A consignment of 3,000 “useless” blank biometric passports has been stolen on its way to British embassies throughout the world. Or at least, the Identity & Passport Service says they’re useless.…
The ‘fraud-proof’ e-passport can be copied and altered, a Dutch security researcher has demonstrated. In tests conducted for the Times, Jeroen van Beek of the University of Amsterdam changed the chip data in a normal UK e-passport to contain a picture of Osama bin Laden. The paper also reports that van Beek has contrived to have a passport in the name of Elvis Presley accepted by a public e-reader in a Dutch town hall.…
Analysis The organised tampering of PIN entry devices to commit credit card fraud, which led to arrests in Birmingham last week, has been linked to a breach in an Asda store on the outskirts of Portsmouth.…
Updated Cybercrooks are targeting self-service checkout systems in UK supermarkets to cash-out compromised US credit and debit card accounts.…
A UK government minister has warned that cyber-terrorists were attempting to take out the national grid.…
Two in five Brits are worried that free webmail comes at the expense of privacy because firms are scanning their messages in order to serve up targeted ads.…
A widespread spam campaign claims that a nuclear power plant on the outskirts of London exploded on Tuesday afternoon.…
Two in five Brits are worried that free webmail comes at the expense of privacy because firms are scanning their messages in order to serve up targeted ads.…
One long-running controversy in the open source community has to do with device drivers and whether binary modules (proprietary code provided by device manufacturers, such as Nvidia) should be allowed within the Linux kernel. Purists believe that including these closed-source driver modules violates the open source General Public License (GPL). Some kernel contributors have even called for an outright ban of these binary modules, which has met with resistance from the more practical-minded in the Linux community, notably by Linux Torvalds himself, who reportedly called it both “shortsighted” and “stupid.”
Obviously, limiting users of the Linux kernel only to the open source drivers that are available is not preferable. Linux aficionados want to use any hardware they darn well please, whether or not they have to use a closed-source driver to support it.
Riding into the breach between the purists and pragmatic, the Linux Driver Project launched in early 2007, headed up by Greg Kroah-Hartman. The LDP proposes a compromise, offering to device manufacturers:
…a group of Linux kernel developers (over 200 strong) and project managers (over 10) that develop and maintain Linux kernel drivers. We work with the manufacturers of the specific device to specify, develop, submit to the main kernel, and maintain the kernel drivers. We are willing and able to sign NDAs with companies if they wish to keep their specifications closed, as long as we are able to create a proper GPLv2 Linux kernel driver as an end result.
I read about this ongoing project in an interesting article from IT Pro in the UK, whose author Richard Hillesley makes the argument: “Open source drivers will become an imperative, rather than a choice, for device manufacturers who want to break into new markets and extend their user base.” Hillesley makes his argument for why manufacturers should drop their resistance to open source drivers (or at least, take advantage of the LDP’s offer) and reap the benefits of better maintenance, support, and the distributed costs of development.
