Cody Taylor

david_adams writes “All the recent talk about various polls and elections being pranked or hijacked, serious and silly alike, prompted me to write an article about the technical realities behind online polling, and the political fallout of ever becoming subject to online voting for serious elections. Even if we were to be able to limit voting to legitimate, legal voters, the realities of social networking and the rise of Internet-based movements would dramatically alter the political landscape if online voting were to become commonplace.”

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onehitwonder writes “While many recruiters and HR managers are taking advantage of the Web and online social networks to screen candidates for positions inside their organizations, a bank in Texas has decided that using social networking websites in its recruiting process is too risky legally. Amegy Bank of Texas now prohibits internal HR staff and external recruiters from using social networking sites in its hiring process. Amegy’s decision to ban the use of social networking sites in its hiring process demonstrates its respect for prospective employees’ privacy. It also sends a message to the employers and recruiters using social networks to snoop into job seekers’ personal lives that their actions border on discrimination and could get them in a lot of legal trouble.”

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number6x writes “LinuxDevices.com is reporting that the Open Invention Network has posted the details of three of the eight patents used by Microsoft in the Tom Tom suit (which Tom Tom settled last month), asking the community for prior art. These patents cover aspects of the FAT file system. You can find them on Post-Issue.org — see numbers 5579517, 5758352, and 6256642. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt believes that these three patents are of tenuous validity and will probably not survive a review. Bergelt believes that there’s a good chance that the USPTO may well invalidate them before the end of the year.

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The Narrative Fallacy writes “According to BusinessWeek, Verizon Wireless is in talks with Apple to distribute two new iPhone-like devices that are not iPhones. (Apple has created prototypes.) AT&T’s contract with Apple, which has not been made public, is believed to cover all models of the iPhone, but only the iPhone. So if Apple builds something that isn’t an iPhone — and perhaps doesn’t even make cellular calls — they won’t be violating their exclusivity contract with AT&T, which runs through at least 2010. One device is a smaller, less expensive calling device described by a person who has seen it as an ‘iPhone lite.’ The other is a media pad, said to be smaller than a Kindle but with a bigger screen, that would let users listen to music, view photos, watch high-definition videos, and make calls over a Wi-Fi connection. (And read books?) Apple could use the prospect of an iPhone-esque device as leverage to prevent Verizon Wireless from introducing the Palm Pre, or at least to delay its introduction on Verizon’s network. ‘The media pad category might go to Verizon,’ said one person who has seen the device. ‘We are talking about a device where people will say, “Damn, why didn’t we do this?” Apple is probably going to define the damn category.'” Reader stevegee58 writes with word that Verizon may be playing both ends against the middle. Marketwatch reports that Microsoft and Verizon are in talks to develop a touch-screen mobile phone that would run on Windows Mobile.

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook regularly attracts more than 200 million people to its website, but the company is now looking for ways to permeate the lives of its users without the need to check-in to the Facebook site. The Palo Alto,…

jmwci1 writes “The US Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development — an about-face for such a historically top-down organization. In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies.”

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nk497 writes “The UK government has further detailed plans to track all communications — mobile phone calls, text messages, email and browser sessions — in the fight against terrorism, pedophiles and organized crime. The government said it’s not looking to see what you’re saying, just to whom and when and how. Contrary to previous plans to keep it all in a massive database, it will now let ISPs and telecoms firms store the data themselves, and access it when it feels it needs it.” And to clarify this Barence writes “The UK Government has dropped plans to create a massive database of all internet communications, following stern criticism from privacy advocates. Instead the Government wants ISPs and mobile phone companies to retain details of mobile phone calls, emails and internet sites visited. As with the original scheme, the actual content of the phone calls and messages won’t be recorded, just the dates, duration and location/IP address of messages sent. The security services would then have to apply to the ISP or telecoms company to have the data released. The new proposals would also require ISPs to retain details of communications that originated in other countries but passed over the UK’s network, such as instant messages.”

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tobiasly writes “I administer several Ubuntu desktops and numerous CentOS servers. One of the biggest headaches is keeping them up-to-date with each distro’s latest bugfix and security patches. I currently have to log in to each system, run the appropriate apt-get or yum command to list available updates, determine which ones I need, then run the appropriate install commands. I’d love to have a distro-independent equivalent of the Red Hat Network where I could do all of this remotely using a web-based interface. PackageKit seems to have solved some of the issues regarding cross-distro package maintenance, but their FAQ explicitly states that remote administration is not a goal of their project. Has anyone put together such a system?”

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