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Linux

30 Days With Ubuntu Linux 852

Posted by Hemos from the making-the-switch dept.
jkwdoc writes "Vexed by Vista's hardware requirements and product activation issues, many have claimed on various boards that they plan to 'switch to Linux.' [H] Consumer spent 30 days using nothing but Ubuntu Linux to find out if this is truly a viable alternative for the consumer. Linux has indeed become much more than the 'Programmer's OS.'"
Music

Submission + - New Royalty Rates Could Kill Internet Radio

Submitted by FlatCatInASlatVat
FlatCatInASlatVat writes: Kurt Hanson's Radio Internet Newsletter has an analysis of the new royalty rates for Internet Radio announced by the US Copyright Office. The decision is likely to put most internet radio stations out of business by making the cost of broadcasting much higher than revenues. From the article: "The Copyright Royalty Board is rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters and instead adopting the "per play" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange (a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA)...[The] math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues." Clear Channel, in the meantime, pays nothing. So long Radio Paradise, and all the other wonderful internet stations.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - GoDaddy Deletes Domain Name for Bad E-mail address

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Domain registrar GoDaddy canceled the domain registration for FamilyAlbum.com because the owner provided an inaccurate e-mail address for its 'whois'. The phone number and address were correct but GoDaddy never contacted the customer that way and simply deleted the domain from his account. GoDaddy sold the domain to someone who placed a backorder for the domain and maintains it did the right thing. Here's the scoop: http://domainnamewire.com/2007/02/27/godaddy-delet es-domain-name-for-inaccurate-email-address/ http://domainnamewire.com/2007/02/28/godaddy-respo nds-to-deletion-over-invalid-email-address/
Music

Submission + - Internet radio buckles under new royalty law

Submitted by geogeek6_7
geogeek6_7 writes: The Copyright Royalty Board has sided with RIAA lobbyists and decided to move internet radio stations' royalties to a per-play system. According to calculations by RAIN, the seemingly benign change comes at a high cost to existing internet radio stations: most stations' royalty costs will be over 100% of their revenue! Independent radio stations, like RadioParadise, say they will go out of business unless a "percentage-of-revenue" system can be negotiated instead.
Security

Homeland Security Offers Details on Real ID 227

Posted by Zonk from the always-been-at-war-with-eurasia dept.
pr0nqu33n writes "C|Net is running an article on the DHS's requirements for the Real ID system. Thursday members of the Bush administration finally unveiled details of the anticipated national identification program. Millions of Americans will have until 2013 to register for the system, which will (some would argue) constitute a national ID. RFID trackers for the cards are under consideration, as is a cohesive nation-wide design for the card. States must submit a proposal for how they'll adopt the system by early October of this year. If they don't, come May of next year their residents will see their licenses unable to gain them access to federal buildings and airplanes. The full regulations for the system are available online in PDF format. Likewise, the DHS has a Questions and Answers style FAQ available to explain the program to the curious."
Announcements

Submission + - Computer Archive Used to Find Stolen Art

Submitted by Standup
Standup writes: The request was simple enough: Lloyd's underwriters had been approached to insure the movement of seven paintings, including one by Cezanne, from Russia to London for valuation and sale.So Lloyd's contacted the Art Loss Register, a small private company in London whose computer archive lists 180,000 items ranging from sculpture and silver to textiles, books, stamps and vehicles — and many of the great art works stolen or missing around the world.
OS X

Submission + - PC World Picks OSX Over XP, Vista (and, uh, Linux)

Submitted by
DenmaFat
DenmaFat writes: "The article is buried in PC World's web site, but the ordinarily Redmond-centric magazine comes right out and says that OS X is the best operating system for its readers, over Linux and Windows XP, with Windows Vista ranked dead last. The review is the subjective assessment of just one author, but he provides a lengthy qualitative comparison chart to back up his recommendations. On a related note, chilled beverages now available in Hades."
Security

Month of PHP Bugs Has Begun 165

Posted by Zonk from the quick-hide-the-furniture dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The previously announced Month of PHP Bugs started three days ago, and already lists 8 security vulnerabilities in PHP and PHP related software. From the site: 'This initiative is an effort to improve the security of PHP. However we will not concentrate on problems in the PHP language that might result in insecure PHP applications, but on security vulnerabilities in the PHP core. During March 2007 old and new security vulnerabilities in the Zend Engine, the PHP core and the PHP extensions will be disclosed on a day by day basis. We will also point out necessary changes in the current vulnerability management process used by the PHP Security Response Team.'"
Google

Tax Accounting Evil at Google? 261

Posted by CowboyNeal from the passing-the-bucks dept.
theodp writes "In its annual report, Google said it's done no tax-accounting evil, but the search giant acknowledged that both the IRS and SEC are taking a look at the way in which it accounts for income tax. Google is one of a number of U.S. companies that have come under fire for allegedly practicing 'profit laundering', i.e., moving book profits offshore to evade millions and even billions in taxes to the country where it really operates. In past SEC filings, Google has credited its Irish subsidiary for reducing its effective tax rate."
The Almighty Buck

Why DRM Cannot Open Up New Business Models 131

Posted by CowboyNeal from the supply-and-demanding dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Techdirt has a cool post up that doesn't just explain why DRM is bad, but gives a really interesting economic explanation for why DRM cannot create successful new business models. Since the RIAA and MPAA keep insisting that DRM will create new business models, it's useful to see an argument for why that's basically impossible." As the article says, anyone can create a "new" business model. Creating a successful "new" business model is what is so elusive here.
Windows

Submission + - Vista file security < XP file security

Submitted by Ksigpaul
Ksigpaul writes: Microsoft claims that Vista is a huge step forward in security, but one has to question this by some very deliberate choices between the Vista flavors. We all know the BitLocker(TM) technology is only available to Ultimate and Business users but what about EFS? Windows XP Professional has the EFS technology built in but you have to buy the 300+ Vista Ultimate just to be able to encrypt individual files in Vista. Can a community outcry or a couple of good articles from respected journalists essentially force Microsoft to include this for their Home Basic and Home Premium customers? Home customers have important files and are occassionaly burglarized or the victim of a laptop theft.
Microsoft

Microsoft OneCare Last in Antivirus Tests 144

Posted by CowboyNeal from the not-so-great-expectations dept.
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "PC World has a story reporting that Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare came in dead last out of a group of 17 antivirus programs tested against hundreds of thousands of pieces of malware. The report of an Austrian antivirus researcher was released at the AV Comparatives Web site this week. Several free AV products were included in the test as well." While the top dog was able to find 99.5% of the malicious code, OneCare clocked in at 82.4%. Of course, there's no metric for the severity of the malware in the 17% gap.
Wii

The Wii's MEMS Inventor on Future Technology 118

Posted by Zonk from the wii-wii-wii-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.
eldavojohn writes "IEEE Spectrum is running an article on the inventor of the motion sensor that the Wii uses. The microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gives Wii its core ability to sense motion in the controller. What's really interesting is where Benedetto Vigna wants to take this technology. He has plans to make the sensor smaller and tougher, and hope to place it inside of things like shoes, textiles, and medical devices to aid in data collection. He continues, 'Then I want to make a three-dimensional gyroscope, to measure rotation around three different axes. Today, such products are quite big, a cube 10 centimeters on a side. We want to do this in less than a 30-millimeter cube, to serve as an image stabilizer in cameras and to track a person's position in the intervals when he can't get a GPS signal.'"
Security

Submission + - RSAkey revealed in few sec w/o Quantum Computer

Submitted by
QuantumCrypto
QuantumCrypto writes: "IRISA is reporting that Branch Prediction is NOT good for Security. Branch predictors allow processors to execute the next instructions without waiting for the previous ones to be resolved, which in turn allows the RSA key to be spied.
Old news. Right? Well André Seznec at IRISA has independently verified the claims. "I've tried to validate the principle. It works! Beautiful case study by the way!" said André Seznec. Onur Aciçmez and his colleagues managed to grab 508 bits out of a 512-bit key on RSA encryption , at first shot, in just a few thousandths of a second. Quite a feat when compared to the endless three months and the line-up of 80-some 2.2 GHz CPU computers that the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) once poured in to crack a SSL 640-bit key (3).

Background from the Artikle:
Until not so long ago,processors were executing threads in a time shared mode: T0 was executing during a time slice, then T1 was executing during the next time slice, then T0 again, ..."Each of these time slices lasts far longer than the processor execution cycle. Say a thread lasts around10 milliseconds, representing about 20 to 30 million processor cycles. As long as a spy thread and a cryptographic thread are not executed simultaneously, there is no way the former can grab very precise information on the latter." The impervious architecture keeps threads peep proof. But things have changed with the arrival of Pentium 4 HT processor generation (7), a SMT processor in PCs and servers. These CPUs run two threads at the same time: on the very same cycle, instructions from the two threads are executed on the CPU. Why? "Mainly to squeeze performance from the processor, Seznec answers. The processor can execute several instructions per cycle, but generally a significant part of the resource is lost if a single thread executes. When two threads execute at the same time, the hardware is significantly better utilized." Unfortunately, running two threads in parallel on the same hardware CPU can lead to some information leakage. "One can manage to grab an indirect view on a thread execution from a spying thread that is executed simultaneously. This indirect information about its execution can allow to recover critical information such an encryption key.""

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