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Comment Re:OOh (Score 3, Interesting) 803

by brain159 (#28713639) Attached to: Windows 7 Clean Install Only In Europe

It won't work the same way. For win7 Upgrade versions (from what I've gathered) you'll have to install and activate your Old OS and then put 7 on over the top.

MS are basically doing us in Europe a huge favour - the preorder pricing for Win7 Home Premium E is VERY heavily discounted. Like, it's about £50.

We couldn't Upgrade if we wanted to (meh), don't have IE installed as default (yay!), and get the Full Version for the price they would've been charging for the inferior Upgrade Edition.

Comment Re:Voltage and current (Score 1) 363

by brain159 (#26896533) Attached to: Handset Vendors Plug Micro-USB Charge Ports

The Three 3g/hsdpa dongle (which is really a Huawei modem) does the same trick - plug it in, Windows sees a USB CDROM drive and (unless you've disabled it) will autorun the driver installer.

The same technique is used more generally by "U3" flashdisks (from Sandisk, primarily). There's a way to remove that behaviour from the device - and quite probably a way to make it launch your arbitary attack-code instead of the U3 Launcher.
Media

MediaDefender's BitTorrent-Based DOS Takes Down Revision3 426

Posted by timothy from the well-that's-certainly-reasonable dept.
Sandman1971 writes "Over the long Memorial Day weekend, Revision3 was the target of a malicious Denial Of Service Attack which brought R3 to its knees. After investigating the matter, it was discovered that the source of the attacks came from MediaDefender, the famed company hired by the MPAA and RIAA to try and stop the spread of illegal file sharing. The kicker? Revision3 was taken down for running a bittorent tracker to distribute its own legal content."
Censorship

Wikileaks Gets Domain Back, Injunction Dissolved 70

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the it-all-sounds-like-dirty-pool-to-me dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The judge in the Wikileaks case has dissolved the injunction against Wikileaks, which means that it can get its .org domain back. He defended his prior ruling because it was based on the pittance of information the bank and registrar had provided him, saying 'This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit... Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order.'"
Businesses

Telecommuting Can Be Bad For Those Who Don't 249

Posted by kdawson from the left-behind dept.
SirLurksAlot writes "An article up on Ars Technica reports on a study of telecommuting from the point of view of those who show up at the office every day. The study discovered that telecommuting can have adverse effects on the office-bound. Researcher Timothy Golden 'found that in-office employees took less satisfaction in their jobs and felt less of a relationship and obligation to their company as the number of telecommuting coworkers grew. In-office employees in his study became disappointed at having fewer and weaker relationships. They also got frustrated at a perceived increase in workload and difficulties that telecommuting can present to finishing projects and building strong working relationships.'" The article notes that telecommuting is "not an exact science." Some good insights in the discussion forum too.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Creationists Silence Critics with DMCA (richarddawkins.net) 1

Submitted by Gothmog of A
Gothmog of A writes: As richarddawkins.net reports. An organization called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries has been submitting DMCA copyright requests to YouTube resulting in the Rational Response Squad being banned after they protested against videos being taken down and accounts being closed by YouTube. Rational Response Squad are attacking creationism (AKA intelligent design) and promoting the atheist viewpoint.

The copyright requests are claimed to be without merit by the Rational Response Squad since the material in question is covered by fair use or has been declared to be in the public domain.

Behind Creation Science Evangelism Ministries is the infamous Kent Hovind (AKA Dr. Dino) who is currently serving jail time for tax evasion.
Privacy

Submission + - 700mb of Media Defender e-mails leaked (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
Lonin
Lonin writes: "It appears Media Defender, the company behind the supposed honeypot trap video sharing website MiiVi.com, and friend to the MPAA, is going to have a very bad week. Some 700mb of e-mails, some as recent as September '07, were leaked onto the net and are being uploaded to various torrent sites as we speak. The e-mails have only been skimmed so far, but it appears to show the inner workings of a company dedicated to lying and entrapping people in the name of copyright. This should be interesting."
Censorship

SQL-Ledger Relicensed, Community Gagged 194

Posted by kdawson from the i-can't-heear-you dept.
Ashley Gittins writes "Users of the popular accounting package SQL-Ledger were being kept in the dark about a recent license change. Two weeks ago a new version of the software was released but along with it came the silent change of license from GPLv2 to the 'SQL-Ledger Open Source License' — presumably in an effort to prevent future forks like LedgerSMB. As it turns out, the author was making deliberate attempts to prevent the community from finding out about the license change. No posts to the SQL-Ledger mailing lists asking about the license change were getting past moderation and direct questions to the author were going unanswered. Just recently the license was switched back to GPLv2. This behavior is not a first for this particular project, and is part of the reason for the original LedgerSMB fork. Does a project maintainer have an ethical obligation to notify his or her community of a license change? What about a legal obligation?"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - New Laws of Robotics proposed for US kill-bots

Submitted by jakosc
jakosc writes: The Register has a short commentry about a proposed new set of laws of robotics for war robots by John S Canning of the Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Unlike Azimov's three laws of robotics Canning proposes (pdf) that we should "Let machines target other machines and let men target men." although this sounds OK in principle, "a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.."
Privacy

Submission + - YouTube Takedowns: Any 15-year old can do it

Submitted by BillGatesLoveChild
BillGatesLoveChild writes: Recently Slashdotters wondered how easy it would be to take down YouTube videos. Wonder no longer:

A 15-year old Australian Boy with nothing more than a HotMail account emailed YouTube saying he was the "Australian Broadcasting Corporation" and under the DMCA ordered YouTube to take down hundreds of videos. They did without immediately and without question. YouTube did not try and call the ABC back, nor ask why the email came from Hotmail. Given Cringely's recent report which lead to Slashdotters asking the question, YouTube seem remarkably slow to learn. How many more DMCA attacks will there be before they get the message?

Many of the Video's were from the ABC's The Chaser, including one where a prankster rolling a cigar asked Senator Hillary Clinton if he could be her new intern. The Chaser Staff were impressed with the youngster, "I don't think we should prosecute him — we should probably hire him."
Programming

Submission + - Second Life Coding for Software Engineers

Submitted by
blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: "Second Life has hatched a whole new generation of novice programmers into the world, most struggling to learn techniques that seasoned software engineers have known for years. But for a professional programmer who wants to start working in Second Life, it's exactly the reverse situation. The Linden Scripting Language has so many limitations that you have to throw half of what you've learned out the window. How can you create bug-free, performant code in a development environment where you don't even have arrays. I recently took half a year of development experience in Second Life and turned it into this guide to software engineering in Second Life, on dev.aol.com."

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