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Businesses

Submission + - Delta opens "ticket window" on Facebook (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Forget using Facebook to promote ticket sales....Delta Airlines is now using the site to sell tickets. Delta has become the first airline to allow customers to reserve flights on Facebook. The airline plans to expand the ticket window to other sites. This move comes on the heels of a redesign of Delta's own site earlier this week.
Iphone

Submission + - Jailbroken iPhone Exploit Code Goes Public (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Minutes after Apple issued an iOS security update on Wednesday, the maker of a 10-day-old jailbreak exploit released code that others could put to use hijacking iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads. 'Comex,' the developer of JailbreakMe 2.0, posted the source code for the hacks that leverages two vulnerabilities in iOS and allows iPhone owners to install unauthorized apps.
Programming

Submission + - The Risks of Entering Programming Prizes (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister warns developers of the hidden risks of entering programming prizes, which are on the rise since NetFlix awared $1 million to BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos in 2009. 'Web and software companies offer prizes for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is simply to raise awareness, interest, and participation in a given software platform or service,' McAllister writes. But the practice of offering and entering software prizes is not without concerns. Privacy implications, class-action lawsuits — many of the prizes leave participants vulnerable to prosecution. Worse is the possibility of handing hard work over to a company without reward. 'Contests like the Netflix Prize are sponsored by commercial entities that stand to profit from the innovations produced by the entrants. Those who participate invest valuable time toward winning the prize, but if they fail to meet the deadline (or to produce the leading results) their efforts could go completely unrewarded. Depending on the terms of the contest, however, the sponsor might still be able to make use of the runners-up's innovations — which, of course, would be a whole lot cheaper than hiring developers.'"
Idle

Submission + - Rupert Murdoch claims to own the "Sky" in "Skype" (independent.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Crudely_Indecent
Crudely_Indecent writes: Not content to own just the news stories, Rupert Murdoch is now going after individual words!

Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB is fighting a legal battle with the internet telecommunications pioneer Skype, claiming that it owns the “Sky” in “Skype”.
Privacy

Submission + - Senate Bill Allows Govt to Collect Personal Info (cnsnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Senate Democrats united to pass a financial regulatory bill that allows the government to collect data on any person operating in financial markets at any level, including the collection of personal transaction records from local banks, including customer's addresses and ATM receipts." ... "The bill, if it becomes law, will create the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection and empower it to 'gather information and activities of persons operating in consumer financial markets,' including the names and addresses of account holders, ATM and other transaction records, and the amount of money kept in each customer's account."

Comment Sound of .... (Score 1) 154

by Dark Coder (#32296514) Attached to: Facebook, Others Giving User Private Data To Advertisers

There's a sad sort of leaking
From Facebook on your wall
And the info on your profile, too
And out to the advertise
An absurd little Zuckerburg... See More
Is popping out to say boo-hoo
(boo-hoo, boo-hoo)

boo-hoo Regretfully they tell us
boo-hoo But firmly they compel us
to be a dumb fuck
boo-hoo
To you

So long, farewell
Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight
I hate to go and leave this pretty site

(Children)
So long, farewell
Auf Wiedersehen, adieu
(Zuckerburg)
What's new, what's new
To you and you and you

(chorus)
Who care, farewell
Au revoir, Auf Weidersehen

I'd like to stay
And play my first farmville
(talking to my boss) yes?
(boss) no!

(chorus)
So long, farewell
Auf Weidersehen, goodbye

I leave and heave
A sigh and say goodbye
Goodbye

I'm glad to go
I cannot tell a lie

I flit, I float
I fleetly flee, I fly

Your Privacy's gone
Back to Reality, so must I

(chorus)So long, farewell
Auf Weidersehen, goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye

Goodbye

Submission + - ImageLogr Scrapes "Billions" of Images Illegally (thomashawk.com) 1

Submitted by PurpleCarrot
PurpleCarrot writes: In what must be one of the largest attempts to scrape images from the web, the site ImageLogr.com "claims to be scraping the entire 'free web' and seems to have hit Flickr especially hard, copying full-sized images of yours and mine to their own servers where they are hosting them without any attribution or links back to the original image in violation of all available licenses on Flickr." The site even contains the option to directly download images that ImageLogr has scraped. What makes this endeavor so amazing is that this isn't a case of "other people gave us millions of infringing images, help us remove the wrong one's" but one of "we took all the images on the webz, if we got one of yours, oops!" The former gets some protection from the DMCA, whereas the latter is blatant infringement. The site has caused a flurry of activity and has since shut off its site, being replaced with the following message: "Imagelogr.com is currently offline as we are improving the website. Due to copyright issues we are now changing some stuff around to make people happy. Please check back soon."

Submission + - Friday Freebies: Mafia Wars (goozernation.com)

Submitted by averyzoe
averyzoe writes: If you're on Facebook, chances are you've heard of Mafia Wars. Chances are also good you've hidden the incessant notifications from all your friends, asking for bodyguards and gifts and various other items. As annoying as all that can be, if you haven't given Mafia Wars a chance, you're missing out. This extremely popular game won a Webby Award in 2009 and has nearly 26 million accounts on Facebook alone. And guess what? It's not just on Facebook. Zynga, the company behind Mafia Wars and other popular games such as Farmville and Petville, also offers MAfia Wars on Sonico, Myspace, Yahoo!, and even has an iphone app.
Science

Submission + - Scientific R&D At Home

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hello, I'm currently on the cusp of getting myself a new hobby and making some investments. There's a few areas that interest me greatly, from playing with EEG/ECG and trying to put together a DIY sleep lab, to astronomy etc. I'm somewhat hesitant to get into some of these areas because (despite the potentially short lived enjoyment factor) I'm not convinced that they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd rally like to do. I've also read quite a number of articles on 'bio hacking' and the subject seemed interesting but it also seemed futile without an expensive lab (not to mention years of experience!). The question I'm trying to ask is what R&D hobbies do slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?
Bug

Microsoft Dynamics GP "Encrypted" Using Caesar Cipher 206

Posted by kdawson from the no-safety-in-numbers dept.
scribblej writes "Many large companies use Microsoft's Dynamics GP product for accounting, and many of these companies use it to store credit card numbers for billing customers. Turns out these numbers (and anything else in GP) are encrypted only by means of a simple substitution cipher. This includes the master system password, which can be easily selected and decrypted from the GP database by any user. Quoting: '[Y]ou DON'T HAVE TO GIVE ACCESS TO THE DYNAMICS DATABASE. What that means is if you create a base user in GP, that user can log into the SQL server and run a select statement on the table containing the "encrypted" GP System password. Not good.'" Update: 05/22 02:57 GMT by T : The original linked post has been revised in a few places; significantly, the following has been added as a correction: "By default, GP gives the user access to the DYNAMICS database but the user CANNOT login to the SQL server using SQL Enterprise Manager."
Patents

Submission + - Are Trade Secrets and Trademarks the Future? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: The Internet's perfect copying machine makes the ideas behind copyright — now in its 301st year — largely irrelevant today: once a copy is online somewhere, it's impossible to take it down everywhere. Could the arrival of low-cost, high-quality desktop 3D printers do the same for patents, by enabling anyone to download and print off analogue objects? With copyright and patents nullified, what might manufacturing companies turn to in order to fight back against these perfect counterfeit versions? How about trade secrets and trademarks?

Comment Re: brilliant and dangerous? (Score 2, Interesting) 1134

by Dark Coder (#27212527) Attached to: Are Quirky Developers Brilliant Or Dangerous?

Try hiring ANY decent coder that works with my former boss's highly impossible deadlines.

I'm with previous parents. A good fire extinguisher (Asperger's) is handy to have. Deadline gets met, even though the end-result (support and maintenance) sucks.

Most start-ups are in it for a quick and lucrative exit strategy (post IPO-sale).

Comment Re:Ask them two questions (Score 1) 485

by Dark Coder (#25334855) Attached to: Choosing a Replacement Email System For a University?

Ok, so it's very secured between the University and Google Data Center.. Big whoop.

How secured is it when Google EULA states that sharing of your aggregates, University IP, patents, and relations with other GMail account holders (and god forbid, your personal) data with other nosey 3rd-party is very EXPECTED?
Businesses

Submission + - Giving up personal copyrights to a business

Submitted by E
E writes: Prior to my current job I have created many different programs and applications which I retain full copyrights to (250k+ loc). Some were created for companies others as hobbies and currently, many of them sit rather idle. I have been offered a partnership in a small company with big potential, where I am the only tech person. In all the leagalities of the process, there is a copyright clause that basically says the company owns anything and everything tech related I do inside and outside of work. This is a fairly standard clause, however I am stuck on what to do.

I will be consulting a lawyer, but wanted some feedback first on what others may have done. I have been told already that the partnership won't buy it from me for what the software is worth, and if my copyrights don't ever make money, the partners won't care about it. Knowing legally, if I do any development in the future, it belongs to the partnership. Should I:
(1) Let the company take my copyrights and hope the partnership pays off.
(2) Sell the rights to someone else and "cash out" on what I currently have.
(3) Pretend the clause isn't in there and continue dev as a hobby/side business.
(4) Release it under an OSS license, and hope someone will continue dev work (since legally I can't), knowing it will most likely become stagnant or abandoned.
(5) Focus on the partnership and archive my software (If I don't do anything with them in the future, the partnership has no claims to them).
(6) Hold out until the clause is changed.
(7) Any other options or advice?

Has anyone else been in a similar situation, and what have you done?

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