IAmTheDave writes, "This morning MSNBC's home page is topped by the opening story in a series, Privacy Under Attack, But Does Anybody Care? Privacy rights have been debated to death here on Slashdot, but this article attempts to understand people's ambivalence towards the decline of privacy. The article discusses how over 60 percent of Americans — while somewhat unable to quantify what exactly privacy is and what's being lost — feel a pessimism about privacy rights and their erosion. However, a meager 6-7% polled have actually taken any steps to help preserve their privacy. The article's call to action: '...everyone has secrets they don't want everyone else to know, and it's never too late to begin a discussion about how Americans' right to privacy can be protected.'"

Browser Buddy writes "A new Symantec study on browser vulnerabilities covering the first half of 2006 has some surprising conclusions. It turns out that Firefox leads the pack with 47 vulnerabilities, compared to 38 for Internet Explorer. From Ars Technica's coverage: 'In addition to leading the pack in sheer number of vulnerabilities, Firefox also showed the greatest increase in number, as the popular open-source browser had only logged 17 during the previous reporting period. IE saw an increase of just over 50 percent, from 25; Safari doubled its previous six; and Opera was the only one of the four browsers monitored that actually saw a decrease in vulnerabilities, from nine to seven.' Firefox still leads the pack when it comes to patching though, with only a one-day window of vulnerability."

eastbayted writes "Tom Yager at InfoWorld predicts: 'At the end of the decade, we'll find that Apple UNIX has overtaken commercial Linux as the second most popular general client and server computing platform behind Windows.' That's not a gloom-and-doom omen for the ever-popular Linux kernel, though, he stresses. While Apple and Microsoft will grapple for dominance of client and server spaces, Linux will be 'the de facto choice for embedded solutions.' And by 'embedded,' Yager means 'specialized.' With a push of a button and a flip of switch, he predicts, you'll be able to create a configured database and a mated J2EE server — all thanks to Linux."

mrogers writes "Following on the heels of last year's collision search attack against SHA-1, researchers at the Crypto 2006 conference have announced a new attack that allows the attacker to choose part of the colliding messages. "Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML documents with a long nonsense part after the closing </html> tag, which, despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage have the same hash value." A similar attack against MD5 was announced last year."

Rob Lanphier writes "I'm sure there are plenty of people like myself who do a fair amount of programming against MySQL databases, and consider it a feature of the product that it's pretty easy to do without having to fuss much with the actual database. Still, it's nice to look at what goes on under the hood, even if smoke isn't pouring out from beneath it. Pro MySQL by Michael Kruckenberg and Jay Pipes provides a broad well-organized exploration of intermediate and advanced MySQL topics that is a satisfying overview of the database management system." Read the rest of Rob's review.

Tony Mobily has written a thought-provoking editorial for Free Software Magazine that makes the bold prediction of Red Hat's eventual demise at the hands of Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. Calling on memories of Red Hat alienating their desktop user base to focus on their corporate customers and making money, Mobily states that many of those alienated desktop users are also system administrators who now feel more comfortable with Ubuntu and will make the choice to use Ubuntu Server over Red Hat now and in the future.

westcoaster004 writes to tell us that according to The New York Times the Hong Kong government will be using some 200,000 youths to scour the internet for piracy. Members of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and nine other youth organizations will be drawn from with the first 1,600 being "sworn in" this Wednesday. From the article: "Tam Yiu-keung, the Hong Kong Excise and Customs Department's senior superintendent of customs for intellectual property investigations, said the program should not raise any concerns about privacy or the role of children in law enforcement. The youths will be visiting Internet discussion sites that are open to all, so the government program is no different than asking young people to tell the police if they see a crime while walking down the street, he said."

Craig Mason writes "The BBC Reports that "Microsoft has been fined 280.5m euros ($357m; £194m) by the European Commission for failing to comply with an anti-competition ruling. The software giant was hit by the fine following a long-running dispute between the US firm and EU regulators. The move follows a landmark EU ruling in 2004, which ordered Microsoft to provide rivals with information about its Windows operating system. EU regulators also warned Microsoft it could face new fines of 3m euros a day.""

Alex Stern writes "In an attempt to clean up its tarnished name, Claria has hired Deutsche Bank to help them sell off the software tools that were previously supported by their adware. Claria says they are unwilling to sell the software for the GAIN ad network, or the data they have collected from their users. Claria is also holding on to their eWallet software that manages passwords. On July 1, Claria will shutdown the GAIN network and inform their users they can either uninstall their software or pay for it. Claria's new business model is 'a new platform designed to provide consumers with a personalized Internet experience.'"

koreth asks: "What are some good two-player games that a newbie can successfully play with a more seasoned gamer? I want to find a good console or PC game I can play with my girlfriend, who has only recently started gaming. Something cooperative would be great, but head-to-head is fine too. All the games we've tried are made for players of roughly the same skill level -- so either I end up dumbing my gameplay way down (no fun for me) or blowing her out of the water without much effort (no fun for her). Is there any game out there that gives two players tasks of varying difficulty to keep both of them engrossed, at the same time?"

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is reporting that chip giant Intel hopes to get back on track in their continued market share war with AMD when they unveil a new line of chips at their upcoming twice-annual developers forum. From the article: 'AMD, once content to mimic Intel's advances, has set the technological pace in recent years with innovations such as putting two processing cores in a single chip -- moves that have helped it gobble market share from its much-larger rival.'"

ninja_assault_kitten writes "ZDnet is running an article on how a Swedish Mac OS X enthusiast held a competition to prove how good security was on his new fully patched Mac Mini was. Unfortunately, 30 minutes after the competition began, a hacker known as 'gwerdna' had broken in and defaced the website, thus winning the contest. According to gwerdna, 'Mac OS X is easy pickings for bug finders. That said, it doesn't have the market share to really interest most serious bug finders.'." It's also worth noting a piece that says all the security news is much ado about nothing, in practical terms. The security contest also allowed people to have local access via SSH, so that had a lot to do with the crack.