All Things News

Straight from Slashdot: “The worry is that shuttle computers aren’t designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new year while in flight. NASA has never had a shuttle in space December 31 or January 1. ‘We’ve just never had the computers up and going when we’ve transitioned from one year to another,’ said Discovery astronaut Joan Higginbotham. ‘We’re not really sure how they’re going to operate.’”

Straight from Slashdot: “The team responsible for Samba has just asked Novell to reconsider its recent patent agreement with Microsoft, arguing that the agreement is a divisive agreement, effectively splitting the open source movement into groups with and without commercial status. Samba argues that with this move Novell is disregarding the will of the people who write the software sold by Novell and that Novell has ‘no right to make self servicing deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community’.”

Straight from the Miami Herald: “When Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chávez called President Bush ”the devil” in a U.N. speech in September, many thought his ”anti-imperialist” rhetoric had reached rock bottom.But fresh depths have since been plumbed. The Venezuelan government, to judge from recent events, officially regards Bush as a genocidal Nazi who arranged the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to justify aggression against other nations.

In a speech Tuesday, Chávez criticized the decision of an Iraqi court to sentence former dictator Saddam Hussein to the death penalty. ”If sentencing is to be done,” Chávez said, “the first one to be given the most severe sentence this planet has to offer should be the president of the United States, if we’re talking about genocidal presidents.””

Straight from Time.com: “Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany’s top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Microsoft has had a long history of battling against piracy, ever since Bill Gates’ Open Letter to Hobbyists in 1976, long before there was even a personal computer software industry to speak of. Now, Microsoft finds itself in its latest piratical engagement, with the recent cracks of Windows Vista and Office 2007, both of which just hit gold release status. Torrents of the cracks are already finding their way around pirate sites. The crack for Windows Vista (which is called “Vista BillGates”) is not a true crack, as it replaces components from the final version of the operating system with those from earlier betas. This allows the would-be pirate to use a product key that worked with Beta 1, Beta 2, RC1, or RC2, with the Gold release of the operating system. This allows the OS to be activated normally over the Internet, but does not bypass the activation system itself. Microsoft had made these earlier betas available to the public on a limited basis.

The other piratical news today is that a copy of the Enterprise edition of Office 2007 was also made available on the ‘Net. This version, like other “Corporate” editions of Microsoft products, uses a volume license key (in this case, Volume Activation 1.0) and does not require activation over the Internet.”

Straight from the DebkaFile: “A disturbing piece of US intelligence was due to be laid before the US president George W. Bush’s strategy review conference with the Iraq Study Group and talks with the visiting Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in Washington. It is bound to color the two events which both take place Monday, Nov. 13. Twelve days before North Korea’s first nuclear test on Oct.10, a secret Iranian military delegation of nuclear and missile experts was present in Pyongyang. The visitors were taken round North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor and the Punggye-ri testing site in the far north amid the preparations for the coming North Korean test.

Some US officials received the impression that the Iranians were briefed on some of North Korea’s secret preparations for the test. If true, this would point to three developments in North Korean-Iranian relations:

First, China was in on the Iranian visit, but ignored it, preferring Pyongyang to carry the can as Iran’s nuclear partner rather than Beijing.

Second, China must also have known about the coming North Korean nuclear weapons test and only pretended to have been taken unawares by Pyongyang’s ten-minute advance notice.

Third, North Korea not only agreed to open its most secret nuclear installations to Iranian scrutiny, but is also willing to instruct Iranian scientists and technicians in Pyongyang or on their home ground on how to set up and execute a nuclear weapons test.”

Straight from the DebkaFile: “In a Jerusalem Post interview ahead of prime minister Ehud Olmert’s White House talks next week, Sneh said he is not advocating a pre-emptive Israeli operation, but considers it a last resort. “Even a last resort is sometimes the only resort.”

Taking a different line, Olmert said Thursday night that Iran posed a serious threat that should be addressed with a cool head. “The big countries have to lead and we have to push them,” he said. But Sneh said the chances of the international community instituting effective sanctions against Iran was not high. “My working assumption is that they won’t succeed.”

The newly-appointed second in command at the Israeli defense ministry stressed that his priority was “preparing the IDF for victory in the next round with Iran and its proxies.”

High on the list was the need to improve the country’s defense systems. “We developed and produced the Arrow, the only system that can intercept nuclear missiles. Depending on the altitude when intercepted, the warheads do not detonate. But Israel needs to substantially improve its indigenous long-range capacities.”"

Straight from the DebkaFile: “Head of the British spy agency MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller said at least 30 terrorist attacks are being plotted in Britain, which could involve chemical and nuclear devices. “Other countries also face a new terrorist threat,” she warned, from Spain to France to Canada and Germany.” DEBKAfile adds: The two suicide bombers who attacked the Tel Aviv bar Mike’s Place three years ago were British al Qaeda members who reached Tel Aviv through Syria and Gaza.”