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Comment Patents are desctructive (Score 2) 90

by RenHoek (#42425883) Attached to: Ban on Certain Samsung Products Appears Likely ITC Ruling

I'm glad the patent wars are being fought out in the telecom industry, instead say the computer hardware or software industry, in hopes that people will see the folly of this idiotic and in the end destructive set of laws concerning patents.

But I have no illusion that if this is not stopped, it will spill over into every other aspect of our lives, from patents in software (which is already ramping up) to foods, cars, books and more. The damage will be impressive.

Comment Misleading title (Score 5, Insightful) 268

by RenHoek (#42350921) Attached to: ElcomSoft Tool Cracks BitLocker, PGP, TrueCrypt In Real-Time

Unlike the title claims, it doesn't _crack_ in real time, it just allows you to mount the encrypted volume and lets you decrypt it with the keys you found. I.e. make it work just like truecrypt when you mount a partition.

If they were able to _crack_ in real time, then they'd have just solved P = NP.
EU

Facebook Says EU 'Right To Be Forgotten' Would Harm Privacy 277

Posted by timothy from the want-to-subscribe-to-your-newsletter dept.
judgecorp writes "The European Commission has proposed a "right to be forgotten" online, which would allow users to remove personal data they had shared. The idea has had a lot of criticism, and now Facebook claims it would actually harm privacy. Facebook says the proposal would require social media sites to perform extra tracking to remove data which has been copied to other sites — but privacy advocates say Facebook has misunderstood what the proposal is all about."

Comment Ads are bad for your eHealth (Score 5, Insightful) 686

by RenHoek (#42076899) Attached to: Ad Blocking – a Coming Legal Battleground?

I'd love.. well.. no. I'd tolerate more ads on sites if they were safe. Here in the Netherlands, we've recently had infections go via nu.nl and nrc.nl. Both very respectable news websites and perfectly safe. If it wasn't for the trojans served via the ads.

Nowadays all ads are the enemy. Flash, Java and Adobe reader seem perma-broken, coming with new 0-day attacks every time.

So adblockers aren't just a convenient way of stopping the more shady sites from popping a million blinking commercials in your face, they're part of regiment to keep your PC as healthy as possible.

(Certainly with the current trend of commercialized trojan kits, which means every noob can whip up something that nestles itself in your MBR, stays invisible and undetectable to everything you can through at, can steal your passwords and inject any banking site with redirecting iframes. No sir, the internet is a wild an dangerous place.)

Comment Video drivers (Score 1) 951

by RenHoek (#42037917) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Video Games Keep You From Using Linux?

Video driver support from the manufacturers should come first.

I'm running Ubuntu with Gnome, since I hate Unity. I've been trying to install the ATI drivers for my Radeon card, but it's a horrible mess. I can't get it to work and I'm a Unix sysadmin with kernel development experience so I'm not a newbie. I could probably spend a few weeks time working on it, getting to know the exact in and outs of video driver configuration under X, but honestly I don't want to. I've got other things that I'd rather spend my time on.

When video driver support becomes as easy and as solid as under Windows 7, then a huge hurdle would fall for Linux as a gaming platform.
The Internet

Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Become a Rural ISP? 239

Posted by Soulskill from the hit-the-lotto-and-then-buy-somebody-out dept.
hawkeyeMI writes "I live in a small, rural town nestled in some low hills. Our town has access to only one DSL provider, and it's pretty terrible. However, a regional fiber project is just being completed, and some of the fiber is in fact running directly past my house. Currently, there are no last-mile providers in my area, and the regional project only considers itself a middle-mile provider, and will only provide service to last-mile providers. Assuming this will not be my day job, that the local populace is rather poor, and that because of the hills, line-of-sight service will be difficult, how could I set myself up as an ISP? I have considered WiFi mesh networking, and even running wires on the power/telephone polls, but the required licensing and other issues are foreign to me. What would you do?"
Image

Voting Machine Problem Reports Already Rolling In 386

Posted by Soulskill from the let-the-conspiracy-nuttery-commence dept.
Several readers have submitted news of the inevitable problems involved with trying to securely collect information from tens of millions of people on the same day. A video is making the rounds of a touchscreen voting machine registering a vote for Mitt Romney when Barack Obama was selected. A North Carolina newspaper is reporting that votes for Romney are being switched to Obama. Voters are being encouraged to check and double-check that their votes are recorded accurately. In Ohio, some recently-installed election software got a pass from a District Court Judge. In Galveston County, Texas, poll workers didn't start their computer systems early enough to be ready for the opening of the polls, which led to a court order requiring the stations to be open for an extra two hours at night. Yesterday we discussed how people in New Jersey who were displaced by the storm would be allowed to vote via email; not only are some of the emails bouncing, but voters are being directed to request ballots from a county clerk's personal Hotmail account. If only vote machines were as secure as slot machines. Of course, there's still the good, old fashioned analog problems; workers tampering with ballots, voters being told they can vote tomorrow, and people leaving after excessively long wait times.

Comment Re:Beyond pale (Score 4, Insightful) 560

Yup, take the revolution in Egypt for example..

1) The people in Egypt revolt so they can get a democratic election.. USA: Yay!
2) They choose the Muslim Brotherhood.. USA: Boo!

Granted, it's mainly Fox News that is complaining about this and somehow blaming Obama for this, but still...
Your Rights Online

Mother Found Guilty After Protesting TSA Pat-down of Daughter 652

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the guess-it's-not-political-speech dept.
Penurious Penguin writes "In 2011, en route to Baltimore, Tennessee mother Andrea Abbott was arrested after squabbling with the TSA over their pat-down and "naked" body-scan process. Initially Abbott had protested a pat-down of her 14 year-old daughter, though eventually backed off. When her own turn came, she refused both a pat-down and body-scan. This week, despite having no criminal record, Abbott was found guilty of disorderly conduct and sentenced to one year of probation. A surveillance video of the affair shows what appears an agitated Abbott surrounded by various TSA agents, but seemingly contradicts the premise by which she was convicted. In the case against Abbott it was claimed that her behavior impeded the flow security-lines and lawful activity. Beyond Abbott's confession of issuing some verbal abuse, the video does not appear to display a significant blockage of traffic nor anything noticeably criminal."
Microsoft

Ballmer Tells the BBC There's More MS Hardware On the Way 133

Posted by timothy from the threat-or-promise dept.
Microsoft has made hardware for quite a while, but not much of it as visible as the Surface; now, it looks like there's more where that came from. Dupple writes: "Steve Ballmer told the BBC: 'Is it fair to say we're going to do more hardware? Obviously we are... Where we see important opportunities to set a new standard, yeah we'll dive in.' The chief executive's comments came ahead of a Windows 8 launch event in New York, following which Microsoft's Surface tablet will go on sale. News other devices are likely to follow may worry some of the firm's partners. Mr Ballmer caused a stir when he revealed in June that his company was making its own family of tablet computers — one offering extended battery-life powered by an Arm-based chip, the other using Intel's technology to offer a deeper Windows experience."

Comment Hmm (Score 1) 357

From the excerpt, it sounds a little like wavelet compression. But that works well for lossy compression like video/audio. It's just really hard to get a formula that describes 'random-ish' data that would typically be going over WiFi.

To be honest, it smells like an infinite recursive compression story. I'd like to see proof of this before I get excited.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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