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Education

Want a Science Degree In Creationism? 848

Posted by Soulskill from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.
The Bad Astronomer writes "In Texas, a state legislator wants the ironically-named Institute for Creation Research to be able to grant a Masters degree in science. In fact, the bill submitted to the Texas congress would make it legal for any private group calling themselves educational to be able to grant advanced degrees in science. So, now's your chance: that lack of a PhD in Astrology and Alchemy won't hold you back any longer." The Institute for Creation Research made a similar request to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board last year, but were shot down.

Comment Re:Three Strikes = BS (Score 1) 278

by Snowdog (#27141447) Attached to: South Korea Joins the "Three Strikes" Ranks

Which is why the ISPs will challenge the law in court when and if the MAFIAA attempts to bring suit for failure to "cut off" a customer(s).

That sounds reasonable at first glance, until you realize that for many people their ISP is also a content provider (e.g. Comcast), who has just as much or more financial interest in selling you TV/movies/music than they do in selling you Internet service.

If this "three strikes" approach becomes common, how long do you think it'll be before the big ISPs begin to offer Internet service packages (called something else, of course) that provide access only to content and services they or their affiliates control? It's a very attractive route to reigning in all this wild proliferation of options and getting thing$ back to where they belong.
Music

Lars Ulrich Pirates His Own Album 672

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'm-sure-the-tags-on-this-will-be-friendly dept.
rudeboy1 writes "Lars Ulrich, drummer for Metallica, and long time opponent of file sharing admitted to 'pirating' his own album, Death Magnetic last year. 'I sat there myself and downloaded "Death Magnetic" from the Internet just to try it,' he said. 'I was like, "Wow, this is how it works." I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download "Death Magnetic" for free, it's me.'"

Firefox Beta Touts Advanced Engine, Solves 8 Flaws 493

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-is-better-right dept.
nandemoari writes "Mozilla may be this year's winner in the 'browser battles' as they ready the next beta version of their tour-de-force, Firefox 3.1. Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox — a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users. As this year's crop of new browsers emerges, enhanced features are becoming secondary to one thing: speed. Mozilla is nearly ready to release the next beta version of Firefox 3.1 to the public for testing, and insiders predict that it will outpace even Safari 4, which has been the fastest browser in wide release since its beta began last week." It looks like they also will be upping the next major release to v3.5 to better show the significance of the release.
Image

Outliers, The Story Of Success Screenshot-sm 357

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
TechForensics writes "Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is subtitled "the story of success." It is a book that purports to explain why some people succeed far more than others. It suggests that a success like Bill Gates is more attributable to external factors than anything within the man. Even his birth date turns out to play a role of profound importance in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation." Look below for the rest of Leon's review.
Google

Outage Knocks Gmail Offline For Many Users 209

Posted by timothy from the blissfully-sleeping-through-it dept.
Many readers noted an outage affecting Google's gmail service last night. Firmafest points to a statement from Google, according to which only a small subset of users were affected. According to reader CaptHarlock, mail itself remained accessible through IMAP clients, and the chat feature via external applications. jw3 asks "Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So — what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?" (Some readers still seem to be unable to reach the site, too.)
Games

Game Technology To Watch In 2009 123

Posted by Soulskill from the axiously-awaiting-the-wii-hibachi dept.
IGN has compiled a list of gaming technology they expect to have a significant effect on this year's products. Leading the list is the 3D technology being pushed in television and films. A number of popular games are already set up to handle this, and more are on the way. They also suggest that improved Blu-ray technology, which allows much more storage, will pave the way for even bigger and better looking games. IGN hopes that brain-computer interfaces, such as Emotiv's headset, will become responsive enough to be taken seriously, and notes that DirectX 11 and a broader adoption for PhysX are on the horizon.
Censorship

UK Gov. Wants IWF List To Cover 100% of UK Broadband 281

Posted by kdawson from the tackling-blocking dept.
wild_quinine writes "The UK government stated in 2006 that they wished to see 100% of UK consumer broadband ISPs' connections covered by blocking, which includes images of child abuse. 95% of ISPs have complied, but children's charities are calling for firmer action by the government as the last 5% cite costs and concerns over the effectiveness of the system. According to Home Office Minister Alan Campbell, 'The government is currently looking at ways to progress the final 5%.' With a lack of transparency in the IWF list, firm government involvement, and blocking that only 'includes' (but may not be limited to) images of child abuse, it looks like the writing is on the wall for unfiltered, uncensored Internet connections in the UK."
Image

Bush Turns Down Job Offer From Dallas Hardware Store Screenshot-sm 11

Posted by samzenpus from the home-improvement-accomplished dept.
Elliott's Hardware store offered George W. Bush a position as a greeter in an open letter in a Dallas newspaper last month. Bush walked in the store on Saturday and said, "I'm looking for a job." Andrea Bond, a manager at the store, said president Bush spent about an hour with his secret service security detail shopping and talking to customers during the surprise visit. Despite having a lot of free time, the former president turned the job down. I'm sure W would make a great hardware store employee as long as Karl Rove worked in the aisle next to him.
Security

Submission + - Combining BitTorrent with darknets for P2P privacy (washington.edu) 3

Submitted by
CSEMike
CSEMike writes: "Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."
Privacy

Submission + - Linked In or Out?

Submitted by Mr_Whoopass
Mr_Whoopass writes: I am the IT Administrator for a regional restaurant chain and as of late I am noticing more and more people sending me invitations to sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc. Mother always taught me to be a skeptic and knowing more than the average Joe about how information can be used in this digital era, I am reticent to say the least about posting such personal details such as my full name and where I work on the net for all to see. I have thus far managed to stay completely below the radar and a search on Google has nothing on my real persona. However now times are tough and I see sales dropping in the industry I work in as it is a discretionary spending market to be sure. I wonder if I should loosen up on the paranoia a bit and start networking with some of these folks in case of the all too common layoff scenario that seems to be happening lately. What do other folks here think about this? I am specifically interested in what people who work in IT think (since I know that just about every moron that has "Vice President" or sits on the "Executive Team" is already on LinkedIn and has no clue about why they should be trying to protect their identity).
United States

Submission + - Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police (cnet.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed ( http://news.cnet.com/Congress%20may%20consider%20mandatory%20ISP%20snooping/2100-1028_3-6066608.html ) by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let "law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals."

Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 ( http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:s.00436: ) in the Senate and H.R.1076 ( http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:h.r.01076: ) in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act.

Each contains the same language: "A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."

Translated, the Internet Safety Act applies not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on--but also to the tens of millions of homes with Wi-Fi access points or wired routers that use the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (That method is called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP.)

CNET News : http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10168114-38.html
Security

Twitter Hack Details Revealed 222

Posted by CmdrTaco from the my-password-is-p4ssw0rd dept.
Jack Spine writes "Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has confirmed both to ZDNet UK and Wired's Threat Level blog that a dictionary attack was used to hack Twitter. After the hacker distributed details on the Digital Gangster forum, celebrities such as Britney Spears and Barack Obama had their accounts defaced. Wired spoke to the alleged hacker, while ZDNet UK got in contact with someone who had been on the Digital Gangster forum at the time."
Linux

The 2008 Linux and Free Software Timeline 133

Posted by CmdrTaco from the year-in-review dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "Here is LWN's eleventh annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. As always, 2008 proved to be an interesting year, with great progress in useful software that made our systems better. Of course, there were some of the usual conflicts — patent woes, project politics, and arguments over freedom — but overall, the pace of free software progress stayed on its upwardly increasing trend. 2008 was a year that saw the end of SCO — or not — the rise of Linux-based 'netbooks,' multiple excellent distribution releases, more phones and embedded devices based on Linux, as well as major releases of software we will be using for years (X.org, Python, KDE, ...)."

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