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Comment Genuinely Positive Experience (Score 1) 2

by zeroRenegade (#34604504) Attached to: Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 released
I have been recommending MSE to family and friends for a year. It found a virus that crippled the university network on windows machines that was not found by Mcafee or Norton. It is so lightweight, and the updates are wonderfully transparent. It is a joy for the very short amount of time I spend using a windows machine.
Encryption

The Clock Is Ticking On Encryption 228

Posted by timothy from the promise-that-keeps-on-giving dept.
CWmike writes "In the indictment that led to the expulsion of ten Russian spies from the US in the summer of 2010, the FBI said that it gained access to their communications after surreptitiously entering one of the spies' homes, during which agents found a piece of paper with a 27-character password. The FBI had found it more productive to burglarize a house than to crack a 216-bit code, despite having the computational resources of the US government behind it, writes Lamont Wood. That's because modern cryptography, when used correctly, is rock solid. Cracking an encrypted message can require time frames that dwarf the age of the universe. That's the case today. 'The entire commercial world runs off the assumption that encryption is rock solid and is not breakable,' says Joe Moorcones, vice president of information security firm SafeNet. But within the foreseeable future, cracking those same codes could become trivial, thanks to quantum computing."
Botnet

Raising a Botnet In Captivity 60

Posted by timothy from the cute-until-they-escape dept.
holy_calamity writes "Technology Review reports that researchers installed 3000 copies of Windows XP on a high performance cluster at a Canadian university and set loose the Waledac botnet on them. It's the first time researchers have built and operated their own botnet as a strategy to better understand those at large on the internet. Doing it inside an experimental computing cluster removes the legal and ethical complications of experimenting with live botnets that control innocent users' machines."
Hardware Hacking

Calculator Networking With CALCnet and Doors CS 60

Posted by timothy from the site-for-sore-thumbs dept.
KermMartian writes "In an effort to make your trusty graphing calculator more like a computer, a shell called Doors CS has been developed, with an integrated networking stack, CALCnet2.2. The protocol is demonstrated in a nine-calculator pong-type demo, and the many file management, GUI, and other features of Doors CS can be seen at here. All the associated software is available for download."
Debian

Debian 6.0 To Feature a Completely Free Kernel 283

Posted by timothy from the nothing-dirty dept.
dkd903 writes "The Debian Project has announced that the upcoming release — Debian 6.0 'Squeeze' — will have a completely free Linux kernel. This means that the Linux kernel which ships with Debian 6.0 will not have any non-free firmware. The Debian Project has been working on removing the non-free parts since the last two releases. With Squeeze, they are finally realizing that goal."
Advertising

Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already? 608

Posted by CmdrTaco from the or-gimme-a-tote-bag dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Large images of Jimmy Wales have for weeks dominated each and every page on Wikipedia, making Wales arguably the single most visible individual on the planet. Now Molly McHugh writes that Wikipedia is once again pleading for user donations with banners across the top of its site with memos from purported authors and this week, Wales stepped up the shrillness of his rallying cry by adding the word 'Urgent' to his appeal. Wales attempted the same request for donations last year, and failed to meet the company's goal until Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar donated $2 million and Google stepped in with another $2 million gift to the foundation. This time around the foundation is approximately $7 million short of its 2010 fundraising goal, and Wikipedia analysts are saying the site would be better off with a marketing scheme as Alex Konanykhin of WikiExperts explains that the donations-only, no-commerce model restricts Wikipedia to relying exclusively on free volunteers, losing opportunities to involve qualified professionals who charge for their time in addition to the thirty staff members already on the Wikimedia payroll. 'Advertising is not cool. You're not as cool if you have advertising. But you know what else is not cool? Begging,' writes Jeff Otte. 'We do not care if there is advertising on Wikipedia, so long as it is not ridiculously invasive. So please, replace your sensitive mug with a Steak 'n' Shake ad or something, and start making advertisers pay for people to have stuff for free and not feel bad about it. It's the Internet's way.'"

Comment Linux opens too many possibilities (Score 1) 481

by zeroRenegade (#34568560) Attached to: Netflix Touts Open Source, Ignores Linux

I would love for Netflix to produce a Linux client (I was outraged to find there wasn't one), even though Netflix Canada still does not have anything to watch on it, so I'm paying $8 for about one movie every month.

Unfortunately, there are simply too many distributions to support. If we pay hard earned money for something, we demand that it works always, regardless of the distribution we may be using or what else we are running.

Saying that, It would be a joke to write a Linux client, especially since they already have some experienced developers as it would seem. I imagine there may be some lobbying that is keeping the service from coming to linux. Imagine the concept of dirt cheap netflix set top boxes using embedded linux. It may even be pretty easy to make with a wireless arduino module. I imagine it would completely destroy cable distribution as we know it (not that it isn't already dying), in America at least. The fact that most people still want to watch their tv on a tv, instead of having to hook up their wireless laptop to a wired tv to stream online media. If viewers could pay 10 dollars once for a set top box and 8 dollars a month for netlix, instead of 50 for cable, and a lot more for a crappy pvr. Imagine a set top box that is just a sheva plug using external flash storage, so you tv could go with you everywhere. I know I am a a dreamer. Linux opens too many possibilities.

Open Source

Netflix Touts Open Source, Ignores Linux 481

Posted by samzenpus from the practice-watch-you-preach dept.
Julie188 writes "If Netflix loves open source, where's the Linux client? Last week's post from Netflix on its use of open source has gotten a lot of coverage from the tech press. Too bad nobody's called the video giant out on its hypocrisy: They benefit greatly from open source, but really don't care to let their customers do the same."
Earth

Watch 200 Years of Global Growth In 4 Minutes 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the statistics-are-fun dept.
kkleiner writes "A professor of international health in Sweden, Hans Rosling has a long history of exploring the facts and figures that surround our changing world. In the a segment of the BBC series, Rosling gives one of his most famous lectures with a new twist. Using 120,000+ bits of data and augmented reality, the exuberant professor takes us through the last 200 years of global history and its uneven growth of wealth and health." This is really worth watching. Seriously.
Google

Stallman Worried About Chrome OS 393

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fear-the-cloud dept.
dkd903 noted that Stallman is speaking out about the risks of Chrome OS and giving up all your local data into the cloud, pushing people into "Careless Computing." Which is a much more urgent concern than something like calling it GNU/Chrome OS.
The Internet

Michael Moore Posts Julian Assange's Bail 987

Posted by CmdrTaco from the right-is-right dept.
digitaldc quotes Michael Moore in a story running on the Huffington Post where he says "Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail. Furthermore, I (Michael Moore) am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars."

Submission + - ChromeOS laptop-smashing ad equation solved

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's latest marketing video for Chrome OS is interesting to watch for the laptop-smashing amateurs or the slow motion fans, but the real fun may be at 2:24 in the video where a X=G/(CHROM-3) equation is displayed on a chalkboard. Only 20 hours later, it has already been cracked by Jamendo founder Sylvain Zimmer and his team. Check out the details on how they did it and won a Cr-48 netbook which probably won't be delivered because they are not in the U.S.
Robotics

Researchers Develop Self-Healing Plastic 71

Posted by kdawson from the you're-terminated dept.
schliz writes "Arizona State researchers have been working on a 'self-healing' polymer that uses a fibre optic 'nervous system' to detect and fix cracks. The system recovers up to 96 percent of an object's original strength in laboratory tests. It could find use in 'large-scale composite structures for which human intervention would be difficult,' such as wind turbines, satellites, aircraft, or the Mars Rover."

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