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Developer Demands Pirate Bay Not Remove Torrent 203

Posted by samzenpus from the please-steal-this-software dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This week TPB got a very unusual e-mail. It was a 'Notice of Ridiculous Activity' from a company that had found one of its apps cracked and listed as a torrent on TPB. The app in question is called Memoires, developed by Coding Robots. Memoires is marketed as the easiest way to keep a journal on your Mac. It costs $29.99 to buy after you've enjoyed a 30-day free trial. That, of course, didn't stop someone from cracking the software and making it available for free as a torrent. Dmitry Chestnykh, founder of Coding Robots, noticed the cracked torrent and decided to download it to see what had been done. After using it, he was upset — not because the cracked version was available, but because the cracker (named Minamoto) had done such a bad job of cracking it. The best section of the e-mail has to be this: 'I demand that you don't remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn't cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.'"

Submission + - Android : encrypting text (clevlab.com)

Submitted by GPone
GPone writes: "Crypt Your Life allows encrypting all your SMS and your password. Moreover, encrypting your SMS conversation is user-friendly thanks to its symmetric encryption mechanism. In order to give you an optimal security, Crypt Your Life is using some of the best cryptographic algorithm: AES, RSA and MD5."
It is free and i hope this could help.
Microsoft

Submission + - Research: Weird Works When It Comes to Passwords (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers at Microsoft and Harvard University warn that popular passwords pose a bigger risk to online security than weak ones and suggest that many tools to enforce strong passwords actually steer users to choices that are easy to guess.

Forcing users to choose passwords that are rare and “unpopular,” rather than “strong," as it has traditionally been defined, provides a better defense against one type of attack, known as "statistical guessing," according to a paper by researchers Cormac Herley and Stuart Schechter of Microsoft Research and Michael Mitzenmacher, a professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. The researchers will present their paper, "Popularity is Everything: A new approach to protecting passwords from statistical-guessing attacks" at the USENIX HotSec '10 Workshop in Washington, D.C. on August 10.
Privacy

Submission + - Tech Specs Leaked For French Anti-Piracy Spying Ap (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the "three strikes" law now in effect in France, the organization tasked with implementing it, Hadopi, has been working on technology specs for making the process work — and those specs have now leaked. It appears to involve client-side monitoring and controlling software, that would try to watch what you were doing online, and even warn you before you used any P2P protocol (must make Skype phone calls fun). It's hard to believe people will accept this kind of thing being installed on their computers, so I can't wait to see how Hadopi moves forward with it. It also appears to violate EU rules on privacy.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Releases Final IE9 Platform Preview (msdn.com)

Submitted by CSHARP123
CSHARP123 writes: MS releases final IE9 preview and if the 8 week schedule is kept we can expect beta in September. With this release, IE 9 Preview gets 95 in Acid 3 tests and is surpassing Safari 5 in Webkit Sunspider microbenchmark. The latest preview version also integrates its Chakra Javascript engine natively inside the browser. Chrome and Opera are the only two browsers ahead of IE 9 preview in JavaScript Benchmarks. IE blog also recommends developers to send the same standards-based markup your site sends other browsers. Here is ZDNet version of the article.

Submission + - Non-human sugar drugs causes inflammations

Submitted by wog777
wog777 writes: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that a kind of sugar molecule common to chimpanzees, gorillas and other mammals but not found in humans provokes a strong immune response in some people, likely worsening conditions in which chronic inflammation is a major issue.This non-human sialic acid sugar is an ingredient in some biotechnology drugs, and may be limiting or undermining their therapeutic effectiveness in some patients, the scientists report in a letter published in the advance online July 25 edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology. However, they also propose a simple modification to the drug-making process that could solve the problem.

Submission + - Court rules bypassing dongles not a DMCA violation (courthousenews.com) 2

Submitted by tcrown007
tcrown007 writes: MGE UPS makes UPS systems and software that are protected by hardware dongles. After the dongles expired, GE bypassed the dongles and continued to use the software. MGE sued, won, and now lost on GE's appeal. Directly from the court's ruling, "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision...The owner’s technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing." Say what? I think I just saw a flying pig go by.

Submission + - Windows Administrator move to Linux 2

Submitted by x_IamSpartacus_x
x_IamSpartacus_x writes: I have been administering Windows machines for more than 10 years and am extremely comfortable in a Windows environment. I went to school as came out with a Windows Network Administration degree, my CCNA and a Cisco Network Admin degree and have worked in the corporate world administering mid-level scale Windows environments. Unfortunately, I took only 1 (basic) Linux administration class and promptly forgot it because it had no bearing on my degree plan(s). I know the slashdot community will hate me for this but I would really consider myself quite technical and yet I know virtually nothing about administering Linux. I am hoping that the slashdot community can (after forgiving me for my obvious lack of geeky Linux knowledge) help me get started on my quest to be as familiar with Linux as I am with Windows. I have no CS background so I am not a programmer but I hope that I can learn to write drivers for hardware (never needed in Windows) and get a deeper understanding of the Linux environment and it's strengths. Where should I start and what path should I follow to do this?
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox Just Perfected Tabbed Browsing. Tab Candy (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Nunavut
Nunavut writes: Be sure to watch the video below for a full overview — from the looks of it, it seems as if Tab Candy is sort of like Apple’s Expose feature mixed with their Spaces feature, both of which are baked into OS X. For those who don’t use a Mac, basically these features allow you to zoom out and get a bird’s-eye-view of all your windows (or tabs, in this case) that are open — and you can also arrange open windows (or again, tabs, in this case) in certain spaces so they’re clumped together. This allows you to more easily find what you’re looking for with so many tabs open.
Google

Submission + - Google's Googlebot indexing the IPv6 internet (fix6.net)

Submitted by Japje
Japje writes: As of 18th of June (perhaps sooner) the Googlebot has been indexing websites via IPv6. This means unique content on the IPv6 internet will finally be searched and indexed.

From the combined log of Fix6.net:

"2001:4860:4801:1109:0:6006:1300:b075 — [18/Jun/2010:08:46:05 +0200] GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1 200 69 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
BSD

Submission + - Freebsd 8.1 Released (freebsd.org)

Submitted by datentod
datentod writes: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

zfsloader ,zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14,NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities,UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support, SMP support in PowerPC G5,BIND 9.6.2-P2,sendmail updated to 8.14.4,
OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1,GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5
Intel

Submission + - Dell pay $100 million settlement to the SEC (economist.com)

Submitted by Sri.Theo
Sri.Theo writes: Dell's brilliant business model may not have been all it seems. HIdden slush funds and secret agreements between Dell and Intel helped the two giants to thrive, in exchange for locking out AMD Intel provided Dell with huge sums of money that at one point made up to 76% of Dell’s quarterly operating income. Accounting mistakes are being blamed.

Submission + - PayPal & The 9th Circle of Customer Service He (ocremix.org) 1

Submitted by djpretzel
djpretzel writes: Awhile ago PayPal classified our site, OverClocked ReMix, as a file-sharing service. I pointed out at the time that 1. all submissions were reviewed by staff and 2. technically, all websites are comprised of files at some level, which are being shared... but the shenanigans have continued. They've requested numerous policy documents — which can only be uploaded in JPG, BMP, or GIF via their website — and just recently requested a "guest account" so they can monitor content on our site. Since providing them with such an account would bypass their own acceptance of & agreement to OUR Terms of Service, I composed the following response. Are we being picked on for some reason, or is this now common? We have some ads but rely increasingly on donations to cover our hosting costs, and I have to think there are other sites out there in the same boat...

Submission + - Tongue Thai'd over Facebook? (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Thailand is taking aim at social networking....for hurting their language. The country's Culture Ministry says sites like Facebook and Twitter are causing deteriorating language skills. It says young people in Thailand aren't concerned about misspellings, abbreviations, and grammatical errors....because they're common in social media exchanges and text messaging. Culture Minister Nipit Intarasombut says "We must preserve our national language. If nobody sees its importance, then we're doomed".

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