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Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU pr

The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, is kind of on a roll lately. We already discussed how they outlawed generic ISP-side internet filters, and now, in an opinion (so it’s not a ruling just yet), Yves Bot, an advocate-general at the Court, has stated that functions provided by computer programs, as well as the programming languages they’re written in, do not rece

Home > Unix > Dennis Ritchie, Creator of UNIX and C, Dead at 70 Twitter is currently buzzing about the death of Dennis Ritchie, the visionary creator of UNIX and C, among other things. We hope it’s just a false rumor. Story developing, we will be updating. Update: Unfortunately, it seems to be confirmed. Rob Pike, co-creator of the Plan 9 and Inferno OSes, who has worked with Ritchie in the past,

The latest version of GTk+, version 3.2, has been released. While this new release contains many smaller, less invasive changes, it also has experimental support for two very important new features. First, the ability to run Gtk+ applications inside a browser using HTML5. Second, initial support for the Wayland display server. Gtk+ 3.2 introduces many smaller features which users will benefit from

Patent term calculation is complicated in the US because there are essentially two different systems and quite a few corner cases. Even with a list of patents, it can be tricky to determine when the patents are all expired. Since I am a computer programmer (and not a lawyer), I created a program to try and automate this. This paper discusses how patent term calculation works, and some results from

Here’s the latest in our new series on OS tips from power users: a seemingly trivial task. You have a computer, most likely a laptop, that you wish to keep suspended while you’re not working. For example, let’s say overnight. At the same time, you wish to run a handful of maintenance tasks, like backups and cleanup, which you don’t normally do during the day. So you need a mechanism that will send

NTFS is the file system used by Windows. It is a powerful and complicated file system. There are few file systems that provide as many features and to fully cover them all would require a book. And in fact there is a book detailing NTFS, and it’s already out of date. The purpose of this article is not to cover all of the features of NTFS, nor will it exhaustively cover NTFS features in detail. Ins

Employees of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have ported Sun’s/Oracle’s ZFS natively to Linux. Linux already had a ZFS port in userspace via FUSE, since license incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL prevent ZFS from becoming part of the Linux kernel. This project solves the licensing issue by distributing ZFS as a separate kernel module users will have to download and build for themsel

Well, this certainly explains a whole lot. Both Apple and Microsoft have stated that the legality of Theora is highly debatable, and as it turns out, they knew more than we do – most likely courtesy of their close involvement with the MPEG-LA. Responding to an email from Free Software Foundation Europe activist Hugo Roy, Steve Jobs has stated that a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theor

Home > Editorial > Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife Holier-than-thou, an adjective, meaning “marked by an air of superior piety or morality”. Everybody has moments in their life where they get into a “holier-than-thou” attitude, and I think Steve Jobs’ open letter regarding Adobe, and Flash in particular, really fits the bill. There are three specific points I want t

Home > Linux > Linux Not Fully Prepared for 4096-Byte Sector Hard Drives Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. R

Over the weekend, there has been a bit of a ruffling of the feathers over in the GNOME camp. It started with complaints received about the content on Planet GNOME, and ended with people proposing and organising a vote to split GNOME from the GNU Project. Recap The entire situation started when Lucas Rocha sent an email to the GNOME Foundation mailing list, stating that the Foundation had received

Home > macOS > Snow Leopard Seeds Use 32bit Kernel, Drivers by Default Even though Apple has been hyping up the 64bit nature of its ucpoming Snow Leopard operating system, stating it will be the first Mac OS X release to be 64bit top-to-bottom, reality turns out to be a little bit different so far. With the current Snow Leopard seed, only Xserve users get the 64bit kernel and drivers – all other M

Home > Google > Google Chrome for Linux On Its Way: Take It for a Spin In addition to the Chrome 2.0 beta, work for the Linux version of Chrome is on its way. Its official name is currently “Chromium,” and Google Chrome for Linux doesn’t officially exist yet. For the sake of argument, however, Google Chrome for Linux is on its way whether it’s currently in a Chromium and pre-alpha state or not, an

Chicken Blood Well, what Adam said is not exactly in line with what the comic portrays. HTML is not a language, so it’s not about being “good”, it’s about actually being “compatible”. Hmmm. I wonder what the ‘L‘ in HTML stands for then. JonathanBThompson Well, you’re both at least partially wrong in what you imply: HTML stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language” and that’s exactly what it does: it de

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be nai

Home > Original OSNews Interviews > Introduction to OpenBinder and Interview with Dianne Hackborn OpenBinder is the core technology that ex-Be engineers started at Be, Inc. as the “next generation BeOS”, finished implementing at PalmSource as one of the key foundations of the Cobalt system, and is now being open-sourced running for Linux. Dianne Hackborn, a legendary engineer throughout the BeOS h

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be nai