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Businesses

Submission + - The Transistor's Birthday

Submitted by Apple Acolyte
Apple Acolyte writes: Tomorrow the transistor turns 60 years old:

Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry.
In a related story, the AP looks at the prospect of processor technology nearing the end of potential gains from fab shrinks, indicating that the transistor is showing its age and may need to be replaced in order for the industry to keep pace with Moore's Law.
Security

Submission + - FFXI accounts jacked by trojan keylogger 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A trojan virus targeting the players of the MMO Final Fantasy XI was released through a popular community page (ffxi.somepage.com). The virus keylogs players' account information and uses it to steal their accounts, strip them of sellable gear, and sometimes to put them to use as Real Money Trade bots. No official word on exactly how many accounts were stolen, but the thefts seem to have started at the end of November and haven't stopped since. World of Warcraft players may also be at risk. One community responded by identifying the infection and making lists of stolen accounts. Square-Enix responds on the game's homepage by reminding everyone that the "Starlight Festival is almost here"!
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - $85000 Cellphone Charge (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Piotr Staniaszek had been using his cell phone as a modem for his computer, thinking he was covered under his $10-a-month unlimited mobile browser plan from Canadian telco Bell Mobility. He actually caught the bill at $65,000." Staniaszek thought he was being clever using the phone as a modem to connect to the Internet. He must have downloaded a lot quasi-legal [adult] media files to accrue that much charges. Unfortunately, carriers have very special definitions of what kind of data their unlimited data plans cover.
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - EverQuest 2: Devs Grant Favors to Cheating Guild 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: SOE's small and generally quiet EQ2 Test Server is suddenly at the center of a major controversy. A guild proven to have enjoyed Dev favors on Test was transferred for free to a Live (production) server. No other Test players were allowed this "small kindness," widely known to be forbidden, and transfers from one Live PvE server to another usually cost a player $50 USD.

In an epic thread on SOE's official EQ2 forums, the new senior producer for the game (Bruce "Froech" Ferguson, taking over for the recently departed Scott Hartsman) insults and blames the other players for the fiasco, choosing a guilt trip instead of an apology. Red-names at SOE claim to be sorry that the player-base is offended but, in excellent political double-speak, never once acknowledge themselves as the source of the offense.
Businesses

Submission + - Should IT Support the iPhone for Business?

Submitted by
explosivejared
explosivejared writes: "Should IT departments support the iPhone for business use? A new report by Forrester Research suggests not. The report cites security issues and pricing as cons that outweigh the pros of usability and popularity. From the article: "Enterprises often make mobile device purchasing decisions based on the experience of their peers or industry analysts' recommendations, but with such information lacking about the iPhone, Forrester said it won't likely be making its way into many businesses anytime soon.""
The Internet

Submission + - Canada's New Copyright Debate

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Leave it to Michael Geist, who led the fight against the Canadian DMCA, to put this week's event into perspective. He highlights how the online pressure against the government shows the power of social media and how the debate in Canada over copyright must now address user rights and consumer property concerns.
Networking

Submission + - Data trips between light and sound

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "As you probably are aware, future communications networks will certainly be based on optics. A research team led by Duke University physicists has done an important discovery which might lead to these future super-fast optical communications networks. The team has found a way to store information coming from a beam of light by converting it to sound waves. More importantly, it was able to retrieve it again as light waves. These reversible data transfers from light to sound are today limited to labs. Several years will pass before commercial companies can use this technique because there are still some technical issues to solve. But read more for additional references and a diagram showing how data can flow between light and sound and light again.."
Government

Submission + - Boys to Girls ratio exceeds 120:100 in China (sina.com)

Submitted by
hackingbear
hackingbear writes: "Surveys in China show that boys-to-girls ratio exceeds the alarming 120:100 in the country.

The number of males in China at marriage age is 18 million more than that of females due to a long period of high sex birth ratio since the 1980s, according to the country's family planning authorities.

The sex ratio at birth in rural areas is 122.85:100, higher than the national average of 119.58:100, as compared with the normal sex ratio of 103 to 107:100, according to Zhang Weiqing, National Population and Family Planning Commission director.
This is, of course, the result of the One-Child Policy mixing with the must-male-offspring-or-damned-by-ancestors heritage (which is the main cause of the Policy was needed.)

China will continue to crack down on illegal prenatal sex selection and will try to help people discard traditional ideas of a preference for boys...
And of course, as usual, whatever the laws say people will find a way to get around. They will continue to abort girl fetuses until they get a boy."
The Military

Submission + - British nukes protected solely by bicycle locks

Submitted by StationM
StationM writes: Newsnight at BBC2 has revealed that British were secured only by a bicycle lock and 'trust' in the integrity of the officers in charge of the weapons. "Newsnight has discovered that until the early days of the Blair government the RAF's nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key...The Royal Navy argued that officers of the Royal Navy as the Senior Service could be trusted:

"It would be invidious to suggest... that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders".

Neither the Navy nor the RAF installed PAL (Permissive Active Link) protection on their nuclear weapons.

The RAF kept their unsafeguarded bombs at airbases until they were withdrawn in 1998."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7097101.stm

sure makes me feel safe!
Privacy

Submission + - Do you have any idea who last looked at your data?

Submitted by
tqft
tqft writes: "Or why the NSA is overspending.

"What these situations have in common is that a corporation was a ready source of data. And as search engines and social networks collect more and more user data for business purposes, governments will find that data more and more useful for their investigatory purposes.

Further, as a person's stored data profile grows to include items such as group memberships, purchases and a list of friends, it forms a very tempting target for governments to try to mine for suspected criminal contacts. This concept is of course not new, with traffic analysis (of phone calls or data) being an ancient intelligence technique. But corporations are now essentially volunteering to collect all the information, put it in a readily searchable package and then perform all the analytical work. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/15/comment

Yes yahoo and friends are doing it for advertising and the governments are subverting it. But honestly, wouldn't at least some of the NSA dollars on collecting everything and doing it themselves be better spent getting people to sign up to social networking sites and let the users incriminate themselves?

"Search engine companies are understandably reluctant to confront these issues. They make predictable statements about needing to obey local laws and the benefits of their products"

"We cannot expect that having large warehouses of data on individuals will be free from unintended consequences, especially when there are incentives to try to build highly detailed models of everyone's lives. The price of total personalisation is total surveillance."

Article authors blog here:
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001280.html"
The Internet

Submission + - Comcast Sued Over BitTorrent Blocking

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From the other-shoe-dropping dept?
WIRED's Threat Level blog reports that cable ISP Comcast is being sued by a California man over it's interference with the BitTorrent use of its customers, "arguing that the company's secret use of technology to limit peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent violates federal computer fraud laws, their user contracts and anti-fraudulent advertising statutes."

Comcast maintains that "Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services." And says, "...we use the latest technologies to manage our network so that they can continue to enjoy these applications."

The plaintiff wants the court to force Comcast to stop interfering with the traffic, and also wants the court to certify the suit as a class action.

Related stories on Slashdot:
FCC Complaint Filed Over Comcast P2P Blocking
Comcast Confirmed as Discriminating Against FileSharing Traffic
Security

Submission + - NAC's dirty little secrets told by early adopters (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Early network access control adopters are attracted to the technology for very specific reasons that often don't include the main reason NAC technology was brought about in the first place: endpoint checking. For example, the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development, which has used Mirage Networks NAC gear since 2005, has about 250 desktops attached to two Extreme Black Diamond 1Gbps switches that are connected by a 10Gbps fiber link. The department uses the Mirage device for two reasons, Kupchaunis says. The first is to keep unauthorized users who are allowed into the building from gaining network access, a form of identity-based access control. The second is to make sure devices that are allowed access don't misbehave once they are on the network. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/111407-nac-early-adopters.html"
The Internet

Submission + - Average number of links on a web page (uclue.com)

Submitted by flatbush52
flatbush52 writes: According to Uclue, the average website includes 62.5 links. Actually, the figure is really according to IBM, Microsoft, and HP researchers who studies a few hundred million pages. But Uclue is the one who puts it into perspective in a nicely done write-up. The figure includes all links on a page, including anchor tags, image links, advertising, etc. Because of the heavily skewed nature of the web, with a small number of sites housing thousands upon thousands of links, there's a sizable discrepancy between the mean and median figures, which is also discussed in the Uclue article. By the way, Uclue is the same group who gave us the controversial estimate on the Enegy Use of the Internet a few weeks ago...they're getting to be an interesting little operation.
Biotech

Journal Journal: Scientists discover protein cue that allows limb regrowth in newts

Journal by stemceller
Agence France Presse (AFP) reports "Scientists have discovered a protein's molecular signal that apparently plays a key role in allowing newts -- which are amphibians -- to regrow severed limbs, a report in the journal Science said Friday. The protein called nAG, produced by nerve and skin cells, apparently plays a key role in stimulating blastema cells, the undifferentiated cells from which a new organ or limb can grow, Kumar and

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