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Google

VLC For Android May Arrive In Early 2011 90

dkd903 writes "The development of an Android client for VLC has been going on for months now, but it has been slowed down by the fact that Android's multimedia output libraries are in Java. VLC itself is based on C and so translating them to Java is difficult and takes time. With the newer Android NDK, however, using native codes for Android apps has been becoming easier. So, the VLC developers have developed two basic modules for audio and video output based on the new NDK and most of the VLC libraries have been ported to Android."
Australia

Aussie Spies Spooked By Cyberwar 72

An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks cables released overnight revealed that Australia's top cyber spy agency (akin to the NSA) was unprepared for cyberwar in the view of other intelligence agencies in 2008. Australian agencies were so concerned they asked US intelligence to provide the framework to defend the country's critical information infrastructure, modelling on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. Spooks also discussed how Israel was preparing to take down Iran's nuclear program and how to stay relevant when so much information that was classified was now open source and available to anyone."

Comment Re:Will it be as hard to update as Android? (Score 1) 140

Yes, but for those examples there are other barriers to entry.

To own your own home, you have to make a large financial investment.

And hire a qualified electrician to install cabling inside the house, to reinforce your point.

People try to draw a line between electric cabling and using a computer, based on the false assumption that if you screw up electric cabling you die, whereas if you screw up your own computer, it only affects you.

That's a bogus assumption because the reality is that we have this thing called the "Internet". You know, a community of networks, where computers actually talk to each other. And, you know, cause havoc on each other's networks.

If you crash the car in your own paddock, that's okay -- it's your car, and your paddock. But if you drive irresponsibly on the road, especially a highway, which is a commons of road drivers, you suddenly have the ability to cause a lot more harm.

It's the same with the Internet. If you own a PC, and you connect it to the Internet, you have a responsibility as a citizen of the Internet (and the world, pretty much) to be conscientious to others. An infected PC is not a laughing matter — you’re actively harming someone or something whether you’re aware of it or not. If you're not prepared to take due care, you should be treated like the cops would treat you if you were an unlicensed drive — you shouldn't be allowed on the Internet.

It's a social problem, not a technical one.

Transportation

Rear-View Cameras On Cars Could Become Mandatory In the US 754

According to the Los Angeles Times, "The federal government wants automakers to install back-up cameras in all new vehicles starting in late 2014. The plan, announced Friday, received a strong endorsement from insurance industry and other analysts and is likely to get some level of support from car manufacturers. ... The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that, on average, 292 fatalities and 18,000 injuries occur each year as a result of back-over crashes. The agency said children and the elderly were the most common victims. About 44% of the fatalities in such accidents are children and 33% are people over 70, it said. NHTSA said its proposal was designed to keep drivers from running over pedestrians who might be crossing behind their vehicles. It could also prevent parking-lot bumper thumpers. The camera systems show motorists what's behind them via a video display on the dashboard. They typically feature a bell or alarm that alerts the driver if an object is within the camera's field of view."
Emulation (Games)

3dfx Voodoo Graphic Card Emulation Coming To DOSBox 156

KingofGnG writes with this excerpt from King Arthur's Den: "One of the forthcoming versions of the best PC-with-DOS emulator out there should include a very important architectural novelty, ie the software implementation of the historical Voodoo Graphics chipset created by 3dfx Interactive in the Nineties. "Kekko", the programmer working on the project with the aid of the DOSBox crew and the coding-capable VOGONS users, says that his aim is the complete and faithful emulation of SST-1, the first Voodoo chipset marketed in 1996 inside the first 3D graphics accelerated cards on the PC."
Education

Simple Virus For Teaching? 366

ed1023 writes "Currently I am teaching a 101 class on computers. It is more of a 'demystifying the black box' type of class. The current topic is computer viruses; I am looking for a virus with which I can infect the lab computers (only connected to local network, no outside network connection) that would be easy for the students to remove by hand. Can the Slashdot community point me in any directions? Is there an executable out there that would work, or do I try to write one myself, or is there one that is written that I can compile myself?"
Ubuntu

Ubuntu 10.10 Release Candidate Launched 172

tuXx writes "On Thursday, Canonical rolled out the official release candidate of its upcoming Ubuntu OS version 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat. The release announcement has a feature list, and a review of the RC is up at ITWorld. It's available for download at the Ubuntu wiki site. If all goes well, the stable release is planned for Oct. 10th."
Privacy

Does A Company Deserve the Same Privacy Rights As You? 379

An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an important case to determine whether or not AT&T deserves 'personal privacy' rights. The company claimed that the FCC should not be allowed to distribute (under a Freedom of Information Act request) data it had collected concerning possible fraud and overbilling related to the e-rate program. The FCC argued that the information should be made public and that companies had no individual right to 'personal privacy,' the way individuals do. As it stands right now, the appeals court found that companies like AT&T do deserve personal privacy rights, and now the Supreme Court will take up that question as well. Given the results of earlier 'corporation rights' cases, such as Citizens United, at some point you wonder if the Supreme Court will also give companies the right to vote directly."

Comment Re:All well and good, until... (Score 1) 431

Its 2010 and the fact you still have to explain to people how a digital connection works is getting old.

Yes, the data going through the USB may be digital, but as I have shown, the USB power, not data can cause interference.

For a vinyl ripper, the USB power has the ability to interfere with the audio while it's still analogue, before its conversion to digital prior to being sent over USB.

One would hope a vinyl ripper would use an external source of power and shield the USB well.

Comment Re:All well and good, until... (Score 1) 431

Uh, what? USB means that the ADC is outside the computer, which means that you get less possibility of EM noise from the electronics in the case interfering with the analogue signal.

In theory, maybe, but in practice I get noticeable EM noise from USB.

I have a USB-powered speaker (uses a normal 3.5 mm jack for audio) for my computer which also has an earphone port on the side, which is handy. It used to be part of a HP LCD monitor (L1740 if you must know), which had a USB port for plugging the speaker into for power. Why you would design the speakers to get their power off a monitor they were specially designed to be an accessory for with USB I do not know -- surely a normal DC plug would have done the job. But I digress.

Anyway, I no longer use that monitor, but kept the USB speakers. To power them, I now plug them directly into my desktop PC's USB port for the power. Now when I plug my earphones into the side of the speaker bar, there is a noticeable hum that is directly correlated with the CPU usage. Normally it's like "bzzt zzt zzt". But if I drag a window around or compile something, it goes like "BZZT THH ZZT THH ZZT TTH ZZT".quite loudly.

It does that with two separate motherboards with two separate PSUs. However, it does not do that if I plug the USB power into my Eee PC (laptop) instead.

So there you have it. USB does suffer from EM noise. If you have a solution, I'd like to know -- it drives me batty some days.

Security

Submission + - Are work web blockers a waste of time? (pcpro.co.uk)

Barence writes: Are attempts to filter or block personal web access at work counterproductive for both employers and employees? Palo Alto Networks’ Franklyn Jones insists that “the very idea of trying to apply web filtering to control end users is misguided and ineffective,” not least because internet-savvy employees can easily circumvent them to get access to the applications and sites they want. A Palo Alto Networks survey of companies with multiple security technologies to control users and applications found "oethat unwanted applications, threats, and bandwidth consumption were widespread”. Kevin Harrington, a director at Sodexo Motivation Solutions, also warns that that companies run greater risks by blocking personal web access. "oePeople will find a way around it,” Harrington said. “Companies blocked Facebook, Vodafone promoted a free phone application and staff still got their Facebook messages – but were now beneath the radar.”

Comment Reading comprehension fail (Score 1) 442

If you're going to spend money why don't you just buy a damn SBS and use AD?

The GP did use AD. Re-read this quote from the GP, my friend:

This meant it had to be AD.

If that doesn't convince you, read this quote, then read up up on the description for the likewise-open package.

The first thing I tried was likewise-open which I had a number of problems with.

If the GP wasn't using AD, then what the heck were they doing using a tool that provides "authentication services for Active Directory domains"?

Comment Re:Why it was made big (Score 1) 267

But the truth is, sometimes you *have* to break the back button. Sometimes, you have to update portions of a page in order to keep it "fresh". Sadly, doing so breaks the back button.

A bit like how Gmail, Twitter, or many other sites don't use the document fragment identifier to do such a thing. Or a bit like how there's no such thing as history.pushState() to implement that (and because it doesn't exist, it doesn't work in Google Chrome, but if it did, it would work perfectly).

Yep, sometimes you have to break the back button.

Comment Re:The one real data model: XML (Score 1) 208

The issue isn't that it's not possible, the issue is that HTML5 seems to tend towards HTML markup over XML markup.

I don't get why that is an issue. If you want to write clean markup, write clean markup. And today's browsers are perfectly capable of handling all manner of weird and wonderful markup.

The only situation I can think of where lax HTML5 markup would cause you a problem is if you're deploying to a custom mobile device or custom-written browser for a specific deployment. But in that case, you'd likely have control over both the input and output, in which case what I said above -- just write damn clean markup -- still applies.

If I saw problems with my browser struggling to render all the HTML5 content out there, I'd agree with you. But the reality is that browsers are mature, and can deal with the markup out there. And those that are writing markup are testing. It's a cycle that is working in practice, not just theory.

Comment Re:The one real data model: XML (Score 5, Informative) 208

There is nothing stopping you from using well-formed XML in your HTML5, or serving your document as application/xhtml+xml (explicitly stated in the HTML5 spec). Serving HTML5 as proper XML is dubbed "XHTML 5". It uses the same doctype. All the new tags -- video, audio, section, header, etc. are supported, but obviously the lax markup features of HTML5 (like being able to omit most tags) no longer apply.

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