dbarclay10 - Slashdot User

Submission + - SPAM: Blogger Outage

Submitted by

Drew Kime

on Thursday March 12, 2009 @04:21PM

Drew Kime writes: "For at least the past hour I haven't been able to connect to my Blogger-hosted blog. If my stats on Google Analytics are up to date, no one has hit the site for at least two hours. (And I average over a hundred per hour this time of day.)

I tried to check the official Blogger status. Ironic error message: "Your request for [spam URL stripped] could not be fulfilled, because the connection to status.blogger.com (72.14.207.121) could not be established." Well, I guess that tells me the status. It seems they host their official status blog on the same server or cluster that hosts *my* blog.

I wonder when something will show up in Google News."
Link to Original Source

KY Appeals Court Nixes Seizure of Gambling-Linked Domains 102

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @05:12PM from the stick-to-the-whiskey-making dept.

davidwr writes "A state appeals court in Kentucky ruled that the state courts cannot seize domain names as 'gambling devices.' The court ruled that 'it's up to the General Assembly — not the courts nor the state Justice Cabinet — to bring domain names into the definition of illegal gambling devices.'"

No More Space Tourists After 2009, Russia Says 105

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:38PM from the after-gathering-up-all-of-these-box-tops dept.

mknewman writes with disappointing news for anyone with the money that it would have cost to fly as a space tourist, excerpting a story that says "Russia's space chief says there won't be any more tourists headed to the international space station after this year. Anatoly Perminov told the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that there will be no room for paying tourists because the space station's crew is expanding from three members to six."

3 Cups of Coffee Increases Hallucinations 628

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @12:37PM from the but-they-ARE-out-to-get-me dept.

PearsSoap writes "The Telegraph and other sources are pointing out a study on 200 students which has found that a high caffeine intake can cause visual and auditory hallucinations, and can make people think that others are 'out to get them.' The abstract (and full version if you have access) is available. 'The volunteers were questioned about their caffeine intake from products including coffee, tea, energy drinks, chocolate bars and caffeine tablets.'"

30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet 407

Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:01AM from the malignant-cells dept.

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox 62

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 05, 2009 @04:07PM from the other-applications dept.

phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."

Graphene Transistors Clocked At 26GHz 174

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 11, 2008 @11:17AM from the slightly-faster-than-one dept.

KentuckyFC writes "A team at IBM has built the first high quality graphene transistors and clocked them running at 26 GHz . That doesn't quite knock silicon off its perch. The fastest silicon transistors are an order of magnitude faster than that but the record is held by indium phosphide transistors which have topped 1000 GHz. But it's not bad for a new kid on the block. It took silicon 40 years to get this far. By contrast, the first graphene transistor was built only last year. IBM says 'the work represents a significant step towards the realization of graphene-based electronics.' (Abstract)."

VMware Promises Multiple OSs On One Cellphone 90

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 10, 2008 @01:28PM from the just-make-sure-i-can-strip-it-off-if-i-want dept.

superglaze writes to tell us that VMware has announced a large effort behind their Mobile Virtualization Platform, promising the possibility of multiple operating systems on mobile devices. "The company described MVP as a 'thin layer of software' that will be embedded in handsets and 'be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.' Asked whether MVP would offer something different from the abstraction already provided by mobile Java, VMware's European product director Fredrik Sjostedt told ZDNet UK that MVP would require less recoding. 'If you want to have an application run on a Java-specific appliance, you need to code it for Java,' Sjostedt said. 'What we're introducing with MVP is an [embedded] abstraction layer below that, between the physical hardware and the software layer.'"

What Normal Users Can Expect From Ubuntu 8.10 511

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 25, 2008 @06:31PM from the abnormal-users-can-expect-whatever-they-want dept.

notthatwillsmith writes "With Ubuntu 8.10 due to be released in just a few days, Maximum PC pored through all the enhancements, updates, and new features that are bundled into the release of Intrepid Ibex and separated out the new features that are most exciting for Linux desktop users. Things to be excited about? With new versions of GNOME and X.Org, there's quite a bit, ranging from the context-sensitive Deskbar search to an audio and video compatible SIP client to the new Network Manager (manage wired, Wi-Fi, VPN, and cellular broadband connections in one place)."

Elcomsoft Claims WPA/WPA2 Cracking Breakthrough 349

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 12, 2008 @02:12PM from the it-budget-excuse-par-excellence dept.

secmartin writes "Russian security firm Elcomsoft has released software that uses Nvidia GPUs to speed up the cracking of WPA and WPA2 keys by a factor of 100. Since the software allows them to network thousands of PCs, this anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks; any network handling sensitive data should start using VPN encryption on machines connecting over Wi-Fi networks, or stop using these networks altogether."

Homeland Security's Space-Based Spying Goes Live 289

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @08:43PM from the eye-in-the-sky dept.

BountyX writes "While America's attention has shifted to the economic meltdown and the presidential race between corporate favorites John McCain and Barack Obama, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) National Applications Office (NAO) 'will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.' NAO will coordinate how domestic law enforcement and 'disaster relief' agencies such as FEMA use satellite imagery intelligence (IMINT) generated by US spy satellites. Based on available evidence, hard to come by since these programs are classified 'above top secret,' the technological power of these military assets are truly terrifying."

Particle Physicists Share the Physics Nobel 67

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @09:39AM from the wave-physicists-get-it-simultaneously dept.

somegeekynick writes "The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'"

Mozilla CEO Objects To Safari Auto Install 768

Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday March 22, 2008 @12:19PM from the hey-wait-a-minute dept.

A reader writes "Do you use iTunes on Windows? If so you may be getting the gift of Safari from Apple whether you want it or not, and Mozilla CEO John Lilly is not happy about it. After his daughter was offered Safari as a 'bonus update' with a recent update to her iTunes software, Mr. Lilly says on his blog, 'What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that's bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web.' He also pointed out the check box is already clicked when you go to update meaning you have to opt out, not in and that it lists Safari as getting an update even if you don't have it installed." Update: 03/21 21:44 GMT by KD : Corrected the name of the Mozilla CEO; also linked directly to his blog.

Firefox Spoofing Bug Puts Passwords At Risk 157

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 04, 2008 @10:52AM from the please-keep-the-fox-in-the-pen dept.

A reader writes "Aviv Raff, an Israeli researcher known for his work in hunting browser bugs, has revealed a Firefox spoofing vulnerability which could allow identity thieves to dupe users into giving up their password. According to Mr. Raff Firefox fails to sanitize single quotes and spaces in the 'Realm' value of an authentication header. Raff was quoted as saying 'This makes it possible for an attacker to create a specially crafted Realm value which will look as if the authentication dialog came from a trusted site.' This vulnerability was shown to be in the latest Firefox, version 2.0.0.11 and until Mozilla fixes this vulnerability Mr. Raff recommends in his blog 'not to provide username and password to Web sites which show this dialog.'"

Creative Commons Launches CC+ License 67

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @05:34PM from the all-about-just-gettin-paid dept.

A user writes "Creative Commons has this week released their CC+ protocol, which provides a way for authors to allow other people to commercially reuse their work, and give them a pre-negotiated fee or percentage. It makes it easy for people to release the Material under CC-No-Commercial, and then have a way to charge for commercial use if companies are interested."

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