Spanish Consulting Company uses Debian's logo in green

[Update: Feb, 03, 2009] "As I promised here is the results of my research: So, I decided to ask in Barrapunto (the Spanish Slashdot) about the issue, and following the comments and re-reading the Debian Logo's license it seems that it could not be a "huge" violation of the Copyright law. They should just add a comment saying where the logo comes from and/or a link to the Debian project's web page. And the final obtained conclusion is that since I am not directly affected, I cannot "do more" than inform the parts involved in the case."

Surfing the Internet I founded a Spanish consulting company from the dark side of the source using a nice green logo lightly similar to the logo of the rebel group called Debian. I am not very strong in laws, and after reading the Debian Open Use Logo License, I don't really know if this becomes a violation of the it. I know that in the software galaxy the fsf take charage of violation reports of their licenses GNU GPL, LGPL, AGPL, o FDL, but I don't really know what should be the correct acting protocol in this case. Right now I am researching about it, I will post my progress...

Here you have the logos so you can check the mentioned similarities:

Debian's Logo:

Consulting Company's Logo:

"I have a very bad feeling about this."
Luke Skywalker

Some history of Weapons from the Dark Side (Mac)

Apple's Macintosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott

Steve Jobs Introducing Mac to the Galaxy

And now some pics...

1984 - Macintosh 128Kb

1987 - Macintosh II

1989 - Macintosh Portable

1991 - Quadra 700

1991 - PowerBook 100

1993 - Macintosh Color Classic

1998 - iMac

1999 - Power Macintosh G3

1999- iBook

2001 - PowerBook G4


2002 - iMac G4

2003 - Power Mac G5

2008: MacBook Air

The Future?: MacBook Wheel (no keyboard!, WTF?!)

"I have you now."

Darth Vader

OpenBSD's song 4.4: "Trial of the BSD Knights"

Source Wars
Episode IV
Trial of the BSD Knights




"Not so very long ago
and not so far away
AT&T made system code
and gave some bits away

Some Berkeley geeks rebuilt it
better, faster, more diverse
This open thing was wonderful
for everyone on Earth

And then the roaring 90's came
The Empire changed its mind
And good old greed was back again
The geeks were in a legal bind

The Empire's Unix Lab
sued BSDi from above
The code is free but
only we can sell it bub!

The University came calling
in full protective mode
and proved the source in Net/2
didn't use the Empire's code

Then Bostic brought the Empire's books
n' slammed them dandys down
And showed the giant chunks
of BSD code all around

They didn't even give an ounce
of credit front to back
This broke the license USL
was using to attack

The case was thrown out by the judge
and "settled" out of court
And UCB was big enough
to take it like a sport

And to this day the geekfolk say
Now did we win or lose?
They shoulda made 'em reprint
every book with proper dues

And take out ads in major rags
apologetically
And maybe now it wouldn't be
the same monopoly

The Empire might have tumbled
down if everybody saw
How greed became so big
they couldn't see that glaring flaw

But only one community
the one that makes it tick
Is there to fight for everyone
exposing hypocrites

And OpenBSD is here
to tell the story right
Once again the fight is fought
and kept in shining light

And may the source be with you
May the Empire fall apart
Ya like that's gonna happen!
But we gotta keep heart!"

Download song, more here.

Que?!
Darth Vader.

YouTube's Internal Server Error

It seems that Google's stuff can also fail. It's undeniable truth that it doesn't happen so frequently as in other apps... but here you have an Internal Server Error I got today trying to find a Halo video on YouTube. Pretty cool the second line of the error's explanation, Huh? What a freaks!
Now a philosophical question comes to my mind: Do they have monkeys working at Google or are they calling they own workers, trained monkeys?

"I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed."
Princess Leia Organa

The Environmental Impact of Google searches

A typical Google search generates about 7g of CO2, Boiling a kettle generates about 15g, pointed out Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, Physicist at Harvard University. So according to Dr. Alexander performing two Google searches will generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

According to Times online's article: "More than 200m internet searches are estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions."

Up to now, Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. Data centers are one of the most energy-intensive facilities that exists and Google operates huge data centers all over the world consuming a big amount of power. On the other hand, google's explaination says that obviously in the quantified amount of energy is also included the one used by your personal computer which is higher than the one used by the search engine to answer your query. The company said that one Google search is about 0.2 grams of CO2.

For further information here is Dr. Alexander's website called co2stats, and here a more deep description of the research.

"Do you think they'll melt us down?"
C-3PO

Cut-backs at the Evil Empire force of MS

There are rumors going on about layoffs at the "Evil Empire force of Microsoft", as much as 17% of its workforce (which is a lot). It seems that they are not immune to recession and things are not going good for the strongest privative force of the Software Galaxy. The truth is that some sources from the inside pointed out that there might be a hit for a few quarters next year. They assure nothing is gonna happen in January but they also say that "anything" could be possible over the following months... certainly it seems that is not gonna be before the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Vegas (Nevada), on the 15th of January, because it won't be good for them to have any bad news before it.

However these are some undeniable facts showing that things are not going really well for the Redmond giant:

• Several big customers have not renewed MS Software Assurance (SA)
  
• The whole worldwide economy is in a major slump.
• Hiring is way, way down. Except for a scattered few positions, Microsoft has almost no openings for external hires.
• One of the more likely solutions to be employed is no bonuses in 2009 reviews.
  

You can reed more about this here, written by an anonymous blogger from MS.

Only a master of evil, Darth.
Obi-Wan Kenobi

200 PS3 break SSL!

A team of Rebel Security Hackers (researches and academics) with the help of 200 PS3 weapons, the equivalent to 8000 standard cores or $20K of Amazon EC2 time, have broken SSL (Secure Socket Layer), one of the core protocols of the Internet. This attack is possible because of a flaw in MD5. This might convert the entire software galaxy in an unsafe place.

They collected around 30000 trusted certificates from Firefox, 9000 MD5 signed. 97% of them from rapidssl. They builded a fake certificate and transfered the signature to it. The task took around 2 days to complete making use of the 200 PS3. Taking advantage of the known content of the certificate that would be issued by RapidSSL, they predicted two variables: the serial number and the timestamp.

Now, since they control the content of the certificates, they changed the flags to make themselves an intermediate certificate authority. That gave them authority to issue any certificate they wanted. All of these ‘valid’ certs were signed using SHA-1.

You can try their live demo site, you just need to set your clock back to some date before August 2004. This is just a secuirty measure for the example, but it would work identically with any certificate that hasn't expired.

In order to fix this, Certificate Authorities are now using SHA-1 for signing and Microsoft and Mozilla will blacklist the team’s rogue Certificates in their browser but... enough? :s

Here is the project site and for more information here is a more detailed article.

"We're doomed."
C-3PO