67616
submission
El Lobo writes:
Ever since the next generation high definition movie formats were announced, consumers have been up in arms about the proposed content protection by Hollywood film studios known as Advanced Access Content System or AACS for short. One annoyed consumer, going by the name of "muslix64", bought an Xbox 360 HD-DVD player over the holidays along with some HD-DVD's and was annoyed to discover he couldn't watch his movies at 1080p because his hardware lacked HDCP support. In what would seem like an act of frustration, the consumer set out about finding a way to playback his HD-DVD movies on a system without any content protection available.
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1025/hd_dvd_cont ent_protection_already_hacked_muslix64_believes_so /index.html
muslix64 has a video of the hacking on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oZGYb92isE
67532
submission
Anonymously Mad writes:
My fiance's debit card was stolen from her car and used at a EBgames where an employee bypassed whatever is needed to avoid putting in a PIN (which is not written on anything *DUH*). They attempted to use a credit card first for the purchase, but the fraud protection kicked in at the $700 charge (She has never purchased a Video Game in her life, I do the buying). When I spoke to the Manager, he said "The guy had ID", stating he remembered the transaction; my fiance is most indeed female and looks like one (long hair, lipstick and all). The manager is either in on it, doing generic lying to cover up an employee who did it, or lying to cover a stupid mistake. EBgames/Gamestop corporate's response is that they will cooperate with any investigation police bring to them, whenever that will be seeing as how it was $700 across county lines in a large city with other crime problems.
The issue is: The employee was a willing participant in credit card fraud. People make, I would guess thousands of dollars of purchases with EBgames/Gamestop daily using credit cards and now at least on person at a location to whom you would hand your card is committing fraud with cards like that.
The question is: Should the brick and mortar locations be held to the same expectation of fraud protection as their cyberspace counterparts? Clearly, there is a physical hole in the security policy as corporate has no oversight for employee malfeasance.
67448
story
Standard Disclaimer writes
"Most here on Slashdot know that Microsoft released its OpenXML specification to counter ODF and to help preserve its market position, but most people probably aren't aware of all the interesting legacy code the OpenXML specification has brought to light. This article by Rob Weir details many of the crazy legacy features in the dark corners of OpenXML. As it concludes after analyzing specification requirements like suppressTopSpacingWP, 'so not only must an interoperable OOXML implementation first acquire and reverse-engineer a 14-year old version of Microsoft Word, it must also do the same thing with a 16-year old version of WordPerfect.'"
67436
story
JHWH asks:
"I've been asked to design and implement a management software system with text based user interface as the replacement of an older one running on AS/400. Despite my attempts towards a web UI, the customer is actually willing to have a text based UI. The main reasons are the need for a very low bandwidth and the ability to run on serial terminals. All this in the 21st century! Host systems will be Linux, the language will be C or C++. I already thought about the use of text based browsers like lynx or links. So now I have to wipe the dust away from my ncurses manual, or can Slashdot suggest something more effective?"
67450
submission
PatPending writes:
Google was granted new patents this week on a methods for estimating similarity between web pages and documents which may help to filter duplicate content, and upon a digital mapping system which appears to be the foundation for Google Maps, and has a number of related map-based patent applications in its wake.
http://searchengineland.com/070102-064435.php
