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The Internet

Teens Actually Do Protect Their Online Profiles 137

Posted by Zonk from the wisdom-of-the-young dept.
Thib writes "A study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project reveals that the majority of teens pay attention to what they are revealing about themselves in their online social profiles. For instance, while many routinely use their first name or include a picture, 'fewer than a third of teens with profiles use their last names, and a similar number include their e-mail addresses. Only 2 percent list their cell phone numbers.' The study comes to light just as state legislatures once again begin to mutter about the dangers of online predators. From the article: 'According to Pew, 45 percent of online teens do not have profiles at all, a figure that contradicts widespread perceptions that the nation's youths are continually on MySpace.'"
The Internet

Canadian MP Calls For ISP Licenses, Content Blocks 273

Posted by CowboyNeal from the fun-time-over dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A member of Canada's ruling Conservative party has pledged to "clean up" the Internet with new bill that would mandate ISP licensing, know-your-subscriber rules, and allow the government to order ISPs to block content. ISPs that fail to block would faces possible jail time for the company's directors and officers."
Security

Steam Hacked, Credit Card Numbers Taken 141

Posted by Zonk from the waiter-check-please dept.
An anonymous reader writes "DailyTech reports that Valve's Steam content distribution system has been compromised. According to the article a hacker claims to have 'bypassed Valve's security system and accessed a significant chunk of data, including: screenshots of internal Valve web pages, a portion of Valve's Cafe directory, error logs, credit card information of customers, and financial information on Valve.'"
The Internet

Why are Websites Still Forcing People to Use IE? 899

Posted by Cliff from the betcha-it's-active-x-controls dept.
DragonTHC asks: "I just visited Movielink's website for research. Their site has a nice message saying, 'Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 (or higher) or Mozilla/Firefox with an IE Tab Extension (IE installation required).' While allowing the IETab Firefox extension is somewhat progressive, why do companies still force people to use Internet Explorer? Surely the site should work just fine in Firefox? With Firefox's steady gains in market share, you would think that webmasters would get the hint. If you are a webmaster, what are your reasons for forcing IE?"
The Internet

Browser Wars Declared Over? 182

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the everyone-just-afraid-of-losing dept.
Kelson writes to mention Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google took the stage this week at the Web 2.0 expo and in addition to discussing pressing issues have declared their intent to avoid another browser war. All the panelists agreed that security was the largest concern currently facing browser developers. "Brendan Eich, the chief technology officer at Mozilla, said that security was hard and always will be. 'I don't think we should take security lightly; it's an end-to-end problem and we have to step outside the current model to win on this front,' he said. For his part, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, said one of the scenarios that kept him awake at night was offline access to the browser and what that meant from a security perspective, particularly on the user-to-user front."
Sony

Sony Fixes Problems With New DVDs 210

Posted by kdawson from the DRM-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Following up on reports that DVDs for some Sony titles were causing problems, Video Business is reporting that Sony has fixed the copy-protection problem on recent DVD releases, and will provide replacement discs to customers. The problem was with the ARccOS DRM system. The company issued the following statement: 'Recently, an update that was installed on approximately 20 titles was found to cause an incompatibility issue with a very small number of DVD players (Sony has received complaints on less than one thousandth of one percent of affected discs shipped)... Since then, the ARccOS system has once again been updated, and there are no longer any playability problems.' Customers can call 800-860-2878 to inquire about replacement discs."

Comment Re:This is a gaming enthusiast's dream... (Score 4, Informative) 76

by MonMotha (#18611705) Attached to: Rock Band As the Costly New MTV?
It's not unheard of in the world of Music games at all, which may explain why the genre has trouble with the US market. If you're familiar with Konami's Bemani series (which, I might add, has much of this functionality since Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania can be linked, and are in fact on the same disc when sold for the home market), expensive controllers are the way things work. A beatmania controller is about 7000Yen (~$70US) in Japan, and pop'n mini controllers are comparable. If you want *good* (so-called "Arcade Style"), full arcade size controllers, you can expect to drop upwards of $300 on a single controller for these games. A good controller for Drum Mania (a MIDI drum set) can cost over $1000! Even a cheap-o DDR pad will run you $25 here in the US. A good one is usually in the $75-120 range for foam insert based ones, and $200+ for a sturdy metal one.

The Japanese are more gadget oriented than USians, though, and this may explain at least some of the success of the series in the Japanese market as compared with its difficulty here in the USA.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA sues paralyzed stroke victim

Submitted by
Waylon
Waylon writes: "It seems the RIAA will sue anyone, anywhere, even if you're a paralyzed stroke victim. Yes, Warner Music and the RIAA are suing a retired railroad man in Florida whose left side has been paralyzed by a stroke and whose sole source of income is his disability check. From the article: "Although the defendant John Paladuk, an employee of C&N Railroad for 36 years, was living in Florida at the time of the alleged copyright suit, and had notified the RIAA that he had not engaged in any copyright infringement, and despite that the fact that Mr. Paladuk suffered a stroke last year which resulted in complete paralysis of his entire left side and severely impaired speech, rendering him disabled, and despite the fact that his disability check is his sole source of income, the RIAA commenced suit against him on February 27, 2007.""
Software

Submission + - Linux Kernel Devs Offer Free Driver Development

Submitted by schwaang
schwaang writes: Linux Kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman, author of Linux Kernel in a Nutshell has posted an epic announcement on his blog:

"the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. [...] All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while."

"If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device's specifications, we have arranged a program [...] in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled."

"Now your developers will have more time to work on drivers for all of the other operating systems out there, and you can add "supported on Linux" to your product's marketing material."

This could portend increased device compatibility for Linux users, higher-quality drivers, and fewer non-free binary blobs.

P.S. nvidia this means you!
The Internet

Submission + - Hosting Provider Builds Own Power Substation

Submitted by
1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: "With data centers using more and more power, Sacramento managed hosting provider RagingWire wanted to ensure that its customers wouldn't run out of juice. So the company built its own 69kV power substation on its property, which will supply its data center with up to 46 megawatts — enough to power about 25,000 single-family homes. Concerns about the availability of electricity for data center prompted a Silicon Valley "power summit" last month. Is this a sign of things to come?"
Windows

Submission + - Windows XP Activation in the Future?

Submitted by bigredswitch
bigredswitch writes: Now we're on the verge of Vista being released, how are we going to activate XP when Microsoft drop support, either when performing a reinstall or resurrecting old hardware? It's not going to be a problem now or for the next few years, sure, but what's the future going to be like (flying cars aside)? Getting an older machine back into action to pull files off, run machine automation, etc., is easy with Win2k and everything that went before (I've worked at places running Gem on 286s still for in-house stuff) but is this at an end with XP and onwards? How are other people looking to handle this?
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - A Blogger gets an "Un-Cease and disist" no

Submitted by AlphaLop
AlphaLop writes: A blogger who wrote a somewhat Derogatory article about the online "Game" Second Life and created a link on his blog inviting lawsuits got an unexpected response from Linden Lab...



Too bad the RIAA and MPAA don't think this way.... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/ap_on_hi_te/se cond_life_parody Sorry for not embedding the link but I don't know HTML yet.
XBox (Games)

Submission + - What are these 360 ports for?

Submitted by
jwigum
jwigum writes: "So I got to wondering: What are those two ports on the bottom of a 360 controller used for? The ports in question(second photobucket file here in case the first dies) obviously have contacts. The thing that puzzles me is that the only peripheral I know of that uses these ports is the stock 360 headset. I've included that in the same picture, but flipped upside down so that the area that would be in contact with the... contacts is visible. As you can see, there aren't any contacts there. I can only assume they're for a peripheral that is either unreleased, or abandoned(stereo sound headphones for split screen?).

So Slashdot: What are these ports for?"
Software

Submission + - Time for a different terminal emulator?

Submitted by
swankjesse
swankjesse writes: "I spend a lot of time at the command line, so a good terminal emulator is important to me. Unfortunately, the default ones all have some annoyances:
Konsole inserts extra newline characters in the output, which makes it labour-intensive to do cut-and-paste.
Gnome Terminal doesn't let me scroll back while output is being generated.
Terminal.app doesn't have tabs, so I'm constantly having to search for my window. And it's Mac-only.

So I started searching for a better terminal emulator. The most interesting thus far is Terminator. It's got horizontal scrolling, which is ideal for SQL. And it gets the details right: scrollback, wrapping, fonts and keyboard shortcuts Just Work.

What's terminal emulator do you use? What does it do better?"
Handhelds

Submission + - Sega to stop GD-ROM production

Submitted by Joan Cross
Joan Cross writes: Sega of Japan plans to discontinue production of GD-ROM media in February, 2007. This media is used almost exclusively by the Sega Dreamcast home console, and the NAOMI arcade system. By stopping production, future official games (licensed by Sega) on the Dreamcast or NAOMI will not be possible. The Dreamcast Community are asking all fans past and present to help keep alive the Dream.

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