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Government

Submission + - Wikileaks Cablegate: Time to Blame the Victim? (threatpost.com)

Gunkerty Jeb writes: Political rhetoric aside, however, history will remember the leak and subsequent publication of confidential diplomatic correspondence as one of the great diplomatic and national security blunders of all time. It was an act of almost total malfeasance, the responsibility for which lies squarely in the lap of the U.S. government and the Pentagon, which has — for years — ignored warnings from the GAO and other watchdogs about the potential for just such a breach, while — events would suggest — displaying an almost comical cluelessness about basic network and data security principles that most corporations and non-profit organizations have long since learned. This from an organization charged with guarding the crown jewels of a super power's military and diplomatic secrets. In short, while it’s never nice to blame the victim in incidents like this, in the case of the Wikileaks controversy, blaming the victim — and holding it to account — is exactly what's needed.

Comment Why do we still talk to the MPAA? (Score 1) 300

The MPAA(and RIAA) exist for a single purpose. Being the media Mafia. If they were to one day wake up with a conscience, they'd also be without a job. MPAA is just the front that gets to take the betting, and we should really focus more attention on those who fund the MPAA/RIAA. Universal, Sony, EMI, Warner and friends. If _they_ decided that respecting their customers mattered, MPAA would be gone overnight.
Games

Submission + - Blizzard Claims Ownership of All Starcraft II Maps 5

ccherlin writes: The EULA of Starcraft II contains an extremely disturbing clause:

3. Map Editor. The Game includes a program that allows you to create custom levels, maps, scenarios
or other materials for use in connection with the Game (the “Map Editor”). The following terms are specific to the Map Editor:
a. Map Content. You understand that the content required to create or modify STARCRAFT® II
Modified Maps (as defined below) is included in the STARCRAFT® II game client, and that all
such content is owned by Blizzard and governed by this Agreement. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND
AGREE THAT ALL MAPS, LEVELS AND OTHER CONTENT CREATED OR MODIFIED USING THE MAP
EDITOR (COLLECTIVELY, “MODIFIED MAPS”) ARE AND SHALL REMAIN THE SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE
PROPERTY OF BLIZZARD. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, YOU HERE BY ASSIGN TO
BLIZZARD ALL OF YOUR RIGHTS, TITLE AND INTEREST IN AND TO ALL MODIFIED MAPS, AND
AGREE THAT YOU WILL EXECUTE FUTURE ASSIGNMENTS PROMPTLY UPON RECEIVING SUCH
A REQUEST FROM BLIZZARD.

Prior Blizzard games like Warcraft III had EULA provisions that prohibited selling maps created with their editor, but the copyright remained with the map maker. Now? Anyone who creates a new, popular mod like DotA with the Starcraft II editor will have no rights to their own creation.

Submission + - Quit Facebook Day is Today (quitfacebookday.com)

Kilrah_il writes: Well, some people just had enough of the privacy issues surrounding Facebook and now they have called May 31 the Leaving Facebook Day. "For a lot of people, quitting Facebook revolves around privacy. This is a legitimate concern, but we also think the privacy issue is just the symptom of a larger set of issues. The cumulative effects of what Facebook does now will not play out well in the future, and we care deeply about the future of the web as an open, safe and human place. We just can't see Facebook's current direction being aligned with any positive future for the web, so we're leaving."
The site for the project has links about the reasons for leaving Facebook and tips on how to quit the "addiction" and find a replacement. Currently, 26,469 people have confirmed that they are leaving Facebook, which doesn't look like it could put much of a dent in Facebook's user statistics.

Businesses

Brokers Get Strict Social Networking Rules 50

eldavojohn writes "If you're a broker or work for a brokerage firm then you better think twice before posting content to Facebook and Twitter. It seems the static parts of the pages like your profile must be approved and fall under the watch of FINRA. But a post to Facebook or a tweet might constitute a 'public appearance' representing your firm. Which means that 'firms must supervise these interactive electronic communications under NASD Rule 3010 in a manner reasonably designed to ensure that they do not violate the content requirements of FINRA's communications rules.' It's days like these I'm glad I don't work on Wall Street or have jury duty."
Games

Game Difficulty As a Virtue 204

The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders for the trend toward casual or "easy" games. But the success of a few recent titles, despite their difficulty, has caused some to wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far; whether a little frustration can be seen as a good thing. Quoting: "The evidence is subtle but compelling. For one example, look to major consumer website GameSpot's Game of the Year for 2009: Atlus' PS3 RPG Demon's Souls, which received widespread critical acclaim – none of which failed to include a mention of the game's steep challenge. GameSpot called it 'ruthlessly, unforgivingly difficult.' Demon's Souls was a sleeper hit, an anomaly in the era of accessibility. One would think the deck was stacked against a game that demanded such vicious persistence, such precise attention – and yet a surge of praise from critics and developers alike praised the game for reintroducing the experience of meaningful challenge, of a game that demanded something from its players rather than looked for ways to hand them things. It wasn't just Demon's Souls that recently flipped the proverbial bird to the 'gaming for everyone' trend. In many ways, the independent development scene can be viewed on the macro level as a harbinger of trends to come, and over the past year and into 2010, many indies have decided to be brutal to their players."
Earth

Submission + - Discovery of coldest driest calmest place on Earth (spacefellowship.com)

Matt_dk writes: "The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. No human is thought to have ever been there but it is expected to yield images of the heavens three times sharper than any ever taken from the ground. "The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers," says Dr Saunders. "Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly-sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on earth.""
Software

Submission + - Opera 10.0 released (opera.com) 2

neonsignal writes: Opera 10 has been released. It now supports rich text email, the 'turbo' Opera proxy server feature, some HTML 5 support, XML 'pretty printing', extra skinning features, and a 100/100 score in the Acid3 test. There has been no official announcement as yet.
Lord of the Rings

Submission + - Con Kolivas : back to work. (kolivas.org) 1

Anonymous Coward writes: "I was browsing around and happened upon this tasty tid-bit:
----- snip ----
"After years of using my old kernel and numerous hardware upgrades, I finally
had hardware that needed a newer kernel for drivers and to try out the newer
filesystems. Booting the mainline kernel was relatively reassuring in that
the scheduler behaviour was much better than what was in earlier kernels.
However, it didn't take long before I started being disappointed in that too"

---- snip -----
Con's back to work in some way it seems. He's got patches for a new scheduler on his site: BFS.
I haven't tried it myself. But I'm sure anything is better than the fudge of a kernel 2.6.30 is becoming.
Kernel developers need to test on older hardware: Test as in use Xorg, OpenOffice, KDE and Gnome.
It's sort of obvious they aren't. I've tested quite a few machines. Something happened back in 2.6.23 up.

All inclusive, all encompassing just doesn't cut it any more. We need different versions of the kernel.
Desktop, Server, Relic. whatever. Wake up people,."

Windows

Submission + - What happens when you get that Windows tax refund? 1

Letharion writes: "I recently encouraged my brother to ask his retailer for a Windows Tax refund. After getting past the usual "The computer and windows are sold together", Acer accepted that he should be refunded. However, they demand that in order to get a refund, he has to send his computer for "service", so that the computer can be wiped, and he will have to pay both for the shipping, and for the time it takes to wipe the drive. Since the license is never accepted in the first place, should he really have to pay for its removal? Since the serial needs to be revoked anyway, just asking for it seems like a much better way to go about it. What happened in the previous Amazon cases recently mentioned here, and do you know of other cases? This is in Sweden, and to my knowledge there are no other cases involving the refund that has come this far. Searched around trying to find a similar case but to no avail, some have tried and might have succeeded but not reported back."
The Internet

Submission + - Tech startups look to kill off IE6 (itpro.co.uk)

nk497 writes: "A group of tech startups are looking to kill off Internet Explorer 6. The aged browser is still used by over a quarter of web users, a fact No More IE6 is trying to change by urging developers to include a line of code in their sites that will advise those surfing with the old school software to upgrade to a "modern" browser."

Comment Re:Corporate culture (Score 3, Insightful) 883

I beg to differ. That myth has been perpetuated "forever", and it's always "10 years into the future". It was 10 years left 10 years ago, and it will be 10 years still in "10-20 years, your lifetime". If oil prices hadn't been at the low they are, I'd say that the myth is even deliberately upheld by oil companies to increase oil price. "We will run out of oil soon!" is at best, a grave simplification, and at it's worst, a direct lie. Google it, and at the very least you will get a more nuanced picture than "10-20" years. Or read, "The Next Millionaires", and you will get a completely different picture. (Of economics in general, compared to what I was taught in school atleast)

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