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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What lightweight alternative to Chrome / Firefox do you use?

Submitted by thegarbz
thegarbz writes: It seems not a day goes by without yet another story reflecting poorly on major browsers. Not uncommon are stories that are mixed with a degree of bloat, either discussing rarely used features or directly criticising memory consumption of major browsers. Unfortunately memory consumption is quite often the result of complete feature implementation of technologies used on the web, including DRM for streaming services and WebRTC. Other times it's the result of security measures, feature creep, or poor coding.

So in 2019 for those of us with slower tablets, what browser do you use as an alternative to the big two? How well does it work with the modern HTML5 internet? Are websites frequently broken does the simplicity of other browsers largely go unnoticed?

Submission + - SPAM: Under Fire for Excluding Boys, Are All-Girls STEM Camps Helpful?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The LA Times recently reported that the U.S. Dept. of Education has opened more than two dozen investigations into universities across the nation that offer female-only scholarships, awards, professional development workshops and even science and engineering camps for middle and high school girls, prompting Forbes contributor Kim Elsesser to question if all-girls STEM camps are even helpful for girls. "Sex discrimination in educational programs is banned under Title IX, a federal law that applies to all schools, both public and private, that receive federal funding," the Times noted. "UC Berkeley, under federal review for running a Girls in Engineering summer camp for middle school students, said the program was open to all genders [UCTV promo for "Berkeley's Girls-Only Engineering Camp"]." Back in 2014, Fortune reported that iD Tech Camps spun off a girls-only chain of tech camps called Alexa Cafe (hosted at UC Berkeley and other universities) at the urging of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki ("the concept was mapped out in the offices of Google") and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. So, is it necessary to separate boys from girls in STEM education programs in the quest for STEM equity? Or is single-sex education, as the ACLU argued, based on junk science and disturbing gender stereotypes?
Security

Submission + - Intel Confirms 'Sophisticated' Attacks in January (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Intel was targeted by 'sophisticated' attacks last month, about the same time that Google reported its network had been breached, allegedly by Chinese hackers, Intel confirmed its annual report filed Monday with the SEC. 'We regularly face attempts by others to gain unauthorized access through the Internet to our information technology systems by, for example, masquerading as authorized users or surreptitious introduction of software,' read the 10-K filing. 'These attempts, which might be the result of industrial or other espionage, or actions by hackers seeking to harm the company, its products, or end users, are sometimes successful. One recent and sophisticated incident occurred in January 2010 around the same time as the recently publicized security incident reported by Google.' Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy denied any connection between the attacks against Google and his own firm. 'The only connection is timing,' Mulloy told Reuters.

Comment Re:So (Score 5, Informative) 334

by berboot (#31213592) Attached to: Ars Analysis Calls Windows 7 Memory Usage Claims "Scaremongering"
SuperFetch also keeps track of what times of day that applications are used, which allows it to intelligently pre-load information that is expected to be used in the near future.
Source: Wikipedia
Their work, says Horvitz, was able to predict which applications users would open by time of day and also by day of the week.
Source: InfoWeek

Comment Re:What is wrong with Forumla One? (Score 2, Informative) 73

by berboot (#24803445) Attached to: Rocket Racing League Flights With Armadillo Engine
2008 is the last year they will have the grooved tires. Next year, they'll allow full slicks again, but the aero requirements will be much more stringent (I've heard some people say that the new cars will have half as much downforce). All of this is part of Bernie's plan to make F1 cheaper for the smaller teams to participate (see Super Aguri Honda's withdrawl from the series.)
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox 3 AntiMalware does NOT send urls to Google (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The official developers guide of the Safe Browsing API by Google (here) indicates that there is no way you can query Google for a malware URL. Instead, you need to download the blacklist and ask for updates frequently. Then, you need to authenticate the list, canonicalize the URLs, split them into small parts, md5 hash them and compare them to the list. That does not sound like sending URLs to Google. You can also verify by looking at Firefox's source code. Last I heard, Firefox was open source.
The Courts

Submission + - Electric Slide Creator Backs Off In EFF Victory (eff.org)

Submitted by chameleon_skin
chameleon_skin writes: Richard Silver, purported creator of the Electric Slide, has backed down from his earlier assertion that under the DMCA videos of the dance he supposedly created cannot be shown on YouTube without his explicit permission. In the face of an EFF lawsuit, Mr. Silver agreed in the settlement to release the rights to the dance under the Creative Commons License. Put on your dance shoes and fire up your video cameras!
The Internet

Submission + - CBS buys Last.fm

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Last.fm, a social music site, has been purchased by CBS for $280 million. News.com.com.com analyzes the deal: "The service, which was founded in 2002, is popular, with more than 15 million active users worldwide. The acquisition gives CBS access to a young, tech- and music-savvy demographic, which is certainly a valuable asset. But according to Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, the hefty price tag suggests that CBS may be after the scrobbling technology too.""
Programming

Submission + - The Stagnation of Virtual Game Development

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "In an egotistical yet concise blog entitled "Why Don't Game Developers Do What I Wan't?", IEEE takes a stab at why virtual worlds have evolved so little in the past decade or more. Aside from the obvious better resolution and colors, why aren't there huge 'Snow Crash'-esque advancements? From the blog: "Mostly, a world costs too much to make. A little over a decade ago, a game character in a AAA title could be painted by a single artist in a week or two. Now, it takes a team of artists months to model, texture, rig, animate, and script a single character. Back in the day, Non-Player Characters could be single full-screen images of a person who talks to you via box of text, and sells you groceries or swords or whatever. Now, NPCs take nearly as much effort as main characters, and overall may take more, because you need a lot of variety in the NPCs that fill your virtual world. It takes a lot of time." He follows it up nicely in the second part (with a more offensive title, "Are Developers Just Thick, Or Something?") about development with this short insightful comment: "The apparent improvement in computers has been rather less dramatic than players suppose, I think, because much of what they want is AI-complete: that is, the desires require that the central problem of true artificial intelligence be solved first. But even simpler problems can mean much more work than one might first assume, if only because there are a world of them to solve." I agree with him on the point that we are disappointed that games aren't further along in mimicking human behavior or challenging us on a psychological level ... yet we're still blown away by eye candy. This is one of the fundamental lackings in today's games."
Businesses

Submission + - Is Place-Shifting Fair Use?

Submitted by Nom du Keyboard
Nom du Keyboard writes: Major League Baseball seems to want to control where you can watch their televised games, and they've set their sights on Slingbox. While you may be allowed to watch an ad-supported, or paid cable channel, of your team in your own home, MLB (and others) don't feel that includes watching it remotely in another city through your local broadcast. Although they call this "illegal distribution" (reminds you of the RIAA lawsuits), Sling Media has taken steps to ensure that only you can watch your own content, wherever you might be. While no one has yet been bold enough to actually test this in court (losing would be a disaster), does the content industry have the right to decide not only what and when (i.e. shows that can't be recorded for later viewing) you'll watch something, but where you have to watch it as well?
The Internet

MySpace Gets False Positive In Sex Offender Search 345

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the not-if-but-when dept.
gbulmash writes "In its eagerness to clear sex offenders off its site and publish their identities, MySpace identified an innocent woman as a sex offender. She shares a name and birth month with a sex offender who lives in a neighboring state and that was apparently enough to get MySpace to wrongly brand her and completely ignore her protests."
Privacy

OMB Website Exposes Thousands of SSNs 107

Posted by Zonk from the good-managing dept.
msblack writes "The New York Times is reporting that an Office of Management and Budget website accidentally exposed at least 30,000 social security numbers publicly online. As many as 100,000 to 150,000 individuals may have been affected. The cost to taxpayers just for notifications and credit monitoring is estimated to run $4 million. 'While there was no evidence to indicate whether anyone had in fact used the information improperly, officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau removed the Social Security numbers from the Census Web site last week. Officials at the Agriculture Department said Social Security numbers were included in the public database because doing so was the common practice years ago when the database was first created, before online identity theft was as well-known a threat as it is today. '"

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"Unibus timeout fatal trap program lost sorry" - An error message printed by DEC's RSTS operating system for the PDP-11

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