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The Media

Submission + - Opentopia - a version 2.0 country

Submitted by Paris The Pirate
Paris The Pirate writes: Interesting article the Nation State 2.0 concept. From the article "Inspired by logic, democracy and true clarity of government, Opentopia is an alternative to the corruption, war-mongering, FUD and spin that we have come to accept from our government "representatives". Control your own destiny by participating in a free and open nation state — Opentopia." Who's in?
Media

Submission + - Weekly World News Eaten by Bat Boy! 1

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "While not exactly a primary source of technology news, the Weekly World News was always popular among engineers, programmers, and other geeks when I was in college. So there's something sad about hearing that the August 27 issue will be its last. Where else are we going to hear about FBI conspiracies, alien probes, bizarre technological experiments, and right-wing nutjobs? (I mean, besides on Slashdot, of course!)"
KDE

Submission + - Sharp Fonts On A KDE Desktop (mattparnell.com)

Submitted by
ilikenwf
ilikenwf writes: "There are many articles about getting your Gnome fonts looking all pretty, but so far, I have only seen one that tells how to do this on KDE. This appeals to me, as I use Kubuntu, and if you follow the directions, you can have fonts that are easy to see, for once."
Censorship

Submission + - MSNBC caves in to pressure from China 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two days ago I found a news story about recent arrests of protesters in China via searching for "Tibet" on MSNBC. Today I went back to look at it again, and there is no evidence such a story ever existed on MSNBC, yet the story is easily found on other news sites:

Never mind whether you care about the Tibet issue, this apparent quiet censorship by Microsoft/NBC, no doubt as a result of China's constant pressure to paint a happy picture for the Olympics makes MSNBC a sham as a news organization. Maybe it's a bad idea for a media outlet to be in bed with a large US corporation that sees China as a huge growth market? Ya think?

Amusingly, I also just noticed you also cannot create a Hotmail account with the phrase "tibet" in it.
Security

Submission + - One-liner to crash IE6 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Kelly Yancey
Kelly Yancey writes: "A Japanese fellow going by the name Hamachiya2 has stumbled upon one line of HTML/CSS code that crashes IE6. The magic line is:
<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input>< /table> You can try it yourself at: http://hamachiya.com/junk/ie_crash.html. Of course, if you are running IE6 or anything that embeds IE6 as a component, you can expect it to crash. All other browsers appear to render the code just fine. I think I may have just found a new signature. :)"
Security

Submission + - Flashlight weapon makes target vomit (foxnews.com)

Submitted by
synaptic
synaptic writes: "From the FOXNews article:

Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., of Torrance, Calif., has been granted a contract by the Department of Homeland Security to develop what it calls the "LED Incapacitator," according to a DHS online newsletter. The handheld device using [sic] light-emitting diodes to emit super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths, causing disorientation, nausea and even vomiting in whomever it's pointed at.

"There's one wavelength that gets everybody," says IOS President Bob Lieberman. "Vlad [IOS top scientist Vladimir Rubtsov] calls it 'the evil color.'"
Vlad calls it the EVIL COLOR, eh? I wonder if shutter glasses could be rigged to detect the light and actively filter it."
Software

Submission + - Migrating from Windows to Linux (linuxlinks.com)

Submitted by
Steve Emms
Steve Emms writes: "There are many articles written about the reasons why users may wish to convert to Linux. Frequently cited reasons include the favorable licensing terms, the freely distributable software (with source code), support from the Linux community, improved security, open file formats, the fact that Linux can run on a wide variety of platforms, etc. However, unless a desktop user is provided with real alternatives to the existing software he or she currently uses, migration to a different operating system is going to be very difficult.

This collection of articles aim to dispel the myth that Linux isn't really ready for the desktop user seeking to move away from the Microsoft world. If you are thinking about switching from Windows to Linux, bear in mind that many of your favorite desktop applications have Linux equivalents, often with a comparable feature set.

For each Linux application, we have compiled a portal page providing an overview of the software, a screenshot of the application in action, a comprehensive list of its features, and links to sites offering information and support on the software such as forums, tutorials, and reviews.

Read on ..."
Privacy

Submission + - Google Toolbar Always Reports Your URLs to Google

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes: The Google Toolbar in Firefox is sending every URL I visit to Google, even though I'm not logged in to my Google account, even though I have a web history turned off for my account, and even though I have Safe Browsing/Enhanced Protection mode turned off (hidden away in Firefox's Tools > Options > Security > "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is suspected of forgery". I can see the URL transmitted to Google with the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin.

This is a Privacy and Security issue. The Google privacy policy clearly states in the first bullet that the Toolbar will not transmit URLs to Google unless I explicitly tell it to.

—
Information we collect

        * The Google Toolbar automatically sends only standard, limited information to Google, which may be retained in Google's server logs. It does not send any information about the web pages you visit ( e.g., the URL), unless you use Toolbar's advanced features or use Safe Browsing in Enhanced Protection mode. You do not need to provide any personal information in order to download and use the Google Toolbar.
—

I have explicitly turned off all of these features, but it still sends URLs.

Here's an example: if I visit a web site like http://wikipedia.org/ , and Live HTTP Headers shows (some info masked):

—
http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?sourceid=n avclient-ff&features=Rank&client=navclient-auto-ff &googleip=O;64.233.161.99;146&ch=...&q=info:http%3 A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org%2F

GET /search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank&client =navclient-auto-ff&googleip=O;64.233.161.99;146&ch =...&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org%2F HTTP/1.1
Host: toolbarqueries.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Fedora/2.0.0.5- 1.fc7 Firefox/2.0.0.5 pango-text GoogleToolbarFF 3.0.20070525
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,tex t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q= 0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: __utma=...

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: GWS/2.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:32:25 GMT
—

Clearly, a request was sent to Google with my URL and Google accepted the request, in clear violation of their Privacy Policy. Worse yet, it sends the url in the clear! So if there is any session or security information on the URL, it is there for the world and Google to see.

My Google Toolbar, as much as I used to love it, disappears today.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - William Gibson gives up on the future

Submitted by Tinkle
Tinkle writes: Sci-fi novellist William Gibson has given up trying to predict the future — because he says it's become far too difficult. In an interview with silicon.com, Gibson explains why his latest book is set in the recent past.

From the Q&A:
"We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it's going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that — we have no idea at all now where we are going."

"Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That's a possibility too."
Security

Submission + - A Web Application Exploitation Expose (informit.com)

Submitted by twistedmoney99
twistedmoney99 writes: Installing an insecure web application is dangerous for the website operator, its visitors, the hosting provider, as well as any other clients of that provider. In an expose of one such web application, Seth Fogie walks through the testing of a commercial application (EZPhotoSales), gaining access to sensitive data, bypassing applications protections, finding permanent cross-site scripting bugs, gaining shell access, and obtaining access to the web pages and scripts of all the other clients of the hosting provider. If you are a user of this software, the article does include a few tips on how to secure the application. Ironically, the application developer did take measures to protect their intellectual property using ionCube (a PHP encoder) — if only the same efforts were made to protect the customer.

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