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Education

Yahoo CEO Wrongly Claimed To Have Degree In Computer Science 363

Posted by samzenpus from the was-that-wrong? dept.
jmcbain writes "Scott Thompson, Yahoo!'s CEO who was hired on January 4 of this year, was found to have lied about his CS degree from Stone Hill College. Investigation from an activist shareholder revealed that his degree was actually in accounting, and apparently Thompson had been going with this lie since the time he served as president of PayPal's payments unit."
Graphics

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Benchmarked 119

Posted by samzenpus from the running-the-numbers dept.
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA has lifted the embargo on benchmarks and additional details of their GeForce GTX 690 card today. According to a few folks at NVIDIA, company CEO Jen Hsun Huang told the team to spare no expense and build the best graphics card they possibly could, using all of the tools at their disposal. As a result, in addition to a pair of NVIDIA GK104 GPUs and 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, the GeForce GTX 690 features laser-etched lighting, a magnesium fan housing, a plated aluminum frame, along with a dual vapor chamber cooler with ducted airflow channels and a tuned axial fan. The sum total of all of these design enhancements results in not only NVIDIA's fastest graphics card to date, but also one of its quietest. In the performance benchmarks, NVIDIA's new dual-GPU powerhouse is easily the fastest graphics card money can buy right now, but of course it's also the most expensive." The GeForce GTX 690 has been reviewed lots of different places today, Tom's Hardware and AnandTech to name a few.
Microsoft

Microsoft Using Linux To Optimize Skype Traffic 396

Posted by samzenpus from the strange-bedfellows dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A security researcher believes that Microsoft has overhauled Skype, with thousands of Linux boxes serving as the 'supernodes' that route calls between users of the voice-over-IP service. Kostya Kortchinsky of Immunity Security 'discovered the Linux supernodes using a Skype probing technique he and colleague Fabrice Desclaux first demonstrated in 2006,' according to Ars Technica. The drastic infrastructure change doesn't affect the peer-to-peer nature of the calls between Skype users."
Android

Oracle Vs. Google and the Right To Use APIs 155

Posted by samzenpus from the my-precious-code dept.
jfruh writes "Even as an EU court rules that APIs can't be copyrighted, tech observers are waiting for the Oracle v. Google trial jury to rule on the same question under U.S. law. Blogger Brian Proffitt spoke with Groklaw's Pamela Jones on the issue, and her take is that a victory for Oracle would be bad news for developers. Essentially, Oracle is claiming that, while an individual API might not be copyrightable, the collection of APIs needed to use a language is. Such a decision would, among other things, make Java's open source nature essentially meaningless, and would have lots of implications for any programming language you can name."
Security

Osama Bin Laden Didn't Encrypt His Files 333

Posted by samzenpus from the not-so-secret dept.
An anonymous reader writes "If you're running a terrorist organization, it might make sense to encrypt your files. Clearly Osama Bin Laden didn't realize that — as some of the documents seized during the raid on his hideout in Pakistan have been made public for the first time. 17 electronic documents, which were found on USB sticks, memory cards and computer hard drives after US Navy Seals killed the terrorist chief in the May 2011 raid, are being released in their original Arabic alongside English translations by the Combating Terrorism Center, reports Sophos."
Security

NY Judge Rules IP Addresses Insufficient To Identify Pirates 268

Posted by timothy from the that-pesky-proof-thing dept.
milbournosphere writes "New York Judge Gary Brown has found that IP addresses don't provide enough evidence to identify pirates, and wrote an extensive argument explaining his reasoning. A quote from the judge's order: 'While a decade ago, home wireless networks were nearly non-existent, 61% of U.S. homes now have wireless access. As a result, a single IP address usually supports multiple computer devices – which unlike traditional telephones can be operated simultaneously by different individuals. Different family members, or even visitors, could have performed the alleged downloads. Unless the wireless router has been appropriately secured (and in some cases, even if it has been secured), neighbors or passersby could access the Internet using the IP address assigned to a particular subscriber and download the plaintiff's film.' Perhaps this will help to stem the tide of frivolous mass lawsuits being brought by the RIAA and other rights-holders where IP addresses are the bulk of the 'evidence' suggested."
Data Storage

Ask Slashdot: DIY NAS For a Variety of Legacy Drives? 260

Posted by timothy from the thinking-about-a-giant-USB-hub dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I have at least 10 assorted hard drives ranging from 100 GB to 3 TB, including external drives, IDE desktop drives, laptop drives, etc. What's the best way to setup a home NAS to utilize all this 'excess' space? And could it be set up with redundancy built-in so a single drive failure would cause no data loss? I don't need anything fancy. Visibility to networked Windows PCs is great; ability to streak to Roku / iPad / Toshiba etc would be great but not necessary. What's the best way to accomplish this goal?"
Role Playing (Games)

Bethesda Announces Elder Scrolls MMO 295

Posted by timothy from the hey-zonk dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today Bethesda announced that their popular Elder Scrolls series of video games will be getting its own MMORPG. It's planned for 2013, and will be available for PCs and Macs. 'Players will discover an entirely new chapter of Elder Scrolls history in this ambitious world, set a millennium before the events of Skyrim as the daedric prince Molag Bal tries to pull all of Tamriel into his demonic realm. "It will be extremely rewarding finally to unveil what we have been developing the last several years," said game director and MMO veteran Matt Firor, whose previous work includes Mythic's well-received Dark Age of Camelot. "The entire team is committed to creating the best MMO ever made – and one that is worthy of The Elder Scrolls franchise."'
Medicine

Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage 684

Posted by timothy from the could've-told-you-that dept.
ideonexus writes "NFL Linebacker Junior Seau's suicide this week bears a striking similarity to NFL Safety Dave Duerson's suicide last year, who shot himself in the chest so that doctors could study his brain, where they found the same chronic traumatic encephalopathy that has been found in the brains of 20 other dead football players. Malcom Gladwell stirred up controversy in 2009 by comparing professional football to dog fighting for the trauma the game inflicts on players' brains. With mounting evidence that the repeated concussions football players receive during their careers causing a lifetime of brain problems, it raises serious concerns about America's most popular sport and ethical questions for its fanbase."
Crime

FBI Caught On Camera Returning Seized Server 267

Posted by timothy from the but-we-were-just-pampering-the-evidence dept.
sunbird writes "As previously covered on Slashdot, on April 18th the FBI seized a server located in a New York colocation facility shared by May First / People Link and Riseup.net. The server, which was operated by the European Counter Network ('ECN'), the oldest independent internet service provider in Europe, was seized in relation to bomb threats sent to the University of Pittsburgh using a Mixmaster anonymous remailer hosted on the server (search warrant). The FBI's action has been criticized by the EFF. Predictably, the threats continued even after the server seizure. On April 24th, the FBI quietly returned the server, without notifying either Mayfirst / People Link or riseup, and were caught on video doing it."
NASA

NASA Boss Accused of Breaking Arms Trade Laws 88

Posted by timothy from the what-part-of-regulation-XXIII-459823(aiii)-don't-you-understand? dept.
ananyo writes "The head of NASA Ames Research Center may have fallen victim to restrictive arms regulations — just as a US government report recommends changing them to help the space industry. Simon 'Pete' Worden, who recently announced that Mars exploration would be done by private companies, has been accused of giving foreign citizens access to information that falls under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). ITAR has hampered U.S. firms seeking to export satellite technology. The allegations against Worden come just as the new report recommends moving oversight of many commercial satellites and related activities from the State department to the Commerce department, and some fear they could provide lawmakers with reasons to not ease export controls."
Java

JavaFX Runs On Raspberry Pi 147

Posted by timothy from the crushing-fruit dept.
mikejuk writes "Oracle seem to be concerned that the Raspberry Pi manages to run Java properly and they are actively working on the problem. To prove that it more than just works, what better than to get a JavaFX app up and running — what could be more cutting edge? Unfortunately the trick was performed using a commercial version of the JDK with JIT support and some private code, but it is still early days yet. Java and JavaFX on Raspberry Pi takes us into a whole new ball game." Watch the video at the linked report to see it in action.
Censorship

B&N Pulls Linux Format Magazine Over Feature On 'Hacking' 301

Posted by timothy from the I-miss-borders dept.
New accepted submitter super_rancid writes that issue 154 of the "UK-based Linux Format magazine was pulled from Barnes and Noble bookstores in the U.S. after featuring an article called 'Learn to Hack'. They used 'hack' in the populist security sense, rather than the traditional sense, and the feature — which they put online — was used to illustrate how poor your server's security is likely to be by breaking into it."
Facebook

Open Compute Developing Wider Rack Standard 237

Posted by timothy from the so-many-to-choose-from dept.
1sockchuck writes "Are you ready for wider servers? The Open Compute Project today shared details on Open Rack, a new standard for hyperscale data centers, which will feature 21-inch server slots, rather than the traditional 19 inches. "We are ditching the 19-inch rack standard," said Facebook's Frank Frankovsky, who said the wider design offered better heat removal and a unified approach to power, including a 12 volt busbar. The Open Compute Project, developed by Facebook to advance open source hardware design, believes an open approach can avoid the mistakes of blade server chassis design."
The Gimp

Gimp 2.8 Finally Released 737

Posted by timothy from the they-brought-out-the-gimp-again-and-again dept.
Cryophallion writes "After many years of development, GIMP 2.8 is finally released. Among its features: the oft-desired single-window mode, layer groups, and many other massive improvements, including some of the GIMP UI team's work. This might be the release that helps make The GIMP a much more user friendly experience for newcomers, and has features that are rivaling those of certain exceptionally expensive commercial programs. While the porting of GEGL is still ongoing (and recently reported to have made massive advances made), this is a major step forward for one of the premier open source projects." Here are the official release notes.

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