An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that BT, the UK's dominant telecom and internet service provider, has 'banned all future discussion of Phorm and its "WebWise" targeted advertising product on its customer forums, and deleted all past threads about the controversy dating back to February.' Phorm is a controversial opt-out system for delivering targeted advertising that intercepts traffic passing through an ISP in order to profile subscribers via an assigned unique ID based on their online activities. Subscribers can opt-out at the Webwise website but are opted-in again if the Phorm cookie is cleared. Firefox users can install Melvin Sage's Firephorm add-on to manage their interaction with Phorm and Webwise."

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• KDE Video Cast Episode 2, Nov 22nd

• WINE 1.1.9 Brings Improved Memory Performance
• From the SuperComputing '08 Floor, Part 3
• From the SuperComputing '08 Floor, Part 4
• Musical Geek Friday #15: Kill -9
• IBM buys code-converter firm in Linux move
• Belgium.be using Drupal
• Mind Maps: The Fedora Project
• The Daemon, the GNU, and the Penguin
• Extended Linux support from Red Hat
• Ubuntu Linux Install Week at AIS Picture Gallery
• Metrics of open source success
• Create Read View Edit Word Document on Ubuntu
• OpenSUSE 11
• Public Open Source Companies: Much Ado About Nothing?
• Five reasons Sun won't be acquired
• The tanking economy and OSS
• Damn you Gentoo Devs!
• The Software Freedomometer

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redhat.com: Over the next week we plan to post a series of blogs that explore ten examples from around our community, of people making a difference to free software through their work in Fedora.

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NCSoft announced today that it will be closing down Tabula Rasa on February 28th. The sci-fi shooter-flavored MMO struggled for quite some time, despite recent attempts to draw in new players by announcements of new features, price reductions, and using Richard Garriott's trip into space as a promotion. We discussed Garriott's departure from NCSoft a couple weeks ago. This is NCSoft's second failed MMO, and apparently layoffs are in the works. They seem to be making an effort to make the game's last few months as fun as they can for their remaining players, though. "Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009. We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while."

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• Gitting going with git: creating your first repository

• python: writing binary file
• make your BIOS love security
• How the Linux Kernel Manages Virtual Memory
• USB Hard drive spindown fix on Linux
• An Executive Guide to Open Source
• Parallels Desktop 4: Installing Parallels Tools with Ubuntu as Guest
• A graphical way to MySQL mastery
• Problem installing PECL PHP extensions while /tmp is secured
• Customizing Firefox for Netbooks

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gpronger writes "The ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter) has potentially discovered the presence of dark matter close (only 3000 light-years) to our solar system. The system detected a large amount of high energy cosmic rays which match the theoretical signature of dark matter annihilating itself. The universe is believed to be composed of about 25% dark matter, but there has been little evidence of it. This discovery, if correct, would be the first." The paper was published in Nature, but it requires a subscription to see beyond the abstract.

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kexec-loader is a Linux-based bootloader that aims to fit on a floppy and have a grub-like interface and configuration system. It loads kernels using the kexec system calls. License: BSD License (revised) Changes:
This release fixes some bugs and implements shell autocompletion.

fuselagefs consists of a C++ wrapper class for FUSE called Fuselagefs, as well as Delegatefs, which is a Fuselagefs subclass that delegates all operations to an underlying base filesystem. With Delegatefs, you can expose dir1 at mountpoint dir2 very easily as a FUSE filesystem. Subclasses of Delegatefs can then be created, which add a little extra functionality to the delegation operation but rely on the parent class to perform the work and return errors to FUSE in an appropriate manner. An example subclass is petardfs. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
This release adds BASEDIR handling to main(). It fixes a bug in delegatefs xattr methods.

ring3k is a user mode kernel capable of running Windows 2000 and XP compatible native applications on a Linux platform. It is a light-weight virtualization of the NT kernel for the Linux x86 platform achieved by reimplementing kernel mode code as a ring 3 process in C++. License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Changes:
An initial implementation of named pipes. Valgrind fixes.

Darcs is an advanced revision control system. It has two particularly distinctive features which differ from other revision control systems: each copy of the source is a fully functional branch, and underlying it is a consistent and powerful theory of patches. In spite of its power, darcs is simple to use, in part because of the symmetry that is restored by making each copy of the repository a branch. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
This release provides GHC 6.10 support and fixes a crash on Windows with the darcs help command.

WMFS (Window Manager From Scratch) is a very lightweight window manager for X. The goal of this project is to make a very basic, lightweight, and dynamic mindow manager. The result is currently a small WM usable for daily use (but not yet stable).

Openrdate is a date and time-setting program that implements RFC 868 (inetd time) and RFC 2030 (SNTP/NTP) protocols. It is a platform-independent package of OpenBSD's rdate program. License: BSD License (original) Changes:
This release has been updated to the latest version of OpenBSD's arc4random. It also tweaks the configure to determine if the user is compiling on Linux and with what kernel version. If the version is >= 2.6.19, the urandom device is used instead of sysctl, because sysctl is being deprecated in Linux.

Gallery is a slick Web-based photo album written using PHP. It is easy to install, includes a config wizard, and provides users with the ability to create and maintain their own albums in the album collection via an intuitive Web interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning and more. Albums can have read, write, and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
Resolution of one security issue and several minor bugs.

ruphus13 writes "In an effort to take on IE and make strong headway in its share of the browser market, Google is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook and working on deals with PC OEMs to include Chrome in their devices. From the article: '[Google] is likely to pursue deals with major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to put Chrome on their computers and devices. ... If Mozilla could get aggressive about this too, we could see Internet Explorer facing more serious competition than ever. ... Google, much more so than Mozilla, has enough global brand recognition, money, and savvy to make a big deal of this. ... Microsoft wooed Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Acer and many other companies into making its browser the default choice on Windows desktops. Chrome currently has just under one percent market share, according to NetApplications. That number could rise significantly through this effort. Mozilla doesn't have the kind of money required to get the significant deals in this space, but Google definitely does.'"

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blog.cardoe.com: The Gentoo Council is a group of elected Gentoo Developers that are elected on a yearly basis by the developer body as a whole for the purpose of deciding on global issues and policies which affect the Gentoo Linux Distro as a whole or part.

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howsoftwareisbuilt.com: In this interview we talk with Dries. In specific, we talk about: Building specialized commercial support for open source technology, Making cloud computing more viable for widespread use, and The relationship between Drupal and Linux distros.

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linuxtoday.com: Mark Shuttleworth made headlines not too long ago when he called for the Linux desktop to surpass Mac OS X in both beauty and functionality. I'm not much of an Apple fan-- I don't care for the Apple desktop. I think there is a better model to aspire to, and that is the AmigaOS.

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Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: "China is stealing sensitive information from American computer networks and stepping up its online espionage, according to a US congressional panel. Beijing's investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarization of outer space and lifting it into the 'commanding heights' of modern warfare, the advisory group claims. ... A summary of the study, released in advance, alleges that networks and databases used by the US government and American defense contractors are regularly targeted by Chinese hackers. 'China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from US computer networks,' says Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission set up by Congress in 2000 to investigate US-China issues." The full study addresses these issues and others relating to the US-China relationship (PDF).

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ErikTheRed writes "In an audio clip discovered by NewsBusters, then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder advocated federal censorship of the Internet. This was in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings. From the clip: 'The court has really struck down every government effort to try to regulate it. We tried with regard to pornography. It is gonna be a difficult thing, but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at.'" Holder is reported to be Barack Obama's choice for Attorney General of the United States.

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More from the SuperComputing '08 floor. Editor Shawn Powers talks about RAID, ethernet, power conservation, InfiniBand, global super computing networks, programming tools, storage and more.

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