tommy - Slashdot User

Comment The title misses the point (Score 5, Insightful) 404

by tommy on Thursday October 01, 2009 @05:35PM (#29611319) Attached to: Americans Don't Want Targeted Ads

The article isn't so much about targeted advertising as it is how the user's data is obtained. What the article actually says is we don't want to be tracked across multiple sites. It doesn't mention targeted advertising using data acquired on a single site.

Submission + - TiVo Awarded Patent For Password You Can't Hack

Submitted by

Davis Freeberg

on Friday May 11, 2007 @02:26AM

Davis Freeberg writes: "TiVo has always been know for thinking outside of the box, but this week they were awarded an unusual patent related to locking down content on their hard drives. According to the patent, they've invented a way to create password security that is so tough, it would take you longer than the life of a hard drive, in order to figure out. They could be using this technology to prevent the sharing of content or it could be related to their advertising or guide data, but if their decryption technology is really that good, it's an interesting solution for solving the problem of securing networks."

Submission + - Google Censors Thai King Video

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11, 2007 @02:03AM

An anonymous reader writes: In a bid to avoid any lawsuits and hostile feelings, Internet search giant Google has agreed to take down all anti-monarchy videos from its YouTube website.

In a letter addressed to Thailand's Information and Communications Technology Minister, Google's vice president Kent Walketer said that "the American company did not want to promote hostile feelings over the Internet video clips," reported the Bangkok Post.

This action is seen as a means to end the ban that Thailand had imposed on the popular video sharing website since digitally enhanced videos lampooning the Thai king emerged last month and to also drop the lawsuit the Thai government had filed against Google whose company slogan is "Don't do evil."

According to the Bangkok Post a Google official had confirmed that although it might take a while to find all the video clips uploaded on YouTube, they will be removed eventually.

However, as of yesterday evening, majority of the offensive videos were still available for viewing said the Bangkok Post.

Although the lawsuit from the government has been dropped, it is not known if the pending charge from the National Police Office will be dropped as well.

The much revered Thai king is the world's longest-reigning monarch and is protected by tough laws against any insult on the royal family.

http://www.sda-asia.com/sda/news/psecom,id,16004,s rn,4,nodeid,4,_language,Singapore.html

Submission + - Red Hat Releases Liberation Fonts Under GPL

Submitted by

Espectr0

on Thursday May 10, 2007 @08:05PM

Espectr0 writes: "On May 9, 2007, Red Hat announced the public release of a set of high-quality fonts under the trademark LIBERATION at the Red Hat Summit. There are three sets: Sans (a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans), Serif (a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera Serif) and Mono (a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono). The press release covers the details."

Submission + - 70 Expert Ideas for Better CSS Coding

Submitted by Patrick Griffin on Thursday May 10, 2007 @06:47PM

Patrick Griffin writes: CSS isn't always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren't sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. The article 70 Expert Ideas for Better CSS Coding includes over 70 expert tips, which can improve your efficiency of CSS coding. It also has most interesting and useful CSS ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions as well as basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them.

Submission + - A Step Backwards in Online Banking Security

Submitted by Gates82 on Monday May 07, 2007 @04:22PM

Gates82 writes: I have recently been frustrated by "added security" questions on banking and credit card websites. It seems that all of these institutions are heading towards a regular login and a second (3rd or 4th) security question to be used as a second authentication or as verification to reset your primary password. These questions seem a step backwards in security; now all that it is required to reset my password on these sites is to know my user ID and then answer a simple question (ie. place of birth, date of birth, pets names, etc) with most of the answers being quite publicly available. Personally, I normally bash on the keyboard and click continue not caring what the answer is; assuming that it will be more difficult to crack then guessing fluffy as a pet name. But to make matters more unbearable I attempted to login to a credit card website and was greeted with a second login and it was requesting an answer to one of these (hit-head-on-keyboard) questions. It took two calls to get logged in and I am now forced to use a password for each security question in place of the real answer.

This process seems like a way for companies to deal with joe blow who forgets his password every month when he goes to make a payment. But how insecure is this for the rest of us who are comfortable with our password making/remembering capabilities?

Submission + - Wikipedia admins go on rampage

Submitted by joeszilagyi on Monday May 07, 2007 @04:17PM

joeszilagyi writes: After their passwords got cracked: At least four different Wikipedia administrators have had their weak passwords taken in the past 24 hours. They deleted the home page repeatedly, and one person even put Tubgirl on the "Site notice", which is a global header for all of en.wikipedia.org. How did it happen? Weak logon security measures — there is no CAPTCHA; crappy passwords, and on top of that, while there is an encrypted SSL logon page, it's hard to find. The scariest thing is that people with passwords of "password" are entrusted as sysops and administrators on one of the Top 10 websites on Earth. They even blocked Jimbo Wales repeatedly from his own website!

Submission + - Massive IBM Layoffs!

Submitted by

number1scatterbrain

on Monday May 07, 2007 @03:37PM

number1scatterbrain writes: "150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM? Last year I wrote a series of columns on management problems at IBM Global Services, explaining how the executive ranks from CEO Sam Palmisano on down were losing touch with reality, bidding contracts too low to make a profit then mismanaging them in an attempt to make a profit anyway, often to the detriment of IBM customers. Those columns and the reaction they created within the ranks at IBM showed just how bad things had become. Well they just got worse. This is according to my many friends at Big Blue, who believe they are about to undergo the biggest restructuring of IBM since the Gerstner days, only this time for all the wrong reasons. The IBM project I am writing about is called LEAN... http://www.pbs.org/hplink/redir/http://www.pbs.org /cringely/?campaign=pbshomefeatures_5_icringely_20 07-05-07"

Submission + - Unix to Linux migration considerations

Submitted by

E. Stride

on Monday May 07, 2007 @03:34PM

E. Stride writes: "Unix-to-Linux migration expert Ken Milberg describes how virtualization, support, clustering and more fit into the migration of an IT infrastruction from Unix."

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