The Fedora Project is proud to announce the beta release of its free cutting-edge Linux operating system, Fedora 17, code-named "Beefy Miracle". Fedora offers the latest open source technology integrated into a Linux distribution that anyone can freely download, use, modify, and redistribute. We believe this beta release certainly lives up to its beefy namesake, with numerous features and enhancements on the desktop and under the hood, as well as updates to several developer tools for those who can't wait to cook up the next great open source project.

 

The Fedora Project is a worldwide community of more than 20,000 collaborators that help advance the cause of software freedom. These contributors interact to create a vibrant, growing community dedicated to the advancement of free and open source software. The most anticipated product of this community is Fedora, the operating system released by the project approximately every six months. Fedora represents the culmination of work by hundreds of engineers and thousands of contributors from many different locations and many different walks of life... [more]

The High Court has spared internet service providers liability for millions of acts online piracy carried out routinely by Australians prompting celebration across the sector.

 

After three years fending Hollywood's lawyers through lower circuits, the country's highest federal court today found that Perth-based iiNet could not be held responsible for the trade of thousands of pirate movies and music files by its customers. The unanimous decision upheld a finding by the full bench of NSW Federal Court in February last year that iiNet did not authorise its customers to breach copyright online... [more]

So we have the IBM patent on the technique of using the past as an indication of the future – in this case, the past being the previous pixels in the fax image. Now, last time I looked such inductive approaches formed the basis of most of science, so it seems pretty extraordinary that it was deemed worthy of a patent, even if – or perhaps especially if – it's dressed up with a bit of maths.

 

Next, we have Mitsubishi's patent, which is actually just an observation about IBM's patent. It represents zero creativity whatsoever – it's effectively just fixing a bug in what Kuhn rightly calls the original "crude IBM approximation".

 

All-in-all, then, the IBM and Mitsubishi patents represent all that is worst in the US patent system: trivial, obvious and based on pure mathematical knowledge. But as Kuhn observes, the standards community at the time managed to turn what would otherwise have been just a minor annoyance into a full-blown disaster... [more]

There are some Hollywood fantasies you'd like to see in the real world. Hoverboards and Happy Places, for example. Then there are the Hollywood nightmares that you'd rather not think too much about. Or rather governments with huge military budgets wouldn't think about. Such as the airborne virus which this year almost wiped out the population of the world in Contagion.

 

Obviously, the US government aren't huge Steven Soderbergh fans, having paid scientists to figure out how the deadly bird flu virus could mutate to become a bigger threat to humans. They then demanded virologists researching the work... [more]

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient's five-year-survival odds, from 5 percent to 15 percent, albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn't spend much on him.

 

It's not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don't die like the rest of us. What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans,... [more]

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty.

 

Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market,... [more]

Why is it, a friend of mine once pondered, that Microsoft is "evil" and Apple is "lovely" when the guy who started Microsoft was now doing his utmost to eradicate malaria, and the guy who started Apple was still in charge of an enormous, all-pervasive company that does its utmost to screw you six times before breakfast? It was a good question, and the answer isn't just "because people are morons".

 

On Thursday, Steve Jobs, the company's chief executive and co-founder, announced he was standing down for health reasons. If only this were just a business story. But Jobs was not just the man at the top of Apple - he also embodied it. Neatly bearded, usually in a black poloneck, with no visible buttons, he even looks like the sort of thing you'd buy in one of his shops. Jobs's resignation made the market value of Apple fall by $US16 billion ($15bn), but it will also have made people cry. I'm going to try to explain why without sneering,... [more]

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win." His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

 

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government... [more]

A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas, which they turned into code, which they released on the Internet for free. These four men, not one of whom finished college, laid the foundations for much of the digital-media environment we currently inhabit. Then, for all intents and purposes, they vanished.

 

In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the intermediary of a big studio or retailer. TIME put him on its cover,... [more]

Lie #1: The filter will help in the fight against child pornography. I wish this were true. But it isn't. Even child protection group, Save The Children, has come out exposing Conroy's plan as unworkable and the wrong way to protect children online. The filter will not (and Stephen Conroy admits this) work for the areas where unwanted material actually lives, namely: peer-to-peer networking, instant messaging, torrents, direct emails and chat rooms.

 

Lie #2: The filter won't slow connection speeds. The filter is not equipped to process large bandwidth sites such as YouTube or ABC iView. Google, owner of YouTube, has said that filtering such volume sites is not technologically possible,... [more]