"New Wikileaks cables indicate that the US has been keeping a close watch on IP enforcement policy in New Zealand, going so far as to propose funding anti-piracy efforts there to the tune of around $427,000. US diplomats have also offered to help New Zealand rewrite its 'three strikes' illegal file sharing law."

"A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the 'pay-up-or-else-schemes' that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person."

Apple has updated its line of iMac desktops, with new processors and bumped graphical specifications. They also includes an HD FaceTime camera, which is certainly useful. The most interesting feature is, of course, that they include Thunderbolt ports - one on the 21.5" model, and two on the 27" model.

"Nikkei.com on Monday reported that an online Sony gaming network has once again fallen victim to a cyberattack. This time, the attack may have exposed the credit card numbers of thousands of Sony customers from around the world. According to the report, over 12,700 customer credit card numbers were stolen during a breach of Sony’s online gaming network, Sony Online Entertainment. According to Nikkei.com, Sony discovered the possible attack on Sunday."

"IonMonkey is the name of Mozilla's new JavaScript JIT compiler, which aims to enable many new optimizations in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. InfoQ had a small Q&A with Lead Developer David Anderson, about this new development that could bring significant improvements in products that use the SpiderMonkey engine like Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acrobat, MongoDB and more."

Well, this is a bit surprising. Research In Motion, which isn't exactly doing well at this point, has just launched version 7.0 of the BlackBerry OS. Curiously enough, this release has nothing to do with the QNX-based operating system of the PlayBook.

"Qubes OS comes from an elegant concept: if you can isolate functional components within disposable containers, and you can separate those components that can be tainted through their interaction with the outside world from the core subsystems, you stand a good chance to preserve the integrity and security of the base Operating System at the possible expense of needing to jump through some hoops to move data around the system. All in all it sounds like a good proposition if it can be demonstrated to be practical." Read the full review.

Attachmate now owns Novell and therefore, by extension, also owns SUSE and openSUSE. With Oracle currently doing everything in its power to thoroughly destroy what's left of Sun's open source commitments, scepticism abound about the future of SUSE, and more specifically of openSUSE. Attachmate's CEO has answered some questions about the future of SUSE and openSUSE, and as far as words go, it's looking good.

"The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that AT&T - and indeed, any company - could block class-action suits arising from disputes with customers and instead force those customers into binding arbitration. The ruling reverses previous lower-court decisions that classified stipulations in AT&T's service contract which barred class arbitration as 'unconscionable'."

This is interesting. I've been saying for a while now that both Apple and Microsoft are hard at work making Android as undesirable as possible. Sadly, they're not doing this by making their own products better, but by trying to make it seem as if Android isn't free due to patent costs and such. It looks like Barnes & Noble is the first company to openly say the same.

Yeah, it's the day of double-dippin' today. And, the contradiction couldn't be bigger. In one corner we have one of the oldest and most respected distributions, and in the other corner we have the sometimes controversial but immensely popular relative newcomer. Slackware 13.37 and Ubuntu 11.04 have been released.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. This weekend, we ran a story about the carrier situation in the The Netherlands. The largest carrier in The Netherlands has announced it's going to charge for services like IM and Skype, while the other two carriers were thinking about following suit. I stated I expected little from our politicians - but boy, turns out I was wrong. Basically the entire lower house - left to right, progressive to conservative - is not happy with the carriers' moves, and are now exploring options to prohibit them from implementing their plans - including the option to embed net neutrality in our telecommunications act. Go go... Politicians?!

Nokia announced yesterday that they will transfer the Symbian Developers to Accenture. Regardless of what one feels about the merits of Symbian, this does seem like the end of the road. The proverbial selling of the horse to the glue factory.

This release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support. Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation. The 'hammer dedup-simulate' command can be used to estimate space savings for existing data. DragonFly now uses gcc 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step. DragonFly now offers significant performance gains over previous releases, especially for machines using AHCI or implementing swapcache(8).