stress_weenie - Slashdot User

Case Against Video-Sharing Site Dismissed 131

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 28, 2008 @01:49PM from the separating-tool-from-tools dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A California copyright infringement case brought by an adult video maker against a video sharing web site, Veoh Networks, has been thrown out, based upon the 'safe harbor' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ('DMCA'). In a 33-page decision (PDF), the Court concluded that Veoh was covered by the DMCA, and had carried out its duties to comply with takedown notices in a reasonable manner. The Court rejected the plaintiff's arguments showing possible ways that users could do an end-around, saying that the law requires 'reasonable' compliance, rather than perfection, and noted that the DMCA is 'designed to facilitate the robust development and world-wide expansion of electronic commerce, communications, research, development, and education in the digital age'."

New Algorithm Boosts Network Efficiency 114

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday August 28, 2008 @10:35AM from the more-is-better dept.

palegray.net writes "Researchers at the University of California have developed a new network routing algorithm that has the potential to significantly boost Internet traffic routing efficiency. This new approach focuses on the needs of dynamic networks, where connections are frequently transient. From the article: 'What the team did with their new routing algorithm, according to Savage's student Kirill Levchenko, was to reduce the "communication overhead" of route computation — by an order of magnitude.' For the technically inclined, the full research publication (PDF) is available."

WCG Tournament Director Admits Drugs In E-Sports 448

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday August 28, 2008 @09:44AM from the hopped-up dept.

SlappingOysters writes "In the lead up to the World Cyber Games finals in Germany, Gameplayer has an incredible interview with Tournament Director Alex Walker in which he freely admits knowledge of participants taking illegal drugs to enhance their performance. The interview came in response to a previous article by the site in which they examined whether there was a need to bring drug testing into professional gaming events to ensure a level playing field. Walker said, 'I've seen a number of players at national tournaments who came in "baked" (that's stoned for the uninformed) purely so they could play better. In most cases they did, although obviously they couldn't just pull out another joint midway through. In one WCG, a player I knew took amphetamines an hour before his match to boost his reflexes.'"

IE8 Beta Released To Public 605

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday August 28, 2008 @08:04AM from the upgrades dept.

Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."

Quebec Govt Sued For Ignoring Free Software 388

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday August 28, 2008 @02:58AM from the what-about-the-cheap-stuff dept.

Mathieu Lutfy writes "The CBC is reporting that 'Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. ... Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.' The group also has a press release in English."

Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes 502

Posted by kdawson on Friday August 22, 2008 @12:33PM from the i-didn't-do-it-nobody-saw-me-you-can't-prove-anything dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Premier Election Solutions (a subsidiary of Diebold) has acknowledged a flaw that causes the systems to lose votes. It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio's counties, but they are issuing guidelines for avoiding the problem that presumably contain a work-around. While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in 'certain circumstances' — something their initial analysis missed. It would be nice to hope that Ohio poll workers would be tech-savvy enough to make this a non-issue, but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer."

Microsoft Releases Photosynth 247

Posted by kdawson on Friday August 22, 2008 @11:43AM from the look-at-me-i'm-flying dept.

Spy Hunter writes "Photosynth has graduated from a 'tech preview' to a complete service. Now you can upload your own photos and have them automatically transformed into a 'synth': a 3D fly-through reconstruction of your home, your vacation, or anything else you can take pictures of. Learn more about Photosynth at the official blog, see what Walt Mossberg has to say about it, or just go try it out right now." According to Mossberg, Photosynth works on PCs using IE or Firefox, but not yet on Macs. We've been discussing Photosynth since its introduction.

New Attack Against Multiple Encryption Functions 130

Posted by kdawson on Friday August 22, 2008 @10:53AM from the think-harder dept.

An anonymous reader sends word of a paper presented a few days back by Adi Shamir, the S in RSA, that promises a new form of mathematical attack against a broad range of cryptographic ciphers. The computerworld.com.au report leans heavily on Schneier's blog entry from the Crypto 2008 conference and the attached comments. Shamir's paper has not been published yet. "[The new attack could affect] hash functions (such as MD5, SHA-256), stream ciphers (such as RC4), and block ciphers (such as DES, Triple-DES, AES) at the Crypto 2008 conference. The new method of cryptanalysis has been called a 'cube attack' and formed part of Shamir's invited presentation at Crypto 2008 — 'How to solve it: New Techniques in Algebraic Cryptanalysis.' The new attack method isn't necessarily going to work against the exact ciphers listed above, but it offers a new generic attack method that can target basically formed ciphers irrespective of the basic cipher method in use, provided that it can be described in a 'low-degree polynomial equation'... What may be the biggest outcome from this research is the range of devices in widespread use that use weaker cryptographic protection, due to power or size limitations, that are now vulnerable to a straightforward mathematical attack."

Red Hat, Fedora Servers Compromised 278

Posted by kdawson on Friday August 22, 2008 @10:04AM from the quick-action dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In an email sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it has been revealed that both Fedora and Red Hat servers have been compromised. As a result Fedora is changing their package signing key. Red Hat has released a security advisory and a script to detect potentially compromised openssh packages."

Firefox SSL-Certificate Debate Rages On 733

Posted by kdawson on Friday August 22, 2008 @08:27AM from the four-screens-i-mean-really dept.

BobB-nw points out the ever more raucous debate over the way Firefox 3 handles self-signed certificates. The scary browser warnings have affected a number of legitimate sites (such as Google AdWords and LinkedIn) that didn't renew certs in time. Lauren Weinstein loudly called attention to the problem early in July. "If you visit a website with either an expired or a self-signed SSL certificate, Firefox 3 will not show that page at all. Instead it will display an error message... To get past this error page, users have to go through four different steps before they can access the website, which from a usability standpoint is far from ideal. This way of handling websites with expired or self-signed SSL certificates is bound to scare away a lot of inexperienced users, no matter how legitimate the website is."

UK Gov't Lost Personal Data On 4M People In One Year 163

Posted by timothy on Friday August 22, 2008 @04:36AM from the of-which-they-are-aware dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The U.K. government has lost the personal information of up to four million citizens in one year alone. The astonishing figures, calculated by the BBC, added up as Whitehall departments slowly released their annual reports for the year to April. And the trend has not stopped — in the latest revelation, HM Revenue Customs, which infamously lost the details of 25 million child benefits claimants last November on two unencrypted discs, experienced 1,993 data breaches between 1 October last year and 24 June." (More below.)

A Mozilla Plugin to Help Overcome IE Rendering Flaw 270

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @05:11PM from the like-a-screaming-monkey dept.

least_weasel writes "An article on Ars Technica reveals Mozilla's intention to create and release a plugin for Internet Explorer that would allow the often-criticized IE to utilize some of the cooler rendering code developed for Firefox. The current WIP focuses on rendering using HTML5 standards, but the plans seem to be more ambitious than just fixing this one small piece of IE. The article covers some of the plans, hurdles, and potential benefits. It also spills the beans on the code name for the project: Screaming Monkey."

James Powderly of Graffiti Research Labs Detained In China 337

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @02:43PM from the many-eyes-might-help dept.

An anonymous reader writes "News from Free Tibet 2008 that internationally known artist, technologist and co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab, James Powderly, was detained in Beijing early on August 19th while preparing to debut a new work and technology of protest, the L.A.S.E.R. Stencil. According to a Twitter message received yesterday by Students for a Free Tibet at approximately 5 pm Beijing Standard Time, Powderly had been detained by Chinese authorities at 3 am. His current whereabouts remain unknown. Powderly was the inventor of throwies." (Powderly's detention was also mentioned at Make Magazine's blog.)

Leaping the Uncanny Valley 421

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 19, 2008 @12:19PM from the compare-this-to-the-final-fantasty-movie dept.

reachums submits this glance at "the newest level of computer animation," intended to get past the paradoxical "uncanny valley" — that is, the way animated humans actually can appear jarring as the animation gets hyper-realistic. "This short video gives us a glimpse of what we can hope to see in the future of computer games and movies. Emily is not a real actress, but she looks like a real person, something we haven't truly seen before in computer animation."

A Good Reason To Go Full-Time SSL For Gmail 530

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 19, 2008 @11:26AM from the oh-that-hurts dept.

Ashik Ratnani writes with this snippet from Hungry Hackers: "A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers' conference in Las Vegas. Last week, Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, not just authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so, as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool, is planning to release it in two weeks."

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