Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - There go our web standards..... (pwnage.ca) 2

Submitted by blozza2070
blozza2070 writes: Jeff Jaffe (AKA Zonker), Software Patent Supporter, Microsoft Apologist, Ex-IBM, Ex-Novell, FSF hating troll is now the CEO of the W3C. It is the organization responsible for web standards which have been promoted by Firefox, Opera, and Google. The w3c has been known for hiring bad staff but this just takes the cake. How long do you think it will take before MS-invented standards are pushed as defacto standards?
Robotics

Submission + - MeBot, the Telepresence Robot With Body Language (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Engineers at the Personal Robotics Group at MIT Media Lab have developed MeBot, the first telepresence robot with a head and arms that move. MeBot’s arms are moved using a controller that resembles the bot’s actual limbs. This means that instead of just saying "hi" in a remote telepresence conversation, now you can physically wave hello with your telepresence robot's hand. It’s a pretty cool setup, and it makes a difference. Psych experiments performed by the developers showed that humans responded better to a telerobot with a dynamically moving body.
Software

Submission + - US eases Internet export rules to Iran, Sudan,Cuba (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Looking to facilitate what it calls free speech rights in countries that don’t look favorably at such liberties, the US government today said it would ease the regulations around exporting Internet-based applications such as e-mail, blogging and social networking software to Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Specifically the Treasury Department said it would add general licenses authorizing the exportation of free personal Internet-based communications services – such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking – to Cuba, Iran and Sudan. The amendments also allow the exportation of related software to Iran and Sudan, the department said in a release (the US Commerce Department controls software exports with Cuba). Until now all such exports were would have broken federal laws.
Microsoft

Submission + - Where were the cops when Microsoft busted Waledac? (techworld.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Name the most important anti-crime organisation on the Internet. Not easy. An international police body? Some wing of the US government? Here's my guess, and I base this on some evidence. It's Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit a small department so low-key even some people in Redmond don’t know much about it.

Submission + - Search engines pushing malware through cached page (stopthehacker.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Search engines like Yahoo and Bing have malware embedded in their cached pages. This is an excellent attack vector for malicious hackers. What kind of McAffee safe services does Yahoo use if it cannot identify malware residing on its own infrastructure. As for Bing, they also have some blacklisting mechanism, then why are they pushing malware towards users.
Security

Submission + - NSA Still Ahead in Crypto - But Not by Much

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Network World reports that former National Security Agency technical director Brian Snow told the RSA Conference that cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for 20 years but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt. "I do believe NSA is still ahead, but not by much — a handful of years," says Snow. "I think we've got the edge still." Snow added that that in the 1980s there was a huge gap between what the NSA could do and what commercial encryption technology was capable of. "Now we are very close together and moving very slowly forward in a mature field." The NSA has one key advantage with their deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes. "We cheat. We get to read what [academics] publish. We do not publish what we research," says Snow. Snow's claim of NSA superiority seemed to rankle some members at the conference. Adi Shamir, the "S" in the RSA encryption algorithm and a computer science professor at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, says when the titles of papers in NSA technical journals were declassified up to 1983, there were none that included public key encryption. "That demonstrates that NSA was behind," says Shamir although Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."

Submission + - EVE Online Community donates $50k to Haiti (eveonline.com)

Submitted by zergl
zergl writes: The community of EVE Online, usually better known for its backstabbing and scams, donated 2813 PLEX (ingame equivalent of a game time code) in a donation drive by developer CCP. CCP will donate the full amount and incur "indirect costs such as credit card transaction fees, fraud screening and the use of vast array of staff resources".
Calculating with the baseline price of $34.99 per 60 days of gametime (resulting in two PLEX) this amounts to roughly $49k with a currently undisclosed amount of GTCs bought in EUR (most likely in the range of 1-2%) which will be donated for their slightly higher converted value.
Intel

Submission + - 8 Core Intel Nehalem-EX To Launch This Month (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "What could you do with 8 physical cores of CPU processing power? Intel's upcoming 8-core Nehalem-EX is launching later this month, according to Intel Xeon Platform Director Shannon Poulin. The announcement puts to rest rumors that the 8-core part might be delayed, and makes good on a promise Intel made last year when the chip maker said it would release the chip in the first half of 2010. To quickly recap, Nehalem-EX boasts an extensive feature-set, including up to 8 cores per processor, up to 16 threads per processor with Intel Hyper-threading, scalability up to eight sockets via Intel's serial Quick Path Interconnect and greater with third-party node controllers, and 24MB of shared cache."

Submission + - Poll - Where do you live? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by popoutman
popoutman writes: 1. By oneself.
2. At home with parents/guardians etc.
3. At home but in seperate unit.
4. Cohabiting with non-family.
5. Sharing with significant other.
6. No fixed abode.
7. CowboyNeal ate my house.
NASA

Submission + - Bureaucracy at NASA gone mad (nytimes.com)

Submitted by wisebabo
wisebabo writes: Okay, if there was ever a reason to shut down, dismantle and start NASA over it is this. The Supreme Court is deciding whether invasive (to me at least) personal background checks (sex lives, medical records) will be required of all JPL employees/independent contractors. No top secret work is done there and (I suppose) nothing military or even directly industry related. (In fact I thought the work of NASA was "For All Mankind".) Anyway, 28 scientists and engineers have so far refused to comply and if they lose this case will be fired.

While NASA claims that all Federal employees must go through this kind of check, I don't think these guys fit into the "all" category. It IS rocket science and I'm sure most of them have an IQ/educational background/creativity quotient that is extremely rare. I guess there could be a reason to do this if you were afraid that some personal information could be used to blackmail someone but as I mentioned before, what they are creating is destined to be public anyway.

So what if one guy has a fetish for SCUBA gear and chicken feathers? More seriously, look what happened to Alan Turing (father of the computer); if the Brits had had this policy in place and denied him any serious work in the war effort, computer technology would have set way back (and perhaps the decoding of Enigma and the winning of the war). As it is, they only managed to get him to commit suicide AFTER he had done some incredibly important work.

Look, if one of them is committing a crime/becoming a public menace, let the police deal with it. Otherwise keep the Republican religious police out of our bedrooms! (drug dens?).
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Lefty defames Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens (pwnage.ca)

Submitted by blozza2070
blozza2070 writes: Apparently David Lefty Schlesinger plans to Include Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens in a completely unrelated criminal complaint regarding an unconnected individual in his war against those who support Free Software. Here is a leaked quote from an e-mail Lefty sent to one of the people he has been fighting over the years, 'I will be heavily publicizing the support for your criminal harassment which was provided by Richard "My holy duty is to rape women who've never used EMACS" Stallman and Bruce "Have I got a meaningless waiver for you (at my usual consulting rates)!" Perens, and-"believe you me "you'll have wound up doing your "friends" in the "free software movement" infinitely more damage with this than you've done to me or anyone around me.' — Details on the blog.
GNOME

Submission + - Evangelism is War – The Mono/Moonlight Agend (pwnage.ca)

Submitted by blozza2070
blozza2070 writes: I was going over an old Groklaw posting that got me thinking about Microsoft and it’s .NET Agenda. I decided to do more research and took a look at the Comes vs Microsoft documents again but from the perspective of the current Mono issues. After reading the information contained in the documents I am even more convinced that Mono and Moonlight do nothing but help Microsoft win against competing platforms. I will quote and comment on a few relevant sections I found useful to prove my point.

Slashdot Top Deals

This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian

Close