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Spam

Opting Out Increases Spam? 481

Posted by timothy from the damned-either-way dept.
J. L. Tympanum writes "I used to ignore spam but recently I have been using the opt-out feature. Now I get more spam than ever, especially of the Nigerian scam (and related) types. The latter has gone from almost none to several a day. Was I a fool for opting out? Is my email address being harvested when I opt out? Has anybody had similar experience?"

Windows 95 Almost Autodetected Floppy Disks 334

Posted by timothy from the be-nearly-nostalgic dept.
bonch writes "Windows 95 almost shipped with a technique for detecting whether a floppy disk was inserted without spinning up the drive. Microsoft's floppy driver developer discovered a sequence of commands that detected a disk without spinup — unfortunately, unspecified behavior in the floppy hardware specification meant that half the drives worked one way and half the other, each giving opposite results for the detection routine. Microsoft considered a dialog prompting the user to insert a disk to 'train' the routine, but the idea was scrapped."
Education

Windows Security and On-line Training Courses? 189

Posted by timothy from the temporary-education-discount dept.
eggegick writes "My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I'd have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don't think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view. Myself, I use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old Windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge, I've never had a virus or malware problem. Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and at this point she feels her computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers. Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have for running this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is, have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?)."
Censorship

UK To Mull High Video Game Taxes — To Fight Knife Crime 615

Posted by timothy from the so-it's-like-a-hunting-license dept.
chareverie writes "The Prime Minister of the UK is being urged to impose high taxes on violent video games in an effort to reduce the number of knife-related crime. The request comes from Richard Taylor, who argues that young people 'feel that the law has no control over them. They just feel that they can go on the streets and do whatever they like.' He doesn't have a definitive number on how much to tax on the offensive video games, but says that they should be 'very high.' Rap music is also voiced to be a concern due to the alleged negativity and language. Taylor's son, Damilola Taylor, was killed in November 2000 at the age of 10 by knife stabbing."
Technology (Apple)

Apple Touch-Screen Netbook? 291

Posted by CmdrTaco from the heard-this-before dept.
je ne sais quoi writes "The Apple rumor mill is churning today. Reuters and the DOW Jones news wire are reporting that an anonymous source in Taiwan has leaked that Apple has ordered some 10-inch touch-screens from WinTek, the maker of the touch-screen for the iPhone. It looks like an Apple netbook could possibly be in the works for a delivery date in Q3 of this year, in time for back-to-school sales. CNET and Engadget have completely unsubstantiated mock-ups."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Review: Halo Wars 177

Posted by Soulskill from the now-for-something-completely-different dept.
The success of the Halo franchise is unquestionable. Bungie's trilogy of first-person shooters established a standard against which most similar games have been judged for the past eight years. Thus, when Ensemble Studios picked up the task of bringing the Halo universe to real-time strategy, they faced two separate mountains to climb: maintaining the high quality demanded by fans of the series and developing for a genre that traditionally translates poorly to console play. Fortunately, they had a head start on the latter, bringing in a wealth of experience from the Age of Empires series. Creating an intuitive and dependable control scheme was a top priority, and their success in doing so makes Halo Wars a worthy addition to the series. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.
The Media

Submission + - Node 3 Might be Named After Stephen Colbert

Submitted by Panzor
Panzor writes: Until March 20th, Nasa has opened up the polls to vote for a name for a new addition to the space station: Node 3. Strangely enough, their 4 choices: "Earthrise", "Legacy", "Serenity", and "Venture" are not the four most popular. It seems that the poll maker did not have the foresight to predict such a strong and unified force picking the 5th choice: "Other." Therefore, the race between "Serenity" and the suggestions can only be guessed at. On March 5th, Stephen Colbert pronounced himself Scientology's "Galactic Overlord" as he passed "Xenu" following a previous suggestion to vote his own name as the new title of a node of the ISS.

Comment Re:Ok then... (Score 4, Insightful) 244

by Panzor (#26897475) Attached to: Researchers Hack Biometric Faces

While passwords can be brute forced given enough time, your face is almost certainly available to someone who has access to get at your computer.

Also, you could say that face recognition is just as secure as writing a reasonably long password on your forehead. Someone takes a picture and boom. Access.

Personally, I refrain from writing my passwords on my forehead - regardless if I can see a suspicious-looking character taking a picture of me square-enough in the face to capture all the digits. And, I also refrain of using or buying face recognition devices...

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