PhilipJLewis - Slashdot User

Submission + - Apple Sued For Tracking iPhone/iPad Users (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @01:37PM

nonprofiteer writes: "It's always sad when two people give you the same present for Christmas, especially if it's not a present you want. That's the situation Apple is in this holiday season, served with two lawsuits in federal court last week, both seeking class action status, for helping advertisers create profiles of iPhone and iPad users.

Both lawsuits are essentially copy-and-paste jobs of a recent Wall Street Journal article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704368004576027751867039730.html?mod=googlenews_wsj) about how smartphones spy on their users. The WSJ report detailed how apps on iPhones and Android phones access personal information including location, gender, age, contacts, and a phoness unique identifier, and how that information is sometimes passed along to advertisers. (Re-gift alert: Since this occurs on the Android as well, Google may want to look out for a belated class action present.) The suits focus on Appless disclosing iPhone and iPad users' Unique Device ID (UDID) — a mobile device's social security number, which, when disclosed, can be used to profile a Machead."

Submission + - Apple Sued Over App Privacy

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @11:28AM

adeelarshad82 writes: Jonathan Lalo, a California-man, has filed his complaint in California district court last week accusing Apple of producing devices that allow ad networks to track a user's app activity. The complaint cites Backflip, Dictionary.Com, Pandora, and The Weather Channel as some of the offending apps.The suit says Apple's actions are a violation of federal computer fraud and privacy laws. Lalo requests class-action status for those who downloaded apps between December 1, 2008 and last week.

Submission + - UK Banks attempt to suppress Chip and Pin thesis (independent.co.uk) 2

Submitted by Martin Spamer on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @11:00AM

Martin Spamer writes: The UK Bank's Cards Association has tried to 'bully' the Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory into censoring a PhD student's thesis which exposes flaws in chip and pin technology.

Comment Re:New? (Score 2) 286

by PhilipJLewis on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @08:11AM (#34639846) Attached to: NX Compression Technology To Go Closed Source

xrdp on Linux works for me - not quite as fast as NX but certainly better then VNC variants I have tried.

Comment Dovecot + Maildir (Score 1) 385

by PhilipJLewis on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @04:04PM (#33501572) Attached to: Best Way To Archive Emails For Later Searching?

Yes, me too. Been using dovecot and Maildir files for years now. Before that I used a different open source IMAP servers (courier, cyrus, and UW imap) but since I used Maildir file format the transition was automatic (I used mbox format before that with UW imap server and conversion was really simple using the mb2maildir perl script). I have used IMAP servers etc for 18 years worth of email. I organise the 250,000 emails into different folders for each year as that makes searching much quicker. It's never let me down yet.

Comment Acer Revo (Score 1) 697

by PhilipJLewis on Monday October 26, 2009 @10:51AM (#29872519) Attached to: Low-Power Home Linux Server?

I've used an Acer Revo Intel Atom based nettop. It sucks about 20-30W... I use it as my main desktop which also runs samba, bind, dhcpd, ssh, dovecot and postfix. Works a treat with Fedora11. I had exactly the same motivations and now am saving around $150 per year. The system cost me around $270 including extra 2GB DRAM.

Submission + - Clean-room RTMPE spec created from rtmpdump (lkcl.net)

Submitted by

lkcl

on Saturday May 23, 2009 @04:02PM

lkcl writes: "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against Sourceforge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."

Submission + - Last.fm User Data Was Sent to RIAA by CBS (techcrunch.com) 1

Submitted by suraj.sun on Saturday May 23, 2009 @03:34PM

suraj.sun writes: A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA? ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-over-user-listening-data-to-the-riaa/ )" based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.

Now we've located another source for the story, someone who's very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick's story wasn't correct.

Last.fm didn't hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it.

Here's what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for "internal use only." It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm's denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.

We believe Last.fm and CBS violated their own privacy policy ( http://www.last.fm/legal/privacy ) in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.

TechCrunch : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/deny-this-lastfm/

World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found 108

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 01, 2008 @07:19PM from the it's-a-little-dry dept.

jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."

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