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Netscape

Netscape 9 to Undo Netscape 8 Mistakes? 210

Posted by Zonk from the goin-back-in-time dept.
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine reports that Netscape 9 has been announced. The most interesting thing is how they seem to be re-evaluating many of the decisions they made with Netscape 8. Netscape 9 will be developed in-house (Netscape 8 was outsourced) and it will be available for Windows, OSX, and Linux (Netscape 8 was Windows only). Although Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, the company is also considering resuming support for Netscape 7.2, the last suite version with an email client and Web page editor. It remains to be seen whether Netscape will reverse the disastrous decision to include the Internet Explorer rendering engine as an alternative to Gecko but given that there's no IE for OS X or Linux, here's hoping. After a series of substandard releases, could Netscape be on the verge of making of a version of their browser that enhances the awesomeness of Firefox, rather than distracts from it?"
Security

Submission + - Study Finds Bank of America SiteKey is Flawed

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The NYT reports on a Harvard and MIT study, which finds that the SiteKey authentication system employed by Bank of America is ineffective at prevent phishing attacks. SiteKey requires users to preselect an image and to recognize this image before they login, but users don't comply.

The idea is that if customers do not see their image, they could be at a fraudulent Web site, dummied up to look like their bank's, and should not enter their passwords. The Harvard and M.I.T. researchers tested that hypothesis. In October, they brought 67 Bank of America customers in the Boston area into a controlled environment and asked them to conduct routine online banking activities, like looking up account balances. But the researchers had secretly withdrawn the images. Of 60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns.
The study, aptly entitled "The Emperor's New Security Indicators", is available online.
Programming

Submission + - Writing Open Source Documentation?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I'm an Open Source guy. I run Linux, I suggest FF and OO.org to friends. And I'd like to give back. The problem is, I'm not a coder. So how do I go about writing documentation, and what kind of projects should I look into? What are some stellar examples?
Censorship

Submission + - How Best To Defend Student Bloggers' Rights?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A couple of my classmates are currently under fire for having ran a school gossip blog on Blogger.com. The blog was promptly shut down after several students discussed on the blog complained to our principal, who in turn threatend suspension on the authors. However since the creators of the site have remained anonymous, our principal has further threatened police action to root them out if they do not come forward. A while a go discussed a case similar to this. Does the school have the right to subpoena Blogger.com about this? What would be the best plan for these students in order to defend their rights?
Microsoft

Submission + - Vista developers forgot where the drivers are

Submitted by
Frustrated developer
Frustrated developer writes: "In a hurry to get Vista released it looks like the developers forgot to search the system folders while looking for device drivers. As a result many Vista users are left with USB mass storage devices, cameras etc. that used to work perfectly on Win XP but Vista cannot find any drivers for them. The drivers are all there of course, you just need to explicitly tell Vista to look in the damn windows\system32 folder!! From http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winvista/1169 058238"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The EFF has posted a nice little guide decoding the grid that is printed by the Xerox DocuColor series printer. The FBI and NSA use this to keep track of certain groups, like Greenpeace, here in the US. The article itself only covers the DocuColor series printers, but the EFF warns that this maybe used by other printers as well. Very interesting read, and also very scary knowing that whatever we print can possibly be tracked with exact date and times and the serial number of the printer used. Enjoy!
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The Cost of Sneakernet

Submitted by
SocialWorm
SocialWorm writes: "Jeff Atwood has posted an analysis of The Economics of Bandwidth over at Coding Horror . The surprising result is that, under most conditions, it's possible to send large amounts of data by FedEx or UPS cheaper than over the Internet. Specifically, he estimates that the cost of sending a hard drive in the mail is only 80% of that of sending the equivalent over a T3. Perhaps this indicates that it's time for a full RFC 2549 implementation."
Databases

Submission + - Migrating a Production Database

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "I admin a site that I authored about three years ago in PHP and MySQL, when I knew just enough about both to be dangerous. For a variety of reasons, my team has decided to switch our code to Ruby on Rails. We have two options: build a Rails-friendly database schema from scratch and migrate old data later, or emend the old database and PHP code enough so that it's Rails-friendly, launch the Rails app on top of it, and then migrate the old database to an optimal state. Obviously option 2 is the sexier choice because it allows us to maintain all of our data using Rails or PHP with no outage and would be fall-back ready should something go wrong. However, it's more than trivial as our old database lacks simple things like join tables and would require a lot of work to prep for Rails. What has been your experience with database schema migrations, especially from terrible schemata to 'better' ones? Any tips or best practices? Did you handle yours in a framework like Rails, or use low-level SQL scripts to manage the change?"
Software

Submission + - The Difference Between FLOSS Winners and Losers

Submitted by
porkrind
porkrind writes: "Charlie Babcock has an interesting article at InformationWeek about Open Source winners and losers. That is, what is the difference between projects that take off and the ones that struggle? Is it always a matter of technology? How much does the personality of the project leadership factor into its success? *cough*hansreiser*cough* Not everyone feels it's a black art: "Tony Wasserman thinks the success factors are so clear that he can assign numbers to them." What say ye, slashfaithful, is it really apparent from the beginning which projects succeed and which don't?"

Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem? 276

Posted by Zonk from the make-like-einstein dept.
CexpTretical writes "The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet. There are plenty of open or unsolved problems left for this generation. Why not spend some of your time in the dark of this winter working on one of the big problems facing humanity? Open problems exists in almost every field of study. Wikipedia maintains a small list of them and at least one international group called the Union of International Associations maintains a database of open problems." Which problem do you want to see cracked first? Are you already working on one of these big issues?

The Death Of CS In Education? 521

Posted by Zonk from the give-it-bawls-for-life-support dept.
JohnnyKimble writes "A provocatively titled article recently appeared in the 'Future of Computing' section of the British Computer Society website. 'The Death Of Computing' was written by a lecturer at De Montfort University in the UK, and considers the problem of falling interest in computer science courses in the UK and what needs to be done to encourage more students to take the courses." This ties in well with our discussion last night about Why Software is Hard.
Security

MS Office Zero-Day Under Attack 172

Posted by Zonk from the you-know-they've-released-new-software-when dept.
paulBarbs writes "Microsoft is warning users to be on the lookout for suspicious Excel files that arrive unexpectedly — even if they come from a co-worker's e-mail address. In an advisory, Microsoft confirmed a new wave of limited "zero-day" attacks was underway, using a code execution flaw in its Microsoft Office desktop productivity suite. Although .xls files are currently being used to launch the spear phishing attacks, Microsoft said users of other Office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, etc.) are potentially at risk."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ubuntu Canada vs. Microsoft's Digital Ice House

Submitted by Dave
Dave writes: This past week, Microsoft Canada had a house made of ice at Dundas Square, raffling off free copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007, and demonstrating the "all new features" of their flagship products. The folks at Ubuntu Toronto set up shop just outside of the ice house on Friday and Saturday, fully equipped with a 10-foot inflatable version of Tux, the Linux penguin, handing out freshly burned CDs and flyers. Despite initial discouragement and words from Toronto Police, they report that the campaign was a success. Check out the scoop here, and photos of the event are here.

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