Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, sends us to DarkReading for a backgrounder on new rules from the FTC, taking effect in November, that will require any business that handles private consumer data to check its customers and suppliers against databases of known online criminals. Companies that fail to do so may be liable for large fines or jail time. In practice, most companies will contract with specialist services to perform these checks. Yet another list you don't want to get on. "The [FTC's] Red Flag program... requires enterprises to check their customers and suppliers against databases of known online criminals — much like what OFAC [the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control] does with terrorists — and also carries potential fines and penalties for businesses that don't do their due diligence before making a major transaction."

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, points out a story about the Russian government's interest in expanding anti-extremism laws to include the blocking of websites and ISPs. The laws would match those already in use for the country's print media. Russian internet users may soon be forced to deal with the same issues facing Chinese citizens. Quoting: "An official at the Russian prosecutor's general office, Vyacheslav Sizov, told the Russian-language newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that any web site that is determined to host what he terms 'extremist material' would be blocked from being accessible from within the Russian Federation. Given the Putin government's history with the media, 'extremist material' may be very broadly interpreted as any content unfriendly to the interests of the Russian government."

Dionysius, God of Wine, writes with a link to an Ars Technica story, quoting Bill Gates: "'There's free software and then there's open source' he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, 'there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.' Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: 'I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,' he said, adding with a shrug: 'That may seem radical."

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, points to a Yahoo! story which begins "Google on Wednesday handed over data stored by suspected pedophiles on its Orkut social networking site to Brazilian authorities, ceding to pressure to lift its confidentiality duty to its users, officials said."

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf brings news that Sun Microsystems will be removing the last restrictions on Java to make it completely open source. Sun wants Java to be easily available for use in Linux distributions. We've discussed the steps Sun has taken to open-source Java over the past couple years. From Yahoo! News: "'We've been engaging with the open-source community for Java to finish off the OpenJDK project, and the specific thing that we've been working on with them is clearing the last bits that we didn't have the rights,' to distribute, Sands said. 'Over the past year, we have pretty much removed most of those encumbrances.' Work still needs to be done to offer the Java sound engine and SNMP code via open source; that effort is expected to be completed this year. Developers, though, may be able to proceed without a component like the sound engine, Sands said.

An anonymous reader writes "Jeremy White from CodeWeavers has made the announcement that an experimental build of CrossOver Games is now available for PC-BSD users. However, this unsupported edition should also work on FreeBSD or DesktopBSD, allowing users to play Windows games on their desktop. The FreeBSD version of CrossOver Games can be downloaded here (registration required)." From the attached notes: "Remember this is an experimental build! If you are on FreeBSD 6.x, you will need to apply a system patch from http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine to enable wine to function properly. Users of FreeBSD 7.0 and higher do not need this patch."

mjasay writes "Microsoft just promoted Sam Ramji to run its growing Linux and open source operations. The former head of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, Ramji has a long history with open source, having built out large-scale open-source based applications while at Ofoto, and continuing to run applications like World of Warcraft and Office 2003 on WINE. Microsoft has been putting increasingly open-source savvy people in this role, starting with Jason Matusow and most recently employing Bill Hilf in the role. Ramji has made friends with many in the open-source business and development communities, but will his promotion spell any sort of an about-face for Microsoft in its patent policies? It's unlikely, but at least it demonstrates a step in the right direction."

eldavojohn writes "On message boards, Linus Torvalds was explaining why NDISWrapper is not eligible to be released under the GPL even though the project claims to be. Linus remarked, "Ndiswrapper itself is *not* compatible with the GPL. Trying to claim that ndiswrapper somehow itself is GPL'd even though it then loads modules that aren't is stupid and pointless. Clearly it just re-exports those GPLONLY functions to code that is *not* GPL'd." This all sprung up with someone restricted NDISWrapper's access to GPL-only symbols thereby breaking the utility. Linus merely replied that "If it loads non-GPL modules, it shouldn't be able to use GPLONLY symbols." As you may know, NDISWrapper implements Windows kernel API and then loads Windows binaries for a number of devices and runs them natively to avoid the cost and complication of emulation."

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Researchers at Monash University, in Australia, have found a process to coat natural fibers such as wool, silk, and hemp that will automatically remove food, grime, and even red-wine stains by coating their fibers with titanium dioxide nanocrystals, which break down food and dirt in sunlight. Titanium dioxide is a strong photocatalyst and in the presence of ultraviolet light and water vapor, it forms hydroxyl radicals, which oxidize, or decompose, organic matter. "These nanocrystals cannot decompose wool and are harmless to skin," says organic chemist and nanomaterials researcher Walid Daoud. Titanium dioxide can also destroy pathogens such as bacteria in the presence of sunlight by breaking down the cell walls of the microorganisms making self-cleaning fabrics especially useful in hospitals and other medical settings."

S point 2 writes "Google has announced that they have hired Codeweavers, maker of the popular Wine software to make Photoshop run better on Linux. 'Photoshop is one of those applications that desktop Linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we're happy to say they work pretty well now...We look forward to further improvements in this area.' It is unknown whether or not the entire Creative Suite will be funded for support, but for the time being it seems Photoshop-on-Linux development is getting a new priority under Google."

Several readers have written to tell us about one users rant in which he tells the story of being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."

ozmanjusri writes "Coders working on Wine for Mac have found that the Mac loader has gained its own undocumented ability to load and understand Windows Portable Executable (PE) files. They found PE loading capabilities in Leopard that weren't there in Tiger. Further dissection showed that Apple is masking references to 'Win' and 'PE' in the dll, which means it's not an accidental inclusion. Is Apple planning native PE execution within OS X?"

The official EVE Online site has details of upcoming patch 'Revelations 2.3'. Along with a number of bug-fixes to the PvP-focused Massively Multiplayer Online Game, this game fix will offer up compatibility with Mac OS X and Linux. Though the Mac client is a native port, Linux will require the used of Cedega. The post suggests that if you'd like a preview of what the game will be like on your rig, you can download the client and tool around the test server. System requirements are also listed, as are the distributions of Linux they are specifically supporting: Ubuntu 7+, Suse 10+, and Linspire 6. Update: 11/04 14:32 GMT by Z : Fixed implication of native Linux client.

An anonymous reader writes "Linuxlookup.com is reporting that CCP today announced a partnership with TransGaming to bring EVE Online to Linux and Mac platforms starting later this year. From the article: '"EVE Online has always ranked highly with our Linux users and there is significant demand for it among other platforms, including the rapidly growing Mac base," said Vikas Gupta, CEO of TransGaming Technologies. "As EVE takes place within a single-server persistent universe, it's vital that the game is identical in every way across different platforms. This challenge is what makes the partnership with CCP both important and rewarding."'

jshriverWVU writes to let us know about the release of Wine 0.9.44. Wine is a free implementation of Windows on Unix/Linux. New in this release are: better heuristics for making windows managed; automatic detection of timezone parameters; improvements to the built-in WordPad; better signatures support in crypt32; still more gdiplus functions; and of course lots of bug fixes.

dsinc writes "A guy who uploaded the latest Star Wars movie got arrested, pleaded guilty to 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' and 'criminal copyright infringement' and got jail and home confinement. As part of his home confinement, he agreed to install some tracking software on his computer. The problem is He's an Ubuntu Linux user and the gov't doesn't have any tracking software for Linux. So he's been told that he must use Windows for the term of his confinement. Looks like a case of cruel and unusual punishment to me"

I have the urge to commit my 24" Core 2 Duo iMac to a single Linux operating system, thus giving up the goodness of my beloved Mac OS X. I am not a stranger to Linux, but I am a stranger to running Mac apps on Linux. On my PowerPC I can use SheepShaver to run Classic apps. The Mac-on-Linux project can run OS X apps, but it requires a PowerPC, not an x86. Virtualizing and emulating are inefficient, especially given the wonderful results the WINE project has had in getting Windows apps to run on Linux. What I would like is an equivalent: a software compatibility layer that will allow Linux to run Mac OS X apps at native performance. I believe there is some additional complexity in accomplishing this. Mac OS X apps aren't just Mac OS X apps. They are Carbon. They are Cocoa. They are universal binaries. They are PPC code with Altivec. Does such a project exist yet? If not, why not?

MBCook writes "According to the Official Wine Wiki, SWSoft's Parallels 3.0 contains LGPL code. It seems that the new 3D acceleration features of Parallels 3.0 are based on Wine code (SWSoft isn't hiding this), but despite repeated requests they have not yet released their changes for the Wine developers. It has now been 22 days since SWSoft was first contacted on this issue; at the time they promised the code within 1-2 days. They have been contacted numerous time and currently say that they are waiting on 'legal department approval.'" Update: 07/03 00:06 GMT by KD : Reader something_wicked_thi notes that Parallels released the source code the next day.

bobbocanfly writes "Another crack in the Windows Genuine Advantage wall. A user at UbuntuForums.org managed to validate an Ubuntu installation as a genuine copy of Microsoft Windows and get to the download page of Windows Defender, using IE4Linux and Wine. (Here is an OGG video of the process.) Along with the advancement of LiveCD technology, this could spell the end of Microsoft's control over who gets their updates."

El_Oscuro writes "The MS/Novell deal specifically excludes patent protection for "clone products." In the agreement, a clone product is broadly defined as "a product (or major component thereof) of a Party that has the same or substantially the same features and functionality as a then-existing product (or major component thereof) of the other Party ... and that has the same or substantially the same user interface, or implements all or substantially all of the Application Programming Interfaces of the Prior Product." The text of the clone product definition subsections is very cumbersome to read, but it specifically mentions OpenOffice, Wine, and OpenXchange by name without asserting that they are necessarily clone products."