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• Oracle shuts down open source test servers (Linux Today)
  IT News: "Oracle has shut down servers Sun Microsystems was contributing to the build farm for open source database software, PostgreSQL, forcing enthusiasts to scramble to find new hosts to test updates to their software on the Solaris operating system."
• Spotlight: Kate Scripting Syndicate content (Linux Today)
  Milian Wolff: "Dominik asked me to blog about a feature in Kate that is still (sadly!) pretty unknown and seldom used: Kate Scripting. As you should know you can script KatePart completely via JavaScript."
• The Physics of a Rolling Rubber Band (Slashdot)
  sciencehabit writes "Modern physics can get complicated. Sure, researchers know exactly what forces act on a ball rolling down an incline—an experiment that helped Galileo develop universal laws for movement and acceleration. But what happens when a deformable shape like a a rubber band rolls around? A new study reveals that the faster it goes, the more squashed it gets. (Video included)"

  

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• Android vs iPhone vs Palm Pre vs Maemo: which is best? (Linux Today)
  TuxRadar: "We've looked at three Linux-based phones that give the iPhone a run for its money. There's the Palm Pre, running WebOS; Nokia's Maemo 5-based N900, and the HTC Legend, running Android. Each is a strong challenger to Apple's device, and they beat it today in significant areas. So, which is best for you?"
• ATM Hack Gives Cash On Demand (Slashdot)
  angry tapir writes "Windows CE-based ATMs can easily be made to dole out cash, according to security researcher Barnaby Jack. Exploiting bugs in two different ATM machines at Black Hat, the researcher from IOActive was able to get them to spit out money on demand and record sensitive data from the cards of people who used them. Jack believes a large number of ATMs have remote management tools that can be accessed over a telephone. After experimenting with two machines he purchased, Jack developed a way of bypassing the remote authentication system and installing a homemade rootkit, named Scrooge,"

  

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• Security Vulnerabilities of Smart Electricity Meters (Schneier on Security)

  "Who controls the off switch?" by Ross Anderson and Shailendra Fuloria.

  Abstract: We're about to acquire a significant new cybervulnerability. The world's energy utilities are starting to install hundreds of millions of 'smart meters' which contain a remote off switch. Its main purpose is to ensure that customers who default on their payments can be switched remotely to a prepay tariff; secondary purposes include supporting interruptible tariffs and implementing rolling power cuts at times of supply shortage.

  The off switch creates information security problems of a kind, and on a scale, that the energy companies have not had to face before. From the viewpoint of a cyber attacker -- whether a hostile government agency, a terrorist organisation or even a militant environmental group -- the ideal attack on a target country is to interrupt its citizens' electricity supply. This is the cyber equivalent of a nuclear strike; when electricity stops, then pretty soon everything else does too. Until now, the only plausible ways to do that involved attacks on critical generation, transmission and distribution assets, which are increasingly well defended.

  Smart meters change the game. The combination of commands that will cause meters to interrupt the supply, of applets and software upgrades that run in the meters, and of cryptographic keys that are used to authenticate these commands and software changes, create a new strategic vulnerability, which we discuss in this paper.

  The two have another paper on the economics of smart meters. Blog post here.

  

• Alien Arena 2010 v7.45 Offers Up More Features (Phoronix)
  Back in May there was the initial Alien Arena 2010 (v7.40) open-source game release of this year, but now John Diamond has come about with another update that continues to offer up a number of new features and other improvements. The previous update introduced five new game levels and rendering improvements while this newest update offers:..

  
  

  
• Apple iPad's rivals are coming (Linux Today)
  Cyber Cynic: "I get that Apple's iPad is hotter than hot with over three million sold so far, but to say "Apple has won the battle for tablet computing already" is really overreaching."
• Whitelisting Advances with New Bouncer App (Linux Today)
  eSecurityPlanet: "Starting with Bouncer 6.0, the company is moving to a software appliance model powered by Ubuntu Linux."
• Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar (Slashdot)
  js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."

  

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• FTC Wants Browsers To Block Online Tracking (Slashdot)
  storagedude writes "The FTC wants a do-not-track mechanism that would allow Web users to opt out of online behavioral tracking, similar to the national do-not-call registry. The agency's preferred method for accomplishing this would be a browser-based tool that would give users the option of blocking data collection across the Web. The only problem is that the agency may not have the authority to require this, thanks to concerted lobbying efforts by the advertising industry. The first step may just be voluntary measures, to be released this fall."

  

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• Don't Be Too Quick to Dismiss Open Core (Linux Today)
  IT World: "I've been taking some shots at open core lately, because I've come to the realization there are inherent flaws in this business model as it relates to open source."
• Weekly Ten: Microsoft's New Slogan: Hey, It Could Be Worse, $200 Linux PC, Cloud Cracks WPA (Linux Today)
  Tech Source: "In 2008, I speculated about the future of distributed security cracking. That future has arrived, in the form of a $17 “cloud” based service provided through the efforts of a security researcher known as Moxie Marlinspike."
• Valve Apologizes For 12,000 Erroneous Anti-Cheating Bans (Slashdot)
  Earlier this week, there were reports that large numbers of Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam were getting erroneously banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat software. While such claims are usually best taken with a grain of salt, the quantity and suddenness caused speculation that Valve's software wasn't operating correctly. A few days later, Valve president Gabe Newell sent out an email acknowledging that roughly 12,000 players had been inappropriately banned over the preceding two weeks. "The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game." Valve reversed the bans and gave free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 to everyone who was affected.

  

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• Pizza Lovers Suffer Data Breach From Hell (Slashdot)
  netbuzz writes "Some 230,000 New Zealanders have been informed that their personal information has apparently fallen into the hands of hackers who compromised the network of a locally famous food chain, Hell Pizza. The company says it suspects 'a rogue employee,' but one security expert says Hell's ordering portal is 'about 50 steps of fail.' Several New Zealand celebrities are among the victims and at least one is taking the matter in stride, musing: 'My Twitter has been hacked, my Facebook has been hacked and I'm pretty sure half of New Zealand has my phone number already. I have nothing bad to say about Hell.'"

  

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• Three Sysadmin Rules You Can't (And Shouldn't) Break (Linux Today)
  The Geek Stuff: "When I drafted this article, I really came-up with 7 sysadmin habits. But, out of those 7 habits, three really stood out for me."
• Python Development Masterclass (Linux Today)
  Linux User and Developer: "Mostly seen as a scripting language for system administrators, it is actually capable of doing almost everything and beyond the limitations of regular programming languages. Python started its life as a time-saver programming language."
• AT&T Won't Block Black Hat Eavesdropping Demo (Slashdot)
  snydeq writes "AT&T says it won't interfere with a highly anticipated talk on intercepting cell phone calls at the Black Hat conference this week. Hacker Chris Paget last week said that he plans to demonstrate on Saturday how to set up what's essentially a fake cell tower that allows him listen in on nearby mobile calls. But Tuesday, he wrote on his blog that he had 'heard that AT&T may be considering suing me to stop my talk.' AT&T, however, has insisted it has no plans to interfere with the talk."

  

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• Fly Eyes Used For Solar Cells (Slashdot)
  disco_tracy writes "Researchers took corneas from blow flies, fixed them on a glass substrate, added a polymer to protect the shape and then coated nine-eye arrays in nickel within a vacuum chamber. The result was a master template that retained those useful nanoscale features and can be used to make solar cells."

  

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• "Can Open Source be secure" BCS riposte (Linux Today)
  Advogato: "Experts do not agree about open source security in terms of whether there is an advantage or disadvantage to its use in the business world"

• BSD Release: GhostBSD 1.5 (DistroWatch)
  Eric Turgeon has announced the availability of GhostBSD 1.5, a FreeBSD-based live CD with GNOME and a work-in-progress graphical system installer: "GhostBSD 1.5 is out. We have updated to Gnome 2.30. Now you can install GhostBSD by terminal commands and a list with pc-sysinstall. The partitions supported to....
• Development Release: Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 RC3 (DistroWatch)
  Anil Gulecha has announced the third release candidate for Nexenta Core Platform 3.0, an OpenSolaris-based server distribution: "On behalf of the Nexenta project, I'd like to announce the availability of the Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 RC3. The main changes over the RC2 release include ON fixes backported to b134.....
• KDE SC 4.7 May Utilize OpenGL 3.x For Compositing (Phoronix)
  We're just days away from the release of KDE SC 4.5, but details are now surfacing from Martin Graesslin about his planned KWin compositing changes in the KDE SC 4.6 and 4.7 releases. Compositing in KDE SC 4.6 should be much faster, support mobile rendering using OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, and potentially offer a stable ABI. With KDE SC 4.7 is where we're looking at the KDE world to potentially begin tapping OpenGL 3.0 for a better compositing experience...

  
  

  
• Chevy Volt Not Green Enough For California (Slashdot)
  thecarchik writes "The first two plug-in cars from major manufacturers will go head-to-head on warranties and lease prices: $350 a month for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, $349 for the 2011 Nissan Leaf. Now the choice shifts to other measures, including electric and overall range, as well as the plug-in perks that states like California offer to early adopters to encourage them to opt for electric cars. This is where it gets interesting. While California loves the Nissan Leaf, current regulations deny Chevy Volt buyers two significant perks: a $5,000 rebate, and permission to drive solo in HOV Lanes."

  

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• Irssi - A Really Good Terminal Based IRC Client For Linux (Linux Today)
  Tech Drive-in: "The only IRC client I ever used was XChat. I decided to try something different and Irssi client was a great find. Irssi is a terminal based IRC client for Unix systems and is probably the best I have used till now"

• Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux (Linux Today)
  Phoronix: "ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs."
• Sunbird: Your Calendar, Your Way (Linux Today)
  LinuxInsider: "Mozilla's Sunbird gives you customization options for the interface as well as a rich set of under-the-hood controls for setting up where, how and when the application gets its information."
• ASCAP Refuses To Debate Lessig (Slashdot)
  An anonymous reader writes "Back in June ASCAP oddly declared war on free culture, specifically calling out Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge, making a number of false statements about all three. The war of words continued as the three groups responded politely, pointing out the errors in the statement from ASCAP's Paul Williams. Larry Lessig wrote a blog post where he asked Williams to debate these topics, saying that it might help if they could get away from making false statements. Williams has now publicly declined to debate saying that it's not worth his time, and once again attacking these groups for trying to 'silence' him. It's difficult to see how a request for a public discussion and debate is an attempt to silence, but that's ASCAP's position and they're sticking to it."

  

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• Is Linux Just Another Unix Flavor? (Linux Today)
  PC World: "But, is the Linux operating system just another flavor of the Unix operating system? Yes. But, it's also much more."
• Oracle's Java Company Change Breaks Eclipse (Slashdot)
  crabel writes "In Java 1.6.0_21, the company field was changed from 'Sun Microsystems, Inc' to 'Oracle.' Apparently not the best idea, because some applications depend on that field to identify the virtual machine. All Eclipse versions since 3.3 (released 2007) until and including the recent Helios release (2010) have been reported to crash with an OutOfMemoryError due to this change. This is particularly funny since the update is deployed through automatic update and suddenly applications cease to work."

  

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