jarkus4 - Slashdot User

Submission + - TalkTalk fined £3 million for billing blunde (itpro.co.uk)

Submitted by

twoheadedboy

on Thursday August 18, 2011 @07:52AM

twoheadedboy writes: "UK telecoms firm TalkTalk has been fined £3 million by Ofcom after it charged thousands of people for services they didn't even get. Over 1,000 customers had lodged complaints by the time Ofcom started investigating both TalkTalk and its subsidiary Tiscali late last year. The pair had incorrectly billed over 62,000 customers between 1 January and 1 November 2010. At this point, Ofcom told them to rectify their billing problems by 2 December 2010. Yet despite efforts by TalkTalk and Tiscali to make changes, they still incorrectly billed nearly 3,000 consumers between 2 December 2010 and 4 March 2011."

Submission + - AT&T sues law firms trying to block T-Mobile d (cnet.com)

Submitted by Kludge on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @10:42PM

Kludge writes: CNET has an article about AT&T suing law firms that encourage people to oppose AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile. Perhaps now would be a good time to let the FCC know what you think about AT&T and Deutsche Telekom's deal.

Comment did anyone read the article? (Score 3, Interesting) 228

by jarkus4 on Tuesday August 16, 2011 @11:34AM (#37107658) Attached to: Yahoo, Facebook Test "Six Degrees of Separation"

Everyone here is bitching about privacy breach, algorithm complexity etc. Actually it has nothing to do with this experiment. From TFA
"Anyone with a Facebook account can participate to verify if everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth. You’ll be asked to select one of your Facebook friends whom you believe is most likely to know the “target person” that has been assigned to you. A message will then be sent from friend to friend until you get it to the “target person.” The goal is to do this in as few steps as possible. "

Basically they are just repeating the old mail experiment, but with a new way of passing messages
- unless you (or one of your friends) participates nothing happens to your privacy
- no computer algorithm is involved
- no problem with celebrity profiles linking thousands of people that now nothing about each other

Submission + - EA Says Battlefield 3 Not To Come on Steam (itproportal.com)

Submitted by hypnosec on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:22AM

hypnosec writes: Computer games developer Electronic Arts (EA) has revealed that the company will not release Battlefield 3 on Steam. After a long pause from either side on the matter, EA has announced that its highly anticipated hard core computer game Battlefield 3 will not be made available to game lovers via Steam. Interestingly, this time the statement has been accompanied by reasons for the feud between the two firms. EA has released an official statement informing that the company has no option left but to discontinue its long partnership with Valve and stop selling its games through America’s leading game distributors due to change in policies by the hosting company.

Submission + - What Really Breaks SSL? (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1 on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:44AM

Orome1 writes: For an average web site, the security of the communication channel is rarely compromised by attackers using advanced exploitation techniques. On the contrary, the compromises virtually always come from the flaws in the way SSL is deployed. These problems are created by those implementing and maintaining web sites. And, in most cases, they can relatively easily be fixed. In the most recent round of SSL research, SSL Labs focused on programming and deployment errors that compromise SSL security even when SSL is properly configured, with strong cryptographic primitives and up-to-date libraries.

Submission + - Macs More Vulnerable Than Windows for Enterprise (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by sl4shd0rk on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:23AM

sl4shd0rk writes: At a Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researches presented exploits on Apples DHX authentication scheme which can compromise all connected Macs on the LAN within minutes. “If we go into an enterprise with a Mac and run this tool we will have dozens or hundreds of passwords in minutes,” Stamos said. Macs are fine as long as you run them as little islands, but once you hook them up to each other, they become much less secure.

Submission + - Patent Troll Lawyer Sanctioned: Extortion Tactics (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @06:26AM

An anonymous reader writes: For all the stories of patent trolls and copyright trolls, there haven't been too many stories of either being sanctioned for abusive or extortion-like practices... until now. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (one level below the Supreme Court) has approved over $600,000 in sanctions against a lawyer for a patent troll, saying that filing over a hundred lawsuits, each of which was followed up almost immediately with offers to settle at fees much cheaper than it would cost to fight, has the "indicia of extortion." Now if only judges started doing that more often.

Submission + - Drug Catapult Found at US-Mexico Border (foxnews.com) 2

Submitted by suraj.sun on Thursday January 27, 2011 @02:21AM

suraj.sun writes: Drug smugglers trying to get marijuana across the Arizona-Mexico border apparently are trying a new approach — a medieval catapult, capable of launching 4.4 pounds of marijuana at a time.

National Guard troops operating a remote video surveillance system at the Naco Border Patrol Station say they observed several people preparing a catapult and launching packages over the International Border fence last Friday evening.

The 3-yard tall catapult was found about 20 yards from the U.S. border on a flatbed towed by a sports utility vehicle, according to a Mexican army officer with the 45th military zone in the border state of Sonora.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/26/drug-catapult-mexico-border/

Submission + - 100 P2P users create 75% of BitTorrent traffic (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:04AM

Stoobalou writes: A study carried out at a university in Spain has discovered that just 100 hard-core users are responsible for three quarters of the traffic on popular file-sharing portals.

Researchers at the Carlos III University of Madrid say they have developed a tool which exposes "the name of the user who published the content, his/her IP address (which provides the user’s city, country and the service provider’s name) and the IP address of those users who later used the BitTorrent application to download the contents".

Perhaps the most surprising result of the research is that a hard core of around 100 regular users are responsible for 66 per cent of the uploads, or content published, as well as a whopping 75 per cent of all downloads.

Submission + - RIAA Threatens ICANN with lawsuit (icann.org)

Submitted by think_nix on Friday January 21, 2011 @05:22AM

think_nix writes: A letter from Victoria Sheckler, Deputy General Counsel the RIAA to ICANN threatens to sue ICANN over the future implementation of the .music gTLD if certain "measures" are not met by ICANN in compliance with the RIAA. The letter states and points out such concerns as 'Community Objections', 'Lack of Transparency' , and 'Malicious Conduct' the reasons of concern from the RIAA.

As noted above, we are concerned that a music themed gTLD will be used to enable wide scale copyright and trademark infringment

Auto Incorrect 86

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @06:19PM from the slip-of-the-finger dept.

theodp writes "Combine smartphone auto correction and fat-fingered virtual keyboard typing, writes Rob Walker, and the results can be hilarious and even shocking. The website Damn You, Autocorrect collects the awesomely embarrassing text messages that you never meant to send. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to masturbate some chicken for bisexuals night!"

The Ambiguity of "Open" and VP8 Vs. H.264 493

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday January 17, 2011 @01:37PM from the devil-in-the-details dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With all the talk about WebM and H.264, how the move might be a step backwards for openness, and Google's intention to add 'plugins' for IE9 and Safari to support WebM, this article attempts to clear misconceptions about the VP8 and H.264 codecs and how browsers render video. Firefox, Opera and Google rely on their own media frameworks to decode video, whereas IE9 and Safari will hand over video processing to the operating system (Windows Media Player or QuickTime), the need for the web to establish a baseline codec for encoding videos, and how the Flash player is proprietary, but implementation and usage remain royalty free."

Comment Re:Question... (Score 1) 418

by jarkus4 on Monday January 10, 2011 @10:25AM (#34822770) Attached to: Hosting Company Appears To Be Violating the GPL [Resolved]

And why not? Even with GPL I can decide I don't want to distribute my program anymore and stop doing this. I just can't stop other people that already got it from distributing it on their own.

EMC Engineer Steals Almost $1 Million of Kit One Piece at a Time 235

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 09, 2011 @06:30PM from the and-it-didn't-cost-me-a-dime dept.

aesoteric writes "An EMC test engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing almost $1 million worth of kit from his employer. He reportedly stole the unspecified goods from the storage giant's North Carolina factory using 'a small bag' to smuggle the kit out before selling it on the internet under a pseudonym."

The Guardian's Complicated Relationship With Julian Assange 237

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 06, 2011 @08:47PM from the it's-complicated dept.

Sonny Yatsen writes "Vanity Fair has published an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the unlikely and tumultuous working relationship between WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and The Guardian as the Iraq War Logs were being published. The piece highlights the differences and conflicts between the Guardian's journalistic standards and WikiLeaks' transparency. Particularly interesting is the revelation that Julian Assange threatened to sue The Guardian if they publish a portion of Iraq War Logs leaked to them by a disgruntled WikiLeaks volunteer, claiming 'he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.'"

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