Slashdot Mirror

krou writes "Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba has gone to South Africa's Law Reform Commission to see whether the law can be changed to allow a complete ban of digitally distributed pornography. Gigaba has also been in discussion with The Justice Alliance of South Africa, 'a coalition of corporations, individuals, and churches committed to upholding and fighting for justice and the highest moral standards in South African society,' which has written its own draft bill regarding the issue, which covers the banning of pornography on television, mobile phones, and the Web. Using a car analogy, Mr. Gigaba said, 'Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts.... There is no reason why the Internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it.' Related documents and the JASA's proposed bill can be found online, one of which has the wonderful title 'A reasonable and justifiable limitation on Freedom of Expression and Right to Privacy.'"

krou writes "Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba has gone to South Africa's Law Reform Commission to see whether the law can be changed to allow a complete ban of digitally distributed pornography. Gigaba has also been in discussion with The Justice Alliance of South Africa, 'a coalition of corporations, individuals, and churches committed to upholding and fighting for justice and the highest moral standards in South African society,' which has written its own draft bill regarding the issue, which covers the banning of pornography on television, mobile phones, and the Web. Using a car analogy, Mr. Gigaba said, 'Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts.... There is no reason why the Internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it.' Related documents and the JASA's proposed bill can be found online, one of which has the wonderful title 'A reasonable and justifiable limitation on Freedom of Expression and Right to Privacy.'"

dhiren writes "Secunia on Wednesday announced that their authenticated internal vulnerability scanner, the Corporate Software Inspector (CSI) 4.0, has been integrated with Microsoft Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). This will hopefully pave the way for other vendors to also make use of Windows' existing patching infrastructure and eliminate the need for the multitude of custom updater applications and services that clutter most systems today."

beuges writes "Microsoft has announced over the weekend that it would allow computer manufacturers to receive copies of XP until the end of May 2009, shortly before Windows 7 is expected to hit the market. This should allow users to skip Vista entirely and move straight to 7, which has been receiving cautiously favorable reviews of pre-release and leaked alphas."

beuges writes "General Motors researchers are working on a high-tech windshield that users lasers and infra-red sensors to identify and enhance important objects for older drivers with vision problems. 'For example, during a foggy drive, a laser projects a blue line onto the windshield that follows the edge of the road. Or if infrared sensors detect a person or animal in the driver's path during a night drive, its outline is projected on the windshield to highlight its location.' And it's not only older drivers who will benefit: 'Some features would be helpful to drivers of all ages. If a driver is speeding, a pink box frames an approaching speed limit sign to draw the driver's attention.' The 65 and older population in the US will nearly double in about 20 years, meaning more people will be struggling to see the road like they used to."

beuges writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students. "The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.""

beuges writes "In an entry on the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog, Stephen Toulouse explains exactly how the WMF flaw could be triggered. BetaNews has an overview of the company's response." From the BetaNews article: "This code exists on every version of Windows since version 3.0, security firms have said. When this functionality was introduced, Toulouse said the security landscape differed from what it is now and metafile records were completely trusted by the operating system. Gibson claimed that the flaw could be exploited only by using a byte size of 1 in the metafile record, which Toulouse says is incorrect. He surmised that Gibson's tests had the offending function as the last entry in the metafile, which caused only incorrect sizes to trigger the flaw." We've previous reported on the backdoor claim.

lee1 writes "Astronomers have proven the existence of the event horizon, the 'point of no return' that surrounds black holes. An MIT and Harvard team said they showed its existence by looking for X-ray bursts from neutron stars and more compact objects thought to be black holes." Relatedly beuges writes "IOL is reporting that by tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 177 000km an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole. 'It would take 200 000 years for gas to travel the last leg of its one-way journey,' Kambiz Fathi of Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society."

An anonymous reader writes "Many people have complained about Firefox's memory use. Federico Mena-Quintero has a proposal for reducing the amount of memory used to store images, which, in his proof of concept code, 'reduced the cumulative memory usage... by a factor of 5.5.'."

wjv writes: "Open source Bioinformatics hackers from around the world are meeting in the first ever Biohackathon to hack, eat, hack, sleep, hack... The South African Business Day has the scoop, or see our weblog. The event is co-sponsored by my employer and O'Reilly. I'm typing this from the hackathon, and you wouldn't believe the buzz... or the scenic venue!"

Fernando Perez writes "A new Linux distribution called BeroLinux is out. It's RedHat 5.2 based and seems to have been put together by a single guy." It notably includes kernel 2.2, GNOME, KDE, and Pentium+K6 optimized binary. Secondly, fellow Debian developer Adam Heath (doogie) wrote in with something I'm surprised hasn't been posted yet: Matrox has released G200 specs. Next off, Alan Cox throws us a hat trick. Staring with ac1: For those of you who remember the Echelon articles from awhile back, you can take a "UK ballon trip of a lifetime" over the NSA's listening post in Menwith Hill. ac2: A linux-kernel post where you can read about HP working on a port of Linux to the Merced. ac3: Before Alan worked with Linus, he worked with a man who wrote an entire Unix clone for himself. He's released the source at the website, and has named it, appropriatley enough, OMU (One Man Unix). Finally, for those of you in the DC Metro Area, NOVALUG will be meeting tomorrow morning at 10AM in the Lee Center (check the website for more information).