American cyber-criminal, a Nigerian spammer or the Chinese themselves.' Seltzer concluded 'It's just another espionage tool, and no more or less moral than others we've used in the past.'" This a subject we've also previously discussed.

eweekhickins writes "Google's Postini team says new attacks will take the form of sneaky viruses that will blend with spam, leveraging specific current events, such as the Super Bowl or the Summer Olympic Games. Better yet, virus attacks will target executives at companies whose intellectual property is deemed valuable on the black market. A lot of these attacks will masquerade as legitimate business agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Better Business Bureau and the SEC."

eweekhickins writes "Google's Postini team says new attacks will take the form of sneaky viruses that will blend with spam, leveraging specific current events, such as the Super Bowl or the Summer Olympic Games. Better yet, virus attacks will target executives at companies whose intellectual property is deemed valuable on the black market. A lot of these attacks will masquerade as legitimate business agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Better Business Bureau and the SEC."

Redon Buckeye writes "Google's Android software development kit is using several outdated and vulnerable open-source image processing libraries, some of which can be exploited to take complete control of mobile devices running the Android platform. From the article: 'Several vulnerabilities have been found in Android's core libraries for processing graphic content in some of the most used image formats (PNG, GIF, and BMP). While some of these vulnerabilities stem from the use of outdated and vulnerable open source image-processing libraries, other were introduced by native Android code that uses them or that implements new functionality.'"

alternative coup writes "eWEEK is running a story on the emergence of an anti-botnet market to fill a perceived need for software to deal with botnet-related malware (Trojans, keyloggers, rootkits, etc.). The article characterizes this as 'another black eye' for the existing anti-virus industry — asking consumers to pay twice for protection from things that anti-malware suites are missing. Venture capital money is flowing to these anti-bot products, an implicit statement that the AV giants are not doing their jobs. 'For companies such as Symantec, which sells the Sana-powered Norton AntiBot and anti-malware subscriptions, it's a nickel-and-dime situation. Symantec officials say Norton AntiBot is for a specialized, technical market segment looking for high-end tools to deal with botnets, but [Andrew Jaquith, an analyst with The Yankee Group] said it's a case of anti-malware companies double-dipping.'"

unityofsaints writes "Up until now, Adobe hasn't done much in terms of porting its applications to Linux, as its only product to have recieved any kind of Linux implementation is Flash. This may be about to change because the company has announced a Linux port of AIR, its web application development software. No definite release date is mentioned in the interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, just a vague 'later this year.'"

eweekhickins writes to share an article in eWeek highlighting the forgotten risks that a multifunction printer could possibly offer. Brendan O'Connor first called attention to the vulnerabilities of these new devices at a Black Hat talk in '06 and warns that these are no longer "dumb" machine sitting in the corner and should be treated with their own respective security strategy. "During his Black Hat presentation in 2006, O'Connor picked apart the security model of a Xerox WorkCentre MFP, showing how the device operated more like a low-end server or workstation than a copier or printer--complete with an AMD processor, 256MB of SDRAM and an 80GB hard drive and running Linux, Apache and PostGreSQL. He showed how the authentication on the device's Web interface can be easily bypassed to launch commands to completely hijack a new Xerox WorkCentre machine."

eweekhickins writes to share an article in eWeek highlighting the forgotten risks that a multifunction printer could possibly offer. Brendan O'Connor first called attention to the vulnerabilities of these new devices at a Black Hat talk in '06 and warns that these are no longer "dumb" machine sitting in the corner and should be treated with their own respective security strategy. "During his Black Hat presentation in 2006, O'Connor picked apart the security model of a Xerox WorkCentre MFP, showing how the device operated more like a low-end server or workstation than a copier or printer--complete with an AMD processor, 256MB of SDRAM and an 80GB hard drive and running Linux, Apache and PostGreSQL. He showed how the authentication on the device's Web interface can be easily bypassed to launch commands to completely hijack a new Xerox WorkCentre machine."

harryjohnston alerts us to a story picked up by a few bloggers in the security space. A Russian security research company, Gleg, has discovered a zero-day in the latest version of RealPlayer 11. But they won't reveal details to Real, or to CERT, despite repeated requests. Details are available only to their clients who pay a lot of money for early access to such knowledge. To describe Gleg's business model Daniweb rather cautiously puts forward the word "blackmail." The story was first exposed in Ryan Nariane's Securitywach blog.

eweekhickins writes "Mad about Facebook's treatment of Robert Scoble? 'The idea for people to move their social graph from one service to other is a fabulous benefit,' Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales told eWEEK. 'To me, it's a benefit to customers. People should be very wary about services that are uptight about that kind of thing in an effort to lock you out of the customer.' The problem is that while the profile data may be yours and yours alone, your address book contains the names and e-mail addresses of your friends, family and business contacts. So who owns the data?"

eweekhickins writes "Mad about Facebook's treatment of Robert Scoble? 'The idea for people to move their social graph from one service to other is a fabulous benefit,' Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales told eWEEK. 'To me, it's a benefit to customers. People should be very wary about services that are uptight about that kind of thing in an effort to lock you out of the customer.' The problem is that while the profile data may be yours and yours alone, your address book contains the names and e-mail addresses of your friends, family and business contacts. So who owns the data?"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Frustrated at the FTC's blessing of the Google/Doubleclick merger, Microsoft is complaining to the EU. Its latest filings detail how the merger would give Google a stranglehold on the advertising industry. While these complaints aren't new, the diagram [PDF] Microsoft created gives you an interesting look at the sort of competition Microsoft fears from Google."

eweekhickins writes "A full year after the institution of new federal e-discovery court rules, only a minority of companies are paying attention. Keeping track of every IM, email, and document for a court order that may never come must seem like a tall order. Researcher Michael Osterman said that only 47 percent of companies have some kind of e-mail retention policy in place. 'I don't think it's difficult to understand the rules,' Osterman told eWEEK. 'I just think that it sometimes takes headline shock to make people move on some things.'"

eweekhickins writes "A full year after the institution of new federal e-discovery court rules, only a minority of companies are paying attention. Keeping track of every IM, email, and document for a court order that may never come must seem like a tall order. Researcher Michael Osterman said that only 47 percent of companies have some kind of e-mail retention policy in place. 'I don't think it's difficult to understand the rules,' Osterman told eWEEK. 'I just think that it sometimes takes headline shock to make people move on some things.'"

eweekhickins writes "A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. In fact, almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance."

eweekhickins writes "A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. In fact, almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance."

eweekhickins writes "The US Senate Judiciary Committee delayed a scheduled vote on whether telecommunications carriers should be granted immunity for cooperating with the White House's domestic spying program of telephone wiretapping and e-mail surveillance. The panel hopes to vote on the provision as soon as next week. Senator Pat Leahy said that immunity would make it impossible for Americans to seek redress for 'illegal' violations of their privacy." The article points out the confused state of the immunity measure: the House is considering a version of FISA renewal that has no immunity; in the Senate, two committees are working on different versions, one with immunity, one without.

eweekhickins writes "The US Senate Judiciary Committee delayed a scheduled vote on whether telecommunications carriers should be granted immunity for cooperating with the White House's domestic spying program of telephone wiretapping and e-mail surveillance. The panel hopes to vote on the provision as soon as next week. Senator Pat Leahy said that immunity would make it impossible for Americans to seek redress for 'illegal' violations of their privacy." The article points out the confused state of the immunity measure: the House is considering a version of FISA renewal that has no immunity; in the Senate, two committees are working on different versions, one with immunity, one without.

Lally Singh writes "Interested in the new Netbeans 6, but didn't trust Sun's (already OSI-approved) CDDL? Sun just Dual-Licensed it under the GPL (v2) with Classpath Exception. Keep your karmic license purity and mix in all the (now compatible) GPL code you want. If you've been using Eclipse, Netbeans 6 is really worth a look. Lean, well-featured, and fast."