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Security

Submission + - Osama Stunt Embarasses APEC

GrpA writes: The Chaser's War On Everything, possibly best known previously for their booking flights under the names Terry Wrist and Al Kyder have been arrested at the APEC Summit for what could be one of the most audacious stunts yet performed by the team. Their latest work involved them driving a fake motorcade through the restricted APEC Summit zone, with Chaser "Chas Licciardello" emerged from the vehicle dressed as Osama Bin Laden, embarassing security forces that were guarding world leaders, including Chinese President Hu Jintao and US President George W Bush. I guess our current world leaders haven't learned from lessons of the past.
Portables

Submission + - Palm cancels Foleo

loshwomp writes: Evidently Palm has canceled its Foleo product just a few months after its introduction.

I guess it turns out that limiting your target market to people who already own an expensive Treo isn't a good idea. It's a shame, because the Foleo did have a few nice points — in particular, the instant-on/instant-off feature was a subtle but important convenience that's completely absent in many consumer electronics.
Linux Business

Submission + - Linux market share at 1.34%, surpassing Win 98 (arstechnica.com)

athloi writes: "Recent statistics released by W3Counter reveal that the market share of Windows 98 fell from 1.44 percent to 1.34 percent in August, reducing it to the same level of popularity as the open source Linux operating system, which saw its market share increase from 1.33 to 1.34 in the same period. (These are web statistics, probably less than reality depending on what sites they measure. See the "bad science" story posted earlier: I personally think this is probably inaccurate, but i trust the wisdom of Slashdot editors.)

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070903-linu x-marketshare-set-to-surpass-windows-98.html"

XBox (Games)

Submission + - MS says: Linux is inappropriate language

mocm writes: "The Inquirer has a story about a guy who wanted to use "linux" as his XBox Motto and got the message that this is inappropriate language. I tried it myself and got the same result. It seems that "linux" is on the same level as "sucks" and "baka" which it also won't accept. It will accept "linuxx" though and also "msbaka""
The Internet

Submission + - The Great Leader peddles limited capitalism (theglobeandmail.com)

hodet writes: Interesting article on the North Korean attempt to dip its toe into capitalism. They figure they can do it without giving anyone access to the Internet or the use of cell phones. Just makes me so grateful to live in the free world.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - More damaging compounds found in HFCS drinks (newswise.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Chi-Tang Ho, Ph.D., conducted chemical tests among 11 different carbonated soft drinks containing HFCS. He found 'astonishingly high' levels of reactive carbonyls in those beverages. These undesirable and highly-reactive compounds associated with "unbound" fructose and glucose molecules are believed to cause tissue damage, says Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. By contrast, reactive carbonyls are not present in table sugar, whose fructose and glucose components are "bound" and chemically stable, the researcher notes.

More here: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/532433/

Nintendo

Submission + - Aussie and NZ fans fed up with Nintendo (aussie-nintendo.com)

hinki writes: Interesting report made by a reader from Aussie Nintendo regarding the release schedule of Nintendo games in Australia.

From the article:
In an email to A-N, Davies said, "I have recently penned a formal report relating to the common delays of Nintendo's Wii software releases, specifically in the regions of Australia and New Zealand. After listening to your most recent Podcast, I can tell you too are concerned about this issue. Consumers around our regions are getting bullied and manipulated into unfair and borderline illegal region locking that prevents Wii owners from importing the much earlier released US versions of software."

I for one am sick and tired of waiting up to 6 or so months for an english game to come to Australia! It's good that we can import DS games, but we can't import Wii games as our console is region locked. The thing is, the console can support NTSC games (e.g. before the last Wii update, you could use the GameCube freeloader to play NTSC games on the Wii). So it's ridiculous that we have to wait so long for games.
Would be interesting to compare the release schedule of Nintendo Australia with the release schedule of Xbox and PlayStation in Australian compared to US/Europe.

The Internet

Submission + - Facebook Leaves Advertisers Exposed to Hate Speech (newscloud.com) 1

NewsCloud writes: "Does Facebook believe that no publicity is bad publicity? Why else would they leave a group called, "Fuck Islam" open since July 21, 2007 despite more than 53,482 members joining an opposing group called petiton: if "f**k Islam" is not shut down..we r quitting facebook group. Furthermore, advertisers such as Sprint, Verizon, T Mobile, Target, Qwest and French's wouldn't be too happy to learn that they are paying for ads on the "Fuck Islam" group pages.

I'm not advocating a policy against free speech, just strict enforcement of Facebook's own Terms of Use. The group name is clearly vulgar and obscene. Arguably, inflammatory and hateful. Facebook has positioned itself as the darling of the social network world, without the spam, porn and the sex offender problems of MySpace. Yet, this sort of thing isn't new to Facebook (see Facing Up to Facebook Racism and Elder hate groups on facebook. There's even an active group called I hate Iraqis targeting Iraqi refugees fleeing to Jordan.
Shouldn't a startup like Facebook, worth reportedly more than a billion dollars with over a hundred employees be expected to comply with its Terms of Use in less than six weeks?"

The Media

Submission + - Bad Science (badscience.net)

DocDJ writes: "Ben Goldacre (who writes an excellent article in The Guardian called Bad Science, which regularly demonstrates how poor the mainstream media is at reporting science) points out the flaws in the recent reporting of research which purported to show the evolutionary basis of 'blue for boys, pink for girls'."
Portables

Submission + - WD Scorpio Drive, 250 Gigs For Notebooks (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: "Mobile hard drives don't get nearly as much exposure as their more common 3.5 desktop counterparts, but there have been significant advances made in this space that warrant some attention. Western Digital, for example, has released a high-capacity 250GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, the Scorpio WD2500BEVS, that sports a few proprietary technologies dubbed WhisperDrive, ShockGuard, and SecurePark, that improve the drive's acoustic profile, power consumption, and durability. And despite being a 5400RPM drive, its performance characteristics put it well ahead of most other 2.5" drives with similar spindle speeds and just behind a full-sized desktop hard drive running at 7200RPM. With hard drive speeds being the limiting performance factor in many instances, a drive like this could make for a worthwhile notebook upgrade"
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - The Redneck Humor Zone (angelfire.com)

Anonymous Coward writes: "Howdy Pardners! Look like the holidays is commin' up faster than a bobcat with a bur under its tail. If yer like me, yer probably plannin' a big ol' Thanksgivin' barbacue. Yer kin folks will show up and et ya outta house n' home. If yer kin is like mine, thars gonna be one or two who act like a squirrel crawled up thar crawl space."
Windows

Submission + - Creative Labs' Vista driver team feeling stressed? (creativelabs.com) 2

regular_gonzalez writes: "While the X-Fi's issues under Vista have been widely reported, that doesn't prevent a flood of complaints pouring into the Creative Labs website, posted for all to see. What is more surprising is the employees' responses. A sampling:

# The drivers will be released when we are good and ready and happy with them
# Bitching like a 5 year old won't magically solve all our problems on the drivers.
# Call us hopeless and whatever else all you like, noone else is going to fix these drivers but us, demoralizing us won't bring it faster
# There are already reasonably working drivers supplied with the card, legally our responsibility stops there, think yourselves lucky we even bother updating the drivers at all.
# Anymore of these derogatory posts and we might well just flush the whole XFi/Vista64 saga to the toilet and move on.
Is Creative Labs obliged to treat even the most obnoxious of whiners with a certain level of respect, or is it refreshing to have a company actually state opinions that normally would be kept to themselves?"

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