Slashdot Mirror

Nerdfest writes with news that New Zealand has, after going back and forth a couple of times, finally banned software patents. From the article: "New Zealand has finally passed a new Patents Bill that will effectively outlaw software patents after five years of debate, delay, and intense lobbying from multinational software vendors. Aptly-named Commerce Minister Craig Foss welcomed the modernization of patents law, saying it marked a 'significant step towards driving innovation in New Zealand'. An IITP poll of members at the time showed 94% of those with a view were in favor of banning software patents."

Nerdfest writes with news that New Zealand has, after going back and forth a couple of times, finally banned software patents. From the article: "New Zealand has finally passed a new Patents Bill that will effectively outlaw software patents after five years of debate, delay, and intense lobbying from multinational software vendors. Aptly-named Commerce Minister Craig Foss welcomed the modernization of patents law, saying it marked a 'significant step towards driving innovation in New Zealand'. An IITP poll of members at the time showed 94% of those with a view were in favor of banning software patents."

Nerdfest writes with news that New Zealand has, after going back and forth a couple of times, finally banned software patents. From the article: "New Zealand has finally passed a new Patents Bill that will effectively outlaw software patents after five years of debate, delay, and intense lobbying from multinational software vendors. Aptly-named Commerce Minister Craig Foss welcomed the modernization of patents law, saying it marked a 'significant step towards driving innovation in New Zealand'. An IITP poll of members at the time showed 94% of those with a view were in favor of banning software patents."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Kernel editor-in-chief and noted firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos swings away at Silicon Valley's current startup culture, noting that it's resulted in herds of wannabe founders and startup groupies who don't exactly have a track record of starting successful companies or even producing solid code. 'Though they produce little of value, they are the naive soft power behind aggressive capitalist machines in Silicon Valley: the trend-setting vanguard of the global Web and mobile industries,' he writes. 'We should be very wary indeed of these vacuous cheerleaders whose vague waffle about the transformational potential of photo-sharing apps is more sinister and Orwellian than anything dreamt up by a dictator.' How long can such a culture continue before it dries up, and the whole tech-investment cycle begins anew?"

PolygamousRanchKid writes, quoting Forbes "Researchers at Sweden's Lund University have announced that they've been able to confirm the existence of element 115 on the periodic table. This research team isn't the first to create element 115, which is currently known as ununpentium. The first claim that ununpentium had been synthesized in a lab was by a joint group of Russian and American researchers, who believed that they created it in their lab in 2004."

ananyo writes "Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned, simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse, according to a mathematical study of spatial networks. The upshot of the study is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse. The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team's conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. 'The problem is that this doesn't reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,' says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage."

cold fjord writes with news that the NY Times website was disrupted by hackers Tuesday afternoon. "In an interview, Mr. Frons said the attack was carried out by a group known as 'the Syrian Electronic Army, or someone trying very hard to be them.' The group attacked the company’s domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The Web site first went down after 3 p.m.; once service was restored, the hackers quickly disrupted the site again." The Times wasn't the only site to be attacked: "Earlier today, a Twitter account allegedly belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Syrian-regime hacker collective, claimed to have taken over The New York Times website, Huffington Post UK's website and Twitter.com, by hacking into each of the site's registry accounts." The group was definitely able to change contact info for Twitter's domain. The Wall Street Journal notes that this is the same group that targeted media organizations a few months back. "When the SEA hacked the Twitter account of the Associated Press earlier this year, it posted a false headline to the account that said the White House had been attacked. The hoax caused U.S. stock markets to briefly lose $200 billion in value."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Linux vendors Red Hat and SUSE are pushing to make sure Linux-based virtual machines are an important part of datacenter-based hybrid clouds. The two are taking significantly different tacks toward the same destination, however. SUSE is using the visibility and cloud hype of VMware by extending its partnership with the virtualization provider to promote its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware as an alternative operating system for virtual machines running on VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service. Red Hat is happy to include VMware in its plans, but isn't limiting itself either to VMware-based clouds or, in fact, the idea that a Linux vendor has to tag along with a cloud- or virtualization developer to find its place in mixed infrastructures. 'We do not buy into the premise that a private or a hybrid platform based on one vendor's technologies and products is the answer,' wrote Bryan Che, general manager of Red Hat's Cloud Business Unit. More than 25 percent of customers want clouds or datacenter infrastructures using virtualization products from more than one vendor, according to a buyers' guide published in August by market researcher IDC."

Kelly Beatty has a unique perspective on the world of astronomy: Beatty's been on the staff of Sky & Telescope magazine for nearly 40 years as a writer and editor, including a stint heading "Night Sky" magazine. He's also written what's been called "the definitive guide for the armchair astronomer," and teaches astronomy to people of all ages. (He even has an asteroid named after him.) Besides being fascinated with the objects we can see in Earth's skies, Beatty takes the skies themselves seriously: his Twitter handle is NightSkyGuy for a reason. We talked a few weeks ago, in dark-skied rural Maine, about his involvement with the International Dark-Sky Association, and why you should care about ubiquitous light pollution, even if you don't have a deep interest in star-gazing. (And it's not just to be courteous to your neighbors.)

Jim Jagielski is likely best known as one of the developers and co-founders of the Apache Software Foundation, where he has previously served as both Chairman and President. He also is a director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and now serves as President of the Outercurve Foundation. Formerly known as the CodePlex Foundation, the Outercurve Foundation is "a not-for-profit foundation created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects." Jim has agreed to answer your questions in real-time about his new position and the Outercurve Foundation itself on Wednesday, August 28th from 12-2pm ET (16:00-18:00 GMT). Check back tomorrow and hear what he has to say.

jamie writes "In a story on Thursday, Slashdot and its readers had a little fun at the expense of Al Gore, who was quoted as saying that the hurricane severity scale was going to go to 6. A correction was made the next day. The author of the piece that Slashdot linked now writes 'I retract the balance of my criticism.' Turns out Gore was misquoted. Luckily for Gore, this is the first time he's been ridiculed for something he didn't actually say. Well, except for Love Story, Love Canal, farm chores, and everyone's favorite, inventing the internet. (The original Slashdot story is here and its central link now includes the Washington Post's correction.)" From Ezra Klein's update on his earlier piece: "I'm out-of-town and so away from my tape recorder. So I asked Gore's staff about the line and they have Gore saying: 'The scientists are now adding category six to the hurricane ... some are proposing we add category 6 to the hurricane scale that used to be 1-5.' That doesn't offend my memory of the discussion and it's entirely possible I missed Gore's qualifying sentence while trying to keep up. If so, that's my fault, and I apologize."

An anonymous reader writes "The X.Org Foundation, which drives the X.Org Server projects, Mesa, and Wayland open-source programs, had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS. It turns out the X.Org Foundation had put in quite a lot of work to become a non-profit organization, with guidance from the Software Freedom Law Center. They got in trouble after failing to routinely file their taxes on time. There's also been a host of other X.Org accounting errors in recent years. There was also the recent news of the IRS going after open-source projects, too."

benrothke writes "Little did anyone know that when the first Hacking Exposed book came out over 15 years ago, that it would launch a set of sequels on topics from Windows, Linux, web development, to virtualization and cloud computing, and much more. In 2013, the newest edition is Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions. In this edition, authors Neil Bergman, Mike Stanfield, Jason Rouse & Joel Scambray provide an extremely detailed overview of the security and privacy issues around mobile devices. The authors have heaps of experience in the topics and bring that to every chapter." Read below for the rest of Ben's review. Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions author Neil Bergman, Mike Stanfield, Jason Rouse & Joel Scambray pages 320 publisher McGraw-Hill Osborne Media rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0071817011 summary Excellent resource to understand current mobile security threats The power of mobile devices can be understood by the fact that this book came out in July 2013, and just last week, Steve Ballmer announced that he will step down as Microsoft CEO. While mobile has spelled the doom to Ballmer's career and Microsoft's bottom line, mobile has the Apple brand relevant again, and extremely dominant. More of a concern is that mobile is the new avenue of security attacks for a new generation of attackers.

The book provides a great overview of the new threats created by mobile devices. Like the other books in the series, it provides an overview of the issues, shows how attackers will use vulnerabilities to compromise and exploit mobile devices, in addition to showing you how to secure your mobile devices and enterprise mobile platforms against these threats.

One of difference between this book and other Hacking Exposed titles, especially the Windows editions, is that this has a dearth of script kiddie tools. This is due to the fact that such tools don't exist so much for the mobile platforms.

The 9 chapters in the book provide a comprehensive and meticulous synopsis of all of the core areas around security and privacy concerns about mobile computing.

The first two chapters provide a thorough analysis of the mobile risk ecosystem and how the cellular networks operate.

One of the major risks detailed in chapter 1 is that of physical risks. When data resides in physical data centers, a company can have some semblance of assurance of security given the data has multiple layers of physical controls in an enterprise data center or colocation. The authors note that physical access to mobile devices is difficult to defend against for very long, and the entire phenomenon of rooting and jailbreaking certainly proves this.

They also write that they have yet to find a mobile application that they could not defeat when given physical access, including defeating the mobile device management software.

The book astutely notes that if your mobile risk model assumes that information can be securely stored indefinitely on a physical mobile device, then you are starting with a false assumption. The entire book is based on the assumption of an attacker gaining control of the mobile device. To compensate for that, the book provides the requisite countermeasures.

Another bit of sagacious advice in the book is ensuring your developers, and those you outsource your development to, understand the specific risks and vulnerabilities around mobile apps. It is crucial that all programmers developing mobile apps be sufficiently trained in how to write secure mobile apps.

Chapter 3 details iOS, the Apple mobile operating system. An interesting part of the chapter is on how to jailbreak Apple devices. But the authors also note that there are pros and cons to jailbreaking. The main negative is that you expose yourself to a variety of attack vectors that could lead to a complete compromise of the device. A non-jailbroken device obviates that in most cases given the security controls in place.

The book also sheds light on the fact that even those iOS is a closed system with less threat vectors, it is still far from perfect. The Apple App Store, even with its security controls, is far from impervious to attack. The chapter tells the story of a few malicious apps that slipped past security reviews and found themselves on the Apple App Store. While these malicious apps were later removed, they will there long enough to cause damage.

While the book provides ample evidence of the risk and vulnerabilities around mobile devices, it is rich in appropriate countermeasures and methods to compensate for these. The chapters on iOS and Android provide myriad ways in which to secure the devices. Chapter 8 on mobile development security details a framework in which to secure mobile devices. This framework includes requirements from secure communications, effective authentication, preventing information leakage, to platform controls and more.

Appendix A contains a checklist of options that end-users can use to ensure the security of their private data and sensitive information stored on their mobile devices.

Appendix B is a mobile application penetration testing toolkit for performing security assessment of mobile technologies.

The press is full of stories of how the demise of Microsoft is directly related to their misreading the mobile market. The public has responded to buying mobile devices in the billions, and attackers who not so long ago wrote exploits for Windows, are now putting their efforts into iOS and Android. The message is clear, mobile apps need to be written with security in mind and the mobile devices need to be secured.

For those looking for an understanding of current mobile security threats and how to counter them, Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions is a uniquely good book.

Reviewed by Ben Rothke

You can purchase Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

benrothke writes "Little did anyone know that when the first Hacking Exposed book came out over 15 years ago, that it would launch a set of sequels on topics from Windows, Linux, web development, to virtualization and cloud computing, and much more. In 2013, the newest edition is Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions. In this edition, authors Neil Bergman, Mike Stanfield, Jason Rouse & Joel Scambray provide an extremely detailed overview of the security and privacy issues around mobile devices. The authors have heaps of experience in the topics and bring that to every chapter." Read below for the rest of Ben's review. Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions author Neil Bergman, Mike Stanfield, Jason Rouse & Joel Scambray pages 320 publisher McGraw-Hill Osborne Media rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0071817011 summary Excellent resource to understand current mobile security threats The power of mobile devices can be understood by the fact that this book came out in July 2013, and just last week, Steve Ballmer announced that he will step down as Microsoft CEO. While mobile has spelled the doom to Ballmer's career and Microsoft's bottom line, mobile has the Apple brand relevant again, and extremely dominant. More of a concern is that mobile is the new avenue of security attacks for a new generation of attackers.

The book provides a great overview of the new threats created by mobile devices. Like the other books in the series, it provides an overview of the issues, shows how attackers will use vulnerabilities to compromise and exploit mobile devices, in addition to showing you how to secure your mobile devices and enterprise mobile platforms against these threats.

One of difference between this book and other Hacking Exposed titles, especially the Windows editions, is that this has a dearth of script kiddie tools. This is due to the fact that such tools don't exist so much for the mobile platforms.

The 9 chapters in the book provide a comprehensive and meticulous synopsis of all of the core areas around security and privacy concerns about mobile computing.

The first two chapters provide a thorough analysis of the mobile risk ecosystem and how the cellular networks operate.

One of the major risks detailed in chapter 1 is that of physical risks. When data resides in physical data centers, a company can have some semblance of assurance of security given the data has multiple layers of physical controls in an enterprise data center or colocation. The authors note that physical access to mobile devices is difficult to defend against for very long, and the entire phenomenon of rooting and jailbreaking certainly proves this.

They also write that they have yet to find a mobile application that they could not defeat when given physical access, including defeating the mobile device management software.

The book astutely notes that if your mobile risk model assumes that information can be securely stored indefinitely on a physical mobile device, then you are starting with a false assumption. The entire book is based on the assumption of an attacker gaining control of the mobile device. To compensate for that, the book provides the requisite countermeasures.

Another bit of sagacious advice in the book is ensuring your developers, and those you outsource your development to, understand the specific risks and vulnerabilities around mobile apps. It is crucial that all programmers developing mobile apps be sufficiently trained in how to write secure mobile apps.

Chapter 3 details iOS, the Apple mobile operating system. An interesting part of the chapter is on how to jailbreak Apple devices. But the authors also note that there are pros and cons to jailbreaking. The main negative is that you expose yourself to a variety of attack vectors that could lead to a complete compromise of the device. A non-jailbroken device obviates that in most cases given the security controls in place.

The book also sheds light on the fact that even those iOS is a closed system with less threat vectors, it is still far from perfect. The Apple App Store, even with its security controls, is far from impervious to attack. The chapter tells the story of a few malicious apps that slipped past security reviews and found themselves on the Apple App Store. While these malicious apps were later removed, they will there long enough to cause damage.

While the book provides ample evidence of the risk and vulnerabilities around mobile devices, it is rich in appropriate countermeasures and methods to compensate for these. The chapters on iOS and Android provide myriad ways in which to secure the devices. Chapter 8 on mobile development security details a framework in which to secure mobile devices. This framework includes requirements from secure communications, effective authentication, preventing information leakage, to platform controls and more.

Appendix A contains a checklist of options that end-users can use to ensure the security of their private data and sensitive information stored on their mobile devices.

Appendix B is a mobile application penetration testing toolkit for performing security assessment of mobile technologies.

The press is full of stories of how the demise of Microsoft is directly related to their misreading the mobile market. The public has responded to buying mobile devices in the billions, and attackers who not so long ago wrote exploits for Windows, are now putting their efforts into iOS and Android. The message is clear, mobile apps need to be written with security in mind and the mobile devices need to be secured.

For those looking for an understanding of current mobile security threats and how to counter them, Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions is a uniquely good book.

Reviewed by Ben Rothke

You can purchase Hacking Exposed Mobile Security Secrets & Solutions from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Nerval's Lobster writes "In the 'Iron Man' trilogy, billionaire inventor Tony Stark uses a gesture-controlled hologram to draft new designs of the titular armor, sending virtual parts flying around his lab with the flick of a wrist. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—who is often compared to Stark by the tech press—is apparently creating the real-life equivalent of that fictional hologram system. 'We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously),' he Tweeted August 23. 'Now need a high frame rate holograph generator.' In a follow-up Tweet, he added: 'Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium.' But Musk has no plans to actually make an Iron Man-inspired suit of armor. 'I am not going to make an IM suit,' he wrote on Twitter, 'however design by hand-manipulated hologram is actually useful.'"

Last week you had a chance to ask Guido van Rossum, Python's BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), about all things Python and his move to Dropbox. Guido wasted no time answering your questions and you'll find his responses below. From Google to Dropbox
by nurhussein

Hi, What prompted the move from Google to Dropbox? What did you do at Google, and what are you going to do at Dropbox?

Guido: After seven years at Google I was just ready for some change in environment, and then the Dropbox offer came along. At a high level, my job hasn't changed much: I still

- spend 50% of my time on whatever I want to do for Python in my BDFL role
- am a regular engineer in the organization (not a manager or even TL)
- do a lot of code reviews, architecture and design work
- handle a lot of email
- do a lot of actual coding for my job, in Python

The specifics differ of course. I really did only two things at Google: the first two years I worked on one of the first online code review tools Mondrian, which itself was never open-sourced but begat Rietveld, which did, and is used amongst others, by the Python, Go and Chromium communities. After that I joined Google App Engine where I did a lot of different things, almost all of them in Python. My last big project there was a new Python database API, NDB.

I've been at Dropbox for 7 months and my main project has been the design of the Dropbox Datastore API . It's ironic but not my fault that this also uses the "datastore" moniker -- there's little overlap between Dropbox Datastores and the Google App Engine Datastore.

What's even more ironic is that even though I did much of the design, and wrote two prototypes in Python, the SDKs we released last month only support Java, Objective-C and JavaScript. But I am working on a fix, this interview is just slowing me down. :-)



Why did Python avoid some common "OO" idioms?
by i_ate_god

Interfaces, abstract classes, private members, etc... Why did python avoid all this?

Guido: I can think of two reasons: (a) you don't really need them, and (b) they are hard to do if you have no compile-time type checking. Python started out as a skunkworks project (not endorsed or encouraged by management but not actively prevented), and I wanted results quickly. This led me to remove features that weren't actually needed or urgent; it also led me to do all type checking at run time, which gave me natural constraints on what features Python could support. I also had no religious OO ax to grind -- I just wanted an easy language, and it became OO more or less by accident.

In modern Python there are rough equivalents for all of these, but they don't necessarily work all that well, or they cause a lot of execution overhead, so they are often avoided, but they have their uses and their fans.



functional programming
by ebno-10db

Some people claim that Python is, at least partly, a functional language. You disagree, as do I. Simply having a few map and filter type functions does not make for a functional language. As I understand it those functions were added to the libraries by a homesick Lisper, and that several times you've been tempted to eliminate them. In general it seems you're not a fan of functional programming, at least for Python.

Question: do you feel that the functional programming approach is not very useful in general, or simply that it's not appropriate for Python? It would be nice to hear your reasons either way.

Guido: I'm not a fan of religiously taking some idea to the extreme, and I try to be pragmatic in my design choices (but not *too* pragmatic, see the start of this sentence :-). I value readability and usefulness for real code. There are some places where map() and filter() make sense, and for other places Python has list comprehensions. I ended up hating reduce() because it was almost exclusively used (a) to implement sum(), or (b) to write unreadable code. So we added builtin sum() at the same time we demoted reduce() from a builtin to something in functools (which is a dumping ground for stuff I don't really care about :-).

If I think of functional programming, I mostly think of languages that have incredibly powerful compilers, like Haskell. For such a compiler, the functional paradigm is useful because it opens up a vast array of possible transformations, including parallelization. But Python's compiler has no idea what your code means, and that's useful too. So, mostly I don't think it makes much sense to try to add "functional" primitives to Python, because the reason those primitives work well in functional languages don't apply to Python, and they make the code pretty unreadable for people who aren't used to functional languages (which means most programmers).

I also don't think that the current crop of functional languages is ready for mainstream. Admittedly I don't know much about the field besides Haskell, but any language *less* popular than Haskell surely has very little practical value, and I haven't heard of functional languages *more* popular than Haskell. As for Haskell, I think it's a great proving ground for all sorts of ideas about compiler technology, but I think its "purity" will always remain in the way of adoption. Having to come to grips with Monads just isn't worth it for most people.

(A similar comment applies to Scala. It may be the best you can do trying to combine functional and OO paradigms in one language, but the result isn't all that easy to use unless you're really smart.)



Multi-line lambdas
by NeverWorker1

One of the most common complaints about Python is the limitations of its lambdas, namely being one line only without the ability to do assignments. Obviously, Python's whitespace treatment is a major part of that (and, IIRC, I've read comments from you to that effect). I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about possible syntax for a multi-line lambda, and the best I've come up with is trying to shoehorn some unused (or little used) symbol into a C-style curly brace, but that's messy at best. Is there a better way, and do you see this functionality ever being added?

Guido: Really? I almost never hear that complaint except from people who submit questions to Slashdot interviews. :-)

There is indeed a better way, and that is using the 'def' keyword to define a regular function in a local scope. The defined function object becomes a local variable that has exactly the same semantics as a lambda except that it is bound to a local variable, and it doesn't have any of the syntactic constraints. For example, there is *no* semantic difference between

def make_adder(n):
__def adder(x):
____return x + n
__return adder

and this equivalent using lambda:

def make_adder(n):
__return lambda x: x + n

(except that when you introspect the lambda asking for its name, it will say '' instead of 'adder').

Andrew Koenig once pointed out to me that there's one pattern where lambdas are really much more convenient, and that is if you have a long list or dict (perhaps some kind of switching definition) containing lots of lambdas, since if you wanted to do that without lambda you'd end up first having to define lots of little functions, giving them all names, and then referencing them all by name from inside the list or dict. But in that pattern the lambdas are usually simple enough to be lambdas, and if you have a few exceptions, using 'def' before starting the list or dict is a fine compromise.



PyPy
by Btrot69

Do you see PyPy as the future? Or do you remain unconvinced, and -- if so -- why ?

Guido: I'm still unconvinced, for two reasons: (a) they don't support Python 3 (well) yet, and (b) there are lots of extension modules (both third party and in the standard library) that they don't support well. But I hope they'll fix those issues. I think it's competition from projects like PyPy, Jython and IronPython that keeps the CPython project honest and on its toes.



Python in the browser ?
by Btrot69

Over the years, there have been several attempts to create a sandboxed version of python that will safely run in a web browser.Mostly this was because of problems with Javascript. Now that Javascript works -- and we have nice things like CoffeeScript -- is it time to give up on python in the browser ?

Guido: I gave up on it in 1995, so yes. And please don't try to compile Python to JavaScript. The semantics are so different that you end up writing most of a Python runtime in JavaScript, which slows things down too much. (CoffeScript's strength is that it is designed to map cleanly to JavaScript, and the two are now co-evolving to make the mapping even cleaner.)



Python 3
by MetalliQaZ

How do you feel about the current state of the migration to Python 3 (Py3k)? From a user perspective it seems that the conversion of popular libraries has lagged far behind, which has impeded the transition. In my professional capacity, nearly every single system I use lacks an installed 3.x interpreter. In fact, 2.7 is a rarity. I'd like to get your thoughts.

Guido: Curious where you work. I agree that Python 3 migration will still take a long time, but if your systems don't come with Python 2.7 they must be pretty ancient! When I left Google they were about done with the internal transition to Python 2.7 (having successfully migrated from 2.4 to 2.6 over the past few years) and here at Dropbox both the client and the server are using Python 2.7. Both companies are already thinking about Python 3 too.

Back to Python 3 migration, I am actually pretty optimistic. Lots of popular libraries have a working port or are working on one. (The Python Software Foundation also occasionally funds projects to port libraries that are widely used but don't have enough of a community to do a port.) It will take a long time, but I see a lot of progress, and in a few years I expect most new code will be written in Python 3. Totally eradicating Python 2 usage will probably take much longer, but then again, Windows XP isn't quite dead yet either. :-)



Key question for any language designer
by dkleinsc

Have the prospects of Python in any way improved since you grew a beard? To what degree does language success correlate to beard length?

Guido: It is absolutely essential. Just look at Perl's fate -- Larry Wall is just too clean-shaven. :-)

bfwebster writes "Michael Swaine — long-time, well-known and very prolific author/editor in the programming and personal computing worlds — has just devised a new twist on the Peter Principle: the Peter Pinnacle, 'meaning to get promoted so high and to be so unqualified for your job that the company tells you that you can name your price just to go away.' I'm sure the timing of the neologism is just a coincidence."

Calibre is a feature-laden, open source e-book manager; many readers mentioned in light of the recently posted news about Barnes & Noble's Nook that they use Calibre to deal with their reading material. Reader Trashcan Romeo writes with some news on its new 1.0 release, summing it up thus: "The new version of the premier e-book management application boasts a completely re-written database backend and PDF output engine as well a new book-cover grid view."

New submitter bryanandaimee writes "An optical lattice clock like the one discussed earlier on Slashdot has broken the stability record. Comparing two OLC's using trapped atoms of Ytterbium, the stability of the clocks was measured to 2 parts per quintillion (10^18). While the previously reported OLC used strontium, these clocks, built by another group, use Ytterbium. Interestingly, while the stability of the clocks is now the best in the world, the accuracy has yet to be measured."

oneiros27 writes "Although the initial search for Evi Nemeth (and some other people who didn't write Unix books) ended, family and friends of the missing crew are funding a private search effort for the crew. They've managed to get more images from DigitalGlobe of the drift area, but now need help looking through the pictures. If you've got some free time, you might be able to help save some lives."

dryriver writes "Autodesk will detail in October an 'evolution' of its business model that includes more options to rent its software, rather than buying it, CEO Carl Bass said in an earnings conference call yesterday. Bass promised an array of new rental options by the end of the year that he said will give customers more subscription options and increase the predictability of the company's revenue over time. Bass stressed that Autodesk wasn't upending its existing model, but augmenting it. 'Recall that, just 10 years ago, we added subscription maintenance to our revenue stream,' he said. 'That was a big change at the time, and there was no shortage of skeptics. Today, that's a billion-dollar business and represents over 40% of our revenue. Suffice it to say that transition was a huge success.' Analysts on the call immediately started drawing comparisons with Adobe's move earlier this year to a subscription-only pricing model for its Creative Cloud software. Bass said that Adobe's success made Autodesk more confident about the feasibility of rental pricing, but suggested that Autodesk's move wouldn't be quite as aggressive."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Any number of executives could take Ballmer's place, including a few he unceremoniously kicked to the curb over the years. Whoever steps into that CEO role, however, faces a much greater challenge than if Ballmer had quietly resigned several years ago. Ballmer famously missed the boat on tablets and smartphones; Windows 8 isn't selling as well as Microsoft expected; and on Websites and blogs such as Mini-Microsoft (which had a brilliant posting about Ballmer's departure), employees complain bitterly about the company's much-maligned stack-ranking system, its layers of bureaucracy, and its inability to innovate. Had Ballmer left years ago, replaced by someone with the ability to more keenly anticipate markets, the company would probably be in much better shape to face its coming challenges. In its current form, Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook." In an interview with ZDNet, Ballmer said his biggest regret as CEO was in how Windows Vista was developed. Opinions are divided on both the nature of his resignation and what it will mean for Microsoft. While the stock price is up, BusinessWeek and others suggest the purpose of the transition is to find somebody better able to anticipate future trends. That would certainly lead to more organizational changes within Microsoft, something employees suffered through just last month. Ben Kuchera at the Penny Arcade Report points out that this could mean Microsoft will try to re-enter markets it has abandoned. He asks the company to "stay the hell away from PC gaming."

Trailrunner7 writes "Like most major Web and software companies, Facebook receives a lot of bug reports. And since the company started its bug bounty program, security researchers have become even more interested in looking for vulnerabilities in the Facebook ecosystem. But, as one researcher learned recently, not all bugs are created equal, and Facebook doesn't like people messing with its users – or its executives. That researcher, Khalil Shreateh, discovered a bug in the Facebook platform that enabled him – or any other user – to post comments on the walls of other users who aren't their friends. That shouldn't be possible under normal circumstances, so Shreateh reported the problem to Facebook through its bug bounty program, hoping to earn a reward from the company. Instead, the company told him he didn't provide enough information. So Shreateh went a step further and demonstrated the technique by posting a message to the wall of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. On Aug. 19, after details of the incident became public, Marc Maiffret, a well-known security researcher and CTO of BeyondTrust, started a crowdfunding campaign to get Shreateh a reward for his work. As of Aug. 23, that campaign has raised more than $12,000 and Maiffret is in the process of transferring the funds to the researcher."

Today Microsoft announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring within the next 12 months. He said, "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. ... My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." Ballmer, 57, has been Microsoft's CEO since taking over the role from Bill Gates in January, 2000. The company's board of directors has formed a committee to find a replacement for Ballmer, and he will continue his duties until a new CEO is found. Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to get a foothold in the mobile market. It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price. Upon retirement, Ballmer will be able to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock.

Today Microsoft announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring within the next 12 months. He said, "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. ... My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." Ballmer, 57, has been Microsoft's CEO since taking over the role from Bill Gates in January, 2000. The company's board of directors has formed a committee to find a replacement for Ballmer, and he will continue his duties until a new CEO is found. Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to get a foothold in the mobile market. It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price. Upon retirement, Ballmer will be able to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock.

Today Microsoft announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring within the next 12 months. He said, "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. ... My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." Ballmer, 57, has been Microsoft's CEO since taking over the role from Bill Gates in January, 2000. The company's board of directors has formed a committee to find a replacement for Ballmer, and he will continue his duties until a new CEO is found. Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to get a foothold in the mobile market. It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price. Upon retirement, Ballmer will be able to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock.

Today Microsoft announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring within the next 12 months. He said, "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. ... My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." Ballmer, 57, has been Microsoft's CEO since taking over the role from Bill Gates in January, 2000. The company's board of directors has formed a committee to find a replacement for Ballmer, and he will continue his duties until a new CEO is found. Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to get a foothold in the mobile market. It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price. Upon retirement, Ballmer will be able to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock.

Today Microsoft announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring within the next 12 months. He said, "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. ... My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." Ballmer, 57, has been Microsoft's CEO since taking over the role from Bill Gates in January, 2000. The company's board of directors has formed a committee to find a replacement for Ballmer, and he will continue his duties until a new CEO is found. Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to get a foothold in the mobile market. It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price. Upon retirement, Ballmer will be able to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock.

barlevg writes "In a recent interview, former Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore made a bold claim, that man-made global warming was causing hurricanes to be formed of such severity that 'they're adding a 6' to the hurricane scale, going on to say that 'The fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over these storms and extreme weather events.' In response, the National Weather Service has responded that they have no plans to add a 'doomsday Category 6' to their rating scale: 'No, we're not pursuing any such change. I'm also not sure who VP Gore means by "they,"' also noting that 'Category 5 has no ceiling: it includes hurricanes with top sustained winds of 157 mph and higher.' Furthermore, a recently leaked United Nations climate assessment claims only 'low confidence' of a link between human activity and increased hurricane severity and that this is likely due to increased human settlement in coastal areas and other regions vulnerable to natural disasters." Along similar lines, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that Tesla's Model S, no matter how safe it is, doesn't get any special grade inflation: there's no "5.4" score (as the company did in a press release this week), because that's just not how the NHTSA keeps score. (Hat tip to reader cartechboy.)

theodp writes "As reported earlier on Slashdot, Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday announced the launch of Internet.org, 'a global partnership with the goal of making internet access available to the next 5 billion people,' including 'those who cannot currently afford it.' So it's especially bizarre that just a few days ago, Internet.org carried a FAQ which joked that slaves were used to create an Internet for the Pharaohs. And until recently, Internet.org's home page sported a photo purporting to show that freighters are used to rush Internet porn to affluent residents of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, and an illustration showing how helicopters deliver Internet data to actor George Clooney's magnificent Lake Como Villa. So keep an eye on how your domain is used, kids, especially if you plan to use it soon to position yourself and your partners as saints who champion the right of the world's poor to Internet access."

Nerval's Lobster writes "The crowdfunding campaign to build an Ubuntu-powered smartphone has fallen short of its ambitious goal. Canonical, which works with the open-source community to support Ubuntu worldwide, decided to fund its Ubuntu Edge smartphone via crowdfunding Website Indiegogo. The funding goal was set at $32 million, and at first it looked as if the project had enough momentum to actually succeed: within the first 24 hours of the project's July 22 launch, some $3.45 million had poured in. But that torrent of cash soon slowed to a trickle. In the end, the campaign managed to amass $12,809,906 by its August 21 closing. Nonetheless, Canonical did its best to put a brave face on the situation. 'While we passionately wanted to build the Edge to showcase Ubuntu on phones, the support and attention it received will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014,' the organization wrote in a posting. 'Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won't have much longer to wait.'" Update: 08/22 16:14 GMT by T : Oops -- headline edited to reflect that the Edge was an Indiegogo project, rather than Kickstarter.

Nerval's Lobster writes "A new research paper from the New England Complex Systems Institute, titled "Sentiment in New York City" (PDF), attempts to pull off something that would have been impossible—or at least mind-bogglingly difficult and time-consuming—before the invention of online social networks: figure out the block-by-block happiness level of the biggest metropolis in the United States. In order to generate their 'sentiment map' of New York City, the researchers analyzed data from 603,954 Tweets (collected via Twitter's API) organized by census block. 'This method, combined with geotagging provided by users, enables us to gauge public sentiment on extremely fine-grained spatial and temporal scales,' read the paper's abstract. The study took emoticons and word choice into account when deciding whether particular Tweets were positive or negative in sentiment. According to that flood of geotagged Tweets, people are happiest near New York City's public parks, and unhappiest near transportation hubs. Happiness increased closer to Times Square, the declined around Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. People were in a better mood at night and on weekends, and more negative about the world between the hours of 9 A.M. and 12 P.M. None of this is surprising: who wouldn't be happy amidst the greenery of a public park, or borderline-suicidal while stuck in traffic or waiting for a late train? The correlation between happiness and Times Square is almost certainly due to that neighborhood's massive influx of tourists, all of them Tweeting about their vacation. But as with previous public-sentiment studies, using Twitter as a primary data source also introduces some methodology issues: for example, a flood of happy Tweets from tourists could disguise a more subdued and longstanding misery among a neighborhood's residents, many of whom probably aren't tweeting every thirty seconds about a Broadway show or the quality of Guy Fieri's food."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tom Groenfeldt reports in Forbes that the U.S. Postal Service has awarded a contract to SecureKey to implement the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCXX) designed to enable individuals to securely access online services at multiple federal agencies — such as health benefits, student loan information, and retirement benefit information — without the need to use a different password or other digital identification for each service. SecureKey already operates a trusted identity service in Canada using identification keys provided by one of five participating Canadian banks. It allows Canadians to connect with 120 government programs online with no additional user names or passwords for everything from benefits queries to fishing licenses. The SecureKey program is designed to connect identity providers — such as banks, governments, healthcare organizations, and others — with consumers' favorite online services though a cloud-based broker service. The platform allows identity providers and online services to integrate once, reducing the integration and business complexity otherwise incurred in establishing many-to-many relationships."

Nerval's Lobster writes with one take on an effort to "make Internet access available to the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected": "In conjunction with a variety of partners (including Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung), Facebook is launching Internet.org, which will try to make Internet access more affordable to more people. The partnership will also work on ways to lower the amount of data necessary to power most apps and Internet experiences, which could help people in areas with poor connectivity access online services, and devise incentives for businesses and manufacturers to offer customers more affordable access. Why would Facebook and its partners want to connect another 5 billion people to the Internet? Sure, there are altruistic reasons — people online can access information that will improve or even save their lives. But for Facebook, more people online equals more ad revenue, which equals more profit. Social networking in the developed world is reaching a saturation point, with a significant percentage of the population already on one (or more) social networks; only by expanding into developing nations can Facebook and its ilk maintain the growth rates that Wall Street demands. In a similar vein, building devices and services accessible via weaker Internet connections would open up a whole new customer base for the app developers and manufacturers of the world. In theory, Internet.org plans on enlisting a variety of nonprofits and 'experts' to help in its effort; but the initial announcement only lists for-profit companies among its constituency. NGOs, academics and the aforementioned experts will apparently arrive 'over time.' So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?"

AmiMoJo tips this news from the BBC: "Radioactive water has leaked from a storage tank into the ground at Japan's Fukushima plant, operator TEPCO says. Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), which measures nuclear events. This is the first time that Japan has declared such an event since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker. In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea." There was a significant leak back in April as well.

jfruh writes "As we discussed this weekend, David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, was detained while transporting encrypted data on the Snowden affair from Berlin; all his electronics were seized. Over at the Guardian offices, British police destroyed more of the newspaper's hard drives. Privacy blogger Dan Tynan sees where this one is going: reporters like Greenwald are going to stop even bothering to be circumspect with their revelations. Sorting through the contents of such infocaches to redact sensitive information just gives the government time to track you down. Eventually, the information will just be dumped online, warts and all, as soon as someone who wants the information public gets ahold of it."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Get 'em young: That could be LinkedIn's new motto, after the professional-networking Website opened itself up to universities and students. LinkedIn's University Pages offer schools a place to post updates about campus news and activities; they can also link to famous alumni, who will doubtlessly love when a couple thousand students try to connect with them all at once. Some 200 universities are setting up LinkedIn Pages, including NYU, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and more. Why this aggressive expansion into a younger demographic? Today's students are tomorrow's cubicle bees and entrepreneurs; by locking them into the network early, LinkedIn can (at least in theory) maintain a user base for many years to come. (It's safe to presume that at least a fraction of these young users will eventually engage LinkedIn's paid services, which makes this initiative a long-term revenue play.) Building a substantial base among students could also help LinkedIn head off future competition, such as Facebook moving more aggressively into the careers space. Or it could just open a whole lot of concerns over privacy and security, similar to what Facebook already faces with its teen audience."

Today's interviewee is Cryonics Institute (CI) Director Andy Zawacki, who takes Slashdot's Robert Rozeboom into the facility where they keep the tanks with frozen people in them. Yesterday, Rob talked with David Ettinger, who is both the group's lawyer and the son of CI founder Robert Ettinger. For those of you who are obsessed with the process of vitrification, here's a link to a story about The Cryonics Institute's 69th Patient and how she was taken care of, starting at the moment of her deanimation (AKA death). The story has anatomical drawings, charts, and color pictures of Andy carrying out the actual procedure. But Cryonics, while endorsed as a concept by numerous scientists, may not be as good a way to insure immortality as transplanting your brain into a fresh (probably robotic) body, as Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov hopes to do by 2035. There are also many groups that claim to offer spiritual (as opposed to corporeal) immortality. Which method of living forever works best? That remains to be seen, assuming any of them work at all. Perhaps we'll find out after the Singularity.

Lemeowski writes "Cygnus Solutions co-founder Michael Tiemann takes an in-depth look at whether music can truly ever be open source. Leaning on his personal experiences of trying to convince the market that a company that provided commercial support for free software could be successful, Tiemann argues that similar to how 'the future of software was actually waiting for the fuller participation of users ... so, too, is the future of the art of music.' In his essay, Tiemann makes a case for open source music, from licensing for quality recordings to sheet music with notes from the original composer in an easy-to-reuse format, and he offers ways to get involved in making music open source." Apropos open source music, reader rDouglass adds a link to the Open Goldberg Variations project, last mentioned on Slashdot in 2012.

An anonymous reader was the first to write with news that Groklaw is shutting down: "There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the U.S. out or to the U.S. in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel. So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." Why it's a big deal.

lightbox32 writes "Porn-trolling operation Prenda Law sued thousands for illegally downloading porn files over BitTorrent. Now, a new document from Comcast appears to confirm suspicions that it was actually Prenda mastermind John Steele who uploaded those files. The allegations about uploading porn to The Pirate Bay to create a 'honeypot' to lure downloaders first became public in June, when an expert report filed by Delvan Neville was filed in a Florida case. The allegations gained steam when The Pirate Bay dug through its own backup tapes to find more evidence linking John Steele to an account called sharkmp4." The problem for Prenda being that initiating the torrent would give anyone who grabbed it an implied license.

Nerval's Lobster writes "When Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson sat down to write The Internet Police, Edward Snowden hadn't yet decided to add some excitement to the National Security Agency's summer by leaking a trove of surveillance secrets to The Guardian. As a result, Anderson's book doesn't mention Snowden's escapade, which will likely become the security-and-paranoia story of the year, if not the decade. For anyone unaware of the vast issues highlighted by Snowden's leak, however, The Internet Police is a handy guide to the slow and unstoppable rise of the online security state, as well as the libertarian and criminal elements that have done their level best to counter that surveillance." Read below for the rest of Nerval's Lobster's review. The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed author Nate Anderson pages 320 pages publisher W. W. Norton & Company rating 8/10 reviewer Nerval's Lobster ISBN 0393062988 summary How criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed. Anderson starts off his book in 2000, with an exploration of HavenCo. The people behind HavenCo had a fascinating idea: build a datacenter on a rusting naval fort in the North Sea, and use it to hold data for customers concerned about the government sniffing around. But the company's dream of constructing a "true libertarian paradise" eventually sank, thanks to a toxic combination of infighting and infrastructure challenges.

HavenCo was an early entrant in a longtime attempt to place a large swath of the Web beyond the reach of governments and corporations, and it definitely wasn't the last: from Silk Road to MegaUpload, the properties dedicated to a "liberated Net" have proliferated in recent years. Some people founded such sites out of high principle; others for the LULZ; and many because they simply wanted to download movies and music and possibly highly illegal drugs for free.

Anderson does an excellent job of tracing the push-and-pull between these Websites and various government and corporate entities. People form peer-to-peer networks to swap copyrighted content, and corporations sue to shut them down; others set up networks to trade pornography or drugs, and law-enforcement agencies unleash all sorts of surveillance tools to track down the perpetrators; spam networks rise, and governments pass legislation (boosted by corporations) to nuke them off the Web, with varying degrees of success. These attempts at control usually prove successful, at least until new and improved versions of those Websites rise from the smoking ruins of the old.

To his credit, Anderson wears his journalist hat to the proceedings, never tipping his sympathies to one side or the other. He acknowledges that government and law enforcement really do want to keep people safe above all else, even as certain legislatures and police departments run roughshod over citizens' privacy; he also details how many software creators built their security and privacy tools out of a genuine desire for people to have as much freedom as possible online, only to watch as criminals and others twisted those tools to their own nefarious ends.

Anderson's conclusion is that society needs an Internet police in order to keep some degree of peace, but that "we need to keep a close eye on them." In this post-Snowden era, when it seems increasingly clear that governments have the ability to monitor virtually every single aspect of our electronic lives, this bit of advice seems more important than ever.

You can purchase The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Nerval's Lobster writes "When Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson sat down to write The Internet Police, Edward Snowden hadn't yet decided to add some excitement to the National Security Agency's summer by leaking a trove of surveillance secrets to The Guardian. As a result, Anderson's book doesn't mention Snowden's escapade, which will likely become the security-and-paranoia story of the year, if not the decade. For anyone unaware of the vast issues highlighted by Snowden's leak, however, The Internet Police is a handy guide to the slow and unstoppable rise of the online security state, as well as the libertarian and criminal elements that have done their level best to counter that surveillance." Read below for the rest of Nerval's Lobster's review. The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed author Nate Anderson pages 320 pages publisher W. W. Norton & Company rating 8/10 reviewer Nerval's Lobster ISBN 0393062988 summary How criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed. Anderson starts off his book in 2000, with an exploration of HavenCo. The people behind HavenCo had a fascinating idea: build a datacenter on a rusting naval fort in the North Sea, and use it to hold data for customers concerned about the government sniffing around. But the company's dream of constructing a "true libertarian paradise" eventually sank, thanks to a toxic combination of infighting and infrastructure challenges.

HavenCo was an early entrant in a longtime attempt to place a large swath of the Web beyond the reach of governments and corporations, and it definitely wasn't the last: from Silk Road to MegaUpload, the properties dedicated to a "liberated Net" have proliferated in recent years. Some people founded such sites out of high principle; others for the LULZ; and many because they simply wanted to download movies and music and possibly highly illegal drugs for free.

Anderson does an excellent job of tracing the push-and-pull between these Websites and various government and corporate entities. People form peer-to-peer networks to swap copyrighted content, and corporations sue to shut them down; others set up networks to trade pornography or drugs, and law-enforcement agencies unleash all sorts of surveillance tools to track down the perpetrators; spam networks rise, and governments pass legislation (boosted by corporations) to nuke them off the Web, with varying degrees of success. These attempts at control usually prove successful, at least until new and improved versions of those Websites rise from the smoking ruins of the old.

To his credit, Anderson wears his journalist hat to the proceedings, never tipping his sympathies to one side or the other. He acknowledges that government and law enforcement really do want to keep people safe above all else, even as certain legislatures and police departments run roughshod over citizens' privacy; he also details how many software creators built their security and privacy tools out of a genuine desire for people to have as much freedom as possible online, only to watch as criminals and others twisted those tools to their own nefarious ends.

Anderson's conclusion is that society needs an Internet police in order to keep some degree of peace, but that "we need to keep a close eye on them." In this post-Snowden era, when it seems increasingly clear that governments have the ability to monitor virtually every single aspect of our electronic lives, this bit of advice seems more important than ever.

You can purchase The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Nerval's Lobster writes "When Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson sat down to write The Internet Police, Edward Snowden hadn't yet decided to add some excitement to the National Security Agency's summer by leaking a trove of surveillance secrets to The Guardian. As a result, Anderson's book doesn't mention Snowden's escapade, which will likely become the security-and-paranoia story of the year, if not the decade. For anyone unaware of the vast issues highlighted by Snowden's leak, however, The Internet Police is a handy guide to the slow and unstoppable rise of the online security state, as well as the libertarian and criminal elements that have done their level best to counter that surveillance." Read below for the rest of Nerval's Lobster's review. The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed author Nate Anderson pages 320 pages publisher W. W. Norton & Company rating 8/10 reviewer Nerval's Lobster ISBN 0393062988 summary How criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed. Anderson starts off his book in 2000, with an exploration of HavenCo. The people behind HavenCo had a fascinating idea: build a datacenter on a rusting naval fort in the North Sea, and use it to hold data for customers concerned about the government sniffing around. But the company's dream of constructing a "true libertarian paradise" eventually sank, thanks to a toxic combination of infighting and infrastructure challenges.

HavenCo was an early entrant in a longtime attempt to place a large swath of the Web beyond the reach of governments and corporations, and it definitely wasn't the last: from Silk Road to MegaUpload, the properties dedicated to a "liberated Net" have proliferated in recent years. Some people founded such sites out of high principle; others for the LULZ; and many because they simply wanted to download movies and music and possibly highly illegal drugs for free.

Anderson does an excellent job of tracing the push-and-pull between these Websites and various government and corporate entities. People form peer-to-peer networks to swap copyrighted content, and corporations sue to shut them down; others set up networks to trade pornography or drugs, and law-enforcement agencies unleash all sorts of surveillance tools to track down the perpetrators; spam networks rise, and governments pass legislation (boosted by corporations) to nuke them off the Web, with varying degrees of success. These attempts at control usually prove successful, at least until new and improved versions of those Websites rise from the smoking ruins of the old.

To his credit, Anderson wears his journalist hat to the proceedings, never tipping his sympathies to one side or the other. He acknowledges that government and law enforcement really do want to keep people safe above all else, even as certain legislatures and police departments run roughshod over citizens' privacy; he also details how many software creators built their security and privacy tools out of a genuine desire for people to have as much freedom as possible online, only to watch as criminals and others twisted those tools to their own nefarious ends.

Anderson's conclusion is that society needs an Internet police in order to keep some degree of peace, but that "we need to keep a close eye on them." In this post-Snowden era, when it seems increasingly clear that governments have the ability to monitor virtually every single aspect of our electronic lives, this bit of advice seems more important than ever.

You can purchase The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Nerval's Lobster writes "When Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson sat down to write The Internet Police, Edward Snowden hadn't yet decided to add some excitement to the National Security Agency's summer by leaking a trove of surveillance secrets to The Guardian. As a result, Anderson's book doesn't mention Snowden's escapade, which will likely become the security-and-paranoia story of the year, if not the decade. For anyone unaware of the vast issues highlighted by Snowden's leak, however, The Internet Police is a handy guide to the slow and unstoppable rise of the online security state, as well as the libertarian and criminal elements that have done their level best to counter that surveillance." Read below for the rest of Nerval's Lobster's review. The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed author Nate Anderson pages 320 pages publisher W. W. Norton & Company rating 8/10 reviewer Nerval's Lobster ISBN 0393062988 summary How criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed. Anderson starts off his book in 2000, with an exploration of HavenCo. The people behind HavenCo had a fascinating idea: build a datacenter on a rusting naval fort in the North Sea, and use it to hold data for customers concerned about the government sniffing around. But the company's dream of constructing a "true libertarian paradise" eventually sank, thanks to a toxic combination of infighting and infrastructure challenges.

HavenCo was an early entrant in a longtime attempt to place a large swath of the Web beyond the reach of governments and corporations, and it definitely wasn't the last: from Silk Road to MegaUpload, the properties dedicated to a "liberated Net" have proliferated in recent years. Some people founded such sites out of high principle; others for the LULZ; and many because they simply wanted to download movies and music and possibly highly illegal drugs for free.

Anderson does an excellent job of tracing the push-and-pull between these Websites and various government and corporate entities. People form peer-to-peer networks to swap copyrighted content, and corporations sue to shut them down; others set up networks to trade pornography or drugs, and law-enforcement agencies unleash all sorts of surveillance tools to track down the perpetrators; spam networks rise, and governments pass legislation (boosted by corporations) to nuke them off the Web, with varying degrees of success. These attempts at control usually prove successful, at least until new and improved versions of those Websites rise from the smoking ruins of the old.

To his credit, Anderson wears his journalist hat to the proceedings, never tipping his sympathies to one side or the other. He acknowledges that government and law enforcement really do want to keep people safe above all else, even as certain legislatures and police departments run roughshod over citizens' privacy; he also details how many software creators built their security and privacy tools out of a genuine desire for people to have as much freedom as possible online, only to watch as criminals and others twisted those tools to their own nefarious ends.

Anderson's conclusion is that society needs an Internet police in order to keep some degree of peace, but that "we need to keep a close eye on them." In this post-Snowden era, when it seems increasingly clear that governments have the ability to monitor virtually every single aspect of our electronic lives, this bit of advice seems more important than ever.

You can purchase The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

megla writes "Yesterday Slashdot covered reports that David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald was detained. Now, various MPs and other public figures have expressed their unease over the detention and demanded justification for the incident from the police. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has threatened to be more aggressive with his reporting regarding the UK secret services and to release more documents about their activities, Brazil has stated that it expects no repeat of the incident, and one of the MPs involved in passing the anti-terrorism legislation used for the detention has said: 'those of us who were part of passing this legislation certainly would not have expected it to be used in a case of this kind.'"

Guido van Rossum is best known as the creator of Python, and he remains the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) in the community. The recipient of many awards for his work, and author of numerous books, he left Google in December and started working for Dropbox early this year. A lot has happened in the 12 years since we talked to Guido and he's agreed to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Guido van Rossum is best known as the creator of Python, and he remains the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) in the community. The recipient of many awards for his work, and author of numerous books, he left Google in December and started working for Dropbox early this year. A lot has happened in the 12 years since we talked to Guido and he's agreed to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Guido van Rossum is best known as the creator of Python, and he remains the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) in the community. The recipient of many awards for his work, and author of numerous books, he left Google in December and started working for Dropbox early this year. A lot has happened in the 12 years since we talked to Guido and he's agreed to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Over at The Kernel, staff writer Greg Stevens wonders whether police departments around the world should outfit their officers with Google Glass. There's some logic behind the idea. A cop with wearable electronics constantly streaming audio and video back to a supervisor (or even a Website) would be less likely, at least in theory, to take liberties with civilians' civil liberties. But not everybody thinks it's such a good idea. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, wrote in a recent blog posting that society needs to make choices 'about the extent to which we want to allow the government to store up that data so that it has the power to hit 'rewind' on everybody's lives.' In the view of that organization, 'that's just too much power.' That being said, law enforcement wearing electronics that streams constant video and audio data would still be subject to the law. 'If the officer is recording a communication he has in public with someone, there's probably no wiretap problem since there's at least the consent of one party and no expectation of privacy,' Hanni M. Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an email to Slashdot. 'But if he's recording peripheral communications between two separate individuals, than there's potential wiretap liability depending on the circumstances.' What do you think? Are cops wearing Google Glass (or similar wearable electronic) a good idea?"