Geodesy99 - Slashdot User

Submission + - EU: Telcos don't have to identify p2p users (elpais.com)

Submitted by ccguy on Thursday September 06, 2007 @09:05PM

ccguy writes: According to El Pais (article in Spanish), Promusicae, yet another Spanish IP rights association sued Telefónica -largest telco- because it refuses to identify users. The Spanish law is clear: Non profit sharing is not a crime. The judge however, asked the European Union whether there's any directive on this. Answer: If there's no crime personal information must be kept private.

Submission + - 8-Year Old Girl Bashes Bill O'Reilly (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

fedor291

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @08:19PM

fedor291 writes: "This little girl gives Bill O'Reilly the bashing of his life and its hilarious."

Submission + - Los Alamos Labs to possibly lay off 2,500 staff (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

DougDot

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @08:08PM

DougDot writes: "It was announced today that the current Congressional mark could result in 2,500 layoffs at Los Alamos National Laboratory."

Submission + - AniBOOM (aniboom.com)

Submitted by

Laura Lazear

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @07:53PM

Laura Lazear writes: "Hello, I thought you and your readers would be interested in checking out AniBOOM (www.aniboom.com), which launched officially in the U.S. Aug. 21. Aniboom is a premier animation network that partners with animators around the world for multiplatform distribution of original content. Driven by the passion of the art form, professional animators, animation students, Web 2.0 enthusiasts and animation fans come together at www.aniboom.com to create, watch and share a wide range of animated shorts and series. AniBOOM offers unique online animation tools called Animachines, which allow anyone to create their own high quality content. Aniboom recently launched a great new animation widget tool called MicroSmotion — which allows you to animate yourself or anything else into a video. You can then embed it on your favorite social networking site, including MySpace, Facebook, Frienster, Xanga, FreeWebs and more, use it to comment on someone else's blog or create your own original video greeting cards & send them to your friends & family! http://www.aniboom.com/MicroSmotion/ Also, you can embed any animation you create using AniBOOM's Shapeshifter tool into your social networking site of choice. Also, Aniboom's Creators Studio allows animators who have a great idea for an original animated web series to pitch, produce and monetize high-quality original animated series spanning a variety of genres for worldwide channels of distribution. http://www.aniboom.com/studio/create and http://www.aniboom.com/studio/watch. AniBOOM also provides each creator with simple revenue share models- all animators receive a fair share of advertising and licensing revenue. We hope that you will consider sharing this info with your readers, and become part of the AniBOOM community. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Laura Laura Lazear mPRm Public Relations 5670 Wilshire Blvd., Ste 2500 | Los Angeles, CA 90036 Tel: 323.933.3399 ext. 4259 | Fax: 323.939.7211 Email: llazear@mprm.com | www.mprm.com"

Submission + - Wikipedia blocks Overstock.com from editing 1

Submitted by thefickler on Thursday September 06, 2007 @04:21PM

thefickler writes: Known for having a media director that obsessively stalks critics, Overstock.com's IP address range has now been banned from editing on Wikipedia. Longtime Wikipedia staffer, David Gerard, posted this on the Administrators' Noticeboard Tuesday afternoon: "I've just blocked 65.116.112.0/21, which is an IP range (a) owned by Overstock.com (b) widely used by them for spamming, COI editing and attempted intimidation of administrators dealing with them. I strongly suggest against unblocking this range under any circumstances"

Submission + - Hackers using YouTube to spread latest Trojan

Submitted by thefickler on Thursday September 06, 2007 @04:16PM

thefickler writes: Social engineering attacks are showing a strong rise this Summer. The latest trick is manipulating YouTube users to infect their PCs with a Trojan known as the Fake Codec. For most media, a certain codec is required to encode and decode a digital stream such as audio or video. When a user tries to view a video that requires a specific codec, they'll usually get the message, "Codec not found" or "The proper codec to play this media is not installed." Some sites will usually direct you to another website to download the codec; however, an increasing trend in late August is for hackers to direct users to download a fake codec, which will in turn install malicious software on the user's machine.

Submission + - Indictment highlights file-sharing risks (komotv.com)

Submitted by

Bomarc

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @04:10PM

Bomarc writes: "From KOMO TV website, an article about how Gregory Thomas Kopiloff used Limewire, Soulseek and other "peer-to-peer" file-sharing programs to troll other computers for financial information, which he used to open credit cards for an online shopping spree, according to a four-count indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court on Thursday.

The news article isn't big on details, but it does outline the risks with "peer-to-peer" file-sharing programs. Carried by the By Associated Press"

Submission + - Sony caught editing Halo 3 wikipedia page (vnunet.com)

Submitted by on Thursday September 06, 2007 @04:09PM

An anonymous reader writes: Another high-profile wikipedia scandal has emerged after an edit on the Halo 3 page was revealed to come from one of Sony Entertainment's studios. The edit added no real content beyond claiming that it "would not be any better than Halo 2".

Submission + - Effective spam filtering packages?

Submitted by

AndrewSchaefer

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @03:45PM

AndrewSchaefer writes: "Every few years I rebuild my Linux server and one of the things that I've never been happy with is spam filtering. Three years ago I used a combination of Amavis and SpamAssassin but found that a lot of spam continued to trickle through. One of the key features I'd like to take advantage of would be some of the online blacklist and confirmed spam databases. While spam is a problem I don't want to have to dedicate a lot of time to tweaking rules or downloading new rulesets to defeat new techniques. The other thing I'd like to try to get right is the user interface for administering mail filtering. I host several friends' email inboxes as well and don't want to have to deal with sorting through false positives for them. My ideal setup would include a way for individual users to flag messages as spam, view the messages tagged as spam, and whitelist senders without having to SSH in and run a script."

Submission + - Verizon smokes out another family

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @03:26PM

netbuzz writes: "This time it's a Philadelphia family having to watch smoke billow from the front of their home after another Verizon FiOS tech drills into another electrical wire. The really bad PR news for Verizon? The homeowner happens to be a business reporter for Associated Press. But, hey, at least there was some good news, too, this time: The reporter had very nice things to say about FiOS ... aside from the installation.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/19126"

Submission + - Read-only browser?

Submitted by edmandu on Thursday September 06, 2007 @08:07AM

edmandu writes: My father suffered a brain injury a few years ago and suffers from short-term memory loss, like the guy from "Memento". He remembers the old WWW, where you could enter your SSN or postal address without worrying about identity theft or being scammed, so he frequently submits personal information, much to our chagrin. We constantly warn him about the dangers of doing this, but he will forget about it in 15 minutes or so. What he needs is a web browser that can prevent sending of all form data, essentially a read-only browser. Are there any browsers or plugins available that can do this?

Submission + - Yet another 'world's smallest Mainboard ' (biosmagazine.co.uk)

Submitted by LeadSongDog on Monday July 23, 2007 @05:44PM

LeadSongDog writes: A full PC 100x72mm. No power. No display. No keyboard. No memory. Wired 10/100. Where have these guys been all my life?

Submission + - Data Visualization Tools for Linux

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23, 2007 @05:43PM

An anonymous reader writes: In this article, I provide a survey of a number of popular Linux data visualization tools and include some insight into their other capabilities. Finally, I identify the strengths of each tool to help you decide which is best for your application. The open source tools that I explore in this article are gnuplot, GNU Octave, Scilab, MayaVi, Maxima, and OpenDX.

Submission + - Has audio gone about as fur as it can go?

Submitted by dpbsmith on Monday July 23, 2007 @05:40PM

dpbsmith writes: I was listening to a CD remastered from a 1972 recording of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and I was thinking to my self "1972? Really? That sounds pretty damn good." Then I was listening on my iPod to a 1957 recording of the Boston Symphony that I had recorded off the air in analog FM with my RadioShark, and I was thinking to myself "1957? Really? That sounds pretty damn good."

I'd summarize the history of audio over the last fifty years by saying that from the forties to the mid-fifties, what happened was magnetic tape recording, and "hi-fi," i.e. high fidelity becoming available to any well-heeled, knowledgeable audiophile. What happened in the sixties was two-channel stereophonic sound. What happened in the seventies was the elimination of tape hiss, through direct-to-disk, Dolby, and digital recording.

What happened in the eighties, nineties, and this decade was... nothing much, as far as actual sound quality. The big advance was that integrated circuits, digital audio, rare earth magnets for speakers, offshore manufacture changed changed the population that got to hear mid-fi sound. Today anyone who wanders into Best Buy and spends $500-$1000 dollars will just automatically get a quality of sound that only serious audiophiles in the 1970s got to hear. (The people who bought expensive prepackaged "hi-fis" and "stereos" during the 1960s and 70s got crap in a pretty cabinet).

I know I'm going to get flamed by the high-end fans, but I still say that except for the advances represented by stereophonic sound and the elimination of analog tape hiss, everything else has been subtleties appreciated only by cognoscenti. The acceptance of compressed digital audio and the apparent market failure of SACD and DVA would seem to support this.

So, is that all there is?

Can anyone imagine a future advance in audio, impossible now due to cost or technical factors, that would produce an improvement in sound so dramatic that it would make the ordinary lay listener say "wow?" What would it be? Wavefront reconstruction? Headphones that sense head movement and rotate the stereo sound image in the opposite direction (so as to keep it stable?)Cheap cochlear implants for people without hearing deficiencies that would extend hearing up to 30 kHz?

Feed Science Daily: Double Trouble: Hopelessness Key Component Of Mood Disorder (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed on Monday July 23, 2007 @05:33PM

There's depression, and then there's double depression. Double depression occurs when an individual who suffers from dysthymia, a persistent case of mild depression marked by low energy, falls into a major depressive state. It is not a new concept, but psychologists know little about the characteristics that distinguish double depression from dysthymia or major depression alone.

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