Bill S.773 Threatens Access To The Internet.

There is a current bill passing though congress that might affect your rights to the internet. This bill would give the President the right to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” This bill would give the president the power to cut all internet traffic to and from the US. That means no access to information for as long as the president sees fit. This to me is over kill. I can understand regulating or shutting down networks to government facilities or utilities like power and telecommunications systems. These are the backbone of our nation and should not be open to the outside world. Any threat to these systems would be a danger to us and our country but cutting all internet access in the nation is going to far.

Links to information about this bill.

I found opencongress.org by googling for the bill, and it seems to be a vary nice site for following congress.

Politicsdaily.com has an article about the bill.

Mac/Windows Programmed For Better Netbook Battery Life?

I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook, and after ‘downgrading’ to XP and creating a dual partition, I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long-life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be very disappointing, with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours. Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed. Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the MacBooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life.

Read the article in its entirety here.

DOJ Give’s OK To Oracle/Sun Deal

Database giant Oracle announced late last week that the US Department of Justice had given its approval to Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The companies now await a similar approval from European Union (EU) antitrust regulators so that they can consummate the deal.

Read the Article in its entirety here.

Google Announces 64-Bit Chrome Browser.

“The Google Chrome developers announced on August 19th the immediate availability of a new version of the Google Chrome web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Google Chrome 4.0.202.2 is here to fix a lot of annoying bugs (see below for details) and it also adds a couple of features only for the Mac platform. However, the good news is that Dean McNamee, one of the Google Chrome engineers, announced yesterday on their mailing list that a working port of the Chrome browser for 64-bit platforms is now available: ‘The v8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I’ve had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks. I believe mmoss or tony is going to get a buildbot running, and working on packaging.’ Until today, Google Chrome was available on both 32- and 64-bit architectures, but it appears that the latter was running based on the 32-bit libraries. Therefore, starting with Google Chrome 4.0.202.2, 64-bit users can enjoy a true x64 version!”

read the rest of the article here.