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An anonymous reader writes "Email service FastMail.fm has an blog post about an interesting bug they're dealing with related to the new Mail.app in Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks. After finding a user who had 71 messages in his Junk Mail folder that were somehow responsible for over a million entries in the index file, they decided to investigate. 'This morning I checked again, there were nearly a million messages again, so I enabled telemetry on the account ... [Mail.app] copying all the email from the Junk Folder back into the Junk Folder again!. This is legal IMAP, so our server proceeds to create a new copy of each message in the folder. It then expunges the old copies of the messages, but it's happening so often that the current UID on that folder is up to over 3 million. It was just over 2 million a few days ago when I first emailed the user to alert them to the situation, so it's grown by another million since. The only way I can think this escaped QA was that they used a server which (like gmail) automatically suppresses duplicates for all their testing, because this is a massively bad problem.' The actual emails added up to about 2MB of actual disk usage, but the bug generated an additional 2GB of data on top of that."

First time accepted submitter InsertCleverUsername writes "The Department of Commerce has announced a $10,000 contest for developers making apps to utilize Commerce and other publicly available data and information to support American businesses. Developers must use at least one Department of Commerce dataset to create an application that assists businesses and/or improves the service delivery of Business.USA.gov to the business community. Developers may choose any platform. A list of developer-friendly data sets can be found on the Business Data and Tools page of Data.gov."

quipalicious writes "A Michigan school super asks the state governor to make his school district a prison, highlighting the various rights and privileges that prisoners get and public schooling students don't."

mattcsn writes "Opera Software just bought email service provider Fastmail.fm. Here's hoping that Opera uses a light touch and keeps the email service as unchanged as possible. From the article: 'FastMail has included a FAQ, in which it says that users who wish to not transfer their accounts over to Opera have to go into settings and indicate just that. Not acting upon the email the company sent out to its users or actively accepting the transfer will result in Opera assuming control over the mailbox and the account registration details. As to the reason for selling, FastMail says the market was getting increasingly competitive and that Opera's expertise in web browsers and especially the mobile market would help the company grow and take on the next big challenges in running and building an email service.'"

some_guy_88 writes "The $338 million verdict against Microsoft for violating a patent held by Uniloc has now been overturned. 'Ric Richardson ... is the founder of Uniloc, which sued Microsoft in 2003 for violating its patent relating to technology designed to deter software piracy. The company alleged Microsoft earned billions of dollars by using the technology in its Windows XP and Office programs. In April, a Rhode Island jury found Microsoft had violated the patent and told Microsoft to pay the company $388 million, one of the largest patent jury awards in US history. But on Tuesday ... US District Judge William Smith "vacated" the jury's verdict and ruled in favor of Microsoft.' In his ruling, Smith said the jury 'lacked a grasp of the issues before it and reached a finding without a legally sufficient basis (PDF).'"

Agent Provocateur writes "McMaster University recently announced the discovery of the remains of a gigantic ape, measuring over 3 meters tall and weighing up to 600kg, that supposedly co-existed alongside humans." From the article: "Jack Rink, associate professor of geography and earth sciences at McMaster, has determined that Gigantopithecus blackii, the largest primate that ever lived, roamed southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out 100,000 years ago. This was known as the Pleistocene period, by which time humans had already existed for a million years."

llamaluvr asks: "As I understand it, there are some financial benefits for businesses leasing hardware equipment. Does anybody know what exactly those are, and how much they really help? Do they really outweigh the additional costs of replacing, repackaging, and returning old hardware? How do the size of the business and the computing environment affect these benefits? Additionally, what is the best balance between leasing and purchasing equipment -- would leasing desktops and laptops, but purchasing monitors be best, or should one just lease everything?" "A little bit of background: I work in the IT Operations department for a BU of a Fortune 100 company, and we lease practically everything right now. We have 4 full-time employees for about 800 workstations, and, while we seem to have enough manpower for managing projects and tickets, we have a tough time getting to returning the equipment, so a lot of it is already late. Complicating this is that many of these PCs are in a harsh industrial environment, and often have at least one failing part, which then costs us a fraction of the entire workstation (for example: a busted floppy might cost us $150 or more, unless we test the PC and replace the part, of course). Corporate has been more attentive to this drain on our time and money lately, and they have talked of outsourcing this process, but in the meantime, we're stuck with it. BTW, we lease IBM equipment through ePlus."

robmueller asks: "Like most of you here on Slashdot, I've got my entire music collection on my PC, and would like to share it around the house to at least my lounge room stereo. While the AirPort Express is still a month away (mid July), and the lack of a remote control seems like a problem for a stereo away from the computer, there's a number of other devices out there already; D-Link DSM-320, Squeeze Box, Actiontec, Virtuoso MC-500 (uh... looks like the Actiontec), and a standard 'we hooked it up for 5 minutes' review of several more devices here. However, I want to hear from people who have actually used one, and what they liked, didn't like, ease of use, audio only, is audio & video useful? etc. So who's using one of these things?"

mrSinclair writes "the 'Bagle' or 'Beagle' worm is expected to hit the U.S. by midweek, probably Tuesday as many employees return from a three-day weekend." He points to this Washington Post story (via Yahoo!), which describes the Windows mass-mailing worm as being transmitted via email as an .exe attachment and as installing "a program that lets attackers connect to infected machines, install malicious software or steal files." The article says Bagle has been detected in more than 100 countries. Other readers have sent in links to coverage at the BBC and at SearchSecurity.com.

eldrich asks: "We have two labs: a main lab (lab 1) has 1.2Tb of on-line data storage -- two machines with 600Gb RAID-5s hung off of them. These happily service about 30 Linux machines via NFS over fast ethernet. There are 5-6 WinXP machines that connect via SMB and Samba. The lab is on a private network with a single firewall between it and the world, and we use LDAP for practically everything (hostname, usernames, password, autofs, etc). The students' lab (lab 2) is 40 miles away, with 8 workstations and 2 WinXP machines. This lab also has a small RAID-5 Linux server with 180GB space which serves via NFS and Samba. Sometimes we have people from lab 2 at lab 1 and while they are at the main lab, they need their files. What I want to do is make lab 2's 180GB RAID a subset cache of the 1.2Tb one in lab 1. This puts everyone's main storage at lab 1 (which is backed up weekly) but a local copy can be cached on the lab 2 raid system. This gives the students a local copy for fast access, but all the safety of the backups made from our system. Does anyone know of a filesystem or programs that can help with this?"

"Some people spend 95% of their time in lab 2, so that is their 'home' server, but when they come to lab 1 for a week's stay or so, they scp/rsync their files to the lab 1 server, and at the end of the week push the changes back to lab 2. When people login to a workstation, they usually remain logged in for days at a time and xlock the screen. [If we can get this caching system working], it would mean that people moving between the labs would not need to copy files around since there would always be a 'local' copy.

The network between the labs is not fast enough for direct automounting of lab 1's server on the lab 2 workstations, especially since some files can be over 300Mb in size. We have a VPN (via freeswan) between the different labs, so all data transmitted is encrypted. Also, because lab 2 has 1/6 the capacity of lab 1's RAID it needs to be cached copies of in-use or probable in-use data only.

Crontab entries set for night copies are not useful because people often appear from both places on any given day.

The 3 servers currently run 2.4.18 with XFS so any solution should be compatible with XFS but at a real push we could consider changing the filesystem to another one."

JoshRendlesham writes "Matt Dillon announced today on the freebsd-hackers mailing list the creation of the DragonFly BSD project. It seeks to build on the work of FreeBSD 4.x, including a rewrite of the packaging and distribution system, among other goals."

Anonymous Coward writes "Take a look at this! This guy is working on an OpenGL backend for X. But he needs pizza and some new hardware. He's on a TNT2 for heaven sake!"

Jack Kennedy writes "Apple has released Safari 1.0 Beta v51. Unfortunately, Apple don't list what the update addresses; according to Apple, 'this Safari Update is recommended for all Safari users.' Dave Hyatt's Weblog provides a more detailed account of what issues Apple have addressed over the past few days."

knownsense writes "Wired News is reporting that Google's mysterious Chinese block is now off and users in China can now get to the search engine. Google was being redirected for a while within China and users within China were being redirected to no-name "China friendly" search engines."