Comment Windows 7 advertising (Score 1) 289
I know MS has been advertising Windows 7 a lot, but to sponsor a near miss with a 7m asteroid - that takes some doing.
Comment Some reasons why Enigma failed (Score 2, Interesting) 122
For a good read, I can recommend "The Hut Six Story : Breaking the Enigma Codes by Gordon Welchman".
Some of the reasons why Enigma Failed:
1) Choosing "sillies" for encryption keys (eg QWE, QAZ (or whatever the equivalent is on the German AZERTY keyboard).
2) Re-using keys
3) Using Cribs (eg putting some of the preamble of the message into the encrypted part)
4) Sending the same message day after day (eg "Nothing to Report"). This would compromise the key for all stations using that key:
5) Using the same key for lots of destination stations
6) Fundamental design limitation (A Letter will never encrypt to itself).
7) Enigma operator laziness (eg using the same order of wheels as the previous day). (There are 5*4*3 = 60 combinations possible).
8) More laziness - using the default Ring setting on each ring.
9) "Indicator setting" repeated - in 1 in 8 cases this would lead to a repeated encrypted key - which would give the cryptanalyst an idea of which wheels could have been used. (Fundamentally this is a kind of key distribution problem - how to get the session key established).
10) Basing a military encryption system on a commercial product.
Sixty years on, we're still making some of the same mistakes!
Comment Monopolistic Behaviours again? (Score 1) 364
I'm wondering - Microsoft is now embedding its vitualisation technology into the desktop (they've already done it for Windows Server of course).
Is this the next salvo in the Microsoft vs. EveryOneElse? I'm thinking what happened in the Browser wars. NCSA/Mosaic initially was a superior browser to IE. Now is the same thing going to start happening to VMware/VirtualBox/ParallelsDesktop? It's hard to compete with Free (VirtualBox is free of course for personal users).
I'm also wondering if this is a sort of admission that Windows7 won't offer a fully compatible API for legacy applications to carry on working?
Crispi
Comment What about domain squatting / misspellings etc? (Score 1) 401
Other than being a domain typo, www.ninmsn.com just redirects to a web index.
Are we going to include all domain squatting / domain misspellings / misregistrations now as well?
What about google cache of a banned URL?
It seems clear that the URL filter won't be capable of doing RegEx expansion.
Comment Will it be really gone? (Score 1) 827
Assuming that IE will be removed, will it be little more than :
del "%Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
Comment Re:AES (Sun!) (Score 1) 138
How Ironic that the only reference to "Sun" in this discussion on the Top500 is about a star, and not the company, or it's storage, or it's filesystem, or it's supercomputer (1 out of 500).
Crispi
Comment More other news... (Score 1) 384
The Abacus and Difference Engine have been freed from copyright.
Windows 3.x will be scheduled to be freed from copyright in 2038...ish
I can't wait.
Rock Band Licenses The Beatles 266
eldavojohn writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that MTV's Rock Band has gained the licenses to an undetermined number of songs. Details are scant, but it would be nice to see a whole game based on just the evolution of The Beatles' music. According to Reuters, this has been in the works for months. Hopefully I can finally hide my strained vocals to so many beautiful songs within the privacy of my home instead of drunk off my ass at a bar."
Resisting the PGP Whole Disk Encryption Craze 480
alaederach writes "I run a lab in a non-profit academic life sciences research institute. Our IT recently decided it would be a good idea to use PGP whole disk encryption on all of our computers, laptops and servers and picked PGP's suite of software. The main reason is that a small subset of our researchers work with patient information which we obviously are mandated to keep confidential. My lab does a lot of high-performance computational work (on genes from Tetrahymena, no humans here) and I am concerned that the overhead of complying with our ITs new security policy will be quite detrimental to my research program. For example, dynamically reallocating a partition on a PGP encrypted disk is apparently not possible. Furthermore, there is some evidence that certain forms of compression are also incompatible with PGP whole disk encryption. Interestingly, it is hard to find any negative articles on PGP, probably because most of them are written by IT pros who are only focused on the security, and not usability. I therefore ask the Slashdot community, what are the disadvantages of PGP in terms of performance, Linux, and high-performance computational research?"
UK Opens National Video Game Archive 121
BBC News reports that the UK is acknowledging video games as a "key component of modern culture" by opening the National Videogame Archive inside the National Media Museum.
"'The National Videogame Archive is an important resource for preserving elements of our national cultural heritage,' said Dr Newman. 'It's not just about cartridges and consoles, it's also about video game culture, the ways in which people actually play them. Unlike film and music, it's very difficult to walk into a retail store and walk out with a bunch of games from the 1970's,' said Dr Newman. He feels that games should be archived in the same way that music, books and film are preserved, as we often use them as markers in our culture and history."
There's a similar archive at the University of Texas at Austin. What games would you put on display?
Recommended GPS Receivers? 54
vergere asks: "Christmas has come and gone and I've got the go-ahead from the SO to make one of those big once-a-year electronic purchases. I've decided to get a handheld GPS receiver, so I'd like to draw on the collective knowledge of Slashdot and ask for recommendations. I'd like a good set of features (nothing too basic) and mapping capability - the more bells and whistles I can get for my budget of $350 the better. I'm currently looking at the Garmin GPSMAP 76S - any user experiences with this particular model would be welcomed."
