San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Wednesday, demanding any information about telecommunications companies' efforts to get off the hook for their role in the government's illegal electronic surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans.

Congress is currently considering granting amnesty to the telecoms — a blatant attempt to derail lawsuits aimed at holding the companies responsible for knowingly violating federal privacy laws with warrantless wiretapping and the illegal transfer of vast amounts of personal data to the government. EFF represents the plaintiffs in Hepting v.

AT&T, one of dozens of class-action suits accusing the telecoms of violating customers' rights by illegally assisting the National Security Agency with this domestic surveillance.

News reports have described an elaborate lobbying campaign by the telecoms to drum up support for legislation that would hold them unaccountable for their actions, and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has publicly voiced his support for amnesty. But McConnell's office has not yet responded to EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to disclose records about this lobbying activity.

"Congress is debating amnesty for the telecoms right now cialis chicago — amnesty that could imperil judicial review of a very controversial government program, as well as threaten class-action lawsuits that impact millions of Americans,"

said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "We deserve to know what kind of lobbying has gone on behind the scenes before lawmakers make this critical decision."

EFF's suit asks for the immediate disclosure of ODNI's telecom lobbying records, including any documents concerning briefings, discussions, or other contacts officials have had with representatives of telecommunications companies or members of Congress. This lawsuit comes just two weeks after EFF filed a similar FOIA suit against the Department of Justice for withholding records on telecom lobbying.

For the full complaint:

http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/foia_C0705278/ODNI_complaint.pdf

For more on our FOIA work:

http://www.eff.org/issues/foia

For more on EFF's class-action lawsuit against AT&T:

http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att

For this release:

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2007/10/17

October 19th, 2007

Posted by Ryan Naraine @ 8:56 am

October 21st, 2007

Posted by Christopher DawsonMaybe not for the average corporation yet, or even the average home user, but every time Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu (and with it comes Edubuntu), Microsoft becomes a little less the default vendor of choice for educational computing.

I’m still 2 years from a major tech refresh, including server hardware and software. I have to say I wish I was a little closer, having just installed Edubuntu 7.10 on my test server at home. Not only did the install go even easier than it did when I installed version 7.04 6 months ago, but the performance once installed is significantly improved.

One of the aspects of Gutsy that feels much improved over previous versions is speed.

Everything feels faster and snappier, from loading up the OS to clicking on menus.

For Edubuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu incorporating packages of educational software, and, more importantly, a brilliant implementation of the Linux Terminal Server Project, this translates into faster boot times for thin clients as well as standalone workstations. For those of you who haven’t used Edubuntu before, at installation you have the opportunity to install either a workstation (basically Ubuntu with educational packages and a kid-friendly theme) or a server, which supports connection of thin clients. In it’s simplest form, the latter requires two network interfaces, one connected to the Internet (via a router or drop from a larger network) and one connected to a switch with thin clients attached.

As with 7.04, this setup really is incredibly simple. Edubuntu detects both interfaces and allows manual or automatic networking setup. The automatic setup is remarkably intelligent; one caveat:

if the automatic DHCP/DNS the installer performs fails, then switch the two network connections coming into the server. Most likely, the so-called gateway interface was simply connected to the thin clients instead of the outside network. The text-based installer (sorry, no live CD/graphical install for Edubuntu, although you don’t really miss it) guides you through the rest and various setup options for Edubuntu are well-documented here. Note that while the instructions linked here are cialis cheapest price for version 6.06, the actual installation hasn’t changed much. The look, feel, and performance of the installed system are significantly improved.

I installed Ubuntu on two other older PCs for comparison (Dell workstations with 256MB RAM and Pentium 3 Xeons) without any trouble and had my kids using all of their Flash and Java-based applications in less than an hour and a half (from the time I started the install). My youngest was logged into the Edubuntu server (also an aging old donation with 2GB RAM and a single Pentium 3 Xeon running at 700MHz) via his old desktop (set to boot from the network) while I opened and closed applications, switched users, and monitored his connection via a cool control panel on the server itself. While this is obviously a low-utilization, seat of the pants test, this is also a really old server by modern standards and slower than the server on which I tested Edubuntu 7.04 (a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, running at 3GHz with 2GB of RAM). Performance was definitely improved, even with the slower server hardware, particularly in terms of network boot times and responsiveness on the thin clients.

Which leads me back to my headline. Edubuntu (and the various incarnations of Ubuntu) are very good right now. Microsoft may bring us “Patch Tuesday,” but Canonical brings us a significantly upgraded operating system every 6 months. Many other major Linux developers follow a similar schedule. If the improvements between versions are immediately noticeable, imagine what a couple more generations will bring us. What will Edubuntu 8.10 look like and how much better will it be? For that matter, how will SUSE Linux and their Kiwi implementation of LTSP look (along with the promise of fully-functional library and student information system software out of the box in the coming months)? RedHat/Fedora aren’t exactly far behind either, to say nothing of the countless options represented by other distributions.

I’m itching for a tech refresh already, just so that I can logically roll out one of these distributions somewhere other than my own lab. Of course, it will probably take me the next two years to convince my users that we can do without Windows anyway. For now, I’ll content myself with building a group of champion users who can see first hand the value of software like Edubuntu, and who can be as impressed as I am at its incredibly speedy progress.

Pasted from <http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1280>

October 19th, 2007

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 6:26 am

viksoe.dk – 151KB (Freeware) – cialis canadian pharmacy

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer [WIN key and E (the WIN key is generally between the CTRL key and the ALT key on the lower left side of your keyboard) Hold the WIN key down and tap the letter E key]. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

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