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Even Dirtier IT Jobs 175

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan offers up 7 'even dirtier IT jobs' in a follow-up of last year's 7 dirtiest jobs in IT. Number four? Zombie console monkey. 'Wanted: Individuals with low self-esteem and high boredom threshold willing to spend long hours poring over server logs and watching blinking lights on a network console.'"
PC Games (Games)

Video Games Linked To Child Aggression 500

the4thdimension writes "CNN is running a story this morning that explains new research showing a correlation between video games and aggression in children. The study monitored groups of US and Japanese children, asking them to rate their violent behavior over a period of several months while they played video games in their free time. The study concludes that it has 'pretty good evidence' that there is a link between video games and childhood aggression." Stories like this make me want to smash things.
Operating Systems

MoBo Manufacturer Foxconn Refuses To Support Linux 696

Noodlenose notes a thread up on the Ubuntu forums, where a user is questioning the practices of hardware manufacturer Foxconn. The user describes how his new Foxconn motherboard caused his Linux install to freeze and fire off weird kernel errors. He disassembles the BIOS and concludes that a faulty DSDT table is responsible for the errors. Even though the user makes Foxconn aware of the problem, they refuse to correct it, as 'it doesn't support Linux' and is only 'Microsoft certified.' The user speculates darkly on Foxconn's motives. Read the forum, read the code, and come to your own conclusions. "I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here, I'll tell you what I did find. They have several different tables, a group for Windows XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX. The one for Linux points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board's ACPI implementation.' The worst part is Foxconn's insistence that the product is ACPI compliant because their tables passed to Windows work, and that Microsoft gave the the magic WHQL certification."
Government

Submission + - EU tells UK to deal with Phorm - or else (theregister.co.uk)

Dan541 writes: "

The European Commission has sent a message to the British government, and it reads something like this: "If you don't deal with Phorm, we will." Earlier this month, according to Dow Jones, the European Union commissioner for information society and media sent a "pre-warning letter" to UK authorities, voicing her concern over Phorm, the behavioral ad targeter poised to track user activity on Britain's three largest ISPs: BT, Carphone Warehouse, and Virgin Media. BT has already conducted two trials with Phorm — and web surfers were not notified. "It is very clear in E.U. directives that unless someone specifically gives authorization (to track consumer activity on the Web) then you don't have the right to do that," EU commissioner Viviane Reding said. If UK government does not deal with the issue, Dow Jones says, the EC could take action in the European Court of Justice.

I'm lost for words, the EU is now standing up for our rights. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/16/eu_warns_uk_over_phorm/"

Media

Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It 396

iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: "The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer lobotomized brain-deadness that has characterized music DRM, but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'... DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won't deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market? The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken) or 2) to nickel-and-dime consumers into accepting a new pay-for-use regime that sees moving tracks from CD to computer to MP3 player as a 'privilege' to be monetized."
Mozilla

Firefox 3.0.1 Fixes 'Carpet Bombing' Issue 168

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 3.0.1 was released today. It fixes 3 security vulnerabilities, including a critical issue reported by Billy Rios, Ben Turner, and Dan Veditz. The issue could be combined with an issue in Apple's Safari browser to read data from the user's disk or to execute arbitrary code. This issue was previously discussed on Slashdot. The release also fixes a remote code execution bug involving the CSS reference counter, reported by the Zero-Day Initiative (previously discussed on Slashdot here), as well as a Mac-only potential code execution bug involving GIF image rendering, reported by Drew Yao of Apple Product Security."
The Courts

SCO Owes Novell $2.5 Million 174

CrkHead writes "Groklaw has posted Judge Kimball's ruling on SCO v Novell. For those that have been following this saga, we finally get to watch the house of cards start to fall. For those new to this story, it started with SCO suing Novell and having all its motions decided in summary judgement and went to trial only on Novell's counter claims. Cheers to PJ for keeping us informed!"

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