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Piracy

Microsoft Offers Pirates Amnesty and Free Windows 10 Upgrades 322

Posted by Soulskill from the fighting-fire-with-free-gasoline dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft will make Windows 10 available as a free upgrade even to pirated copies of other Windows operating systems in China. Terry Myerson of Microsoft's operating systems unit made the announcement at the WinHEC technology conference in Shenzhen, China, and then told Reuters, "We are upgrading all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10." Microsoft has a history of attempting to tackle massive and rising software piracy rates in Asia and developing countries, and periodically offers low-cost "licence amnesties" to the worst-offending countries, such as Indonesia and Kenya. Update: 03/18 14:59 GMT by S : Microsoft has clarified that the free upgrade will be offered for unlicensed copies of Windows worldwide, not just in China.

Comment Re:Almost never happens... (Score 1) 56

by rusty (#43887083) Attached to: Funding Open Source By Donations: Lighting the Path

My experience has been the same. I donated $50 to Cyanogenmod a couple of years ago (FFS, they saved my buying a new phone!) and got a delighted email from Steve Kondik.

I used to assume the FOSS world would be supported like the Linux kernel is, but now I realize that many cool projects need a user-funded model. I choose a project to donate to weekly, as well as supporting gittip.com. It's not much (and I hope to increase it markedly one day), but I want to live in a world where Free hackers can just hack, and not stress about money.

Cheers,
Rusty.
BTW I've never used GNU LilyPond, but I'm delighted such a thing thrives. Do you take BTC?
Bitcoin

Bitcoin Hits New All-time High of $32 339

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the causes-peak-oil dept.
Sabbetus writes "Bitcoin tops its previous all-time high of $31.91 and in doing so it proves to be quite a resilient virtual currency. To the supporters of Bitcoin this does not come as a surprise, since we have seen the likes of WordPress, Reddit and Mega embrace it. Recently Namecheap also confirmed that they will start accepting bitcoins. The new record price was reached on the same day that Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, reached an agreement with CoinLab to manage the exchange's operations in the U.S. and Canada." A far cry from the end of 2011.

Comment Re:I'm guessing the US hides the request better. (Score 1) 78

by rusty (#41460519) Attached to: Creeping Government Surveillance Now Without Warrants

Nope, this is a standard media beat up of the current govt. Not based in reality, uses vauge statistics in deliberately misleading manner.

Um, no, the 250,000 requests per year are government warrantless data requests; these include call data (who called whom, not contents), location data, and request header data (eg http, email: interestingly, I've not been able to find out which headers are included: links anyone?)

Obviously with this number of requests going on, the process isn't being vetted very well if at all. Certainly there aren't that many people in Australia under reasonable suspicion of criminal behaviour, so it's deeply concerning :(

Cheers,
Rusty.

Comment The Ada Initiative (Score 3, Insightful) 263

by rusty (#41383735) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Where Should a Geek's Charitable Donations Go?

One of my favourite geek charities is the Ada Initiative which provides resources and training for women in open source and open culture.

Needless to say, you should speak directly to any charity you're seriously considering; they'll often have good suggestions for how they money could be used.

Good luck!
Rusty.

Security

The Register Email Address Blunder 70

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the flog-thyself-in-penance dept.
First time accepted submitter Tim99 writes "This morning I got an email from The Register informing me that they have sent 3,521 of their readers the names and e-mail addresses of 46,000 other readers. Considering their frequent rants about security this has got to be a major FAIL." El Reg writes: "Obviously, this was an error. The two-stage send process that is the norm for all of our mailers was over-looked because someone was in a hurry."
Image

Fitness Site Accidentally Shows Sexual Activity 297

Posted by samzenpus from the private-numbers dept.
smitty777 writes "FitBit is a wearable device created to track calorie usage based on activities. Unfortunately for some users, one of those is sexual activities. The information gained from the device is uploaded to the users online web account, which is searchable by Google. From the article: 'Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable.'" It's just a matter of time before a line gets crossed and a relationship gets ruined by trying to post the largest Fitbit numbers for the evening.
Software

Code Repository Atlassian Buys Competitor BitBucket 150

Posted by kdawson from the lazy-shrug dept.
Roblimo writes "Wow. Atlassian sent press releases out about this, and we're happy for them. But isn't Git easy to install and use — for free, even if your project is proprietary and secret, not open source and public? Whatever. Some people seem to feel better about proprietary software than about FOSS, and the majority of Atlassian's business comes from meeting the needs of behind-the-firewall, proprietary code repositories. At least Atlassian has free versions of its repository for FOSS and small-scale proprietary developers. Which is sort of nice."

Comment Re:For those complaining (Score 1) 258

by rusty (#32663476) Attached to: New Wii Menu Update Targets Homebrew Again

No, assuming they did the same this release as last.

1) This information is on the website, not on the update itself. The update just tells you how to abort it.
2) When you buy a new game, the update is compulsory or you can't play the game you bought.

Nintendo screwed me with this (deleting my whole TP savefile because one slot was the TP hack) and I was livid. 40 hours of my gf's gameplay gone.

Rusty.

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