StonyCreekBare writes "Lately I've been rethinking my personal security practices. Should my laptop be stolen, having Firefox 'fill in' passwords automatically for me when I go to my bank's site seems sub-optimal. Keeping passwords for all the varied sites on the computer in a plain-text file seems unwise as well. Keeping them in my brain is a prescription for disaster, as my brain is increasingly leaky. A paper notepad likewise has its disadvantages. I have looked at a number of password managers, password 'vaults' and so on. The number of tools out there is a bit overwhelming. Magic Password Generator add-in for Firefox seems competent, but it's tied to Firefox, and I have other places and applications where I want passwords. And I might be accessing my sites from other computers that don't have it installed. The ideal tool in my mind should be something that is independent of any application, browser, or computer; something that is easily carried, but which if lost poses no risk of compromise. What does the Slashdot crowd like in password tools?"

fatnickc writes "The UK's Channel 4, from the 16th of September, will be broadcasting a few programmes in 3D, the full list of which can be found here. While the likes of a 3D Miley Cyrus concert aren't exactly groundbreaking, this will give 3D viewing at home much more publicity, paving the way for even more interesting projects in the future. In partnership with retailer Sainsbury's, Channel 4 are producing free 3D glasses so that as many people as possible can watch them, although it's unclear which of the various types they'll be. "

Hugh Pickens writes "Science Daily reports findings from a new study which suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, long before their first babble or coo, and are able to memorize sounds from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language. Newborns prefer their mother's voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech (a.k.a. 'motherese'). 'The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation,' said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany. Wermke's team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old. The recordings of 2,500 cries as mothers changed babies' diapers, readied babies for feeding or otherwise interacted with the youngsters show an extremely early impact of native language, with analysis revealing clear differences in the shape of the newborns' cry melodies, based on their mother tongue."

AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"

Techdirt has pointed out yet another cable exec that just doesn't quite get it. Comcast's COO, Steve Burke, recently urged the TV industry to find ways to "get consumers to change" rather than figure out better methods to cater to demand. "'An entire generation is growing up, if we don't figure out how to change that behavior so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors, we're going to wake up and see cord cutting.' How many consumers, in any market, are focused on 'respecting' vendors' revenue streams? How, exactly, does he propose to effect this sea change? And why not just develop products that consumers will willingly pay for, rather than trying to change consumer behavior in such a fundamental way?"

TechRev_AL writes "A team from the University of Washington has attached an RFID chip capable of sensing neural activity to a live moth, to pick up the spikes that occur as it beats its wings. Most neural implants are still relatively bulky, but the Washington researchers wanted to show the components in an RFID could be adapted for the same purpose. The NeuralWISP chip is a collection of low-power components such as a specialized signal amplifier, on a circuit board just over two centimeters long. The circuitry converts usable power from the reader — roughly 430 microwatts — to a voltage that can turn on a microcontroller. The sensor is also configured to 'wake up' only when a neuron fires. The ultimate goal is to create more compact, wirelessly-powered brain and nervous system implants for people."

toppings writes "Microsoft Technical fellow Mark Russinovich explains why he is now retiring NewSID, which has been used by IT departments for years when deploying Windows to new systems from customized clone images. Russinovich writes: 'The reason that I began considering NewSID for retirement is that, although people generally reported success with it on Windows Vista, I hadn't fully tested it myself and I got occasional reports that some Windows component would fail after NewSID was used. When I set out to look into the reports I took a step back to understand how duplicate SIDs could cause problems, a belief that I had taken on faith like everyone else. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that machine SID duplication — having multiple computers with the same machine SID — doesn't pose any problem, security or otherwise. I took my conclusion to the Windows security and deployment teams and no one could come up with a scenario where two systems with the same machine SID, whether in a Workgroup or a Domain, would cause an issue. At that point the decision to retire NewSID became obvious.' He concludes: 'It's a little surprising that the SID duplication issue has gone unquestioned for so long, but everyone has assumed that someone else knew exactly why it was a problem. To my chagrin, NewSID has never really done anything useful and there's no reason to miss it now that it's retired. Microsoft's official policy on SID duplication will also now change and look for Sysprep to be updated in the future to skip SID generation.'"

As Windows 7's market share passes 3.6%, up from 1.9% the day before launch, llManDrakell notes an experiment they did over at Sophos. They installed Windows 7 on a clean machine — with no anti-virus protection — with User Access Control in its default configuration. They threw at it the next 10 virus/worm samples that came in the door. Seven of them ran; UAC stopped only one baddie that had run in the absense of UAC. "Lesson learned? You still need to run anti-virus on Windows 7."

Glyn Moody writes "A leaked copy (PDF) of Version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework replaces a requirement in Version 1 for carefully-defined open standards by one for a more general 'openness': 'the willingness of persons, organizations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest.' It also defines an 'openness continuum' that includes 'non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the "not invented here" syndrome.' Looks like 'closed' is the new 'open' in the EU."

Archeopteryx writes "According to Wired's 'Gadget Lab' blog, Snow Leopard's next update, OS X 10.6.2, will block the Atom processor and will disable many 'Hackintosh' netbooks. It is indeed true that OS X will run just fine on some netbooks if you install the right drivers and ktexts, but Apple's EULA has always specified that the license was applicable only to Apple hardware. There have always been processor types specified in OS X and that have to be worked around now for those who want to use an Atom or similar non-Apple-adopted processor, so this is likely no more than a hiccup on the road for the OSX86 crowd. But, it raises the question: is it time for Apple to sell a license for non-Apple hardware — priced accordingly of course — for those people who want OS X on platform types Apple has not yet adopted, like the netbook? The only reason OS X is not on my Eee is that I want to comply with the licensing terms. I could just pay for a license to use it."

angryrice tips news that Adobe seems to be campaigning for the inclusion of Flash and PDF in the Obama administration's efforts at increasing government transparency and openness. A post from the Sunlight Labs blog is critical of Adobe's undertaking, in part since PDF is often "non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted." They also say government's priority should be to publish datasets and the APIs to interact with them, rather than choosing how they're displayed in fancy graphs and charts.

cptdondo writes "I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a network card for that. My goal is to get a minimal GUI that lets me run a basic browser like Dillo and open a couple of xterms. I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine. I've done a lot of work on OpenWRT, so naturally I though that would work, but X appears to be broken in the recent builds — I can't get the keyboard to work. (OK, not surprising; OpenWRT is made to run on WiFi Access Point hardware which doesn't have a keyboard...) All of the 'mini' distros come as a live CD; useless on a machine without a CD-ROM. Ditto for the USB images. I'm also finding that the definition of a 'mini' distro has gotten to the point of 'It fits on a 3GB partition and needs 128 MB RAM to run.' Has Linux really become that bloated? Do we really need 2.2 GB of cruft to bring up a simple X session? Is there a distro that provides direct ext2 images instead of live CDs?"

binarybum writes "Often forgotten, but the independent open source spirit lives strong in the once Mozilla project — now SeaMonkey. Version 2.0 is finally out and rivals Firefox with similar features but integrated email with a small footprint." The Register has a short piece on the 2.0 release, which mentions that SeaMonkey is now based on Firefox 3.5.4. Stephen Shankland lists some of the features in a handy bullet-point style, too. I'm using the new release right now; it's crashed once — but only once — in several hours of use.

Barence writes "PC Pro has done a thorough test of the software bundled by nine of the leading laptop manufacturers to find out who installs the most crapware on their PCs. Manufacturers such as Acer add as much as two minutes to their boot times by stuffing their machines full of bundled software, with own-brand proprietary software being the worst offender. HP's bundled apps, meanwhile, have a memory footprint of more than 1GB. PC Pro has also reviewed three pieces of software which promise to remove rubbish from your PC — with mixed results."

eldavojohn writes "Game Politics makes note of criticism over leaked footage from the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 release. (Spoiler warning.) Footage shows the player engaged in killing civilians with terrorists (relevant video begins at about 1:50, second source in case of DMCA). Several game sites are asking if this is taking things too far. Probably just advertising at work, but the footage is indeed controversial — the question remains whether or not it is out of context."