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The Military

Submission + - Gabe of PA interviews his WWII vet Grandpa

Submitted by Flange
Flange writes: Gabe earlier mentioned he had interviewed his grandfather's WWII Navy experiences but never transcribed and posted it. He now posts a recent interview about it: "I'm sharing it with you guys for a couple reasons. First, I hope it might motivate some of you that have veterans in your family to sit down with them and just listen for a little while. Second, his view of World War II games comes from a perspective that we don't often hear. I'm not posting this to change anyone's opinion of these games but his insight has certainly made me think about them in a different way" http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/12/07
Links

Submission + - Drew Curtis of Fark attempts to trademark 'NSFW' (uspto.gov)

Submitted by
Kickstart70
Kickstart70 writes: "Drew Curtis of Fark is attempting to trademark the term 'NSFW'. It seems a little crass to me, but no word on whether he's attempting to do it as a protest against ridiculous trademark law, or if he's just joining the greedy trademark crowd (but, FWIW(TM), discussions in the subscriber-only TotalFark have been deleted)."
Data Storage

Submission + - Best tools for interviewing relatives?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past few years I've lost a lot of relatives. Nearly all of my grandparent's generation is gone. Countless stories have passed on with them. I am determined not to lose more family history so easily. With the holidays bringing everyone back together, it would be a great opportunity to start interviewing my folks for digital preservation. Has anyone here taken on a project like this? Any advice, books or software to help organize my effort?
Cellphones

Submission + - Apple, AT&T sued for $360M over Visual Voicema (reuters.com)

Submitted by LwPhD
LwPhD writes: Reuters and CNN are reporting that Klausner Technologies is suing Apple and AT&T in the U.S. District Court in Marshall, TX, a fertile hunting ground for patent trolls. At issue is patent number 5,572,576 which describes linking contact information with voice messages. Klausner, even though it frequently targets obvious applications and makes no pretense to developing any technology itself, has sued successfully before, most notably winning a recent settlement from Vonage.

Moreover, Klausner is also suing other companies for the same obvious feature. According to Reuters:

The company alleged in its statement that Cablevision's Optimum Voicemail, Comcast's Digital Voice Voicemail and eBay's Skype Voicemail violate Klausner's patent by allowing users to selectively retrieve and listen to voice messages via message inbox displays.


How long will such patently preposterous patent suits be allowed merely because a feature that seems obvious to technology developers may not seem obvious to judges and juries? I remember that my first college computer (a crummy low-end Packard Bell manufactured in 1995) came with answering machine software installed by default. Is there no example of prior art for using Caller ID, a modem, and a computer to tag messages before Klausner's filing date of 1994?
Security

Submission + - eBay Still Has Login Vulnerabilities?

Submitted by
Atario
Atario writes: "This morning I checked my email to find several apparent eBay-alike spam messages in my Inbox. This reminded me that I needed to leave feedback for something on the actual eBay. So I went there, only to find that I could no longer log in. Long story short, I realized that those "fake" eBay emails were the real thing — and were sent from my eBay account! Horrified, I contacted their help people and got my password reset, and some mass eBay emails following up to those who had been spammed, saying that I hadn't done it. Going to my account, I saw that the attackers had sent a "visit our happy and good-spirit Chinese web site and buy electronics" spam to 30 different people. (Only the first six came to me, because those used a general "contact an eBay-er" mechanism, whereas the rest used a "ask seller a question" one; apparently the latter doesn't automatically send you a copy in email automatically.) At any rate, whoever this was was able to change my password and send messages as me; this, to me, implies that they were able to crack my password and log in as me. This would mean either (1) inside job with DB access or (2) eBay is vulnerable to brute-force login-attempt attacks, which is something so easy to defeat (increasing attempt delays), they would need to be ashamed for about aleph-null years were this the case. So, what does Slashdot think: eBay is infested with Chinese spammers as employees, or they can't get security minimally right after all these years?"
Security

Submission + - Former MS (now FF)Security Honcho: MS Hides Holes (mozilla.com) 1

Submitted by
theranjan
theranjan writes: "When Jeff Jones, a Security Strategy Director at Microsoft, decided to compare Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities with those of Mozilla Firefox, and decided to publish his results showing that Internet Explorer was more secure, he perhaps forgot that the Head Security Strategist of Mozilla, Window Snyder, was a former MS employee, in fact the security lead for the Service pack of Windows XP and Server. In a rebuttal of the study, Window Snyder said that the number of vulnerabilities publicly acknowledged was just a "small subset" of all vulnerabilities fixed internally. The vulnerabilities found internally are fixed in service packs and major updates without public knowledge. This is probably one of the first times that we have confirmation from one of Microsoft's former workers that this practice is routinely followed in Microsoft. This also confirms that the studies performed or referenced by Microsoft touting itself as the safest Operating system, comparing the vulnerabilities between OSes, needs to be taken with bucketfuls of salt. Finally, Window speaks out against the practice of counting bugs,stating plainly that "If we as an industry would just acknowledge that counting bugs is useless then vendors could feel safe talking about what they are doing to protect users" and "Were not building fixes for our PR team, were building them for our users. Go ahead and count.""
IBM

Submission + - IBM Embraces Solaris for the Mainframe (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
explosivejared
explosivejared writes: "In an example of the computer industry's higher level of abstraction — in this case, known as horse trading — IBM has called attention to a demonstration of Solaris running on the mainframe. It's also endorsed Sun Microsystems' xVM product, its entry into virtualization for x86 servers. The endorsement is notable at a time when Sun is seeking credibility for yet another hypervisor entrant into the virtualization market. IBM's xVM endorsement is practically the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, since it invented virtualization more than 40 years ago. Sun in turn has assisted a third party, the research and development firm Sine Nomine Associates in Ashburn, Va., in getting Sun's OpenSolaris operating system to run on the IBM mainframe, something that many observers said would never happen.

"We're thrilled to be able to reach new customers and market opportunities alongside IBM," said Rich Green, executive VP for software at Sun, in a statement released during Gartner's Data Center Conference in Las Vegas on Friday."
The Courts

Submission + - Copyright Class Action Settlement Tossed Out (eriksherman.com)

Submitted by
bizwriter
bizwriter writes: "There has been a class action[1] that freelance writers brought against databases and publishers for copyright infringement. Both sides had, after a number of years, finally worked out an agreement, but a number of writers who disliked the terms filed an objection. Word finally came out Friday that the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a three-judge panel, vacated[2] the settlement approval and sent the matter back to the District Court, calling for "proceedings consistent with this opinion," and ruling that the vast number of class action participants who had not registered their copyright could not be part of the class. This is very bad news for the writers[3], and not so good for the publishers, either, who had wanted some predicability in this arena. [1] http://www.copyrightclassaction.com/ [2] http://authorsguild.org/freelancedecision.pdf [3] http://www.eriksherman.com/WriterBiz/2007/11/freelance-class-action-settlement-gets.html"
Music

Submission + - UO Investigates RIAA for Spying (oregonlive.com)

Submitted by
Mr. E
Mr. E writes: "University of Oregon officials have asked a federal judge to let them investigate charges that the RIAA is spying on UO students. While it's not clear how they believe that the RIAA has accessed confidential student information, they make it sound like the RIAA was sniffing the network. Had the RIAA done so, they would have access to all unencrypted information on the network, which is likely to contain things like passwords and private emails in addition to evidence of copyright infringement they are after. UO officials note that, while they do not condone copyright infringement, they have a duty under the law to protect student privacy and to investigate those who may have violated it. RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said that they were "surprised and disappointed" by this investigation."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft says firefox is spyware (maneelgrover.com) 1

Submitted by MozeeToby
MozeeToby writes: Microsofts new Anti-Spyware tool (currently in beta) identifies Firefox as spy ware with a high security risk. To quote the author, "I strongly believe Mozilla Foundation should sue Microsoft for defamation."
Education

Submission + - The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "BusinessWeek reports that higher education is increasingly a tale of two worlds, with elite schools getting richer and buying up all the talent. Thanks to endowments like the one that netted Harvard $5.7B in investment gains just last year, the Ivy Plus colleges — which account for less than 1% of students — have been able to lift their spending into the stratosphere, including extravagances like $272,000-a-bed-dorms and even a $4M student-horse-housing rehab. 'People used to look at every penny,' says a Yale Dean. 'The mind-set is different now.' Meanwhile, reports BW, public colleges and universities struggle to educate 75% of the country's students in an era when most states are devoting a dwindling share of their budgets to higher ed."
Programming

Submission + - New 64-bit Operating System Released (losethos.com)

Submitted by
losethos
losethos writes: "LoseThos is a free, open-source 64-bit PC operating system written from a clean slate. It features graphics, links and trees in source code and at the command-line. The command-line feeds into a C compiler line by line so you don't have a crappy shell like linux — you have a real programming language at the command line. See videos for a truely unique interface. Instead of icons, you have unbounded scalable vector graphics which send a macro to the command line. Version 3.13 has been release. It has compiler optimizations and much faster disk access."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Google Quietly Adds HTTPS Support to GMail 4

Journal by jdray

This may be old news, but I just noticed myself and thought I'd report it. I've been using the "New Version" of GMail for a couple of weeks (I hardly notice the difference from the "Old Version"), and happened to notice today that the inbox URL still used "http://", even after all the complaints that they didn't maintain "https://" after login. I decided a quick test was in order, and added the all-important "s" to the protocol indicator. It worked fine. After clicking around some, openin
Censorship

Submission + - Comcast - Heading the way of the dinosaurs (blorge.com)

Submitted by CasualRepartee
CasualRepartee writes: Comcast has been one of the most successful cable companies in the world; in many parts of the U.S., Comcast sits pretty on huge user bases that don't have many viable high-speed internet alternatives. However, poor customer service, slow speeds and generally poor business practices could make the once-great internet giant another extinct dinosaur, no ice age required. The fact of the matter is this: Comcast is no longer the biggest and the best. Cable is taking a distance back seat to Verizon's FiOS (fiber optic service), which delivers speeds up to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Unlike Comcast, FiOS delivers the full range of bandwidth to each user, whereas Comcast users are forced to share bandwidth with other users on the same coaxial cable, causing speeds to fluctuate dramatically with usage.

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