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Music

Submission + - Freedb.org -- does anyone know what's going on? 1

Submitted by
tednolan
tednolan writes: "The hosts behind the round-robin name freedb.freedb.org provide (provided?) a service to lookup information about music CDs based on a disc ID using a protocol called CDDBP. A number of programs use this information to generate filename and MP3 tag information when ripping CDs. I use cdda2wav (and some custom shell scripts) on FreeBSD.

For the past few days, freedb.freedb.org has stopped resolving disc ID requests. I have verified by searching USENET that this is happening for other people, and is not just an artifact of my configuration or ISP. Noone, however, seems to know what is going on.

The web server at www.freedb.org is still working, but there is no indication of any problem noted on their front page. There is a link for "forums", but if these were ever implemented, they are now gone. Searching slashdot doesn't bring up any recent hits for freedb.

Does anyone know what is going on with this service?"
Intel

Submission + - Theo de Raadt details Intel Core 2 bugs

Submitted by Eukariote
Eukariote writes: Recently, Intel patched bugs in its Core 2 processors . Details were scarce, soothing words that a BIOS update was all that was required were spoken. OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has now provided more details and analysis on outstanding, fixed, an non-fixable Core 2 bugs. Some choice quotes: "Some of these bugs (...) will *ASSUREDLY* be exploitable from userland code.", "Some of these are things that cannot be fixed in running code, and some are things that every operating system will do until about mid-2008".
Education

Submission + - No OLPCs for Cuba. Ever.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a move going largely unnoticed by the developers the OLPC project now requires all submissions to the project to be hosted in the RedHat Fedora project.

While not seeming like a big deal, the implications are interesting. First, contributors have to sign the Fedora Project Individual Contributor License Agreement. By being forced to submit contributions to the Fedora repository they automatically fall under the provisions of US export law. So, no OLPC for Cuba, Syria and the likes. Ever.

But at least the OLPC project will build a nice business for RedHat The software borrows from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, with about 95 per cent of the code overlapping.
Intel

Submission + - Intel releases 2.93GHz quad-core QX6800

Submitted by AnInkle
AnInkle writes: Intel's new QX6800 debuts, and The Tech Report runs the gamut of multi-threaded 64-bit benchmarks, to find out what $1199 can get in a CPU, or if you should get by on the cheap and stick with the $999 QX6700. With popular games, Folding@Home in Linux, real-world scientific applications, and detailed power consumption, the 2.93GHz quad-core QX6800 is compared to over a dozen competitors from both Intel and AMD. The results aren't surprising, but the commentary sure is fun.
Microsoft

Submission + - VBootkit Bypasses Vista's Code Signing Mechanisms

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the Black Hat Conference in Amsterdam, security experts from India demonstrated a special boot loader that gets around Vista's code signing mechanisms. Indian security experts Nitin and Vipin Kumar of NV labs have developed a program called the VBootkit that launches from a CD and boots Vista, making "on the fly" changes in memory and in files being read. In a demonstration, the "boot kit" managed to run with kernel privileges and issue system rights to a CMD shell when running on Vista, even without a Microsoft signature. Bruce Schneier reminds us that this is not theoretical; VBootkit is actual code that demonstrates the exploit.
The Internet

Submission + - U.S. Senators Pressure Canada on Canadian DMCA

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. copyright lobby brought out some heavy artillery last week as it continued to pressure Canada to introduce a Canadian DMCA. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins gave a public talk in which he described Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7, while Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn wrote to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to urge him to bring in movie piracy legislation.

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