jarkus4 - Slashdot User

Why Creators Should Never Read Their Forums 221

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday January 06, 2011 @03:52AM from the lalala-i-can't-hear-you dept.

spidweb writes "One full-time Indie developer writes about why he never goes to online forums discussing his work and why he advises other creators to do the same. It's possible to learn valuable things, but the time and the stress just don't justify the effort. From the article, 'Forums contain a cacophony of people telling you to do diametrically opposite things, very loudly, often for bad reasons. There will be plenty of good ideas, but picking them out from the bad ones is unreliable and a lot of work. If you try to make too many people happy at once, you will drive yourself mad. You have to be very, very careful who you let into your head.'"

Submission + - Kindergartens ordered to pay copyright for songs (dw-world.de)

Submitted by BBird on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @06:53PM

BBird writes: Deutsche Welle reports — up until this year, preschools could teach and produce any kind of song they wanted. But now they have to pay for a license if they want children to sing certain songs.

4chan Has Been DDOSed 710

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @10:11AM from the happens-to-everyone dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to the 4chan status page all of the 4chan boards have been DDOSed and are down."

Submission + - d0z.me: The Evil URL Shortener (spareclockcycles.org)

Submitted by supernothing on Monday December 20, 2010 @01:20AM

supernothing writes: DDoS attacks seem to be in vogue today, especially considering the skirmishes over Wikileaks in the past few weeks. The size of a DDoS attacks, however, has historically been limited by how many computers one has managed to recruit into a botnet. These botnets almost universally require code to be executed on the participants' local systems, whether they be willing or unwilling. A new approach has been emerging recently, however, which uses some simple Javascript to achieve similar ends. d0z.me is a new service that utilizes these techniques, but provides a unique twist on the idea. Posing as a legitimate URL shortening service, it serves users the requested pages in an iframe, while simultaneously participating in a DDoS attack in the background. No interaction is required beyond clicking the link and staying on the page. This makes it relatively trivial to quickly mount large scale DDoS attacks, and affords willing participants plausible deniability in the assault. Full writeup here.

Nigerian Email Scam Victim Sues Bank, Loses Appeal 312

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday December 19, 2010 @10:54PM from the look-how-foolish-I-am dept.

reidhellyer writes "From California Litigation Attorney Blog: 'While many victims of the so-called "Nigerian e-mail scam" would be too embarrassed to trumpet that fact, others end up infamous for their victimhood like the appellant in a published opinion of the California Court of Appeal in Riverside. In March 2009, Charles Peters received an email from someone purporting to be a citizen of Malaysia. The e-mail informed Peters that certain third parties in the United States and Canada owed the Malaysian money, but that “they can not transfer the funds to any bank account outside America continent due to their new company policy [sic].” He asked Peters to “assist me in receiving the funds and forward to me.” He offered to pay Peters 12 percent of the money. Peters agreed after apparently negotiating an increase of his fee to 15 percent.'"

FBI Alleged To Have Backdoored OpenBSD's IPSEC Stack 536

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @08:36PM from the all-your-vpn dept.

Aggrajag and Mortimer.CA, among others, wrote to inform us that Theo de Raadt has made public an email sent to him by Gregory Perry, who worked on the OpenBSD crypto framework a decade ago. The claim is that the FBI paid contractors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD's IPSEC stack. Mr. Perry is coming forward now that his NDA with the FBI has expired. The code was originally added ten years ago, and over that time has changed quite a bit, "so it is unclear what the true impact of these allegations are" says Mr. de Raadt. He added: "Since we had the first IPSEC stack available for free, large parts of the code are now found in many other projects/products." (Freeswan and Openswan are not based on this code.)

Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com 392

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @03:40PM from the can't-imagine dept.

suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."

When Computers Go Wrong 250

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday December 12, 2010 @10:41AM from the best-of-intentions dept.

Barence writes "PC Pro's Stewart Mitchell has charted the world's ten most calamitous computer cock-ups. They include the Russians' stealing software that resulted in their gas pipeline exploding, the Mars Orbiter that went missing because the programmers got their imperial and metric measurements mixed up, the Soviet early-warning system that confused the sun for a missile and almost triggered World War III, plus the Windows anti-piracy measure that resulted in millions of legitimate customers being branded software thieves."

Tour of the Closet Sized Living Quarters On ISS 76

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @11:42AM from the efficient-use-of-space-get-it?? dept.

Phoghat writes "Who knew it could take almost seven minutes to get a tour of the teeny-tiny crew quarters on board the International Space Station? But Expedition 26 Commander Scott Kelly provides an engaging peek inside his personal living space, and an inside look at life aboard the ISS."

Submission + - Wikileaks DNS shut down

Submitted by Sparx139 on Friday December 03, 2010 @06:38AM

Sparx139 writes: EveryDNS.net, the DNS provider for Wikileaks, has terminated the domain name wikileaks.org
The decision came as a result of the recent DDOS attack on wikileaks.org, with EveryDNS attempting to protect their infrastructure and other clients from the attacks.

Wikileaks confirmed via twitter that wikileaks.org has been "killed". The website can now be reached from http://wikileaks.ch/

Comment hmmm (Score 2, Funny) 273

by jarkus4 on Tuesday November 30, 2010 @02:39PM (#34392050) Attached to: Facebook's 'Like This' Button Is Tracking You

First, we dont really know they make any use of this data. They have the possibility, but they dont have to use it (its quite likely they do, but thats a different matter) Second, to avoid sending this data they would have to either limit some functionality or go out of their way and create some special domains to avoid passing the cookies between the systems. And this would be for no gain for them whatsoever - "not stealing" personal information is never a news topic. Also the only people who actually can be "offended" by this are some geeks that, lets be honest, are not an important market part to them, IMO the most realistic scenario for this is accidental data collection. They started partnering with whomever they could and putting their logo button there just to bring more traffic to their site (and their ads). PERHAPS then someone noticed that they can make also use of this extra data they get.

Which Shipping Company Is Kindest To Your Packages? 480

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday November 28, 2010 @09:53PM from the handle-however-you-want dept.

Ant writes "Popular Mechanics mailed a bunch of sensors on an epic journey to find out which American shipping company is the most careful with your packages. From the article: 'One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up." The carriers flipped the package more, and it registered above-average acceleration spikes during trips for which we requested careful treatment.' Here's what they found."

Submission + - Students Banned From Bringing Pencils To School (newsblaze.com) 1

Submitted by mernilio on Tuesday November 23, 2010 @08:02AM

mernilio writes: A Massachusetts school district superintendent said a memo banning sixth graders from carrying pencils was written without district approval. North Brookfield School District interim Superintendent Gordon Noseworthy said Wendy Scott, one of two sixth-grade teachers at North Brookfield Elementary School, did not get approval from administrators before sending the memo to all sixth-grade parents, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported Thursday.

The memo said students would no longer be allowed to bring writing implements to school. It said pencils would be provided for students in class and any students caught with pencils or pens after Nov. 15 would face disciplinary action for having materials 'to build weapons.'

Intel Talks 1000-Core Processors 326

Posted by samzenpus on Monday November 22, 2010 @02:49AM from the we're-gonna-need-a-bigger-heat-sink dept.

angry tapir writes "An experimental Intel chip shows the feasibility of building processors with 1,000 cores, an Intel researcher has asserted. The architecture for the Intel 48-core Single Chip Cloud Computer processor is 'arbitrarily scalable,' according to Timothy Mattson. 'This is an architecture that could, in principle, scale to 1,000 cores,' he said. 'I can just keep adding, adding, adding cores.'"

WSJ Warnings About Cookies Carry Cookies 45

Posted by samzenpus on Monday November 15, 2010 @09:41AM from the pot-meet-kettle dept.

itwbennett writes "The Wall Street Journal has 'a pretty useful section tracking privacy issues, privacy protection tools and the threats thereof from online marketers, from the point of view and on the technical level of a relatively savvy consumer,' says blogger Kevin Fogarty. The downside: He discovered that reading two stories from the WSJ's privacy section left behind deletion-resistant Flash cookies."

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