Submission + - Jailbreaking of iPhones approved by US government (telegraph.co.uk)
toporok writes: The US Library of Congress has ruled that it is legal to hack a mobile phone to use different apps, services and network providers
Submission + - When is it right to go public with security flaws? (pcpro.co.uk)
nk497 writes: When it comes to security flaws, who should be warned first: users or software vendors? The debate has flared up again, after Google researcher Tavis Ormandy published a flaw in Windows Support. As previously noted on Slashdot, Google has since promised to back researchers that give vendors at least 60-days to sort out a solution to reported flaws, while Microsoft has responded by renaming responsible disclosure as "coordinated vulnerability disclosure." Microsoft is set to announce something related to community-based defence at Black Hat, but it's not likely to be a bug bounty, as the firm has again said it won't pay for vulnerabilities. So what other methods for managing disclosures could the security industry develop, that balance vendors need for time to develop a solution and researchers' needs to work together and publish?
Submission + - US government to legalise jailbreaking (thinq.co.uk)
Stoobalou writes: Consumer rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation has successfully overturned part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which will allow users to jailbreak their smartphones.
Submission + - Yahoo! Japan ditching own search engine for Google (bloomberg.com)
KamuZ writes: It seems Yahoo! Japan is ditching their own search engine for Google Search. Also they plan to use the AdSense to serve advertisement. All this should happen before 2010 ends and the length of the agreement is not decided yet.
You can see the original statement in here.(PDF, only Japanese).
You can see the original statement in here.(PDF, only Japanese).
Submission + - EFF Wins, Apple Loses, Jailbreaking is Now Legal (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: "Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office convenes to consider exemptions to the DMCA's ban on circumvention of "technical protection measures." On Monday, the EFF, which had submitted three such exemptions for this go-round of the triennial process, announced that all three exemptions had been granted, meaning for one thing, that jailbreaking iPhones is now officially legal."
UK ISP TalkTalk Caught Monitoring Its Customers 139
An anonymous reader writes "The UK ISP TalkTalk has been caught using a form of Deep Packet Inspection technology to monitor and record the websites that its customers visit, without getting their explicit consent. The system, which is not yet fully in place, ultimately aims to help block malware websites by comparing the URL that a person visits against a list of good and bad sites. Bad sites will then be restricted. TalkTalk claims that its method is totally anonymous and that the only people with visibility of the URL database itself are Chinese firm Huawei, which will no doubt help everybody to feel a lot better (apply sarc mark here) about potentially having their privacy invaded."
Submission + - Intelligent email archive solution?
vierja writes: In the mid-size logistics company I work for, our operations team prints most emails to keep them inside physical folders. A folder contains bills of lading, invoices, packing lists and most emails exchanged for a specific job file or reference. I find this environmentally unfriendly and unproductive. I am trying to persuade management to implement an email archive utility that would work “per reference”. That is, users would send an email to 321909@mail.mydomain.com and that email would be archived and remain searchable for that reference 321909. The tool would accept emails to any address within the domain. Moreover, we would need to be able to send “commands” to the mail archive utility. For instance, an email to 321909@mail.mydomain.com with “MBL” in the subject and a document attached would file an attachment type “MBL” for reference 321909. Then users would be able to retrieve all emails about reference 321909. Additionally, the tool would be able to save attachment type “MBL” for such reference in a specific folder. I am looking for an open source solution that we might be able to modify. I am sure I am not the first one to come up with such idea. I have googled for a day, but haven’t found much. What would fellow Slashdot readers recommend?
Submission + - On demand streaming or On demand radio (mynet.com)
Muzik Dinle writes: "It was all set in 2009 August when Turkish On demand music service kavun (www.kavun.com) started. In a few months with the help of it's main portal MYNET kavun became the most succesful music start up in all Turkish Digital history. It was reported that the service itself created more streams in just 1 month, than the sum of all streaming services in Turkey in 6 months. The service was easy to use and was groving like a snowball.
Since there were big players like Turkcell and TTnet things started to change. Muyap which is the IFPI organisation in Turkey demanded "a little bit more money" for the next year. Lke 5 times more. Rumors said TTnet and Turkcell blackmailed MUYAP for kavun to stop their services because their own music services were going nowhere...
From what we heard kavun rejected to pay this money and will try to continue to it's business like a Last.fm style radio. People still have acces to free music but in a different way. They are calling this as "on demand radio" where users can choose what to listen... It's unclear whether the new direction can attract the same amount of ads to the kavun system but it will be just a matter of time.
Music Geek From Turkey
Osman Hamdi"
Since there were big players like Turkcell and TTnet things started to change. Muyap which is the IFPI organisation in Turkey demanded "a little bit more money" for the next year. Lke 5 times more. Rumors said TTnet and Turkcell blackmailed MUYAP for kavun to stop their services because their own music services were going nowhere...
From what we heard kavun rejected to pay this money and will try to continue to it's business like a Last.fm style radio. People still have acces to free music but in a different way. They are calling this as "on demand radio" where users can choose what to listen... It's unclear whether the new direction can attract the same amount of ads to the kavun system but it will be just a matter of time.
Music Geek From Turkey
Osman Hamdi"
How Cyber Spies Infiltrate Business Systems 83
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bob Violino reports on the quiet threat to today's business: cyber spies on network systems. According to observers, 75 percent of companies have been infected with undetected, targeted attacks — ones that typically exploit multiple weaknesses with the ultimate goal of compromising a specific account. Such attacks often begin by correlating publicly available information to access a single system. From there, the entire environment can be gradually traversed enabling attackers to place monitoring software in out-of-the-way systems, such as log servers, where IT often doesn't look for intrusions. 'They collect the data and send it out, such as via FTP, in small amounts over time, so they don't rise over the noise of normal traffic and call attention to themselves,' Violino writes. 'There's probably no way you can completely protect your organization against the increasingly sophisticated attacks by foreign and domestic spies. That's especially true if the attacks are coming from foreign governments, because nations have resources that most companies do not possess.'"
A New Take On the Fermi Paradox 388
TravisTR points out some new research that aims to update and supplement the Fermi paradox — the idea that if intelligent life was as common as we expect, we should have detected it by now. The academic paper (PDF) from scientists at the National Technical University of Ukraine is based on the idea that civilizations can't expand forever on their own. The authors make the assumption that an isolated civilization will eventually die out or go dark through some other means, which leads to some interesting models of intergalactic colonization.
"In certain circumstances, however, when civilizations are close enough together in time and space, they can come into contact and when this happens the cross-fertilization of ideas and cultures allows them both to flourish in a way that increases their combined lifespan. ... Bezsudnov and Snarskii say that for certain values of these parameters, the universe undergoes a phase change from one in which civilizations tend not to meet and spread into one in which the entire universe tends to become civilized as different groups meet and spread. Bezsudnov and Snarskii even derive an inequality that a universe must satisfy to become civilized. This, they say, is analogous to the famous Drake equation which attempts to quantify the number of other contactable civilizations in the universe right now."
Why SSDs Won't Replace Hard Drives 315
storagedude writes "Flash drive capacities have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current lithography technology. Meanwhile, disk drive densities will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid state drives replace hard drives — if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how small things can get with current technology. Flash densities are going to have data density growth problems, just as other storage technologies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the lithography problem for flash doesn't end there. Jeff Layton, Enterprise Technologist for HPC at Dell, notes that as lithography gets smaller, NAND has more and more troubles — the voltages don't decrease, so the probability of causing an accidental data corruption of a neighboring NAND goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the size and hope to not have data corruption," notes Layton.'"
Comment Re:Limited Options (Score 1) 425
It's called an "Convenience Fee".
Comment What about water? (Score 1) 450
All solar panels need to washed regularly to maintain efficiency because dust/sand build-up blocks sunlight. Now we have a dilemma, sun is abundant in desert but water by definition is not! So if you have these solar plans in desert area, they will have to fight for what little existing water there is with locals or devise ways to bring water where non exists.
I recall seeing stories in the news about locals fighting solar plants for water rights because the planners of the plans apparently forgot that water is scarce in those sunny deserts where they built the plants.
Comment Seems that many are ignorant about what Islam is (Score 1) 1318
From reading all these comments, it's pretty obvious that a lot of you still have no clue what Islam is and the how truly fanatical it's followers are. I grew up in a muslim country and have had many muslim friends that explained to me that what it is and it is based on complete faith where questioning it is not allowed and if you're not a muslim, you must convert or die ( sooner or later) and muslims will pretend to be your friend until that time comes.
But don't take my words, here's a good read on history of Islam.
http://go.to/islamhistory
After reading it, you will probably see building of giant mosque in front of Wold Trade Center and several others within a few block radius in a whole new light...
Comment Re:It won't work (Score 1) 1046
Damn, beat me to it!
