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Security

Submission + - Virtual servers introduce new security threats (networkworld.com)

bednarz writes: "IT managers worry that security attacks designed to exploit a hypervisor could infect virtual machines that reside on the same physical host, in what is known as a "virtual-machine escape." If a virtual machine is able to "escape" the isolated environment in which it resides and interact with the parent hypervisor, industry experts say it's possible an attacker could gain access to the hypervisor, which controls other virtual machines, and avoid security controls designed to protect the virtual machine. "The Holy Grail of security in the virtual world is to bounce out of the [virtual machine] and take control," said Burton Group analyst Pete Lindstrom."
Businesses

Submission + - Linux POS systems (blogspot.com) 2

ReallyEvilCanine writes: It's been five and seven years since the last articles about running a POS (point of sale a.k.a. cash register system) on Linux and the pickings still look slim. The alternatives are expensive, closed-source systems with proprietary hardware and high monthly licence fees with only enough journaling and data access to keep the tax collectors happy. I don't mind paying for development but the constant fees and the lack of access to my own data are unacceptable.

A serious and useful restaurant POS system must include touch screen support, no fewer than four levels of access (user, power user, manager, admin), user identification via card/key, trainee access (non-journaled), journaling, multiple pricing and tax structures, changes to items and prices on-the-fly, reports, data export for taxes and accounting, inventory control and ordering functionality. Is there anything available yet or even in the works?

Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Apple warns Boot Camp could lead to fewer Mac apps

Stony Stevenson writes: Apple is conceding that its decision to include Boot Camp in its new Leopard operating system could cause some developers to discontinue writing applications for the Mac OS. In a report to investors released last week, Apple warned that Boot Camp, "may deter developers from creating software applications for Mac OS X if such applications are already available for the Windows platform." Mac sales could suffer if that happens, Apple warns in its annual report. "The company believes decisions by customers to purchase the company's hardware products are often based on the availability of third-party application software," Apple said.
The Courts

Submission + - Iptable and busybox to sue major european telco

Lejade writes: "Harald Welte (of iptable and gpl-violations.org fame) is suing the second biggest French internet operator, with moral support from two Busybox authors, Rob Landley and Erik Andersen, and legal support from the FSF France. The operator, ironically named "Free", is accused of violating these author's rights by infringing the GPLv2 while distributing their homebrewed DSL router boxes, the "freebox".

Free (mother company is Iliad) is well known for bringing major innovations on the french DSL market, thanks to their massive usage of free-as-freedom software in their core-product, the Freebox. This network appliance is a router, a TV decoder, a VoIP phone switch and since recently a wireless PVR and personal storage space.

The French community started talks with the operator several years ago, asking them to advertize and provide the source for the GPL software embedded into their Freebox, distributed in more than 2 millions homes in France. Iliad was granted 30 days to comply with the terms of the GPL before the issue is brought to the court.

In the meantime, a donation campaign has been setup to help covering the legal costs. 12,000 of the 25,000 needed for the first phase have been raised so far."
Music

Submission + - Pirate Bay Facing A More 'Old Fashioned' Pressure (arstechnica.com)

Jety writes: "Ars Technica has an article reporting that The Pirate Bay is facing legal pressure from a new front. A wealthy musician with a track record for going head-to-head with record labels and little kids is now joining the queue to take a legal swing at TPB. What I find particularly interesting about this article is the description of the "camera-toting investigators following [The Pirate Bay admins] around in cars marked with Danish plates."

This sort of borderline-harassment raises an interesting question: with billions of dollars on the line, and the 'pure evil' of those who stand to lose it, how long will it be before someone takes a page from the Tony Soprano playbook and TPB headquarters mysteriously burns down or one of the admins has an 'unfortunate accident'? Though the question strikes me as a bit sensationalistic, a part of me marvels that it hasn't happened already."

Windows

Submission + - Vista Requires More Hardware Resources than Micros (fliiby.com)

nitroy2k writes: A new level of the absurd... Windows Vista requires more hardware resources than Microsoft's Windows for Supercomputers. Yet one operating system is designed to run on home computers while the other is aimed at the high-performance computing (HPC) market. And when it comes to the actual machines, there simply is no contest between the performance delivered by a commercially-available, off-the-shelf PC and a supercomputer. Super-Windows With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Microsoft made the first step into the high-performance computing market, the initial stage in a strategy set up to make HPC a mundane aspect of the commercial mainstream, in the company's vision. The availability of Windows HPC Server 2008 will be synonymous with the Redmond company gaining ground on parallel supercomputers and computer clusters. Parallel computing represents without a doubt the future direction of evolution for processor architectures, with even Microsoft anticipating the tailoring of the Windows client to multicore infrastructures. http://blog.fliiby.com/archives/2007/11/18/vista-requires-more-hardware-resources-than-microsofts-windows-for-supercomputers/
Privacy

Submission + - NSA backdoor in Slashdot? (wired.com)

Technical Writing Geek writes: "There are a bunch of constants — fixed numbers — in the standard used to define the algorithm's elliptic curve. These constants are listed in Appendix A of the NIST publication, but nowhere is it explained where they came from.

What Shumow and Ferguson showed is that these numbers have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can predict the output of the random-number generator after collecting just 32 bytes of its output. To put that in real terms, you only need to monitor one TLS internet encryption connection in order to crack the security of that protocol. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115"

Math

Submission + - Surfer Devises 'Theory of Everything' (telegraph.co.uk)

Dylan Knight Rogers writes: "Surfer dude physicist Garrett Lisi has devised a 'theory of everything' based upon the complex mathematical constructs of the 'E8'. From the article:

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape." What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8. Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'
His most interesting treatise on physics can be found here."

Announcements

Submission + - 'Man stunned by taser dies' (cnn.com) 1

AnarchyAo writes: A video recently uploaded to CNN.com depicts a Russian man throwing computers, and chairs at the glass windows in an American airport. The man had been asked by his mother to wait in the airport lobby for her, but when she never arrived some ten hours later, he became angry. As a bystander yells for someone to get a Russian interpreter, security officers arrive and subdue the man with two shocks of a taser. The man later died. The entire incident is now under investigation, and an autopsy will reveal an exact reason for the man's death.
Space

Submission + - Incredible Holmes Comet grows bigger than the sun (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: "The Sun is no longer the largest object in our solar system. The recently visible-to-the-naked-eye Holmes comet has achieved that distinction today. The comet has a larger gas and dust cloud known as the coma, and consequently it has a larger diameter than the sun according to astronomers at the University of Hawaii. Scientists don't seem to have a guess as to how big it will ultimately become. The Holmes coma's diameter on Nov. 9 was 869,900 miles (1.4 million kilometers), based on measurements by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. The sun's diameter, stated differently by various sources, is about 864,900 miles (1.392 million kilometers). http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21947"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Live and its misbehaving bots

FirienFirien writes: eKstreme.com is reporting that IP addresses belonging to Microsoft are spamming websites with spoofed Live.com referer headers suggesting good rankings for porn, pharma, and other random keywords on their search engines. The only official word is confirmation in September saying this is a quality check, but from the referral headers it looks anything but that. Other reports indicate that the Microsoft bot is downloading AdSense javascript, which interferes with impressions and lowers click-through-rates. A lot of webmasters are angry at this apparent Microsoft misbehavior, whether interpreted as anticompetitive fiddling or plain referral spam.
Media

Submission + - Where are people going... CNN.com? No....Mininova. (fastsilicon.com)

mrneutron2003 writes: "As proof positive of the relative disconnect mainstream media experiences on the internet, multibillion dollar news organization CNN is now outranked in sheer web traffic by......a torrent search engine. It appears that sometime in mid September mininova.org surpassed CNN , and as you can see from the accompanying Alexa graph continues to skyrocket well ahead of the worlds #1 news organization. Seems people are more interested in the next episode of Heroes, than they are the 2008 Presidential Election. I can't half blame them. http://www.fastsilicon.com/off-the-wall/where-are-people-going-.-cnn.com-no-mininova.org.html?Itemid=60"
The Internet

Submission + - Ressources for "wiki startups"

Wikiscuba Admin Charles writes: "I've been participating, with another scuba diver from Britain, in setting up a wiki regarding things scuba diving. The site is two years old and growing (slowly but surely), but I feel like we've hit a little snag. There's a few issues we're looking to resolve. I was wondering if the slashdot community would have any insight to offer on the following items or would know of ressources for wikis looking to grow faster.

1- What's up with the random string edit spam? We had regular spam for a while (with links to pharmaceutical vendors and the other classics), to which we responded by activating the reCaptcha extension on our mediawiki installation for edits with links. Now, we're getting edits with random strings of letters, 6 to 15 characters long. We can't quite make sense of the utility of such spam. So far, we've speculated that it's used as a test bed to see which edits the wiki will accept. It's our best guess. Most importantly, we don't really know how to get rid of it aside from activing the reCaptcha extension for all anonymous edits, which we're not too fond off. We feel it might turn off new users too much. Is there another way to get rid of that spam? I've been looking for patterns in the edits but couldn't find one, so I'm not too sure how to form a regex which would catch those instances and those only.

2- We would like to have a new service, which would enable users to fill out a form. After submission, a standard wiki page would be created, which would contain the formatted information that was submitted. I've searched in several places but couldn't find extensions that would use more information than the article title. Purists will say that it's not the right way to approach creating wiki pages, but the reality still is that as a wiki becomes more specialized, one has to find ways to entice users who are less familiar and less willing to learn standard wiki syntax (even though it's not very hard). Also, such a system would make it easier for complete neophytes to become familiar with the creation and edition of wiki pages. Unfortunately, my programming skills aren't good and current enough to tackle such a project rapidly. Does the community know of an extension which does this or of a way to find a willing developper who'd be interested in coding this up? Is there a good ressource on learning how to code extensions for mediawiki?

3- What's the fastest way to boost the exposure of a new wiki without reverting to spamming everything and everyone? We're looking for people with both an interest in scuba diving and some computer technology. We've been talking about our growing project on scuba diving forums and I'm wondering what the more "traditional" ways are of gaining exposure for a new, specialized wiki, if such methods exist. How would you raise the exposure level of a relatively new wiki without seeming to be spamming the world? On a related topic, is anyone here aware of studies done on the growth of community based projects? As the word spreads, the rate of growth increases. Is there a way to see how on track a project is by how fast the number of edits change?

Thanks for any input!"
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - I hope the GetTheFacts add pops up! 1

An anonymous reader writes: from MicroSofts site "The Infolect® application, which went into production in September 20"......."In the past six years, there have been no production outages at the London Stock Exchange, and the new systems running on Microsoft technologies are critical to maintaining this 100 per cent reliability record."
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200042

and a 2 years later
"London Stock Exchange blames outage on Infolect"

http://www.cio.co.uk/concern/security/news/index.cfm?articleid=2248&pagtype=allchantopdate
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - U.S. Pork Board vs. Cannibals 2

Muzadi writes: "To the law offices of Faegre & Benson LLP:

Recently, your office requested from Cafepress.com the cessation of my use of the slogan "Vegetarians: The Other White Meat" on t-shirts and bumperstickers provided by my site Crankmonkeys at the behest of your client the U.S. Pork Board. While I appreciate your employer's need to protect their trademarks, unfortunately this claim does not meet the requirements of Title 15, Chapter 22, Subchapter I, 1051 of the Federal statue governing the use of trademarks:

1. The term "The Other White Meat" is a humorous, satirical expression, and as such falls under the protection of parody and similar such works by the First Amendment. See: L.L. Bean, Inc. v. Drake Publishers, Inc., 811 F.2d 26, 28 (1st Cir. 1987) and Hormel Foods Corp. v. Jim Henson Prods., 73 F.3d 497 (2d Cir. 1996).

2. The term "The Other White Meat" as a humorous parody relating to human meat significantly pre-dates the Pork Board's adoption of the slogan in question. Specifically, the Pork industry's usage of the slogan in question dates to only as recently as 1987, whereas the use of the expression relating to human meat significantly predates 1987. The trademark, thus, is arguably not even valid in the first place, and certainly not when applied to anything other than pork.

3. The term "Vegetarians: The Other White Meat" might be protected if the Pork Board's primary business was selling humorous t-shirts and bumperstickers. As its primary business is promoting the over consumption of massive amounts of greasy bacon dripping with cholesterol inducing heart attacks, there is no legal conflict.

4. The term "The Other White Meat" as used by the Pork Board is a trademark, and as such only applies to the use of said trademark as applied to the specific area of commerce engaged in by the Pork Board. Unless the Pork Board has expanded its promotion of food from pork into the area of the consumption of human flesh, there is no commercial conflict, reducing the validity of a possible claim of trademark privilege.

Given the clarity of the legal statutes that in this case completely undermine your assertion, a lack of any adequate response on your part should constitute an acknowledgement of the idiocy of your claim, clearing the way for Cafepress.com to reenable the sale of my product.

Thank you very much."

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