Have you attended a peaceful protest recently? The Guardian reported at the weekend that the Metropolitan police are storing the details of protestors on the criminal intelligence database, in some cases even where the person concerned has no criminal record and is not suspected of any offence.
via Corinna Ferguson: Public trust eroded by police surveillance of protestors | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
[ Just a few days after Yvonne Singh: Why are we fingerprinting children? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk ]
newspicks 1984, newspicks, yro
Looks like Microsoft’s web spider is crawling sites repoting fake (spam) referrals coming from live.search.com. These referrals are completely bogus and if you look at the keywords, it’s quite obvious.
Read more…
rant rant, site
I’ve (mostly) finished upgrading my laptop from Debian Etch (+ backports) to Lenny, and overall it was pretty smooth.
Read more…
rant debian
word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA.
via Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?.
[ I think when I started using last.fm again recently, I asked someone if it wasn't just a very convenient way of giving the MAFIAA a nice index to sue users based on, and the idea was dismissed as insane 
]
Russ comments:
Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for. [1]
Update 2009-02-23: RIAA has denied this as well. Which is why I’m seriously considering the chance that such a leak occurred… 
newspicks newspicks, privacy
Finally. About time – this has been requested several times since 2006 or so.
The announcement: Git now available for SF.net hosted projects.
Interestingly, the features page mentions that there is no quota. In that sense, SourceForge seems to be better off than other git services that have a “soft” quota (repo.or.cz has 100 MB for example).
Some pros/cons:
rant git, sourceforge
More or less. I got a lot of new ideas & important feedback. Six of us joined:
- Oak
- aGu
- beardy
- Targhar
- eladan
- xeno
There weren’t as many issues as I was expecting (testers might disagree), only major one was a last time change I did and blundered. 
Thanks to everyone!
projects encreecia, projects
Encreecia 0.0.9 has been released just now. This is the first public release, and comprises of two years of development and 14k+ lines of Java source (including newlines & comments). It marks my biggest single Free Software contribution so far, and hopefully the last big one, ever. From now on, I hopefully Release Early & Often
For a short flashback to the background of this project, check out the history page. Or go straight for the screenshots.
41d966ea51c20d40fd46114cc44ba66e3a09af4a jfealdia-client-v0.0.9.zip
b42f8c9198046cacd5eef728df151f7770b5ebce jfealdia-src-v0.0.9.zip
releases encreecia, projects, releases
Timeline from my point of view:
- Stories start circulating that the 1 TB and 1.5 TB models have “freeze” issues that freeze the drive for 15-30 seconds. I decide to stall my decision to buy Seagate, at least until there is new firmware that fixes the issues.
- There were reports of Seagate 7200.11 models dying after power-down, not only the big ones, but smaller ones as well. They aren’t even shown by BIOS. Uh-huh.
- Slashdot covers the news on 2009-01-16: Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows
- Seagate releases new firmware, which makes 500 GB models unusable. Slashdot – Seagate Firmware Update Bricks 500GB Barracudas
- Yet another firmware release is done, this time several people report failing SMART values and other oddities.
From the Seagate knowledge base (emphasis mine):
A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
Small number of drives? From what I can tell is that there is a really a lot more of affected drives than “a small number”. For a very long time Seagate also claimed this affected only disks manufactured “thru December 2008″ which was either outright lie, or a clever way to confuse people about the real scale of the issues. I bought my disk over nine months ago, and it is affected, too.
Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is. However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is offering a free firmware upgrade.
In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss associated with this issue.
Very assuring. Not. I didn’t need to ask around much until I found someone who recently had a Seagate drive fail on boot.
All in all, the way how Seagate reacted to this issue and downplayed it has made me firmly decided not to buy Seagate for a while. If this isn’t a PR disaster, I don’t know what is.
hardware hardware, rant
Four weeks after birthing a nationwide Wikipedia edit ban, Britain’s child porn blacklist has led at least one ISP to muzzle the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – an 85 billion page web history dating back to 1996.
via Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history • The Register.
newspicks censorship, newspicks
