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Businesses

Submission + - Staffing Agencies the curse of modern IT 1

Submitted by kupojsin
kupojsin writes: As a junior-mid level sys admin who recently left my place of employment I'd expected to encounter a minimum amount of IT staffing agencies in my next job hunt. What has surprised me during the process however is that I've ONLY been able to find Staffing agency listings on virtually every place I search, whether it be Dice, Monster, Craigslist etc. Often search results on these sites are 90-95% recruitment agencies. I've utilized a throwaway email address and phone number (grand central) on my resume and now I'm glad I did, due to the sheer number of replies I get from staffing agencies. Does anyone still get IT jobs the old fashioned way nowadays?
Security

Submission + - Stolen Medical Data, SSNs for Sale on Servers (arborlaw.biz)

Submitted by
Weblver1
Weblver1 writes: "More than 500 megabytes of stolen medical and business data and Social Security Numbers (SSNs) have been found 'for sale' on "crimeservers" in Malaysia and Argentina.
Vulnerable health data was accessible via compromised login information for healthcare systems using Citrix remote access software"
The Internet

Singapore Firm Claims Patent Breach By Virtually All Websites 481

Posted by timothy from the oh-that-makes-sense dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Singapore firm, VueStar has threatened to sue websites that use pictures or graphics to link to another page, claiming it owns the patent for a technology used by millions around the world. The company is also planning to take on giants like Microsoft and Google. It is a battle that could, at least in theory, upend the Internet. The firm has been sending out invoices to Singapore companies since last week asking them to pay up."
Power

Successful Cold Fusion Experiment? 387

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the so-cold-it's-hot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - OLPC cost rises from $100 to $188 per laptop (cnn.com)

Submitted by
Arathon
Arathon writes: "Turns out that the amazing "$100" laptop designed by the "One Laptop Per Child" program isn't going to make it out the door for that price. CNN reports that the laptops are now expected to cost $188 apiece when they come out later this fall. This is expected to make the program's appeal potentially much smaller, since the developers were relying on the mind-bogglingly low-price to hook governments into the concept of buying laptops for their people. OLPC's spokesman guarantees that the price won't rise further, to "above $190". The price differential is being blamed on raw materials costs and currency fluctuation.
Is this the end of the OLPC's newsworthiness, or should we continue to hope that it will make the difference that so many have said it will?"
Communications

Submission + - Comcast Needs to Clearly Define their Usage Policy (newsgroupreviews.com)

Submitted by
UsenetJunkie
UsenetJunkie writes: "Comcast is currently in the hot seat with many customers.Causes range from disconnecting users for utilizing too much bandwidth to drastically limiting BitTorrent traffic. What is the answer to the madness? While Comcast denies bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping allegations I wonder what they would do if all the BitTorrent users switched ISP's."
Toys

Company Demos Personal Aircraft, Future Jetpack 98

Posted by Zonk from the biggest-toybox-ever dept.
coondoggie writes "Earlier this week researchers with the company ESG Elektroniksystem in Germany demonstrated a form of 'strap-on jet wing' that lets a user truly fly through the air. The system, called Gryphon, consists of a six-foot wing and hand-held rotary controls for the rudder. The pilot has several different instruments available to him, including onboard oxygen and helmet that features a heads-up display. 'Researchers say the final version of the flying wing will contain an electronic system that will take care of some of the steering for the pilot which today can be a little tricky, researchers say. The company also plans to add small jets to the wing making it a true jetpack in the future.'"
Censorship

City Fights Blogger On Display of Public Information 134

Posted by Zonk from the security-through-obscurity-right dept.
rokkaku writes "When the gadfly blogger Claremont Insider went searching for information about employee compensation on the city of Claremont web site, they never expected to find scans of pay stubs for all the employees. Nor did they expect the city attorney to demand that they remove copies of those pay stubs from their web site. They found it especially odd since, according to California law, the compensation of public employees is public information."
Data Storage

The Many Paths To Data Corruption 121

Posted by Zonk from the luke-alan-cox-is-your-guru dept.
Runnin'Scared writes "Linux guru Alan Cox has a writeup on KernelTrap in which he talks about all the possible ways for data to get corrupted when being written to or read from a hard disk drive. This includes much of the information applicable to all operating systems. He prefaces his comments noting that the details are entirely device specific, then dives right into a fascinating and somewhat disturbing path tracing data from the drive, through the cable, into the bus, main memory and CPU cache. He also discusses the transfer of data via TCP and cautions, 'unfortunately lots of high performance people use checksum offload which removes much of the end to end protection and leads to problems with iffy cards and the like. This is well studied and known to be very problematic but in the market speed sells not correctness.'"
Caldera

SCO Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy 421

Posted by Zonk from the a-true-catastrophy dept.
Can you say "the SCO, the" in German? writes "Trading of SCO's stock has been halted on news that SCO has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. This move just so happens to fall on the eve of SCO's trial with Novell. One would think that their prior boasts were mostly bluster, that they believe they have almost no chance of prevailing at trial, and that they're now desperate to protect their executives from SCO's creditors while seeking yet another delay. From the release: 'The SCO Group intends to maintain all normal business operations throughout the bankruptcy proceedings. Subject to court approval, SCO and its subsidiaries will use the cash flow from their consolidated operations to meet their capital needs during the reorganization process. "We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business critical operations," said Darl McBride, President and CEO, The SCO Group. "Chapter 11 reorganization provides the Company with an opportunity to protect its assets during this time while focusing on building our future plans."'"
Media (Apple)

Apple Cuts Off Linux iPod Users 854

Posted by Zonk from the can't-stand-the-heat dept.
Will Fisher writes "New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases. We haven't found out how to generate our own valid hashes (but we do know the hash includes the database itself, and possibly the iPod serial number), and are looking for help."
Censorship

How To Configure Real PC Parental Controls? 618

Posted by Zonk from the keep-it-clean-folks dept.
Orange Crush writes "As the resident computer geek in an office full of accountants, my boss recently asked me how she could reasonably keep her teenage son from using the family computer to 'access inappropriate sites.' I of course responded 'Give up now. There's nothing in this world that can keep a determined teenager from acquiring porn.' Sadly, she was dissatisfied with this answer. I mentioned that there was in fact software available for this purpose, but that all of it was trivially easy to bypass for a clever young mind. I really can't think of another answer. She could password protect the BIOS to prevent booting a different OS, but that's easily defeated with a screwdriver at most. The only solutions I can think of involve upstream firewalls/proxies/etc to which I gleefully redirected her to her ISPs tech support number. As much as I disagree with her reasoning — and ignoring the obvious 'go to a friend's house' loophole — is there really any other way (on a home budget) to netnanny a household computer?"
Role Playing (Games)

New Technologies Attack the One-World Problem 157

Posted by Zonk from the can't-reach-the-folks-on-theta-epsilon-earth dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "An MIT Technology Review article has new details on the challenges of a 'one world design' in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Most games shard their servers, putting up artificial barriers between friends and family members. Technologies are now being developed to keep lots of players within a single world, some of them based off of the unique PvP-heavy title EVE Online. The best part - the technologies don't just apply to gaming. 'NASDAQ, for example, can be thought of as a very large MMO, supporting very large numbers of 'players' performing billions of transactions daily in a graphically intense environment, all within a single shard. Technologies that solve this problem effectively, says George Dolbier, technical lead for games and interactive entertainment at IBM, will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends, or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."'"

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