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Open Source

Submission + - Death of a Community

Submitted by storycrafter
storycrafter writes: Well, it's official. The OpenSolaris communities official governing body has adopted a resolution and collectively resigned, returning control of the community official back to Oracle. A follow up to an earlier Slashdot story, this officially puts the toe-tag on the corpse. It's now up to the spork of Illumos to rise from the soon to be cremated body's ashes.
Open Source

Submission + - Nmap Developers release a picture of the Web (nmap.org)

Submitted by iago-vL
iago-vL writes: The Nmap Project recently posted an awesome visualization of the top million site icons (favicons) on the Web, sized by relative popularity of sites. Once again proving that they're the kings of scanning, this project used the Nmap Scripting Engine, which is capable of performing discovery, vulnerability detection, and anything else you can imagine with lightning speed. We saw last month how an Nmap developer downloaded 170 million Facebook names, and this month it's a million favicons. I wonder what they're going to do next?

Submission + - Retrieving a stolen laptop by IP address alone? 1

Submitted by CorporalKlinger
CorporalKlinger writes: My vehicle was recently burglarized while parked in a university parking lot in a midwestern state. My new Dell laptop was stolen from the car, along with several other items. I have no idea who might have done this, and the police say that without any idea of a suspect, the best they can do is enter the serial number from my laptop in a national stolen goods database in case it is ever pawned or recovered in another investigation. I had Thunderbird set up on the laptop, configured to check my Gmail through IMAP. Luckily, Gmail logs and displays the last 6 or 7 IP addresses that have logged into your account. I immediately stopped using that email account, cleared it out, and left the password unchanged — creating my own honeypot in case the criminal loaded Thunderbird on my laptop. Last week, Gmail reported 4 accesses from the same IP address in a state just to the east of mine via IMAP. I know that this must be the criminal who took my property, since I've disabled IMAP access to the account on all of my own computers. The municipal police say they can't intervene in the case since university police have jurisdiction over crimes that take place on their land. The university police department — about 10 officers and 2 detectives — don't even know what an IP address is. I even contacted the local FBI office and they said they're "not interested" in the case despite it now crossing state lines. Am I chasing my own tail here? How can I get someone to pay attention to the fact that all the police need to do is file some RIAA-style paperwork to find the name associated with this IP address and knock on the right door to nab a criminal and recover my property? How can I get my laptop back — and more importantly — stop this criminal in his tracks?

Submission + - ICANN approves XXX top-level domain (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: After years of wrangling on the proposal, ICANN today has officially decided that pornography will have its own top-level domain, .XXX. ICM Registry, the company that proposed the domain, welcomed the vote with a statement. "It's been a long time coming," deadpanned its chairman, adding that he is "excited" by the move. Uh, right.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - How xmms.org got sold to a cyber squatter. (wordpress.com)

Submitted by trundstrom
trundstrom writes: In my blog I detailed what happened to xmms.org the last couple of weeks. It's a pretty funny story that also means that you shouldn't trust any binaries that comes from this site in the future.
Linux

Submission + - Microsoft claims Android steps on its patents (cnet.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Is the Android platform in general going to risk anything or is Microsoft just suing HTC for their hardware technology and not the Android OS it self.
Security

Submission + - McAfee Retracts Bug Damage Estimate (zdnet.com.au) 1

Submitted by bennyboy64
bennyboy64 writes: McAfee has changed its official response on how many enterprise customers were affected by a bug that caused havoc on computers globally. It originally stated it affected 'less that half of 1 per cent' of enterprise customers. Today McAfee's blog states it was a 'small percentage' of enterprise customers. ZDNet is running a poll and opinion piece on whether McAfee should compensate customers. ZDNet notes a supermarket giant in Australia that had to close down its stores as they were affected by the bug, causing thousands of dollars to be lost.
Iphone

Submission + - Linux DRM-free Ubuntu One Music Store in beta (itwire.com)

Submitted by davidmwilliams
davidmwilliams writes: Canonical is privately beta-testing its own music store, set to go live with the release of Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, later next month. The music store will offer both DRM-free and watermark-free MP3s.

Submission + - Test Proves Theory of General Relativity Wrong? (softpedia.com)

Submitted by
ogre7299
ogre7299 writes: ""The first test that proves the General Theory of Relativity wrong. A spinning top increases its weight much more than expected. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts. ""

Submission + - Ubisoft's new DRM system cracked within a day (eurogamer.net)

Submitted by mobby_6kl
mobby_6kl writes: The previous article on this topic got even more attention from slashdot posters than the original confirmation of Ubisoft's new draconian DRM system, but one of the first games to implement this has been released recently, and, perhaps to the surprise of few, was cracked on the very same day, according to Eurogamer and many other sources. Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic was supposed to implement the system under which a constant connection to Ubi's servers was required in order to play the game, but contrary to the article linked in the previous submission, it appears to have been much more vulnerable than expected.

So far Ubisoft denies that the game has been really cracked, and while it is indeed too early to tell which part of the protection was circumvented, and whether it was a weakness in the specific implementation, it is hard to argue with the ability to play the game after the rather standard process of installing the game and then overwriting the executable with the one provided. It should also be noted that the patch which was rushed out to address some of the game's technical issues fared no better than the original release.
Windows

Submission + - New Crossover release with improved compatability (codeweavers.com)

Submitted by solanum
solanum writes: On March 2nd Crossover 9.0 was released. CrossOver 9 features a new user interface that focuses on making installation of Windows software quicker and easier than previous versions. Another new feature is CrossOver's ability to download installation "recipes" directly from CodeWeavers online Compatibility Database. "If another CrossOver user has figured out how to use CrossOver to install a Windows application, they can upload that installation recipe to our database," said Jeremy White, CodeWeavers chief executive officer. "As we go forward, and build this online storehouse, CrossOver will begin to automatically install that same application for other users. This enables us to move closer to a world where CrossOver will begin to run the majority of Windows apps, and not just an officially supported subset. "In other words, our diabolical plot for world domination is going exactly as planned," he added.

Early reviews and comments are positive and my own experience is that many more Windows applications work in this new version than previously.

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