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Privacy

UK Plans To Monitor 20,000 Families' Homes Via CCTV 693

Posted by timothy from the words-fail-but-pictures-deliver dept.
metrix007 points out a story in the Sunday Express with more surveillance-camera madness from the UK, where the government now wants to place 20,000 CCTV cameras to monitor families ("the worst families in England") within their own homes, to make sure that "kids go to bed on time and eat healthy meals and the like. This is going too far, and hopefully will not pass. Where will it end?"
Security

Submission + - CARS.gov EULA Allows the Government to Own Your PC 1

Submitted by
54mc
54mc writes: "Glen Beck today revealed what a close inspection of the End User License Agreement for the CARS system contains. From the EULA, "This application provides access to the DoT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the U.S. Government." The EULA goes on to include other specific aspects of what exactly belongs to the computer.Will this be yet another issue for the already troubled system?

This is of course, yet another example of EULAs that no one reads going way too far."
Security

Submission + - Police Ask Hackers to Help Track Jakarta Bombers

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Australian newspaper "The Age" reports that police in Indonesia are calling on computer hackers to track who is behind a website claiming responsibility for the Jakarta hotel bombings that left nine people dead in attacks on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in downtown Jakarta on July 17. "The cyber crime team is chasing (who is behind this) ... hopefully, we can track them," says national police spokesman Nanan Soekarna. "There are a lot of smart hackers in Indonesia. Come on, try to prove that you can defend your people and country and provide information so we can catch them." A statement discovered earlier this week on blogging service Blogspot.com claimed responsibility for the hotel attacks under the name of Malaysian-born extremist Noordin Mohammed Top. Police are investigating the authenticity of the blog which carries two messages from a group called Tanzim Al Qoidah Indonesia saying the bombings aimed to destroy all parties related to the West and Christianity and offers solace to Muslims suffering from their oppression. Real or not, the statement has attracted tens of thousands of visitors to the blog, more than 2,000 of whom have posted messages in response, the vast majority condemning the attacks. "These comments represent the mood of the larger Internet users in Indonesia," writes Riyadi Suparno in the Jakarta Post. "Their mood, their anger and their frustration with terrorism represent the mood, anger and frustration of many of us nationwide.""
Idle

Submission + - Facebooking Judge Catches Lawyer in Lie (abajournal.com) 2

Submitted by
edadams
edadams writes: "A Galveston, Texas lawyer asked for a continuance because of the death of her father. But the judge she was asking knew the lawyer had earlier posted a string of status updates on Facebook, detailing her week of drinking, going out and partying."
Security

Submission + - How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World' 1

Submitted by mysidia
mysidia writes: A new article from forbes.com reports on an unpatched iPhone vulnerability that researchers Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner plan to reveal at Black Hat. The bug may allow hackers to remotely seize control of iPhones by using SMS text messages. "If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly."
A similar vulnerability is reported to exist on devices running Windows mobile software.
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: FTC delays identity theft rules for third time

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Well this is getting kind of predictable. The Federal Trade Commission this week has delayed for the third time in less than a year the deadline for companies to enact its identity theft rules known as Red Flags, which were set to become practice Aug. 1. Originally set to become required practice Nov. 1, 2008, the Red Flags program is touted as being one of the major ways the government plans to fight the growing identity theft blight. Under the Red Flags rules, all entities that regularly permit deferred payments for goods or services, including entities such as health care providers, attorneys, and other professionals, as well as retailers and a wide range of businesses that invoice their customers must develop a written program that identifies and detects the relevant warning signs — or "red flags" — of identity theft. These may include, for example, unusual account activity, fraud alerts on a consumer report, or attempted use of suspicious account application documents. The program must also describe appropriate responses that would prevent and mitigate the crime and detail a plan to update the program. Lawyers are perhaps predictably protesting the loudest about implementing such rules. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Government

Submission + - National Ban Sought on Texting While Driving

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that states that do not ban texting by drivers could forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars in federal highway funds under legislation introduced in the Senate. Under the measure, states would have two years to outlaw the sending of text and e-mail messages by drivers or lose 25 percent of their highway money each year until the money was depleted. "Studies show this is far more dangerous than talking on a phone while driving or driving while drunk, which is astounding," said New York Senator Charles E. Schumer, one of four Democratic senators to introduce the proposal. Currently, texting while driving is banned in 14 states, including Alaska, California and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia. However the Governors Highway Safety Association, a group that represents state highway safety agencies in every state, opposes texting while driving but does not support the proposed legislation. "We oppose sanctioning states since there is not yet a proven effective method for enforcing a texting or cellphone ban," says association spokesman, Jonathan Adkins. Safety advocates respond that such concerns about enforcement were raised about seat belt laws but argued that the value of such laws — even if they could not be enforced all the time — created awareness about the issue and set societal guidelines for the behavior."
Government

WoW Gamer Earns Federal Investigation Achievement 167

Posted by Soulskill from the jack-thompson-jumps-for-joy dept.
barnyjr writes "A teenager could face federal charges after investigators say he made online threats to kill Americans on a plane from Indianapolis to Chicago. According to investigators, a monitor of the online interactive game World of Warcraft saw the alleged threats in an on-line chat and called Johnson County authorities. She told investigators the chatter didn't seem like a game." I'm not sure who's crazier, this guy or the guy who just became the first World of Warcraft player to rack up 10,000 achievement points.
Transportation

Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge? 519

Posted by samzenpus from the go-where-now dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Moran writes in the BBC News Magazine that Sat-Nav clearly suits an era in which 'map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.' Sat-Nav 'speaks to our contemporary anxieties and preoccupations about the road,' writes Moran. 'More roads and better cars mean we can travel further, and so the risk of getting lost is all the greater.' But do real men use sat-nav? Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like 'make a legal U-turn' and 'recalculating the route', as stubborn or bossy. Still we don't quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. 'Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections,' writes Moran. 'Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.'"
Censorship

Japanese ESRB Bans Rape Depiction In Games 662

Posted by Soulskill from the touchy-subjects dept.
eldavojohn writes "The Ethics Organization of Computer Software (EOCS), now 233 companies strong, and met in Tokyo yesterday to ban a controversial title from Japan known as RapeLay, an eroge game (something much more adult than the more popular dating simulators). It's gotten a lot of press as reviewers have noted at one point the player must force sex on a 12-year-old. More importantly, the large ($353 million annually) adult game industry in Japan will now need to stay away from rape in their games if they wish to remain a member of EOCS. RapeLay seems to be available on Amazon's UK and JP sites, sparking outrage and causing a former US Ambassador to Japan to write an editorial criticizing Japan, saying, 'Only Japan allows people to possess these hideous images without penalty. Six of the G-7 countries have found ways to protect the innocent from being prosecuted for possession of child pornography. Is it not time for Japan to find a way to punish the guilty?' Singapore's Straits Times has more details, pointing out that it's still not illegal to possess these materials in Japan. We discussed this and other games last month in an editorial."
Education

Keeping a PC Personal At School? 695

Posted by kdawson from the mine-mine-mine dept.
Berto Kraus writes "As one of the most tech-oriented students in my art-oriented institution, I'm usually the one with the laptop. This causes frequent requests from other students to read mail, check some site, or connect it to the projector to display a file from their Flash drive. For the sake of my privacy, the health of my laptop, and my own peace of mind, I'm reluctant. But telling my compatriots to go to our building supervisor and ask him for a desktop-on-a-cart, as they should do, is considered rude and unfriendly. Now, I could dual-boot Ubuntu, or carry around a Linux-on-a-stick. Or I could embed the computer in my skull. For many reasons, none of these solutions is ideal. So I'm asking you, insightful and funny Slashdotters, what would you do to keep your PC personal at school?"

Comment Check the maker (Score 1) 301

by thomasinx (#28160297) Attached to: VHDL or Verilog For Learning FPGAs?
I'm seeing a lot of people complaining about VHDL and praising verilog, but I've used both and I'd say that the difficulties encountered with one will be seen with both. A lot of these complaints are just people who did some programming in VHDL and hated it. Using an HDL is not like using a normal programming language, and getting over that hurdle is what will be difficult for most people.

As far as what to teach in the class, identify what hardware you are going to use first, and then look at the tutorials supplied by the company supplying the boards. Most companies (Xilinx, Altera, to name a few) have tutorials they supply to use on their boards, that you can use as a first-step in designing coursework. I would make the language decision after checking what is supplied by the company.

-T
Biotech

Fluorescent Monkeys Cast Light On Human Disease 174

Posted by samzenpus from the grape-ape-version-2.0 dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that a team of Japanese scientists has integrated a new gene for green fluorescent protein into the common marmoset, causing them to glow green under ultraviolet light, creating second-generation, glow-in-the-dark monkeys in what could be a powerful new tool in human disease research. Though primates modified to generate a glowing protein have been created before, these are the first to keep the change in their bloodlines. If a fluorescent protein gene can be introduced into the monkey genome and passed onto future generations, other genes could be too opening up a world of possibilities for medical research, such as the generation of specific monkey colonies containing genetic defects that mirror human diseases aiding efforts to cure such diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. However many people are likely to find the routine use of monkeys in medical research far less acceptable than that of rodents, drawing action from animal rights activists. 'I'm worried that these steps are being taken without any overall public discussion about whether we want to go down that road. We may find ourselves gradually drifting towards the genetic engineering of human beings,' says Dr David King, from the group Human Genetics Alert. '"Slippery slope" is a quite inadequate description of the process, because it doesn't happen passively. People push it forward.'"

What Free IDE Do You Use? 1055

Posted by kdawson from the ides-of-may dept.
postermmxvicom writes "I program only occasionally and mostly for personal interest. I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005! I went looking for other free IDEs and came across Code::Blocks and Visual Studio Express. I work from a Windows machine, use C++, and make mostly console apps; but have written a few Windows apps and D3D or OpenGL apps. I wanted to know what free IDEs you use and recommend. What do you like about them? What features do they lack? What about them irritate you (and what do you do to work around these annoyances)? For instance, when I used Visual C++ 6.0 in college, there was an error in getline that had to be fixed, and the code indenting in DevC++ needed to be tweaked to suit my liking."

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Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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