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Submission + - Intel Confirms HDCP Encryption Key Leak (informationweek.com)

Submitted by Fumbili
Fumbili writes: Intel on Thursday confirmed that the encryption code posted recently on a content sharing Web site is the master HDCP key used to secure video content on devices with protected interfaces, such as HDMI.
Oracle

Submission + - Oracle profits up 20%, outpacing industry (nytimes.com)

Submitted by yuna49
yuna49 writes: Ashlee Vance at the New York Times reports, "Oracle posted better-than-expected results for its first quarter on the back of strong sales of new software products and higher maintenance and support revenue. Wall Street analysts praised the company for turning in such results for a quarter that closed at the end of August, traditionally one of the slowest selling periods. Oracle’s performance also provided a bright spot for the business computing sector, which has produced a mixed bag of results in recent weeks. "

Submission + - US college blocks Facebook and Twitter (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by NotBornYesterday
NotBornYesterday writes: A social experiment is underway at a college in Pennsylvania. Eric Darr, the university's provost, was inspired to try the experiment when he observed his 16-year-old daughter at home with Facebook open on her laptop, listening to music on iTunes, and had apps open on her iPhone and three different conversations going on instant messaging – all simultaneously. "It struck me how overpowering all this was, not in a negative way, and it made me wonder what would happen if all that wasn't there."

So, for the past week the private Harrisburg University has cut off access through its networks to Twitter and Facebook, instant messaging services and video chat through Skype. The reaction of the 800 or so students ranged from curious to puzzled to outraged. And the results?

Alexis Rivera, an 18-year-old student of internet security, said she had been surprised by the effect of being deprived of her beloved instant messaging and Facebook. "It's a lot better," she said. "I can pay attention much better now." As it is a laptop university, students have computers open at most lectures. In an average class, Rivera would have AOL, Yahoo, MSN and Skype instant messaging running, with up to seven chats going at the same time. "Normally I'd be chatting to other people in the class about how boring it was," she said. This week, without the distractions, she has found herself taking more notes and following the tutor with greater understanding. She has been doing more homework, as in the past she often missed assignments because she was so busy messaging she didn't hear them. And she's also become more outgoing. "I'm a lot more social," she said. "I talk to a lot more people, face to face, rather than sitting there typing away."
Math

Submission + - Yahoo Spends 503 CPU-Years, Comes Up with Nothing (yahoo.net)

Submitted by
jamie
jamie writes: "The 2,000,000,000,000,000th bit of pi is zero, which the Yahoo! folks calculated in July using idle slices in a 1000-machine Hadoop cluster. 'To effectively utilize available cluster resources without monopolizing the whole cluster,' they write, 'we developed an elastic computation framework that automatically schedules computation slices...'"
Microsoft

Submission + - The Return of "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" (technologizer.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As part of its launch of the Internet Explorer 9 beta, Microsoft partnered with dozens of companies--from USA Today to BMW--to build sites that show off IE9's support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration. Some of them work extremely poorly in other browsers, and carry messages telling users to download IE9 for the best experience. Let's hope this isn't a return to the bad old days of the 1990s,when it was common for companies to slap "Best Viewed in Internet Explorer" logos on their sites and not even try to work equally well in every browser.

Comment Re:A rose by any other name (Score 1) 646

by Geccoman (#33594848) Attached to: High Fructose Corn Syrup To Get a Makeover

True story: I stopped eating/drinking anything with sugar in it, other than things like fruit, where it is still in it's original form. I lost 40 lbs in less than 6 months. I even increased the amount of food I was eating, to include MUCH more fat than before.

I was not willing to chew on a piece of sugar cane, so I guess you could say I had to limit my choices somewhat.
Transportation

Submission + - Back to the Futurama (mobilesynergetics.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: A GM-sponsored exhibition at the 1939 New York World's Fair portrayed a Utopian transportation-centric world 20 years hence, complete with vast superhighway networks. Interestingly, GM's Futurama (video link) accurately predicted wireless-based cooperative vehicle technologies that are currently being prototyped (video link). (Note, GM's exhibit was the original Futurama, not the Comedy Central show that ripped off its name.)
Windows

Submission + - Training a Help Desk to Support Windows 7 ?

Submitted by flibbidyfloo
flibbidyfloo writes: My company's help desk is ramping up to begin supporting Windows 7 in a large, globally distributed corporate environment. All of our support is phone-based and uses remote assistance tools when necessary. Most of our twenty-five agents are still on XP or Vista at home, and we'll probably only have it on our work machines a month before the users do. They need training from basic differences up through providing detailed troubleshooting assistance. Of course our budget is pretty limited, and I've been tasked with finding training materials we can use to get the desk up to speed.

What are good sources for training beyond what we can get for free from Microsoft, which seems mostly targeted at the end-user. I'm looking for both computer-based materials and "train-the-trainer" stuff I can use to prepare for my classroom.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Says No to Paying Bug Bounties (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft has no plans to follow in the footsteps of Mozilla and Google and pay researchers cash rewards for the bugs that they find in Microsoft's products.

In the wake of both Mozilla and Google significantly increasing their bug bounties to the $3,000 range, there have been persistent rumors in the security community that Microsoft soon would follow suit and start paying bounties as well. However, a company official said on Thursday that Microsoft was not interested in paying bounties.

"We value the researcher ecosystem, and show that in a variety of ways, but we don’t think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way. Especially when across the researcher community the motivations aren’t always financial. It is well-known that we acknowledge researcher’s contributions in our bulletins when a researcher has coordinated the release of vulnerability details with the release of a security update," Microsoft's Jerry Bryant said.
X

Journal Journal: FVWM - Crystal

Journal by Geccoman
So there I was, using Enlightenment for the past few years, when suddenly I found my self at the website for FVWM-Crystal. Link
Television

Journal Journal: Everybody loves Raymond, including me.

Journal by Geccoman
I don't really understand the whole purpose of it, but I find myself hopelessly addicted to syndicated episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. Everyday when i come home, I turn the tube over to channel 8 and stare at the screen for an hour of laughter and mayhem. I don't think there's a cure, is there?

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