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Communications

Submission + - BlackBerry Predicted A Century Ago By Nikola Tesla

Submitted by andylim
andylim writes: According to the Telegraph, the BlackBerry was first predicted more than a century ago, by Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineer. Seth Porges, Popular Mechanics' current technology editor, disclosed Tesla’s prediction at a presentation, titled “108 years of futurism”, to industry figures recently in New York. Recombu.com has published the original Popular Mechanics article in which Tesla predicts a mobile phone revolution.

Submission + - Why is every browser icon essentially a circle?

Submitted by high_rolla
high_rolla writes: If you look at it, every one of the 5 main browsers has an icon based around the concept of a circle. Internet Explorer is a round E, Firefox is a fox curled around a globe, Opera is an O, Chrome is a round 3 colour disc and Safari is a round compass. What is it about a circle that is synonymous with the internet? Or is it just complete coincidence that they all share this trait?

Submission + - Nearby 'hot spot' gives clues to growth of galaxy (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers have the first evidence that galaxy clusters interact with the large-scale structure of the universe. At the largest possible scale, the universe resembles a kind of cosmic web with voids – huge bubble-like areas with no matter – and filaments.
Microsoft

Submission + - How Assumptions Are Making Us All Insecure (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: In the space of a given year, untold thousands of vulnerabilities are found in operating systems, applications and plug-ins. In many cases, the affected vendors fix the flaws, either with a patch, a workaround or some other mitigation. But there's also a huge population of security bugs that vendors never fix because they're deemed unexploitable, an assumption that may be turning into a serious mistake for software makers. Microsoft made such a call earlier this year, after researchers at Core Security informed the company that they had found a vulnerability in the Microsoft Virtual PC software. The flaw, which affected the virtual machine monitor (VMM) in Virtual PC, could enable an attacker to use applications running in user-space on a guest OS to access portions of the Virtual PC memory that should be inaccessible to those applications. This gives the attacker the ability to bypass anti-exploitation technologies in the underlying operating system and exploit flaws in the OS that otherwise would not be exploitable.

The difference in this case, experts say, is that the Virtual PC vulnerability is the symptom of a larger problem lurking beneath the surface: assuming that protections such as ASLR, DEP and SafeSEH will always be around to save us. "We're less worried about this particular vulnerability than we are about the now-exposed (incorrect) assumption that various security mechanisms will always be in place. It's obvious that a complete re-calibration of exploit potential for uncategorized bugs will become necessary if vulnerabilities like the one described here remain in our fielded systems. Not so good for Windows 7," Gary McGraw of Cigital said.

Comment What bugs me... (Score 4, Insightful) 472

by Ranma-sensei (#32071364) Attached to: IE Market Share Falls To Historic Low
...is that most people now either use Firefox or Chrome - which heightens these browsers' endangerment concerning malware specific to them.

It's not as if it really affects me as an Opera user, but having to put up with Firefox at work, I'm not too excited about this, since the company I work at usually takes its time to update (FF 2.0.0.7, here).

Oh well, at least MS's share is dropping...

Comment Finally... (Score 1) 443

by Ranma-sensei (#31996686) Attached to: Ubisoft's DRM Cracked — For Real This Time
...I get to buy Assassin's Creed 2.

I own only games I can play offline and without activation - if it means I have to crack the retail version, so be it! After all, I legally bought the game, and I want to still be able to play it whenever I feel the urge, even if that's ten years from now.

Just for the record, I don't own any games I haven't bought in a retail box (I like to show them off).

Comment Re:Yup (Score 0, Troll) 282

by DJRumpy (#31656192) Attached to: BBC Activates DRM For Its iPlayer Content

Yes. They profit from the sale of DVD's and Blu-ray. You may not like it, but they do, and they are taking steps to protect that revenue stream. If they did not have this option, I would probably not be able to freely view this content via browser as is. They would simply make everyone buy the disk when it came out.

Is BBC entirely funded by the tax-payer? Do you agree that any taxes eliminated by profits that they may make are a good thing? You can't have it both ways. I can only assume that the BBC is much like PBS in the US (public funded). PBS is a wasteland of uninteresting content here and doesn't have near the recognition of BBC. If they have a successful model that doesn't cost your tax payers too much, I personally wouldn't be so quick to criticize this move.

Comment Re:Call me conservative (Score 1) 229

by stonewallred (#31655792) Attached to: Canadian Libraries Want $300,000 To Buy Games
Define classic. Start there. I think RAH's works are for the most part classic. Same with Vachss. I also like some other less known writers, and think their works fall into classics. It is not conservative to want to set the library up with only the items you think are correct. You are trying to shoot your personal opinions into what conservatism is. Conservative would be opposed to public funding of a library, but even then it would be a stretch. The opposition to using public money for something that is broadly considered for the public good is more in line with libertarianism.

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