akutz writes "I've had the flu since Tuesday afternoon. My wife picked me up from work with a temperature of 103.6 and it finally broke at 98.7 around 3am this morning. Yay. The problem is that I used my laptop during my periods of feverish deliriousness, contaminating my shiny 15" MacBook Pro with the icky influenza virus. I am asking my fellow Slashdotters if they have ever sought out a good way of disinfecting their lucky laptops after an illness. Do you use soap? A light acid bath? Just get the family dog to lick it until it looks clean?"

An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of sentences. Currently, it just works with Amazon electronics, but the potential seems incredible. Ars Technica took an in-depth look."

CWmike writes "Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications. Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications. A 2006 survey by the Web Application Security Consortium found that 85.57 percent of 31,373 sites were vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks, 26.38 percent were vulnerable to SQL injection and 15.70 percent had other faults that could lead to data loss."

kthejoker writes "Apparently companies are even worse about losing our data than we suspected. From the article: 'According to a study of 106 major US airports and 800 business travelers published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer, about 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Only 30 percent of travelers ever recover the lost devices. Nearly half of the travelers say their laptops contain customer data or confidential business information.' Kinda scary..."

Bridger writes "Poker software called Polaris will play a rematch against human players during the 2008 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Developed by an artificial intelligence group at the University of Alberta in Canada, Polaris will be pitted against several professionals at the Rio Hotel between July 3rd and 6th. 'It's possible, given enough computing power, for computers to play "perfectly," where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money,"' said associate professor Michael Bowling.'"

destinyland writes "8.7 million AOL subscribers face a new 20% fee increase next month — unless they agree to never call AOL's technical support lines. They'll have to use AOL chat for support or the online help "portal" unless their issue is a failed connection — and they're being enrolled in the program by default unless they opt out. Ominously, AOL used the exact same wording as when they quietly changed their terms of service to allow them to sell subscribers' home phone numbers to telemarketers. 'Your continued subscription to the AOL service constitutes your acceptance of this change.'"

A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Lt. Col. John Bircher, head of an organization with a difficult-to-navigate name: the U.S. Army Computer Network Operations (CNO)-Electronic Warfare (EW) Proponent's Futures Branch. Lt. Col. Bircher has answered from his perspective, at length, not just the usual 10 questions, but several more besides. Read on for his take on cyberwar, jurisdiction, ethics, and more.

Kent Couch plans on attaching 150 giant latex party balloons filled with helium to a lawn chair and flying from his home in Oregon to somewhere in Idaho, preferably Boise, this 4th of July weekend. This is actually Kent's third attempt. The first trip ended abruptly when he shot out too many balloons trying to descend and he had to use a parachute to land. This time Kent has corporate sponsorship, duct tape and zip ties for emergency repairs, extra clothes and a blanket to ward off the cold at higher altitudes. If all goes well, the lawn-chair pilot says he'd like to fly across the English Channel and even Australia. Assuming he can remember the lyrics to 'The Imagination Song,' Mr. Couch might even make it to Imaginationland one day.

necro81 writes "Barely a month ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a freeze on applications for solar power plants on federally managed land, pending a two-year comprehensive environmental review. After much hue and cry from the public, industry, and other parts of government, BLM has today announced that it will lift the freeze, but continue to study the possible environmental effects. To date, no solar project has yet been approved on BLM land."

Barence writes "The majority of dial-up Internet users say they don't want to upgrade their connection to broadband, according to a new study in the US. The Pew Internet & American Life research found that 62% of dial-up users had no interest in upgrading to a high-speed connection." (CNN is carrying the AP's story on the study, too.)

arcticstoat writes "Next week, the G8 summit will discuss proposals for new international piracy laws, which include border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates. The laws will also prevent ISPs from being liable for copyright infringement. If the G8 summit were to agree on these measures and enforce them through international cooperation, could they really cut down piracy, or would they be impractical to enforce?"

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.

Whorhay writes "A Dutch doctor and a violin maker from Arkansas have compared five classical and eight modern violins in a computed tomography (CT) scanner. Apparently the 300-year-old violins are made of wood with a more consistent density than the modern violins. They aren't saying for sure that this is what gives the Stradivarius violins their unique sound, but it's the first scientific explanation I've heard for it that seems to have merit." Unfortunately science has yet to explain how how all three chords I know ROCK on my SG.

Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they were able to transfer 62,419,734 MB in 24 hours. You can get more information, including a breakdown of how many downloads each country did from around the world, by visiting spreadfirefox.com. Congratulations, Mozilla, on the new record."

psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.