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Sci-Fi

New EVE Expansion Nears, Possible Mobile Plans 74

Posted by Soulskill from the isky-business dept.
As the EVE Online creators ramp things up for the free Apocrypha expansion due out next week, lead designer Noah Ward sat down with MTV's Multiplayer blog to discuss the future of the game and what characteristics continue to keep players interested. Ward says they've considered branching out to consoles, but ended up deciding that the game doesn't really lend itself to console play. He left the door open to using smartphones for "augmenting" gameplay. Ward also mentioned that upcoming space MMOs Jumpgate: Evolution and Star Trek Online are so different from EVE that they're not really worried about direct competition; EVE thrives in part because of the player-generated drama and scandals, which few games pull off as well. Massively has gathered a variety of details about the Apocrypha expansion, which includes the game's first epic mission arc, and they've also posted some screenshots. CCP Games launched a website for the expansion containing concept art and interviews with some of the developers.
Space

First Solar Eclipse Recorded From Moon 123

Posted by timothy from the that-we-know-of dept.
dazza101 writes "For the first time ever, we have witnessed a solar eclipse from the moon. On 10 February 2009 Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter captured the sight of the Earth eclipsing the sun. The spacecraft also recorded this video showing the Earth surrounded by a glowing ring and briefly forming the classic diamond ring that often occurs during a solar eclipse, as seen from down here on Earth."
Security

Submission + - Defendant must tell government his password (volokh.com) 1

Submitted by
sohp
sohp writes: "Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, reports are out that the case of a man who invoked the 5th amendment when asked to supply the password to decrypt his hard drive to allow police to search for child pornography has a new development. A judge has overturned the original magistrate's decision allowing the defense and has ordered Sebastien Boucher to supply the prosecutors with a decrypted hard disk. Note that the order is not that he produce the key — just that he provide an unencrypted copy."
The Internet

The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming 231

Posted by timothy from the maoism-taoism-i-ching-and-chess dept.
Glyn Moody writes "The February 2009 Netcraft survey is not the usual 'Apache continues to trounce Microsoft IIS' story: there's a new entrant — from China. 'This majority of this month's growth is down to the appearance of 20 million Chinese sites served by QZHTTP. This web server is used by QQ to serve millions of Qzone sites beneath the qq.com domain.' What exactly is this QZHTTP, and what does it all mean for the world of Web servers?"
Networking

How a Router's Missed Range Check Nearly Crashed the Internet 196

Posted by timothy from the pssst-don't-pass-it-on dept.
Barlaam writes "A bug by router vendor A (omitting a range check from a critical field in the configuration interface) tickled a bug from router vendor B (dropping BGP sessions when processing some ASPATH attributes with length very close to 256), causing a ripple effect that caused widespread global routing instability last week. The flaw lay dormant until one of vendor A's systems was deployed in an autonomous system whose ASN, modulo 256, was greater than 250. At that point, the Internet was one typo away from disaster. Other router vendors, who were not affected by the bug, happily propagated the trigger message to every vulnerable system on the planet in about 30 seconds. Few people appreciate how fragile and unsecured the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure really is — this is just the latest example." Vendor A, in this case, is a Latvian router vendor called MikroTik.
Privacy

Bill Would Require ISPs, Wi-Fi Users To Keep Logs 857

Posted by kdawson from the boon-for-disk-makers dept.
suraj.sun notes CNet reporting on bills filed in the US House and Senate that would require all ISPs and operators of Wi-Fi hotspots — including home users — to maintain access logs for 2 years to aid in law enforcement. The bills were filed by Republicans, but the article notes that the idea of forcing data retention has been popular on both sides of the aisle over the years. "Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that... would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates. ... Each [bill] contains the same language: 'A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user [i.e., DHCP].'"

Comment Re:Bad Article, Bad Summary (Score 3, Informative) 57

by niw (#26924801) Attached to: Security Researcher Kaminsky Pushes DNS Patching

AUTH=Make sure you get your data from the right sources.

Okay.

ENCR=make sure the data are correct.

Huh?

Encryption makes the information secure from snooping, which is pointless in the case of DNS as it is public information by definition.

Signing makes sure the data has not been tampered with. Which is more or less the same as authentication.

Sorry to disappoint you, but you can't "verify" DNS by "querying" if the original data are unprotected.

That is the general idea of how SSL and the CA's work, only with DNS we don't really care if other people know what you are looking for, we just care that we are getting the correct response from the correct server, which requires signing of the responses, which is authentication. That is, with DNS we only really need signing of the data for transfers and queries, not encryption.
Cellphones

Handset Vendors Plug Micro-USB Charge Ports 363

Posted by timothy from the kicking-and-screaming-to-the-briar-patch dept.
ketan324 points to a Register story touting an agreement among several phone makers to settle on Micro USB for their phones' charging ports, writing "It's about time for these cellphone manufacturers to wise up and design a universal phone charger. Although many manufacturers have already 'standardized' to a mini-USB interface, there are many more out there who use proprietary adapters. I wonder how Apple will feel about this? Will they finally realize that their oh-so-special adapter is nothing more than a fudged USB interface?" No legislation required.

Comment Re:How about this (Score 1) 479

by niw (#26869955) Attached to: Microsoft Sued Over Vista-To-XP Downgrade Fees

Sell computers with whatever you want installed, but require an activation key to be typed in in order to use it. Sell the activation key for an extra fee at checkout. If you don't activate, you're free to wipe your computer and use it as you wish.

But then Windows isn't free!! We all know that a computer is useless with out Windows, so why bother selling the computer without. Just have the OEM give Windows to the user for free anyway.

:)

On a serious note, I have seen customers that for some reason think that the 60-day trial of Norton (or McAfee) that is bundled with their computers is all they ever need for AV, even if the software complains at them for 2 years! that it's subscription is out of date and to upgrade the subscription (seriously, a computer that I was working on, on Saturday, had its last definitions update mid 2007, and the customer brought it in because it was "acting funny").

Comment Re:Blaming Microsoft for OEM's fault (Score 1) 479

by niw (#26853913) Attached to: Microsoft Sued Over Vista-To-XP Downgrade Fees

No. I worked for Microsoft tech support and I can tell you that we were not allowed to push customer issues back to the OEMs...

... On top of that, I regularly received calls from customers who were told by HP or Dell or whoever to call MS because it wasn't an issue on their end. The OEMs may or may not offer decent Windows support, but they're under no obligation to. All of the companies involved have strict support boundaries, and if something appears to be an issue with something one of the other parties is responsible for, the support call basically ends there.

If it is a bug in Windows sure, obviously the OEM can't fix it, but I was under the impression that the point of the OEM license was that Microsoft does not directly support it, and as such it is cheaper for that reason.

According to this OEM license on Microsoft's website http://www.microsoft.com/oem/sblicense/default.mspx microsoft does not provide end user support for the license. In particluar section 7 states:

7. End User Support. You must provide end user support for the Software or Hardware. You will provide support under terms at least as favorable to the end user as the terms that you provide to support any Customer System. At a minimum, you will provide commercially reasonable telephone support.

Comment Re:And for $20 more ... (Score 1) 479

by niw (#26853821) Attached to: Microsoft Sued Over Vista-To-XP Downgrade Fees

As a Staples retail employee I can tell you that that would not "cost extremely little to implement." There would definitely have to be a charge, to offset the time an employee would have to be away from the sales floor while wiping a computer hard drive.

Uh, are you wiping the hard drive by using a tiny magnet and flipping all the bits by hand? Typically, you just go out and find your favorite drive wiper, spend five minutes getting it started and then walk away for a few hours.

Well even five minutes would cost ~$10 to do it. And don't forget the computer has to be removed from its box and put back neatly, which adds more time to the operation.
Databases

Is the Relational Database Doomed? 344

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-more-tools-in-the-bucket dept.
DB Guy writes "There's an article over on Read Write Web about what the future of relational databases looks like when faced with new challenges to its dominance from key/value stores, such as SimpleDB, CouchDB, Project Voldemort and BigTable. The conclusion suggests that relational databases and key value stores aren't really mutually exclusive and instead are different tools for different requirements."
Privacy

Cambridge, Mass. Moves To Nix Security Cameras 366

Posted by timothy from the buncha-lefties dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Citing privacy concerns, the Cambridge, Mass. City Council has voted 9-0 to remove security cameras scattered throughout the city. 'Because of the slow erosion of our civil liberties since 9/11, it is important to raise questions regarding these cameras,' said Marjorie Decker, a Cambridge city councilor. Rather than citing privacy, WCBVTV is running the story under the headline 'City's Move To Nix Security Cams May Cost Thousands.'"

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