Technopolitical news

Fife Wikileaks Hactivists Arrested in UK

Police have arrested five people over their alleged roles in an online campaign to support WikiLeaks.

Five males - aged 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26 - were arrested under the Computer Misuse Act in raids across the country at 7am this morning, with the suspects held in local police stations for further questioning.

source


Sony determines that having autism is "cheating"

Jennifer Zdenek, the mother of an 11-year-old boy who lives with autism, is outraged at Microsoft Xbox Live for labeling her son a "cheater" and taking away everything he's earned online.

She says her son, Julias Jackson, is so good at playing X-Box games, Xbox LIVE thought he cheated.

source

And for those who like bloatware, there's a new version of KDE.

More like this

Now that's what I'm talking about! This is what we need to see more of! A father whose child underwent the quackery that is the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) protocol is suing the doctors who administered it for malpractice: The father of a 7-year-old Chicago boy who was diagnosed as a toddler with…
Microsoft says Teh Gay is "inappropriate." The corporate computer giant and evile empire banned a kid from having an X-box account because he listed the name of his home town in his profile, and happens to live in Fort Gay. The people of Fort Gay are not putting up with this. When challenged,…
tags: Harry Potter film, Marcus Belby, Rob Knox, actor People lay flowers at the scene in Sidcup, Kent, where 18-year-old Rob Knox was stabbed to death in a fight early today. The teenager died around 1am in an attack outside the Metro Bar, four other men were also hurt in the fight. Image:…
I would like to propose a new law for consideration by our legislature, which I am calling The Minnesota Anti-Texan Act of 2011. I need to work on the formal language for it, but I can give the gist of it here. If any person within the boundaries of the fine state of Minnesota exhibits any of the…

Uh... that would be Microsoft, not Sony.

According to the article, the boy was banned because his account was (apparently) used to cheat after he admittedly gave his login info to another player to get some special armor.

Microsoft made statements that they had not banned the account because he was "too good", but because there was a pattern of game achievements that were not technically possible in offline play -- unless the software had been tinkered with. That's the basis of the cheating charge.

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but based on the info provided they appear to be acting reasonably given the prevalence of cheating in online games.

RE: KDE, I agree, but before Ubuntu's growth spurt, I think it was a minority opinion (somehow Kubuntu's not kept up).

I wonder if there isn't some convergence. I always avoided KDE because it seemed to make you load too many libraries (gnome is bad enough). But how different are they now?

By Marion Delgado (not verified) on 28 Jan 2011 #permalink

The last overview I read is the most recent issue of Linux Journal (on desktops). KDE fills more memory before you've run your first app, but gnome isn't a lot better. Interestingly, Xfce is the same as gnome.

I'm thinking of running my laptop with a simple windows manager and nothing more.

If there still are any who haven't heard, a fork of KDE3, called "Trinity" is available for Ubuntu and a few others. It works well for me. I keep hoping that KDE4 will develop into something I can use, but I have yet to see a version of it that I can live with. Trinity is available here:
http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/

By John Swindle (not verified) on 28 Jan 2011 #permalink

Greg, Annick wasn't kidding. Microsoft puts out the XBox and runs the XBox Live network service.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Sony (which offers the Playstation and the Playstation Network), but this story isn't one of them.