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News

EU Plans To Make Apple, Adobe and Others Open Up 389

Posted by CmdrTaco from the jaws-of-life dept.
FlorianMueller writes "After pursuing Microsoft and Intel, European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes is now preparing an initiative that could have an even greater impact on the IT industry: a European interoperability law that will affect not only companies found dominant in a market but all 'significant' players. In a recent interview, Mrs. Kroes mentioned Apple. Nokia, RIM and Adobe would be other examples. All significant market players would have to provide access to interfaces and data formats, with pricing constraints considered 'likely' by the commissioner. Her objective: 'Any kind of IT product should be able to communicate with any type of service in the future.' The process may take a few years, but key decisions on the substance of the bill may already be made later this year."

Comment Re:You have to be kidding! (Score 1) 199

by drijen (#32704928) Attached to: The Fastest ISPs In the US
U.S. ISPS need to be shot.
I am currently sitting on a couch in LaCygne, Kansas. Looking out the window, I can see the place where the fiber (yeah fiber, in a rural area) terminates if I look out the window.

Now guess what the speed is. Go ahead, guess.









512 KBits/320KBits.
/
Back home in Texas, my Verizon DLS (non FIOS), is 1.5MBit/384KBit for $30/month. In other words, I can upload from home faster than I can download here in Texas.
/
Now guess how much the Kansas line costs a month. Go ahead and guess.









$60/month.
Its all a scam, and there is no basis for it. Greed, pure and simple.

Comment Why people like the pirate bay are a good. (Score 3, Insightful) 42

by drijen (#32703022) Attached to: Reporters Without Borders Fight Web Censorship
Why the heck would you allow non-hackers to protect you from the people you need to hide from?
I seem to recall that a group like the pirate bay, who made it their business to mask identity from powerful interests created baywords.com for exactly this purpose.
A misconfigured tor node or vpn stream could expose someone to torture or worse. A group like this needs to step back, and ask someone in the know to do it, and just offer funding.
Microsoft

Microsoft Explains Mystery Firefox Extension 142

Posted by Soulskill from the barn-doors-and-horses dept.
Ricky writes with a followup to news we discussed a couple days ago that a Microsoft toolbar update was installing an IE add-on and a Firefox extension without the user's consent. Quoting Ars: "Microsoft has fixed the distribution scope of a toolbar update that, without the user's knowledge, installed an add-on in Internet Explorer and an extension in Firefox called Search Helper Extension. Microsoft told us that the new update is actually the same as the old one; the only difference is the distribution settings. In other words, the update will no longer be distributed to toolbars that it shouldn't be added to. End users won't see the tweak, Microsoft told Ars, and also offered an explanation on what the mystery add-on actually does. 'The Search Enhancement Pack is a shared component used by the Windows Live Toolbar, MSN Toolbar, and Bing Bar. This component enables toolbar search functionality, like the toolbar search suggestions drop down. It is not the toolbar. It is a component used by the toolbars.'"
Google

Microsoft Talks Back To Google's Security Claims 528

Posted by samzenpus from the smack-talking dept.
Kilrah_il writes "Yesterday there was a piece about Google ditching Windows for internal use because of security concerns. Now Microsoft is fighting back, claiming its products are the most secure — more than Google's and Apple's. 'When it comes to security, even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else. And it's not just the hackers; third-party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others.'"

Comment Re:Not Surprising, but when will MS ditch Windows? (Score 1) 1003

by drijen (#32414362) Attached to: Google Reportedly Ditching Windows
Bunk.
Windows 7 is no better than XP in terms and security - just check the news for the last year or so. Furthermore, many of the last updates applied to XP brought 7's security "features" to XP; things like better canary support, an upgraded (still crap) firewall, and other such things. The notion that 7 is more secure than XP is just bollocks.
Privacy

Privacy Machiavellis 206

Posted by kdawson from the prince-of-a-company dept.
Chris Jay Hoofnagle has a piece up at SFGate.com on what he calls the "privacy Machiavellis," which are exemplified by Google and Facebook. (The article is adapted from a longer treatment published last year, called "Beyond Google and Evil.") Hoofnagle heads the privacy foundation set up with money collected from settlements of privacy lawsuits against Facebook. From SFGate: "... you have no way to ask Google to stop this tracking. Instead, you can merely opt out of the targeted advertising — the product recommendations. Exercising your privacy options creates a worst-case-scenario outcome: If you opt out, you are still tracked, but you do not receive the putative benefit of targeted ads. An illusory opt-out system is just one of the increasingly sophisticated sleights of hand in the privacy world. Consider Facebook's privacy options. ... Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers ... more than 100 [choices]. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all. Facebook benefits because poor choices or paralysis leads consumers to reveal more personal information. In any case, the fault is the consumer's, because, after all, they were given a choice. Reader Kilrah_il sends word that Google has just released a tool that could alleviate some of the above worries: it stops tracking by Google Analytics for users of IE7+, Firefox 3.5+, and Chrome 4+. Perhaps Hoofnagle will comment on it here or elsewhere.
Businesses

Local TV Could Go the Way of Newspapers 180

Posted by Soulskill from the not-as-good-for-wrapping-paper-though dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Alan D. Mutter writes on his 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' blog that the economics of local broadcasting may begin to unravel as dramatically in the next five years as they did for newspapers in the last five years, due to the unparalleled consumer choice made possible by a growing mass of (mostly free) content on the Internet. 'Once it becomes as easy and satisfying to view a YouTube video on your 50-inch television as it is to watch "Two and a Half Men," audiences will fragment to the point that local broadcasters will not be able to attract large quantities of viewers for a particular program,' writes Mutter. The economics of cable TV programming already are geared to serving small but targeted niches, but as audiences shatter, those options won't be available to local broadcasters, who will be deprived of the vast reach that enabled the high ad rates and enviable profits long associated with their businesses. Although barely 8% of US households had access to IPTV in 2009, this technology is likely to be available to some 20% of the more than 100 million homes subscribing to pay-television services in 2014, according to senior analyst Lee Ratliff of iSuppli, a private market research company. 'We already have gotten a hint of what the future could hold. Acting to trim spending during the recession, many local stations cut back their news staffs, resulting in a decline in the caliber and depth of their coverage,' writes Mutter."
Science

Your Computer Or iPad Could Be Disrupting Sleep 351

Posted by kdawson from the bright-idea dept.
Crash McBang sends in a CNN report on electronics and sleeplessness and asks, "So, what do Slashdotters do to get a good night's rest?" "More than ever, consumer electronics — particularly laptops, smartphones, and Apple's new iPad — are shining bright light into our eyes until just moments before we doze off. Now there's growing concern that these glowing gadgets may actually fool our brains into thinking it's daytime. Exposure can disturb sleep patterns and exacerbate insomnia, some sleep researchers said in interviews. ... Unlike paper books or e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle, which does not emit its own light, the iPad's screen shines light directly into the reader's eyes from a relatively close distance. That makes the iPad and laptops more likely to disrupt sleep patterns than, say, a television sitting across the bedroom or a lamp that illuminates a paper book, both of which shoot far less light straight into the eye, researchers said."
Data Storage

Best Solutions For Massive Home Hard Drive Storage? 609

Posted by timothy from the watch-and-release dept.
i_ate_god writes "I download a lot of 720/1080p videos, and I also produce a lot of raw uncompressed video. I have run out of slots to put in hard drives across two computers. I need (read: want) access to my files at all times (over a network is fine), especially since I maintain a library of what I've got on the TV computer. I don't want to have swappable USB drives, I want all hard drives available all the time on my network. I'm assuming that, since it's on a network, I won't need 16,000 RPM drives and thus I'm hoping a solution exists that can be moderately quiet and/or hidden away somewhere and still keep somewhat cool. So Slashdot, what have you done?"
Image

Church Turns To Facebook To Find Priests Screenshot-sm 286

Posted by samzenpus from the give-us-this-day-our-daily-farmville dept.
crimeandpunishment writes "The Catholic church of France isn't looking for friends on Facebook, it's looking for priests. The church has turned to Facebook as part of a campaign to attract young people to the priesthood, in an effort to combat its drastically dwindling number of priests. It may be working. The Facebook page attracted more than 1,200 fans in one week."
Businesses

Garage Startup Develops "Personal Computer" 80

Posted by timothy from the doomed-from-the-start dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "In the summer of 1980, MIT graduates Donald Faber and Peter Haberle moved into an empty two-car garage and started work building the first-ever 'personal home computer.' Now almost 30 years later, what began as a humble two-man operation has since grown into an even more humble, even more cramped computer company, based out of an even smaller single-car garage. According to Faber and Haberle, a lot has changed since Xalaga was first founded. What was once a struggling $7,500-a-year business with only a dozen or so paying customers is now a desperate $6,400-a-year business with only a half dozen or so paying customers. Faber, who turned down a promising position with GE in order to start Xalaga, a decision he now says he regrets each and every waking day, told reporters that he knew almost immediately that his company had something not-at-all special on its hands. 'We sold only one computer that first year, then the following year it was three computers, then suddenly 10 computers, then just as suddenly five computers, then back down to three computers again, and finally only one or two machines every other year for pretty much the next decade,' said Faber, standing up from the plastic milk crate that now serves as his desk. 'Had someone told us when we first started that we'd be here today, operating out of a much smaller, somehow less expensive garage, we probably would have laughed right in their face.'"
Google

Microsoft Claims Google Chrome Steals Your Privacy 522

Posted by samzenpus from the our-competitor-is-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is going on the offensive against Google, accusing the search giant of creating a browser that does not respect user privacy. The company posted a video, embedded below, on TechNet Edge with the following description: 'Watch a demo on how Google Chrome collects every keystroke you make and how Internet Explorer 8 keeps your information private through two address bars and In Private browsing.' Microsoft's first criticism is Chrome's combining the address bar and the search box into a single entry box; IE8 keeps those fields separate. 'By keeping these boxes separate, your privacy is better protected and the addresses of the sites you're visiting aren't automatically shared with Microsoft, or anyone else,' says IE product manager Pete LePage."
Google

Lawmakers Ask For FTC Investigation of Google Buzz 131

Posted by CmdrTaco from the always-with-the-investigating dept.
angry tapir writes "Eleven US lawmakers have asked the FTC to investigate Google's launch of its Buzz social-networking product for breaches of consumer privacy. The representatives — six Democrats and five Republicans from the House Energy and Commerce Committee — noted in their letter that Google's roll-out of Buzz exposed private information of users to Google's Gmail service to outsiders. In one case, a 9-year-old girl accidentally shared her contact list in Gmail with a person who has a 'sexually charged' username, the lawmakers said in the letter."

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