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Movies

Submission + - Homemade dvd storage / streaming server?

Submitted by bingbong
bingbong writes: I'm a DVD addict with a large DVD collection. I want to save space and rip all my DVDs to a storage drive, and then serve them to my various TVs around the house. Are there any suggestions for ripping, cataloging and streaming software? I might also be moving to the UK from the US in the next year. So ideally this system would be something i could use over there.

so that's my dream. Any thoughts?
Education

Submission + - MIT Faculty Accused of Racism

Submitted by epistemiclife
epistemiclife writes: CNN reports that a professor at MIT has resigned in protest, because a colleague was denied tenure. He charges that it was because he is black. DiverseEducation.com expounds upon this, by referencing similar issues with MIT in the past, as well as with other institutions which focus on science and engineering.
PHP

Submission + - PHP 5.2.3 Released

Submitted by infeon
infeon writes: [01-Jun-2007] The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.3. This release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.
Security

Submission + - Searches for pirated media are the most dangerous.

Submitted by
dteichman2
dteichman2 writes: "A study by McAfee (covered at PC World) states that searches for P2P clients and music downloads have a high chance of leading you into a spyware/adware/spam trap. McAfee found that these types of searches resulted in 35-50% 'risky' results. It does seem, however, that their study fails to consider search rankings.

Considering that the study was done by the sellers of popular anti-virus software, please add salt by taste. If you find yourself searching for things like 'music downloads,' 'screensavers,' 'bearshare,' 'Kazaa,' and 'Limewire,' this might be a good time to Get Firefox."
Censorship

Cryptome to be Terminated by Verio/NTT 171

Posted by CmdrTaco from the is-this-the-whole-story dept.
George Maschke writes "Cryptome, a website concerned with encryption, privacy, and government secrecy, has received two weeks' notice from Verio that its service will be terminated for unspecified "violation of [its] Acceptable Use Policy." Cryptome has a history of making publicly available documents and information that governments would rather keep secret. For the notice, and a public response by Cryptome webmaster John Young, see Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT."
Sci-Fi

Ashes of Doohan Sent Into Space 112

Posted by CmdrTaco from the no-original-jokes-left dept.
Stephen Samuel writes "The CBC is reporting that Star Trek actor James Doohan ("Scotty") achieved his hopes of having his ashes launched into space when a package containing some of his ashes, ashes of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and about 200 other people were carried into sub-orbital space by a 6 meter (20') rocket. The rocket was launched by UP Aerospace from "Spaceport America", a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert."

Vudu Set-Top Box Weds Legal P2P and HD Movies 121

Posted by Zonk from the smells-like-money dept.
prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running a story on a Silicon Valley company that is planning to revolutionize the movie business. It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, run by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. That could enables the movie studios to make movies securely available to viewers on the day of release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others: 'DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.'"
Sony

Submission + - Sony Gets Bad Press from Grusome Publicity Stunt

Submitted by walnutmon
walnutmon writes: Sony is suffering a backlash from a recent publicity stunt that seems to have been in bad taste.

In a time of increasing public sensitivity to video game violence, Sony has gone to the extreme by publishing pictures from a party featuring topless cocktail waitresses and, get this: a freshly decapitated goat.

From the article:

The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centerpiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company's PlayStation 2 console.

Guests at the event were even invited to reach inside the goat's still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.

Sickening images of the party have appeared in the company's official PlayStation magazine — but after being contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Sony issued an apology for the gruesome stunt and promised to recall the entire print run.

Sony has been no stranger to bad press in recent years, between a rootkit scandal and countless corporate mishaps, this latest debacle just begs the question: When are they going to learn that there is such thing as bad press?
Spam

Is There Any Reason to Report Spammers to ISPs? 117

Posted by Cliff from the does-it-do-any-good dept.
marko_ramius asks: "For years I've been a good netizen and reported spam that I get to the appropriate contacts at various ISPs. In the entire time that I've done this I've gotten (maybe) 5 or 6 responses from those ISPs informing me that they have taken action against the spammer. In recent years however, I haven't gotten any responses. Are the ISP's so overwhelmed with abuse reports that they aren't able to respond to the spam reports? Do they even bother acting on said reports? Is there any real reason to report spammers?"
Music

RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio 458

Posted by Zonk from the isn't-that-called-stealing dept.
ISurfTooMuch writes "With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"
Programming

Submission + - fun open source communities

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am looking for an open source project to contribute towards, a project using c/c++ or python.
Most importantly it should be made of a fun community, a welcoming community.

Some of the higher profile projects are hard to get patches into, get help from or are for are really run by companies.

what open source projects do you know of that have a nice, welcoming community, one of the spirit of the open source communities of old.
Privacy

Submission + - Woman Denied Teaching Degree Over MySpace Photo

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A woman was denied a teaching degree by Pennsylvania based Millersville University at the last minute, due to a "Drunken Pirate" photo of her on her own MySpace page. According to the story, even though Ms. Snyder received "competent" or "superior" ratings in her final student-teacher evaluation, she was ultimately denied the teaching degree. Conestoga Valley High School threatened to no longer accept student-teachers from Millersville University if Ms. Snyder went unpunished for her "Drunken Pirate" photo.
America Online

AOL Security Compromised by Teenager 99

Posted by Zonk from the off-the-shelf-hacking-oh-great dept.
Freaky_Friday wrote with a link to an InfoWorld article about a teenage kid accessing customer information at AOL. The alleged criminal trespass began late last year, and extended up through early April. According to the article, the guy used some 'off-the-shelf' hacking software he downloaded online to gain access to, and then transmit information from, AOL's systems. "The complaint states that Nieves admitted to investigators that he committed the alleged acts because AOL took away his accounts. 'I accessed their internal accounts and their network and used it to try to get my accounts back,' the defendant is quoted as saying in the complaint. He also admitted to posting photos of his exploits in a photo Web site, according to the complaint ... If the defendant was honest about his motivation in his reported confession, it's safe to assume that he wasn't interested in stealing data for financial gain, [Managing director of technology at FTI Consulting Mark] Rasch said. Still, it'll be interesting to find out what steps AOL is taking if customer data was in fact compromised, he said."
Linux Business

Submission + - New marketplaces for large and small coder service

Submitted by
sdfad1
sdfad1 writes: "Sourceforge mentioned in a recent SF.net update that it is currently trialling a marketplace a la eBay for open source software services under a closed beta (third party link). An interview with Michael Rudolph, VP and General Manager of SourceForge.net shedding some light on this new platform is also available. Complete with reputation systems, this has already been picked up by other interested bloggers.

Hopefully, this will bring more to the table compared to free-lancing sites like rentacoder, e-lance, guru or even the larger systems providers like Salesforce and redhat's (Redhat Exchange (also in private beta)) new offerings."

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