Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Privacy

Submission + - Eavesdropping Helpful Against Terrorist Plot (nytimes.com)

Submitted by AcidPenguin9873
AcidPenguin9873 writes: The New York Times reports that the U.S. government's ability to eavesdrop on personal communications helped break up a terrorist plot in Germany. The intercepted phone calls and emails revealed a connection between the plotters and a breakaway cell of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad Union. What does this mean for the future of privacy in personal communications? From the article:

[McConnell's] remarks also represent part of intensifying effort by Bush administration officials to make permanent a law that is scheduled to expire in about five months. Without the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Mr. McConnell said the nation would lose "50 percent of our ability to track, understand and know about these terrorists, what they're doing to train, what they're doing to recruit and what they're doing to try to get into this country."
United States

Submission + - US Army unmanned aircraft kills two insurgents (manchester.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Nobody
Anonymous Nobody writes: A very vague, spurious account of a US Army armed unmanned air vehicle directly attacking and killing two 'suspected insurgents.' I suppose this is somewhat different than previous lethal attacks against insurgents travelling in vehicles, but the claim that this is "the first time a fully-armed UAV had been launched" seems downright wrong.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA trying to avoid trial by jury next month (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Joe Elliot
Joe Elliot writes: Faced with a jury trial set to begin on October 1, the RIAA has filed a motion for summary adjudication of specific facts: that the RIAA owns the copyrights to the songs in a file-sharing case, that the registration is proper, and that the defendant wasn't authorized to copy or distribute the recordings. If the judge rules in their favor, Ars notes that it may turn into a Novell v SCO situation where the only thing left to be decided are the damages. There are some significant problems with the copyright registrations — they don't match up. 'Thomas argues that since she lacks the financial means to conduct a thorough examination of the ownership history (e.g., track the ownership of "Hysteria" from Mercury to UMG) for the songs she is accused of infringing the copyright to, her only opportunity to determine their true ownership is either via discovery or cross-examination at trial.' Ars also notes that the RIAA's biggest fear is that of losing a case. 'A loss at trial would be catastrophic for the RIAA. It would give other defense attorneys a winning template while exposing the weaknesses of the RIAA's arguments. It would also prove costly from a financial standpoint, as the RIAA would have to foot the legal expenses for both itself and the defendant. Most of all, it would set an unwelcomed precedent: over 20,000 lawsuits filed and the RIAA loses the first one to go to a jury.'
Space

Submission + - Air force had early warning of pulsars

Submitted by
mbone
mbone writes: "It turns out that the US Air Force may have detected Pulsars before Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish. According to a news story in Nature, Charles Schisler of the USAF detected radio pulses from the Crab Nebulae "months before the first scientific observation of a pulsar was published," in 1968 in the same journal. Schisler was bored working in Alaska at a BMEWS radar site, and used the large BMEWS antenna for the observations.

If true, this would have to be added to the list of astronomical phenomena first detected by the military, including radio waves from the Sun (during World War II) and gamma ray bursts (by the Vela satellites). The article also has an interesting list of other pre-discovery observations of pulsars, all of which seem to have been ignored by the observers. Hewish (but not Burnell) was awarded a Nobel prize for the discovery."
Microsoft

de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard" 615

Posted by kdawson from the say-it-ain't-so-miguel dept.
you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"
Software

Submission + - Government Backsliding on Open Source Promises (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by
willdavid
willdavid writes: "By Tash Shifrin (ComputerWorld UK): Parliamentary battle looms over failure to break proprietary software stranglehold. The Liberal Democrats have hit out at the government's failure to use more open source software, three years after it pledged to avoid 'lock-in' to proprietary systems. The government published a policy document, 'Open Source Software: use within UK government' in 2004, promising to consider open source alongside proprietary products in IT procurements. http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/it-business/services-sourcing/news/index.cfm?newsid=5081"

Cybersquatter Faces Jail Time For Wire Fraud 55

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the it-isn't-true-till-i-see-a-summons dept.
coondoggie writes to mention that a Las Vegas man faces about 20 years in prison today after pleading guilty in a case where he impersonated intellectual property lawyers and tried to bully owners out of their domain names. "According to the FBI, David Scali is charged with registering an e-mail account under an alias and then sending e-mails in which he claimed to be the intellectual property lawyer. In the e-mails, which were sent in late June and early July of 2006, Scali threatened to file $100,000 trademark infringement lawsuits against the owners of various Internet website names unless they gave up their domain name registrations within two days."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Radio Freguencies help burn salt water (yahoo.com)

Submitted by skipsbro
skipsbro writes: ERIE, Pa. — An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century. John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn. Read on..
Programming

Free Pascal 2.2 Has Been Released 284

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the never-say-die dept.
Daniel Mantione writes "Free Pascal 2.2 has been released. Several new platforms are supported, like the Mac OS X on Intel platform, the Game Boy Advance, Windows CE and 64-Windows. Free Pascal is now the first and only free software compiler that targets 64-bit Windows. These advancements were made possible by Free Pascal's internal assembler and linker allowing support for platforms not supported by the GNU binutils. The advancement in internal assembling and linking also allow faster compilation times and smaller executables, increasing the programmer comfort. Other new features are stabs debug support, many new code optimizations, resourcestring smart-linking and more."
Security

Submission + - Security expert used Tor to collect government e-m (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
stevedcc
stevedcc writes: "You may have heard about Swedish security expert Dan Egerstad exposing password and login information for various embassy accounts and government servers. Well, anandtech are running a story about how he got the information: he ran a specialised packet sniffer on 5 Tor exit nodes ran by his corporation. From the article

Unfortunately, many Tor users do not realize that all of their network traffic is being exposed to Tor nodes. Tor users who do not use encryption are broadly exposing themselves to identity theft. Egerstad was originally doing a study on e-mail encryption, but during the course of the research project, he decided to create the packet sniffer and expose sensitive e-mail login data in order to increase awareness of the fact that Tor exposes sensitive information when not used with encryption.


I've heard people criticise anonymising networks before, saying you never know who's running them or watching them. Is this a taste of goverments' own medicine?"
IT

Seven Wonders of the IT World 170

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the random-stats dept.
C.G. Lynch writes "The computer closest to the North Pole. The most intriguing data center. The biggest scientific computing grid. The little kernel that rocked the world. CIO.com has compiled a list of Seven Wonders of the IT World, some of the most impressive and unusual systems on the planet (and beyond)."
Security

Submission + - Don't mind the rainbow, Pass-The-Hash dudeee (coresecurity.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: If Ophrack scared you, remember that when it comes to NTLM authentication, having the LM/NT hash of a password is equivalent to having the cleartext password. If an attacker has your NT/LM hash, he doesn't need to have 4GB of data to crack a password, he can just use the recently released Pass-The-Hash toolkit (http://oss.coresecurity.com/projects/pshtoolkit.htm) and connect to any service using NTLM authentication with your credentials. This attack has been around for years mainly implemented using modified SAMBA clients, but the public release of PSH toolkit brought it to the mainstream Windows world. The toolkit also has an utility to steal credentials from people connecting to your machine thru, for example, Remote Desktop; so call your Helpdesk, make them help you via remote desktop, and own the Domain! (if you are lucky:)).
Sony

Submission + - PSP Slim Security defeated in record time! (maxconsole.net)

Submitted by
JayFNG
JayFNG writes: "It didn't take Team M33 long did it now? Just FIVE days after the Official European release of the PSP Slim & Lite, M33 have released custom PSP firmware v3.6! Sony will have to try harder than that to 'protect' their system from avid homebrew fans!"
Programming

Submission + - FreePascal 2.2.0 released - no GNU LD (osnews.com)

Submitted by
marcovje writes: Free Pascal 2.2.0 has been released, and it seems they have abandonned GNU LD on Windows like platforms (CE/Win32/Win64)

I still think Lazarus (http://lazarus.freepascal.org) and Free Pascal (http://www.freepascal.org) are the best kept Open Source secrets.

Manifest:

FPC 2.2.0 released. The Free Pascal Compiler team is pleased to announce the release of FPC
2.2.0!

An overview of most changes is available below, but some highlights are:

* Architectures: PowerPC/64 and ARM support
* Platforms: Windows x64, Windows CE, Mac OS X/Intel, Game Boy Advance, and Game Boy DS support
* Linker: fast and lean internal linker for Windows platforms
* Debugging: Dwarf support and the ability to automatically fill variables with several values to more easily detect uninitialised uses
* Language: support for interface delegation, bit packed records and arrays and support for COM/OLE variants and dispinterfaces
* Infrastructure: better variants support, multiple resource files support, widestrings are COM/OLE compatible on Windows, improved database support

Downloads are available at http://www.freepascal.org/download.var

Enjoy!

The Free Pascal Compiler Team

Slashdot Top Deals

The best way to accelerate a Macintoy is at 9.8 meters per second per second.

Close