roger6106 - Slashdot User

Submission + - France Bans Amateur Videos of Violent Acts

Submitted by

narramissic

on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @10:59AM

narramissic writes: "On the 16th anniversary of the Rodney King beating, which was filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday, the French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules."

Submission + - AnyDVD updated, now removes Blue-Ray DRM

Submitted by

mariushm

on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @07:38AM

mariushm writes: "SlySoft has just updated AnyDVD HD, offering users the possibility of watching Blue-Ray media without DRM. This comes after only two weeks from the first release which was able to remove DRM from HD-DVD.

Version 6.1.3.0 has lots of features but probably the most important one is stripping the evil DRM infection from Blu-Ray and restore your fair use rights.

The free upgrade can also remove region encoding, works on Windows XP-64 and Vista-64, and fixes a ton of bugs. You can get the update or a trial copy here."

Submission + - New BBC documentary claims global warming is lies.

Submitted by myside on Monday March 05, 2007 @01:55PM

myside writes: 'The Great Global Warming Swindle', a documentary set to air on BBC on Thursday, claims that man-made global warming is a scam. http://www.lse.co.uk/ShowStory.asp?story=CZ434669U &news_headline=global_warming_is_lies_claims_docum entary

Submission + - Protecting your eyesight in tech

Submitted by

trainsnpep

on Friday March 02, 2007 @11:33AM

trainsnpep writes: "I'm a sophomore undergrad CS major. I'm also lucky enough to have better-than-average eyesight. Now how do I keep the two? I've heard from various anecdotal sources that staring at a monitor too long is bad for your eyes, but I don't recall ever seeing an actual scientific study on it. How long is it safe to work before I should take an eye break, and how long should the break be? Do you know of any way to ease the supposed strain on my sight? Is it even an issue?"

Submission + - Bill Gates Talks about 640k (1989)

Submitted by Andareed on Thursday March 01, 2007 @05:14PM

Andareed writes: It seems that there might finally be proof of Bill Gates statement about how "640k ought to be enough for anybody". NewsForge has an article about a talk given by Bill Gates in 1989. Bill Gates apparently let slip that in 1981 he figured 640k would be good enough for the next 10 years.

Submission + - TMobile bans OperaMini and GoogleMaps on cells

Submitted by

cshamis

on Monday February 26, 2007 @03:33PM

cshamis writes: "TMobile has recently changed their policies which now make it impossible for customers WITH appropriate data plans AND Java-Micro-App-capable phones from running third-party network applications. You can, of course, still use the incredibly clunky and crippled built-in WAP browsers, but GoogleMaps and OperaMini are left high and dry. Would anyone care to speculate if this move is likely to RETAIN or REPEL customers when the iPhone and Cingular's accompanying liberal network policies come out this summer? http://www.gearlog.com/2007/01/tmobile_disses_oper a_says_get.php"

Submission + - Get arrested for using free wifi at the library

Submitted by

edmicman

on Monday February 26, 2007 @12:52PM

edmicman writes: "Tech news outlets are reporting a story from Alaska where a man's laptop was confiscated after he was caught playing online games using the library's free WiFi connection:

Brian Tanner was sitting in his Acura Integra recently outside the Palmer Library playing online games when a Palmer police pulled up behind him. The officer asked him what he was doing. Tanner, 21, was using the library's wireless Internet connection. He was told that his activity constituted theft of services and was told to leave. The next day, Sunday, police spotted him there again.
"

Submission + - Sony PSP Firmware Battle vs Open Source Developers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26, 2007 @12:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: The BBC is running an article entitled Three hacker teams unlock the PSP. The article summarizes the efforts of Open Source developers (including quick descriptions of the renowned Dark_Alex and Fanjita) to unlock the DRM'd Sony handheld. Thanks to their efforts, the Sony PSP homebrew community has become an excellent example of how much value can be added to a hardware product if developers are given the freedom to exercise their creativity. Some examples of interesting homebrew projects include PSPRadio: an "Online Streaming Music Client" supporting shoutcast stations, PSPoste: an SMTP/POP3 email client supporting SSL/TLS, Lua Player: allows users to write applications in the Lua scripting language. Many other homebrew examples can be found at PSP Hacks.

Submission + - What Makes For Good Bank Security?

Submitted by on Monday February 26, 2007 @02:48AM

An anonymous reader writes: West Coast Bank recently enacted a new set of security measures to their login system augment their previous username & password only system. The new enhanced login security system(PDF) uses a scheme of cookies to identify known computers, and additional personality questions such as asking users about their favorite food in order to identify users coming from unknown computers. Upon first glance this seems to be an effectively trivial system that can be defeated by stealing cookies or personality answers, while still making the system harder to use for flaky customers such as myself that don't keep consistent answers to personality questions. However as I don't belong to any other banks I have no idea of how this compares to how other banks handle their security. Compared to other banks, is this system any good or is my bank just giving me the flim-flam on security in lieu of a real security system?

Submission + - Dumping .info TLD for good?

Submitted by

tulare

on Monday February 26, 2007 @12:15AM

tulare writes: "To the chagrin of postmasters and webmasters everywhere, the newish .info and .biz domains have become the realm of all that is seedy on the Internet, from popup-laden porn sites to every imaginable R)oleX and Herbal V14GrA advertising domain. From this writer's point of view, there is simply nothing on .info or .biz that is not at some level related to spam.

My question is this: at what point, and what sorts of efforts can be taken to simply drop the entire mess that has become .info and .biz? I'm sure ICANN would need to get involved, but perhaps a petition drive to convince DNS server admins to blackhole those TLDs would be a starting point to show public support for denying spammers the cheap safe haven they now have. Thoughts?"

Submission + - File Deleting Software a Hoax

Submitted by

teamhasnoi

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @07:02PM

teamhasnoi writes: "In a followup to yesterday's story the developer of Display Eater has responded to the poor publicity, admitting that the app does not delete files. Quote: "It was my hope that if people thought this happened, they would not try to pirate the program. I could stop wasting time writing copy protection routines to be broken over and over. It turned out to be a mistake." He has now made the application free by posting a registration code, and plans to open-source it."

Submission + - Does not having signed an NDA give any leverage?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @07:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: For the past few months, I've worked with a startup developing a new technology that could be of interest to many different sectors when market ready. Despite the fact that the company is well funded, I have yet to be paid, and the issue will likely soon come to a head. Through a combination of circumstance and oversight, I also happen to be the only employee at the company who has not signed a non-disclosure agreement, despite having full access to the technology at hand. Does this give me any discernible leverage in getting the money that is owed to me?

Submission + - SETI@Home tracks stolen laptop, reunites couple

Submitted by yuna49 on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @05:20PM

yuna49 writes: Thieves recently stole a laptop belonging to the estranged wife of a computer programmer in Minnesota. Luckily the husband had installed SETI@Home on the machine. He saw the computer appear on the SETI site three times in a week and gave the IP address to the authorities. This lead to the recovery of the laptop and a reconciliation between the estranged couple.

Submission + - Lightroom vs. Aperture

Submitted by Nonu on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @02:43PM

Nonu writes: Adobe has officially released its Aperture killer, Lightroom, and the reviews are starting to pop up. Ars looks at Lightroom and concludes that it's a better choice for those without bleeding-edge hardware. 'Aperture's main drawback is still performance as it was designed for bleeding edge machines. On a quad Core 2 Duo Xeon, it is very usable but Lightroom just feels faster for everything regardless of hardware. Since Aperture relies on Core Image and a fast video card to do its adjustments (RAW decoding is done by the CPU), it's limited to what the single 3-D card can do. Lightroom does everything with the CPU and so it is likely to gain more speed as multicore systems get faster.'

Submission + - HP voids warrenty if linux is installed

Submitted by ShadowHywind on Monday February 19, 2007 @08:58PM

ShadowHywind writes: Having Hardware failures, I decided to call the HP tech support for help. They asked If i Had any other operating System installed, other then Windows. Because I duel boot, I said yes, I have linux and windows installed. He then quickly stated that If you install another operating system other then Windows, It will void your warranty. I quickly hung up the phone hoping that he wouldn't create a file sense i am working on month 4 of 3 years of my warranty. Is it right for a company to void a warranty just because you decide to install something other then windows?

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