Submission + - Abstinence Debunked: Lessons from the Front Lines (blogspot.com)
Mike Kuykendall writes: "A social worker and activist excoriates the Bush administration's abstinence-only education programs."
Submission + - 99% recognition accuracy on thousands of voices! (blogspot.com)
Wireless speech recognition writes: "IBM Research announces the new Cell Broadband Engine(tm) Cell/B.E processor; capable of literally perfect recognition on thousands of voices, at once. This new Cell/B.E. is a streaming multiprocessor who's architecture contains a general-purpose IBM PowerPC processor, working with additional special-purpose processing cores jointly designed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM.
The Cell/B.E. can handle thousands of simultaneous voice channels in real time, and IBM states "On both the Cell/B.E. processor and the software platforms, recognition accuracy was 99%".
The research team goes on to conclude:
"We have implemented and demonstrated a prototype speech recognition engine that is capable of processing approximately 1,000 speech channels on a single Cell/B.E. processor. The kernel computations are designed to be highly scalable, and we expect this performance result to generalize well to commercial speech systems."
The Cell/B.E. can handle thousands of simultaneous voice channels in real time, and IBM states "On both the Cell/B.E. processor and the software platforms, recognition accuracy was 99%".
The research team goes on to conclude:
"We have implemented and demonstrated a prototype speech recognition engine that is capable of processing approximately 1,000 speech channels on a single Cell/B.E. processor. The kernel computations are designed to be highly scalable, and we expect this performance result to generalize well to commercial speech systems."
Submission + - Samsung's 64GB SSD drive review (computerworld.com) 4
Lucas123 writes: "Computerworld's Rich Ericson reviewed Samsung's first large capacity solid state disk drive and says it's heartier and faster than the drive in Sony's new flash-based notebook. It's also got an impressive mean time between failure of more than 2 million hours, versus under 500,000 hours for the Samsung's other traditional hard drives and the company says the drive can withstand an operating shock of 1,500Gs at .5 miliseconds (versus 300Gs at 2 miliseconds for a traditional hard drive. "Power consumption is just 1 watt when the system is active, 0.1 watt when idle, and .06 watt in standby mode. (Equivalent power consumption figures with hard drives are 2.1, 1.5, and .2 watts, respectively.) That could explain why we got 5 hours, 22 minutes of power in Max Battery mode when surfing the Web, creating documents with OpenOffice, or uploading and downloading files to an FTP server.""
Submission + - Applications go outside of Facebook
An anonymous reader writes: Up until now facebook applications have been inaccessible to the millions of people on the Internet that haven't joined Facebook yet. This policy also prevented applications from being indexed by search engines had the potential to fuel their growth significantly.
As of now facebook has started allowing people to access application canvas pages even when not logged in to Facebook, whilst still respecting their users' privacy. This means that user-specific data available on public canvas pages will be first name and profile picture (and then only if the user's profile picture is already publicly searchable). A fantastic example of this at work is Sponsor Me (http://apps.facebook.com/sponsor-me/), a facebook application which allows users to setup and run campaigns for any purpose. As you can see due to the recent facebook changes, Sponsor Me campaigns are now available to external users, giving the ability for campaigns to be discovered by the millions of non-facebook users which otherwise wouldn't be able to help out.
This can surely only help attract more user to facebook, as application developers find all new ways to tempt users into facebook with the variety of applications.
As of now facebook has started allowing people to access application canvas pages even when not logged in to Facebook, whilst still respecting their users' privacy. This means that user-specific data available on public canvas pages will be first name and profile picture (and then only if the user's profile picture is already publicly searchable). A fantastic example of this at work is Sponsor Me (http://apps.facebook.com/sponsor-me/), a facebook application which allows users to setup and run campaigns for any purpose. As you can see due to the recent facebook changes, Sponsor Me campaigns are now available to external users, giving the ability for campaigns to be discovered by the millions of non-facebook users which otherwise wouldn't be able to help out.
This can surely only help attract more user to facebook, as application developers find all new ways to tempt users into facebook with the variety of applications.
Submission + - Users, Web Developers Vent Over IE7's First Year (pcworld.com)
outlando writes: After a year of IE7, Tony Chor at M$ has written a glowingly self-congratulatory entry in the IE blog. The comments, from various developers, designers and other industry professionals, tell a rather different story to the one outlined in the blog entry itself.
PC World's story is here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140299/article.html
Unfortunately, PC World neglected to provide a link to the blog entry itself. You can find it at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/11/30/the-first-year-of-ie7.aspx
PC World's story is here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140299/article.html
Unfortunately, PC World neglected to provide a link to the blog entry itself. You can find it at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/11/30/the-first-year-of-ie7.aspx
Submission + - Mounties claim major movie-piracy bust (theglobeandmail.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The RCMP says it has nabbed a major player in the lucrative world of Internet movie piracy.
Montreal resident Geremi Adam, 25, is considered by the FBI as a world leader in Internet movie piracy.
Freakonomics Q&A With Bruce Schneier 147
Samrobb writes "In grand Slashdot tradition, the Freakonomics blog solicited reader questions for a Q&A session with Bruce Schneier. The blog host writes that Mr. Schneier's answers '...are extraordinarily interesting, providing mandatory reading for anyone who uses a computer. He also plainly thinks like an economist: search below for "crime pays" to see his sober assessment of why it's better to earn a living as a security expert than as a computer criminal.'" The interview covers pretty much the whole range of issues Schneier has written about, and he provides links to more detailed writings on many of the questions.
Submission + - Evel Knievel Dies at 69 (blogspot.com)
jazmynmarie writes: Evel Knievel died Friday after 69 years, which is more than twice as long as it by all rights should have taken him. Knievel, who had been in poor health...
Feed New York Times: Canadian Court Opens Up eBay Data to Tax Agency (nytimes.com)
A Canadian court has ruled that tax collectors can demand and review data from eBay to see how much money individual sellers make on the online auction site.
Submission + - New Game Trading Site (gamezola.com)
Frank writes: "Ever since launching a few months ago, Gamezola.com has been taking the gaming industry by storm. We have been featured in prominent gaming websites such as gamespress.com and gameplaymonthly.com. Recently we have been the gold winner of the 2007 WWW awards. We have thousands of gamers registered on our site, who are actively listing and trading video games. We have hundreds of listing on our site, from older to the hottest and latest video games.
In celebrating of E-4-All, Gamezola is launching a special deal of $1 per trade. That is a saving of over 40%. Also, look for us at E-4-All (Los Angeles Convention Center) with special coupons for free trades!"
In celebrating of E-4-All, Gamezola is launching a special deal of $1 per trade. That is a saving of over 40%. Also, look for us at E-4-All (Los Angeles Convention Center) with special coupons for free trades!"
Submission + - Radiohead with "name your own price" LP7
JP writes: "Radiohead have announced a new record http://www.inrainbows.com/ via their blog http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace. The album is to be released ten days from now. What is particularly novel is that you can choose whatever price you wish to pay for the digital download only version of the record or you can purchase an LP/CD combo box. It's already sorta "slashdotted" via pitchfork and a million other news sites. Merge records also has seemed to follow this pattern of giving fans inexpensive downloads (with merge it's via emusic.com) or premium physical goods with high grade vinyl and artwork etc. I'm sure we are seeing the intermediate future of popular music distribution, although Radiohead have an obvious unique existing "marketshare" to be able to pull this off more easily."
Submission + - VM-based rootkits proved easily detectable (stanford.edu)
paleshadows writes: A year and a half has passed since
SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced.
The idea spawned two lively slashdot discussions:
the first, which followed
the initial report about SubVirt,
and
the second, which was conducted after
Joanna Rutkowska
has
recycled the idea (apparently without giving credit to the initial authors).
Conversely, in this year's HotOS workshop,
researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled
"
Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities"
which shows that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable.
The introduction of the paper explains that
"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture, virtual implementations of this architecture differ substantially from physical implementations. These differences are not incidental: performance demands and practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences (sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe the potential for preventing VMM detection under close scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."
The paper concludes by saying that
"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering whether the trusted computing base of a system has been compromised), to the much easier problem of detecting a VMM."
"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture, virtual implementations of this architecture differ substantially from physical implementations. These differences are not incidental: performance demands and practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences (sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe the potential for preventing VMM detection under close scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."
The paper concludes by saying that
"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering whether the trusted computing base of a system has been compromised), to the much easier problem of detecting a VMM."
Submission + - Homely Faces Are Better Faces (associatedcontent.com)
Submission + - NetBSD boosts MySQL performance (feyrer.de)
hubertf writes: "Andrew Doran, who was recently hired by the NetBSD project to
work on NetBSD's SMP implementation, has done a lot of good work,
and he has
merged
some of his work from the vmlocking-branch into NetBSD-current.
Effects of this are that
time for build.sh on a quad-Opteron went down by ~10%.
Andrew also updated his previous benchmarks, and posted about his recent results: ``Most of the sysbench runs that I've seen to date have sysbench running on the same machine as the database. That's a good test but with the exception of small installations and out-of-band activity, production setups rarely look like that. So I ran sysbench itself on a seperate dual core system.''
There are images that compare NetBSD 3 with NetBSD-current (where most of Andrew's changes are now), and NetBSD-current compared to Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
The original benchmarks didn't include Solaris/x86, so Jaime Fournier sat down and repeated the test (on a single system). The results show that NetBSD beats Solaris by ~25% in the ReadOnly test, and that they're about on par in the ReadWrite test, with NetBSD kicking in earlier WRT the number of client threads, but Solaris keeping up longer before they both degrade. The courves are quite similar, and my guess is that there is some room for finetuning there."
Andrew also updated his previous benchmarks, and posted about his recent results: ``Most of the sysbench runs that I've seen to date have sysbench running on the same machine as the database. That's a good test but with the exception of small installations and out-of-band activity, production setups rarely look like that. So I ran sysbench itself on a seperate dual core system.''
There are images that compare NetBSD 3 with NetBSD-current (where most of Andrew's changes are now), and NetBSD-current compared to Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
The original benchmarks didn't include Solaris/x86, so Jaime Fournier sat down and repeated the test (on a single system). The results show that NetBSD beats Solaris by ~25% in the ReadOnly test, and that they're about on par in the ReadWrite test, with NetBSD kicking in earlier WRT the number of client threads, but Solaris keeping up longer before they both degrade. The courves are quite similar, and my guess is that there is some room for finetuning there."
Submission + - Demonoid Going Down For Canadians (torrentfreak.com)
Looce writes: TorrentFreak.com reports that people outside Canada will now see on the Demonoid.com homepage a news story saying:
We received a letter from a lawyer representing the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and we need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.
... and people in Canada will see this instead, without the site navigation:We received a letter from a lawyer represeting the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and We need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. If you reside in Canada, that is the reason you are being redirected to this message. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.
The CRIA is the Canadian Recording Industry Association, an equivalent to the RIAA.
