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Security

Submission + - New Bank Authentication Scheme Debuts, Gets Hacked

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Harvard and CommerceNet researchers report breaking Vidoop, a new two-factor graphical authentication scheme for banks. The scheme requires users to remember "image categories" to login and is supposedly invulnerable to phishing attacks, keyloggers and "all prevalent forms of hacking" (according to theri website and their TV commercial on YouTube). The researchers describe how they broke the scheme in a few hours with a man-in-the-middle attack, and they posted a video of the attack. This is related to the attack on Bank of America's SiteKey by the boarding pass hacker and to the Harvard study on SiteKey that shows how easily users get phished.
Programming

Submission + - 10 Procrastination Avoidance Tips for Techies

Submitted by kierny
kierny writes: Dice.com runs an article on 10 tips for avoiding procrastination. According to researchers, almost everyone procrastinates, and up to 20% of people do so chronically. Overcoming the tendency to procrastinate is especially difficult for techies, give that technology — while boosting productivity — also leads us to distraction, and distractions — Flickr, Skype, IM'ing, BlackBerries — stoke our desire to procrastinate. To help, a leading industrial psychologist recommends a number of techniques to avoid honing your art of delay, from deactivating email notification and killing short-cut buttons, to banishing the Dew and getting separate PCs for work and home.
Security

Submission + - Identity theft battle moves to the states

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "If you are looking to fight identity theft problems help is on the way. According to a story in the Washington Post today 33 states and the District of Columbia let consumers place a "security freeze" on their credit files and many more states are considering similar legislation. The explosion of identity thefts is top of mind among U.S. consumers according to data released recently by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). More than a quarter of a million ID theft complaints were lodged with the agency in 2006, accounting for 36% of the 674,000 complaints the FTC received. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1498 5"
Debian

Submission + - Debian dropping support for 2.4 kernels??

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I have been a carefree user of debian-unstable for more than a decade now, upgrading sporadically and enjoying its incredible robustness. In the last year, suddenly there are issues everywhere I turn. The excessive version dependency has made untangling apt-get messes nigh-impossible (try to install mysql 4, I dare you). But it seems to have reached a new low: this bug report indicates that debian-unstable no longer runs on 2.4 kernels because of a poor decision made by the glibc team. Why has debian turned into a fragile incompatibility nightmare so quickly? Or has this been a long time coming?
Quake

Submission + - Nations Quake Rank 10 Final

Submitted by
Linus Backman aka Ake Vader
Linus Backman aka Ake Vader writes: "Quakeworld is a mod (improved netcode etc) to the first Quake in the Quake series. It's still played competitively with about 60 clans signed up in every 4on4 tournament in Europe.

There are two highly competitive 4on4 competitions in Europe, and one of those is Nations Quake Rank. Tonight at 21:30 CEST it's time for the grand final in the 10th edition of this tournament and the teams in the final is the euro mix in Dota-Allstar-Guys and the finlanders in Clan Malfunction. It will be a game well worth seeing and for someone who hasn't checked out Quake in 10 years it's definitely worth a look. The game is still played on a very high level, rendering an excellent spectator experience.

The game will be streamed so people can tune in and watch the whole thing live on http://own3d.at:8000/listen.pls (requires winamp5 though). To watch the game inside of Quakeworld, just download Quake (it's based on shareware, so it's legal) and then check out the Qizmo Cam guide. This game will also be broadcasted on a finnish digital TV station next week, so if you live in finland you might be able to tune in.

For any questions regarding the game, people are referred to the #NQR channel on Quakenet IRC network."
Security

Submission + - Child safety

Submitted by moorhens
moorhens writes: We all know the internet is full of unsavoury beasts with evil intentions towards children. Or to put it another way, there are manipulative people in every walk of life who will use any means at their disposal to exploit children, and in recent years the newspapers have been full of stories about internet grooming and other horrors. The risks may seem hyped, but however small are real, hence there is plenty of advice for children, parents and teachers about keeping their charges safe online, eg Child Exploitation and Online Protection.

However, what advice is there for developers? When developing, say, moderated discussion or chat areas for children's use, are there things we need to be aware of? And in particular, when I have an audience of teenagers who are screaming for community pages and a Board who are frightened of opening ourselves up for exploitation, is there any "best practice advice" I can point them towards to show that we have done everything reasonable? So far, everything is geared towards protecting the child, but if we have a responsibility to create sites that can be run safely what standards should we adhere to?
Microsoft

Submission + - Has M$ sabotaged Windown XP?

Submitted by Michael Andersen
Michael Andersen writes: Is it just me? Or has Microsoft sabotaged XP lately, possibly to 'help' Vista sales along. I work in IT, and I get one machine after the other in to be fixed, and they all suffer from the most mysterious sickness. They boot up, then after a little while the disk access increases, and it continues to increase until the machine is deadlocked. In my many years in IT and in the history og Windows XP, I have never experienced so many problems at once. Windows XP has always been pretty stable and reliable, and now that Vista sales are lagging, XP performs worse than ever. I know that people will yell at me for acting paranoid, but hey, M$ has created this state in people themselves by using every trick known to mandkind to get further ahead, so no I wouldn't but anything past them anymore! I have had a few people tell me that they have updated to Vista because it gave them better performance on their exsistent hardware!! anyone who has ever used Vista know that, that's not possible !! P.S. If I dissapear, You know who did it!! Cheers, Michael
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA's New DX10 Mobile GPU - GeForce 8M Unveiled

Submitted by Ricochetbiscuit
Ricochetbiscuit writes: NVIDIA announced their next generation Notebook GPU today, dubbed the GeForce 8M. GeForce 8M GPUs differ from their desktop-bound 8800 series brethren in one significant way, per-clock shader performance has been tweaked and greatly improved. In the GeForce 8800, each stream processor can calculate four texture addresses and perform eight filtering operations per clock, while each stream processor in GeForce 8M series GPUs can calculate eight texture addresses and perform eight filtering operations per clock. This allows a greater number of unique texture locations to be sampled.
Software

Submission + - Any creative uses for an extra hard drive?

Submitted by
GM_Kombucha
GM_Kombucha writes: "I just moved my music collection off of two internal hard drives, a 20 gig and a 60 gig, onto my much larger external drive. And now I have two utterly empty internals just itching for some action, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get their motor spinning, if you know what I mean. My first thought was to dual-boot a Linux distro or two (with my current XP setup) but I've had some rather negative experiences on that end, what with my Wacom tablet and my ZyXEL card and my Radeon 9000. So I think I want to go a different route this time, but really, I don't know where to turn. Anyone have any creative, nerdy, semi-pointless uses for these babies? I can't run OS X... but I'm up for just about anything. Thanks!"
Media

Submission + - Journey to YouTube Leads to Launch of Web Series

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Founder's Journey to YouTube Leads to Launch of Reality Web Series. Launch follows founder Brandon Fletcher's cross-country journey to YouTube NEW YORK, NY — May 7, 2007 — FREEative Media today announced the launch of "Date: Unknown," a reality web series featuring the exciting, unpredictable first dates of singles who meet online via social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. "Date: Unknown" creator Brandon Fletcher recently embarked on a bold journey to YouTube in pursuit of getting the series featured on their website. His widely documented trip received the attention of several popular websites such as Wired.com, a national technology journal, and a large base of supporters and user-generated content enthusiasts. The premiere episode of "Date: Unknown," "Nick Meets Mary," features the first date of two young and candid singles with a heavy attraction and sense of fun as they meet in New York City to test their virtual connection following months of flirting online. Comedic and unscripted, the episode provides a sneak-peek into the series' upcoming shows — each time, two different people meeting for the first time, sometimes finding love, and sometimes finding that their online relationships just aren't the same in person. Behind the production, a story of determination and perseverance The "Date: Unknown" series was produced by 20-year old netrepreneur Brandon Fletcher, whose background is in music production and entertainment. He funded the project on his own, and then filmed, edited, and` scored and produced music for every episode, after which he embarked on a gutsy mission to get the project featured on YouTube. Following months of unfruitful efforts to obtain the feature, he launched www.CanYouTubeHearMe.com and flew across the country from New York City to the YouTube headquarters in Northern California to visit the company in person and request a meeting with the editorial staff. His journey garnered the attention of Wired.com, Zdnet, RocketBoom, and National Journal's Technology Daily, as he wrote on his blog "I will not stop trying until I reach my goal." ### Contact: Brandon Fletcher 646-707-4041 http://www.dateunknown.com/"
Music

Submission + - 128kbps or Lossless?

Submitted by Papa Meatball
Papa Meatball writes: CNet.co.uk is running a great article that describes perfectly what your bit rate says about you. It's worth reading the full descriptions but here's a summary of each bit rate and what it means. What category do you fall under?

128kbps
You probably don't know the bit rate at which your music is encoded — this is the default iTunes rate and it seems good to you. You're probably happy with the headphones that came with your MP3 player.

160/192kbps You're likely to have jumped on the bandwagon of the original illegal version of Napster, but have since realised that higher bit rates are noticeable, perhaps by utilising free MP3 encoding tools.

256kbps If you listen to 256kbps (which variable bit rate often averages at), you're a reserved or closet audiophile and you would rather spend more money on a hard-disk-based MP3 player than have either low-quality music or carry only a portion of your music with you.

320kbps You thrive on high-quality music and you actively listen out for the tell-tale signs of high bit rates. You are likely to have downloaded some music from BitTorrent but you mainly buy CDs and rip them yourself.

Lossless (FLAC or Apple Lossless) You are most likely to be born before 1978. You are the most likely group to be a Mac user and your headphones cost in excess of £60, possibly made by Shure, Sennheiser or Ultimate Ears.

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