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Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed 646

Posted by timothy from the not-what-I-want-by-default dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scheduled to be released next month, Ubuntu 12.10 now includes both Amazon ads in the user's dash and by default an Amazon store in the user's launcher. The reason for these 'features'? Affiliate revenue. Despite previous controversies with Banshee and Yahoo, Canonical is 'confident it will be an interesting and useful feature for our 12.10 users.' But are the 'users' becoming products?" Update: 09/22 19:35 GMT by T : Reader bkerensa scoffs, calling the Amazon integration unobtrusive, and says objections to its inclusion in the OS should be ignored, "because in reality ads will not be found in 12.10 unless you are seeing them on a third party website you go to in a web browser." He's got screenshots.
The Internet

Submission + - Fibre break between UK and Netherland causing internet loss past 48 hours. (beusergroup.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Interoute are currently experiencing a network outage on the UK/Netherlands section of their Transmission network. Cause of the issue is a fibre break between UK and Netherland. [snip] OTDR completed and break location identified as a sub-sea break – cable repair ship now being arranged.

Comment a few excerpts (Score 3, Interesting) 101

by anarcat (#40802305) Attached to: OAuth 2.0 Standard Editor Quits, Takes Name Off Spec

Good article, quite interesting to see the problems a community is faced when going through standards processes.

Our standards making process is broken beyond repair. This outcome is the direct result of the nature of the IETF, and the particular personalities overseeing this work. To be clear, these are not bad or incompetent individuals. On the contrary – they are all very capable, bright, and otherwise pleasant. But most of them show up to serve their corporate overlords, and it’s practically impossible for the rest of us to compete. Bringing OAuth to the IETF was a huge mistake.

That is a worrisome situation. With the internet openness being so much based on open standards, the idea that the corporate world is taking over standards and sabotaging them to fulfill their own selfish interests is quite problematic, to say the least.

As for the actual concerns he is raising about OAuth 2.0, this one is particularly striking:

Bearer tokens - 2.0 got rid of all signatures and cryptography at the protocol level. Instead it relies solely on TLS. This means that 2.0 tokens are inherently less secure as specified. Any improvement in token security requires additional specifications and as the current proposals demonstrate, the group is solely focused on enterprise use cases.

I don't know much about oauth, but this sounds like a stupid move.
The Military

How a 1960s Discovery In Neuroscience Spawned a Military Project 112

Posted by samzenpus from the did-you-see-that dept.
Harperdog writes "This is pretty fascinating: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article about a DARPA project that allows researchers to scan satellite photos, video, etc., and have a computer pick up differences in brain activity to tell whether an image has been seen...images that might flash by before conscious recognition. From the article: 'In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.'"
AI

Chatbot Eugene Wins Biggest Turing Test Ever 235

Posted by Soulskill from the it'd-be-easy-to-win-over-xbox-live dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Eugene Goostman, a chatbot imbued with the personality of a 13-year-old boy, won the biggest Turing test ever staged on 23 June, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. Held at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes, UK, where Turing cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War 2, the test involved over 150 separate conversations, 30 judges, 25 hidden humans and five elite, chattering software programs. 'Thirteen years old is not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing,' explains Eugene's creator, Vladimir Veselov."
The Internet

Wikipedia As a "War Zone," Rather Than a Collaboration 194

Posted by timothy from the one-way-to-look-at-it dept.
horselight writes "A new study by sociologists studying social networking has determined that Wikipedia is not an intellectual project based on mutual collaboration, but a war zone. The study finds that although the content does end up being accurate as a rule, it's anything but neutral or unbiased. The study includes extensive data on access and editing patterns of users related to major events, such as the death of Michael Jackson and the edit storms that ensued." The article explains that the research (here's the paper at PLoS One) looked in particular at controversial entries, not ones about obscure duck-hunting equipment or long-settled standards.

Comment SFLvault (Score 4, Informative) 198

by anarcat (#39976751) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Open Source Multi-User Password Management?

I have been keeping an eye on this project for a while. To quote their description: "SFLvault is a Networked credentials store and authentication manager. It has a client/vault (server) architecture allowing to cryptographically store and organise loads of passwords for different machines and services."

The design seems sound, and it is a server/client model which seem to fit well your "multi-user" requirement, which isn't fulfilled by any other password manager that I know of. It can also automagically log you into different services like SSH, MySQL or sudo and can do multi-hop.

The only issue I have found so far is that installing the server component is a bit of a pain (ie. no Debian package, as opposed to the client side)... but i guess this really depends on the "Linux" environment you are using...

I have been maintaining a list of FLOSS password managers in our public wiki for a while, any suggestions not mentionned there are welcome.

Comment tip #3 was news for me, thanks! (Score 1) 284

by anarcat (#39484311) Attached to: Getting the Most Out of SSH

I was also a bit surprised to see basic stuff and some repetition in the article there, but trick #3 was really nice for me:

ssh-keygen -R remote-hostname

This will remove the entry for remote-hostname in the known_hosts file, for example if you know the key changed or (don't do that) if you think you're in a MITM attack and don't care.

now that will fix many countless fiddling around the known_hosts file...

Comment Debian packages still fubar'd (Score 1) 195

by anarcat (#39466053) Attached to: XBMC V11 Eden Has Been Released

The Debian packages are really strange for XBMC. First off the Linux instructions are aimed primarily at Ubuntu. Then the other problem is that there is some kind of a fork between the "official packages" for Ubuntu and the Debian packages provided on debian-multimedia.org, the latter not being up to date (only rc2 is available).

I also note that the Ubuntu packages have an Epoch while the Debian packages do not, which makes it hard to switch between the two.

Short of adding a Ubuntu PPA to my sources.list, I am not sure how I can get this thing installed on Debian, which is a bit annoying.

I wish those great products would actually go the extra mile and work with distributions for their products to be packaged, especially since they seem to be familiar with Debian pacakging...

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