Austin sez, “Last year the Librarian of Congress made it illegal to unlock your cell phone by changing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). This can lead to exorbitant costs to consumers traveling internationally and, perhaps more importantly, it is restricting our freedom in unfair ways. It also has odd implications like forcing the blind to file for exemption every three years in order to use third-party screen readers. After 100,000 people signed a petition on this issue, the White House responded in support of making these laws more fair. Sina Khanifar, who created that petition with support from Y-Combinator, Reddit, Mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more has launched a website to educate the public on the issue and give them the tools to notify their representatives directly with their thoughts on the issue.” Fix the DMCA
Follow this link:
Fix the DMCA! Repeal anti-circumvention and truly own your devices
New submitter razor88x writes “Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book’s dominant form. ‘We may be discovering,’ he writes, ‘that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The wait is over; diegocg writes “Linux kernel 3.7 has been released. This release adds support for the new ARM 64-bit architecture, ARM multiplatform — the ability to boot into different ARM systems using a single kernel; support for cryptographically signed kernel modules; Btrfs support for disabling copy-on-write on a per-file basis using chattr; faster Btrfs fsync(); a new experimental ‘perf trace’ tool modeled after strace; support for the TCP Fast Open feature in the server side; experimental SMBv2 protocol support; stable NFS 4.1 and parallel NFS; a vxlan tunneling protocol that allows to transfer Layer 2 ethernet packets over UDP; and support for the Intel SMAP security feature. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here’s the full list of changes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.