BLT2112 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Defendant must tell government his password (volokh.com) 1

Submitted by

sohp

on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @08:46PM

sohp writes: "Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, reports are out that the case of a man who invoked the 5th amendment when asked to supply the password to decrypt his hard drive to allow police to search for child pornography has a new development. A judge has overturned the original magistrate's decision allowing the defense and has ordered Sebastien Boucher to supply the prosecutors with a decrypted hard disk. Note that the order is not that he produce the key — just that he provide an unencrypted copy."

Submission + - Google debunks Maps Atlantis Myth (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

prxi

on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @06:45PM

prxi writes: "Recently news spread that Atlantis had been located on Google Maps. While quickly dismissed as another rumor, Googlers posted a blog relating to what exactly caused the strange markings to appear off the coast of Africa. In addition, they also go in depth on what would be required to obtain a detailed map of our ocean floor. Apparently it's only 200 ship years of work (Or around the cost of a modern stadium according to Google)"

The Hard Upgrade Path From XP To Vista To Win 7 496

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @06:26PM from the twisty-little-passages-all-different dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft executives have been telling the tech industry that if hardware supports Windows Vista, it will support Windows 7, but it now looks like that may not entirely be the case. According to CRN: 'But after a series of tests on older and newer hardware, a number of noteworthy issues emerged: Microsoft's statement that if hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7 appears to be, at best, misleading; hardware that is older, but not near the end of most business life cycles, could be impossible to upgrade; and the addition of an extra step in the upgrade process does add complexity and more time not needed in previous upgrade cycles.' And here is CRN's overview of the difficulties Microsoft faces in asking enterprise users to walk this upgrade path: 'Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, 'known issues' and unknown issues. Sound familiar? That's what people used to say about Linux.'"

Submission + - Pirate Bay Trial Day 7: Screenshots for Evidence

Submitted by

Zoltan Halassy

on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @03:45PM

Zoltan Halassy writes: "From http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-trial-day-7-screenshots-for-evidence-090224/

Gottfrid: Before taking the screenshot, did you turn off DHT and Peer Exchange? Mårtensson: DHT was obviously on. I wanted to be like an average user. Gottfrid: So in other words, you can't check if the tracker was used? Mårtensson: The tracker address was visible on the screen. From that I assumed it was used in some way. Gottfrid: But since you had DHT on, you have no possibility to state to the court as to whether The Pirate Bay's tracker was actually used or not? Mårtensson: No.
It seems unthinkable that the Prosecution has gathered 'evidence' in this way. Mårtensson was further asked if he was aware that Google can also act as a torrent search engine. The IFPI lawer seemed to be unaware of that, and he stated that they never had any problems with Google.
"

Gnome, KDE, LXDE, IceWM All Working On Android 194

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 22, 2009 @10:56PM from the options-are-good dept.

dooberrymctavish writes "Ghostwalker over at AndroidFanatic has gone and done it again; now he's released clear and concise instructions on how to get X11 server running on your Android device. Not only that, but he has successfully gotten LXDE, and IceWM running at a pace. There is even a photo with the instructions showing the LXDE desktop running right there on the device itself. Apparently, you can also VNC straight onto the phone's new desktop from your PC."

Microsoft.com Makes IE8 Incompatibility List 358

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 19, 2009 @05:55PM from the my-head-just-asplodered dept.

nickull writes "Microsoft is tracking incompatible Web sites for its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and has posted a list that now contains about 2,400 names — including Microsoft.com. Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."

Pirate Bay Founder Begs For Hacker Ceasefire 243

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 19, 2009 @04:17PM from the please-hammer-don't-hurt-'em dept.

Barence writes "Pirate Bay's co-founder has pleaded for hackers to stop attacking the sites of those organizations lined up against him. Peter Sunde is on trial with Pirate Bay's three other founders for allegedly distributing copyrighted material. The trial is about to enter its fourth day, and in a gesture of support for the four men hackers have begun assaulting plaintiff websites, beginning with that of the The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The campaign has caused concern in the Pirate Bay camp, prompting Sunde to write a post titled 'We're winning, stop hacking, please' on his blog."

Comment Re:No Ads (Score 1) 375

by BLT2112 on Thursday February 19, 2009 @11:41AM (#26917153) Attached to: Boxee Drops Hulu Support

What if the rack-rate per minute for advertising was quite a bit bigger on TV than on Hulu?

Because every Hulu show watched through Boxee is one show people aren't watching on real TV! It's like one pirated copy = one lost sale. Suddenly it's all so clear!

Boxee Drops Hulu Support 375

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 19, 2009 @10:23AM from the back-to-dvds-from-the-library dept.

frdmfghtr writes "According to a boxee blog entry, Hulu will no longer be supported. From the post: 'two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.' Reading the hulu blog post, the only 'issue' I see facing Hulu is that content providers have (once again) shot themselves in the foot, switching off a media conduit they should have been promoting." Update: 02/19 14:31 GMT by T : Jamie points out this interesting (speculative) piece at O'Reilly Radar about the thought process that may have driven the decision.

In-Game Web Browser Round-Up 193

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 19, 2009 @09:40AM from the not-complete-until-it-includes-one dept.

theodp writes "CNET takes a look at Web browsers you can run inside of the latest video games, offering mini-reviews of PlayXpert, Steam, Rogue, and Xfire. Why run these instead of your standard browser? Well, these browsers run lean and mean, play nice with full-screen apps, provide hot keys that can make them appear or disappear in an instant, and offer transparency so you can continue to play a game in full screen while chatting, reading e-mail or looking up cheat codes. So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?"

Pirate Bay Day 3 — Defense Requests Dismissal 685

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 19, 2009 @12:16AM from the ninja-lawyers dept.

Hodejo1 writes "Yesterday was a big day for the Pirate Bay when half of the charges against them were dropped leaving only the lesser charges of assisting making copyrighted material available in place. TorrentFreak is following the English twitter feed of the trial in the wee hours of the night, documenting more missteps by the prosecution. 'The Pirate Bay trial is moving forward rapidly and again the day in court has ended early. On the third day the prosecution presented the amended charges. The defendants all called for acquittal while Carl Lundström's lawyer scored points with the already legendary "King Kong" defense.'"

MacBook's "Unremovable" Battery Easy To Remove 476

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @07:17PM from the just-unscrew-16-handy-screws dept.

Slatterz writes "Going just a bit further than your average unboxing, someone has stripped a new 17-inch Apple Macbook Pro to its component parts revealing one or two little surprises. The biggest of which is that the built-in battery is easily accessible, requiring the tinkerer to remove just the 13 Philips screws which hold the bottom cover in place, and the three tri-wing security screws which hold the battery in place."

Is the Bar of Soap Tomorrow's Smarterphone? 141

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @05:00PM from the next-generation-uses-earwax-proximity dept.

Barence writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a gadget that knows whether you want to use it as a camera or smartphone, just by the way you're holding it. So, if you hold the device, dubbed the Bar of Soap, out in front of you like a camera it will automatically bring up an LCD viewfinder. However, if you then switch to holding it as you would a mobile phone, it will bring up a touchscreen keypad instead. The Bar of Soap utilises a three-axis accelerometer and 72 surface sensors to track the position of the user's fingers and its position."

Twitter Leads Social Networks In Downtime 175

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @03:26PM from the great-to-be-top-of-the-list dept.

illectro writes "A study on site availability by monitoring service Pingdom shows that in 2008 Twitter greeted users with the 'Fail Whale' for more than 84 hours, almost twice as much as any other site. At the other end of the scale imeem and Xanga managed less than 4 hours of downtime for 99.95% uptime. Myspace, Facebook and Classmates.com were the only other sites studied which managed to stay up more than 99.9% of the time."

Don't Like EULAs? Get Your Cat To Agree To Them 874

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @02:43PM from the my-cat-toy-is-a-model-m dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Anne Loucks built a device which, when her cat steps on it, can click the 'I Agree' button of a EULA. Who knows what the lawyers will make of this sort of madness. Can a cat make a legal agreement? Does it need to be of legal age? She lures the cat onto the device, and the cat steps on it of its own free will. Anyway, folks who hate EULAs now have another tool to make the lawyers freak out."

Slashdot Top Deals