Cody Taylor

PL/SQL Guy writes “A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody’s movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren’t suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten.”

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What kind of user are you? Take a step back and ask yourself what you need from a Linux distribution. The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think, and which distribution you do choose will have an effect on that distribution’s future, and indirectly, that of Linux.

Cloud computing is a hot topic in the technology world these days. Even if you’re not a tech-phile, chances are if you’ve watched a lot of television or skimmed a business magazine, you’ve heard someone talking about cloud computing as the way of the future. While it’s difficult to predict the future.

An anonymous reader writes with a report about programs revealed in the Department of Justice’s 2010 budget request, which includes 3.9 million in funding for an “Advanced Electronic Surveillance” project, and .6 million to establish the Biometric Technology Center. The surveillance project is designed to help the FBI “deal with changing technology and ways to intercept phone calls such as those used by VOIP phones or technology such as Skype. The program is also conducting research on ways to conduct automated analysis to look for links between subjects of surveillance and other investigative suspects.” The Center for Democracy and Technology’s Jim Dempsey warns, “It is appropriate for the FBI to develop more and more powerful interception tools, but the privacy laws that are supposed to guide and limit the use of those tools have not kept pace.” The biometrics plan lays groundwork for a “vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification,” a system we have discussed in the past.

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stephen.schaubach writes “Spanish Mathematicians have discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed until now. ‘They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford’s law. … Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis. … Benford’s law (BL), named after physicist Frank Benford in 1938, describes the distribution of the leading digits of the numbers in a wide variety of data sets and mathematical sequences. Somewhat unexpectedly, the leading digits aren’t randomly or uniformly distributed, but instead their distribution is logarithmic. That is, 1 as a first digit appears about 30% of the time, and the following digits appear with lower and lower frequency, with 9 appearing the least often.'”

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Not-A-Microsoft-Fan writes with this excerpt from The Coffee Desk: “Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions, the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would term a netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and its (albeit early) web browsing software. The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (we’re flying now!).”

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