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Comment Who is supposedly profiting anyway? (Score 1) 301

Based on the spam I get here, there is no big incentive to buy anything from whoever's business being advertised to begin with. To the extent there even is any kind of business there at all.

To illustrate, from looking at some recent deleted spam I make the following observations:

First of all, my penis is just the size it should be and it works the way it should, so no need for enlargments and viagra, nor, presumably, subsequently having to carry it around in a wheelbarrow.

With that taken care of, next, I don't have time to do contract negotiations with alleged attorneys claiming to represent rich deceased people whom I've never heard of, living in countries where I've never been.

Neither do I care about spending time attempting to claim a prize in lotteries where I never bought a single ticket.

I don't use Paypal in French either.

Then there are the bankers in Ghana that send me notices of their new e-mail address, with wild and wonderful and completely unrelated titles. Since all these notices are basically formatted the same way, the precipitated hypothesis is that there are a lot of bankers in Ghana, and all of them are getting yahoo.com e-mail addresses. Well, I don't need Ghanesian banking services any time soon. If I ever should, I'd deal with someone whose e-mail address had a reasonable resemblance to the name of the bank and the country the bank is operating in, not just some random attention-getter I found in the spam-box.

And that is just looking at the stuff that comes in a language I can read. Sometimes it is Chinese or Hebrew, and sometimes it is in some mysterious language that merely renders as garbage.

Point of all this, there is hardly any legitimate business or services of any kind advertising through this spam channel at all. Hence no one to boycott.

Makes me wonder why do they bother.

Software

Submission + - How can we keep software from being lost forever?

TheRealMindChild writes: Recently, I obtained a contract who ran some system critical applications on Windows NT 4.0 Embedded machines. They have been having problems with the system crashing and the application failing. Inspecting the machine, core DLL files were corrupt enough that they weren't even recognized as executables by utilities like depends.exe. It was pretty obvious that the system image needed rebuilt (no backup... how lucky). The client INSISTS that we not upgrade the system to a more recent Windows Embedded product. The previous contractor who set up the systems took all of the software with him, and convieniently, he can't be located. So I start my search for a copy of Windows NT 4.0 Embedded, somewhere... anywhere. Simply put, it can not be found, legally or otherwise. Contract issues aside, it started really getting me down that software can actually be lost in time. It is a sad state of affairs, as such things can be learning tools for the future, if even only about the history of how things progressed. Is there some sane manner of which we can keep this from happening? What are some solutions?

On a similar note, Magnussoft Zeta 1.5, released this year, seems also as impossible to find anymore. Ignoring the legal implications, this bit of BeOS history is quite a milestone for so many reasons. I went through contacting everyone that has even reviewed this operating system, and they all either threw it away or gave it to a friend (who convieniently doesn't have it anymore either). Something needs to preserve our software history, but I am completely lost on what I/we can do.
Privacy

Submission + - Legality of laptop border searches (wired.com)

Bassman59 writes: "This is something I didn't know they could do ... Apparently, border agents can demand that a citizen returning home must allow searches of the contents of their laptop computers. The good news is that the courts are looking at this."
Programming

Submission + - The Seven Deadly Sins of Linux Security (acmqueue.com)

ChelleChelle writes: Opening with the line "Avoid these common security risks like the devil," this article means business. Bob Toxen of Horizon Network Security presents his list of the seven deadly sins of Linux Security compiled from his own research and experience as well as forensics analysis and discussions with systems administrators. While perfect security may never be a possibility, Toxen's seven rules provide a large step in the right direction.
Programming

Submission + - Job satisfaction of coders - how to improve?

tsrkoodari writes: "We've just started a new research project that aims at finding out how to improve the job satisfaction of coders. Our project is done in collaboration with Nokia. Our research questions include:
  1. which work methods improve job satisfaction of coders?
  2. which factors contribute to the flow experience of a coder?
  3. how multinationality affects job satisfaction?
Our research group would like to ask all developers (whose job mainly consists of coding) reading Slashdot for opinions on these matters. Which work methods improve your job satisfaction as a coder? Have you experienced flow (defined as the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment) in your work? How do you feel about agile methods vs. traditional methods? Do they aim solely at productivity? And finally, how does multinationality/globalization in development teams affect your job satisfaction?"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Chip-and-pin not invulnerable

An anonymous reader writes: Cambridge University researchers, in an investigation for BBC Television's Watchdog programme, have demonstrated a man-in-the-middle attack for the chip-and-pin credit card security system used throughout the UK and Europe. In the attack, the card is inserted into a card-reader that has been tampered with, and the information transmitted in real-time to an accomplice who uses a specially modified card to make a higher-value purchase elsewhere. The modified card-reader shows only the expected amount, but the larger amount is deducted from the victim's bank account. It would not be easy to use this method in practise because the two transactions must be made simultaneously. The same team recently demonstrated a hacked chip-and-pin terminal playing Tetris.
Microsoft

Submission + - 9 Most annoying Vista "Features"

firenurse writes: "Fox news has an interesting story titled "Microsoft Windows Vista's Nine Most Annoying Features". According to the article, "Windows Vista tries hard to protect us from ourselves. One unintended consequence is that it will sometimes block actions that we purposefully generated — and not even recognize that we selected the option." The link is here. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,250344,00.html "
Privacy

Submission + - See-through-clothing surveillance in the streets

vinsci writes: "Leaked documents drawn up by the UK Home Office have revealed new plans for surveillance cameras that can see through clothing to be installed in the streets. Those in control of the system would effectively see everyone naked. The proposal has been presented to PM Tony Blair's working group on Security, Crime and Justice."
Linux Business

Submission + - Linux kernel devs provide free driver development

Goodgerster writes: "Businesses worldwide now no longer have to develop their own Linux drivers, and users no longer have to rely upon reverse-engineering (hopefully.) The Linux kernel community will now write your driver for you, provided you can supply some specs or an engineer's email address. They also provide some support if you have NDA worries. Hopefully this should lead to better hardware support in the more esoteric device categories, such as graphics tablets."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Universal filesystem for removable drives

Cap'n Crax writes: As external USB and FireWire hard drives are becoming more and more common, I often wonder how I can use one for native read and write access between Win, Mac, and Linux systems. As far as I have been able to research, Windows can read and write NTFS and FAT32, but cannot handle HFS or HFS+ systems, nor any Linux EXT systems. Mac can read and write HFS and HFS+ of course, but only read NTFS. Linux it seems has good read support, but dodgy write support for both. All systems, it seems, have good support for FAT32, but it has major limits, expecially the 4GB file size limit.

Is there any modern filesystem that all major OS's today can effectively use on external drives, especially for large files? Is anyone even working on this?
Announcements

Submission + - 'Heartbeat' in Earth's climate

On Purpose writes: "Researchers identify a 'heartbeat' in Earth's climate
A few years ago, an international team of researchers went to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and drilled down five kilometers below sea level in an effort to uncover secrets about the earth's climate history. They exceeded their expectations and have published their findings in the Dec. 22 edition of the journal Science.
The researchers' drilling produced pristine samples of marine microfossils, otherwise known as foraminifera. Analysis of the carbonate shells of these microfossils, which are between 23 million to 34 million years-old, has revealed that the Earth's climate and the formation and recession of glaciation events in the Earth's history have corresponded with variations in the earth's natural orbital patterns and carbon cycles.
The researchers were particularly interested in these microfossils because they came from the Oligocene epoch, a time in Earth's history known for falling temperatures.
"The continuity and length of the data series we gathered and analyzed allowed for unprecedented insights into the complex interactions between external climate forcing, the global carbon cycle and ice sheet oscillations," said Dr. Jens Herrle, co-author of the paper and a micropaleontology professor at the University of Alberta.
The authors also show how simple models of the global carbon cycle, coupled to orbital controls of global temperature and biological activity, are able to reproduce the important changes observed after the world entered an "ice-house" state about 34 million years ago.
In the early half of the 20th century, Serbian physicist Milutin Milankovitch first proposed that cyclical variations in the Earth-Sun geometry can alter the Earth's climate and these changes can be discovered in the Earth's geological archives, which is exactly what this research team, consisting of members from the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Canada, has done.
"This research is not only concerned with the climate many millions-of-years-ago. Researching and understanding 'extreme' climate events from the geological past allows us to better tune climate models to understand present and future events, and the response to major perturbations of Earth's climate and the global carbon cycle, Herrle added.

Article"
Windows

Submission + - Korean Gov't Finds Vista "Interoperability Iss

An anonymous reader writes: The Korean Government has determined that "interoperability issues" exist between Windows Vista and popular Korean e-services, and resolving these issues will require 1 to 2 months of additional development, according to an government briefing released January 23.

Ahead of the January 31 launch of Windows Vista, the Korean Ministy of Communication, in conjunction with the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs and the Financial Supervisory Service, reviewed the functionality of major Korean Web sites, programs, and services, "confirming" that "1 to 2 months of preparations are required" to resolve problems with Internet banking certificate verification, the printing of official government documents offered online, and video playback issues with popular online portals.

The report noted that "Although security has been enhanced in Windows Vista to combat phishing, remove spyware, and improve firewalls, the new User Access Control may give rise to interoperability issues with ActiveX, used by most popular domestic programs."

"The Korea Information Security Agency, Financial Security Agency, and National Information Society Agency are working with Microsoft and solution providers to amend the source code and fix these issues," the report said.

The goverment expects internet banking to be operational by the middle of February, with online games and portal sites to be problem-free by end January. The timetable for resolving E-government service-realted issues will be revealed at a later date.

URL of briefing here (Korean Language) :

Original may also be found here (Korean Language)
Portables

Submission + - Debian Linux gains faster ARM port

An anonymous reader writes: The Debian project has just gained a whole new ARM port that promises much, much faster floating point performance, especially on phones and other mobile devices based on newer VFP-enabled ARM cores. The ARM EABI port, aka "armel," currently has about 10,000 packages, thanks to the efforts of Lennert Buytenhek, who was sponsored by board vendor ADS to sit down with three donated Thecus N2100's and compile, compile, compile. Early reports suggest that mp3 compile times drop from 68 minutes to 4 minutes, using the new ARM port.
Nintendo

Submission + - 10 people fired over Wii radio contest

Skadet writes: 10 people have been fired in the aftermath of the tragic death of one of the contestants for Sacramento radio station 107.9 The End's "Hold your Wee for a Wii" promotion (first covered on Slashdot here).

From TFA:
The hosts of KDND-FM's "Morning Rave" — who go by the on-air names Trish, Maney and Lukas — were fired a day after the station announced it was suspending the show and investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of Jennifer Lea Strange. [...] John Geary, vice president and general manager of KDND parent company, Entercom/Sacramento, made the announcement Tuesday in an e-mail to reporters.

"Effective immediately, the 'Morning Rave' program is canceled and ten employees are no longer with the station."

A company spokesman, Charles Sipkins, confirmed the three DJs, as well as two other on-air personalities, "Carter" and "Fester," were among those fired. Five other employees who worked on the "Morning Rave" also were let go. All 10 were fired, the spokesman said, for violating terms of their employee agreements.
I used to work at a corporately owned radio station (full disclosure: not for Entercom, KDND's owner. I was a techie in radio in a previous life). But I can tell you from experience that most of the people fired were most likely not responsible for this event. At my station group, no events happened without the express consent of #1, the station manager, and #2, the promotions director. They're the ones ultimately responsible. So why isn't John Geary the one getting the boot? Is this just an example of Corporate America scapegoating the peons? What if you had been commissioned by your boss to write code that ended up being a danger? Would you be culpable, or your boss?

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