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Submission + - Gamefly sold my e-mail address!

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I own a few domains for my own vanity and amusement. When signing up for any service online, I use the format [unique-servicename]@[mydomain]. Even slashdot doesn't get a hold of my 'home' address. This is great for filtering, redirection, etc. It's also a great tool to see who has been selling my e-mail address.

During a bored moment, I was perusing through my junk mail to see which addresses spammers were using. Lo and behold, a great number (about 33%, actually) of the spam I found was sent to gamefly@[mydomain]. According to their privacy policy, they may from time to time share my information with game related third-party vendors. However, at no point did they say, "you will receive ads for viagra and porn sites." Since most people utilizing the service are probably still in high school, is it appropriate for them to be receiving such material? Someone, please! Think of the children!

Has anyone had any experience similar to this? What are the legal (if not moral) implications of such a practice?
Government

Submission + - FOIA documents reveal interesting UFO sightings

Submitted by honeymustard
honeymustard writes: AboveTopSecret has started a collaborative project for government FOIA documents with a focus on user comments, rather than cryptic document names. Many interesting observations : "While the military has downplayed the whole UFO question, especially how seriously they viewed this. It becomes evident when reading these documents that this is not the truth." And a legendary pre-Roswell UFO sighting : "The document includes newspaper clippings of the missile expert's eye-witness account of a flying saucer over the Naval Research Laboratory missle range." Lot's of "UFO buzz" in the media lately.
Networking

Submission + - Rackspace DFW is down due to power outage

Submitted by darrenfulton
darrenfulton writes: Rackspace's DFW data center is down due to a broken transformer. They've turned off everyone's servers to keep them from overheating their facility. From their live chat feature: "Chat Information Chat InformationWelcome to Rackspace. My name is Mike K and I am a Live assistant. How may I help you today? you: what is up? you: Can't get to my servers? Mike K: An incident occurred involving a power transformer outside of our datacenter. The transformer feeding power to the DFW datacenter was damaged causing loss of power and cooling to the entire datacenter. The temperature increase required that your server be shut down. We are currently working to rectify the situation and will provide updates via My.Rack as they become available."
Unix

Submission + - The dark art of the Unix Find command 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The UNIX operating system is much like a vast, uncharted wilderness. As you travel the terrain, you can pick up tools that assist you later. The find command is such a tool. The find command is capable of much more than simply locating files. Learn advanced Find techniques.
Handhelds

Submission + - 20 Yet Unreleased Gadgets for Geeks (autopartsplace.com)

Submitted by
ipodwheels
ipodwheels writes: "The following are the devices that I feel will be a part of the future's digital lifestyle. From infrared keyboards, to edible music media, these will surely have you drooling. The following has been a compilation of gadgets still under development at NEC. This story later inspired the "List of Gadgets not Sold in the US" on the Auto Parts Blog which on the other hand listed gadgets that are "banned" for distribution in the US."
The Courts

Submission + - Supreme Court rules Ebay sale binding. (smh.com.au)

Submitted by Slurpee
Slurpee writes: The NSW Supreme court has ruled that making an offer of sale on Ebay is legally binding. In other words — you can't change your mind. In a case that reached the NSW Supreme Court, Peter Smythe sued Vin Thomas after he changed his mind on the sale of a 1946 World War II Wirraway plane after the eBay auction had ended. "It follows that, in my view, a binding contract was formed between the plaintiff and the defendent and that it should be specifically enforced," Justice Rein said in his decision. The judgment sets a precedent for future cases and means eBay sales could now be legally binding (At least in Australia).
Businesses

Submission + - Dell lays off 200 at small-town call center

Submitted by
mr_josh
mr_josh writes: "Dell closed its Roseburg, OR call center this morning, giving its employees less than 24 hours notice. FTFA:

"They've already had all of our checks cut," said another employee, Travis Dominguez. "They knew the whole thing was coming and everything."

Roseburg is a small (about 25,000 people) timber town in southern Oregon, and it was a pretty big deal when this call center opened in 2002. They were given huge property tax incentives at the time of their opening, and those incentives are about to run out. Also, some employees from the call center put together a lawsuit several months ago, "claiming Dell violated federal and state wage and hour laws."

Coincidence?

http://www.newsreview.info/article/20070802/NEWS/7 0802014"
Microsoft

Journal Journal: Mozilla Foundation sues Microsoft over tabbed browsing 149

Journal by Alphager
According to the german tech-site heise.de, the Mozilla Foundation is suing Microsoft over the use of tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer 7.
The Mozilla Foundation owns the patent 5,160,296 through one of their developers (Solomon Katz, a former Opera dev) and has begun suing Microsoft in Mountainview, California.
The Foundation wants that MS imediately
The Internet

Journal Journal: 10 Reasons Why Your Website Will Never Make A Dime

Journal by markfranks101
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/making+money+online.html If you've picked up any business magazines within the last year, you've undoubtedly heard the rumors that everyone is getting rich online. Yet, somehow even after you worked so hard to scrape together a website and found some fabulous widget to sell your online venture has yielded little to no money, Why? eBizMBA surveyed over 250 webmasters with sites ranked in the Al
Security

Submission + - Is this bad advice from an IT manager?

Submitted by e-scetic
e-scetic writes: We've secured funding for building a new website to replace our current one. My direct managers, however, not being technically inclined, are seeking input from our Manager of IT. In response, he has set down a number of dictates that he wants us to follow. Here's the part that frightens me most:

  • 4. You should avoid security issues for now and concentrate on multiple user access for maintenance and updates login issues.
  • 5. You must not worry about performance. You need to concentrate on making a workable website first. You must keep it simple.


Some details: I wanted to create a development and production environment, with a development server using version control and pushing stable changes to the live production server. I wanted to isolate the databases to a separate database server, with each web server remote logging to the database server (using syslog-ng). As we'll be generating email newsletters to the tune of 60k emails per issue, I wanted a separate machine for that too (PostFix, most likely). And most importantly, I wanted to spend time early in the project hardening everything — mod_security, mod_evasive, firewalls, intrusion detection, chroot jails, OS lockdown, SSH, etc., the works, before we began development

But the IT Manager is saying to do this:

  • 10. You must design everything on one server for simplicity and design it in such a way to split the application when you need to do so (when it goes on line). I mean your database, your website, and your email server can all be developed on the same simple prototype server hardware.
  • 12. Leave purchasing the actual hardware are for close to the end of the project when it needs to go on line.


I don't believe this is good advice, given we have one year to complete the project I think my route is safest. Can the Slashdot community advise my non-technical managers as to which of us, me or the IT manager, is on the right track? Or Maybe give advice on how to deal with this IT Manager?
Windows

Submission + - Windows Vista restricts GNU GCC apps to 32 MB

Submitted by Neil Watson
Neil Watson writes: A developer named Thomas R. Nicely claims that... Executable images created for the DOS/Wintel environment (but not employing the Win32 API), using the GNU GCC compilers and language standards, are subject to failure (or performance degradation) when executed in Microsoft Windows Vista, because Vista arbitrarily restricts the memory space for the GCC executable to 32 MB (33,554,432 bytes) Read more.
Microsoft

Submission + - Bill Gates Technology Talk from 1989

Submitted by alphabetasigmagamma
alphabetasigmagamma writes: The Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo hosted a talk in 1989 with Bill Gates as the speaker. Recently this audio tape of the talk has been discovered by the Computer Science Club office and has since been digitized and posted on the Computer Science Club website at http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/ In this talk you get to hear Bill Gates in an awkward position at Microsoft, promoting the then soon to fail OS/2 operating system product while at the same time downtalking slightly the significance of Windows. This rare glimpse into Microsoft in its early days shows some of the predictions that Microsoft got right as well as got wrong (such as the memory allocation issues in MS-DOS). In addition, Bill Gates discusses how he sees the computer industry in the coming years.
Power

Submission + - Does Global Warming Cause C02?

Submitted by
StealthyRoid
StealthyRoid writes: "A documentary set to air on BBC-4 on Thursday, March 8, makes the claim that the global warming alarmist camp has got the relationship between increasing C02 levels and global warming exactly backwards: That an increase in the Earth's temperature is the cause of elevated C02, and the slight uptick in global average temperature that we've been seeing is the result of cosmological effects, not human interference. The documentary also claims that the attempted "fixes" for global warming demanded by the alarmist movement (massive energy output reductions, de-industrialization, etc...) are going to end up hurting poor nations to the point where they're condemned to life in the stone age."
Patents

Submission + - Apple taking steps toward a Multitouch OS X?

Submitted by
SnowDog74
SnowDog74 writes: "MacNN reports that on Feb. 8th, Apple, Inc., filed a US Patent Application titled Method and apparatus for organizing information in a computer system. This patent appears to be based on the Piles project developed by Gitta Salomon in 1992. Of particular note are descriptors such as "The appearance of the graphical representation of the pile (e.g. dynamic or static icon of the pile) provides further information to the user, including the texture, thickness, and color of the various documents within the pile." The summary, as a whole, surreptitiously suggests a dynamic user interface optimized for a touchscreen interface. This may be the first evidence to corroborate the hypothesis that iPhone is simply a tactical step in a larger strategic direction for Apple. Given Apple's typical product development cycle from patent to prototype to release, might we see the first multitouch Mac within two to three years?"
Supercomputing

Submission + - World's first Quantum Computer to be demoed

Submitted by
Leemeng
Leemeng writes: "EE Times reports that D-Wave will demonstrate the world's first commercial quantum computer on Tuesday (Feb 13) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. If it works, that means it can solve some of the most difficult problems, called NP-complete problems, thousands of times faster than current supercomputers. Initially, D-Wave (Vancouver, B.C.) will lease time on its quantum computer, which will be accessed over a secure Internet connection. Eventually, the company plans to sell quantum computer systems.

Being able to quickly solve NP-complete problems has enormous consequences. A fairly well-known NP-complete problem is the travelling salesman problem, which has real-world implications for logistics. NP-complete problems are present in such diverse fields as medicine, biology, computing, mathematics, and finance. Of immediate concern is quantum computers' potential for cryptanalysis (codebreaking). Specifically, a quantum computer could factor very large numbers in a fraction of the time needed by current computers. That BTW, is just what you need for cracking the RSA cipher and other widely-used ciphers that depend on one-way mathematical functions. Perhaps this will light a fire under quantum cryptography efforts."

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