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Comment Me, in France (Score 1) 216

Therefore, partly in French :

I am a customer of EDF (Électricité de France; a now private company owned and managed by the state. Yes, I know it make no senses, but that's a trick to counter European regulations), like more than 90% of the population.

  • - puissance souscrite : 6 kVA (max power available in household)
  • - abonnement mensuel : 7,84 € (monthly subscription)
  • - prix du kWh :
    • * Heures Pleines : 0,1311 € (price per kWh during the day)
    • * Heures Creuses : 0,0893 € (price per kWh during the night : 23h00-07h00)

Comment Open wifi for me in France (Score 1) 458

No restrictions, I broadcast my wifi access point to the complete city block. People are free to use it for accessing the net.

It is the same network that I am using for my personal use, I am only applying QoS for granting me the full bandwidth that I need and for preventing somebody for swamping the line so everybody can use it.

I am using a mix of secure (ssh for work and data exchange between my computers) and unsecure connections (browsing /. :). Other people can do whatever they prefer.

Here in France, more and more citizen and non-profit organisation are willing to explicit put into the law that access to the internet is a basic right, such as healthcare and pension. Actually, the law is confused about the fact that people can share their internet connection with other people, so we need a clarification.

Sci-Fi

BSG Prequel Series Caprica Canceled 602

Kethinov writes "The sci-fi TV series Caprica, a prequel spinoff from Battlestar Galactica, was just canceled by the Syfy channel. In response to the cancellation and the recent theme of many similar good sci-fi shows getting canceled over the last few years, I've written an editorial arguing that Caprica's cancellation reflects the decreasing sustainability of the cable TV business model. A better, more modern business model could have saved Caprica from cancellation. If this model is adopted in the future, it could save many other similar niche genre shows from the same fate down the road." Another perspective here might be that a boring, ponderous show got yoinked because nobody watched it. Just sayin'.
Facebook

FarmVille Now Worth More Than EA 344

tekgoblin writes "Zynga, the creators of the popular hit Facebook game FarmVille, should be happy today as the company's worth has passed that of EA (Electronic Arts)."
Science

Submission + - 40 million years old Primate fossils found in Asia (wired.com) 2

sosaited writes: It has been widely believed that our ancestors originated out of Africa, but a paper published in Nature by Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientists puts this in doubt. The paper is based on the fossils of 4 primate species found in Asia which are 40 million years old , during which period Africa was thought to not have these species.

The diversity and timing of the new anthropoids raises two scenarios. Anthropoids might simply have emerged in Africa much earlier than thought, and gone undiscovered by modern paleontologists. Or they could have crossed over from Asia, where evidence suggests that anthropoids lived 55 million years ago, flourishing and diversifying in the wide-open ecological niches of an anthropoid-free Africa.


Security

Submission + - Aussie kids foil finger scanner with Gummi Bears (zdnet.com.au) 4

mask.of.sanity writes: An Australian high school has installed "secure" fingerprint scanners for roll call for senior students, which savvy kids may be able to circumvent with sweets from their lunch box. The system replaces the school's traditional sign-in system with biometric readers that require senior students to have their fingerprints read to verify attendance.

The school principal says the system is better than swipe cards because it stops truant kids getting their mates to sign-in for them. But using the Gummi Bear attack, students can make replicas of their own fingerprints from gelatine, the ingredient in Gummi Bears, to forge a replica finger. The attack worked against a bunch of scanners that detect electrical charges within the human body, since gelatine has virtually the same capacitance as a finger's skin.

A litany of fingerprint scanners have fallen victim to bypass methods, many of which are explained publicly in detail on the internet.

Communications

NASA Working On Solar Storm Shield 85

Zothecula writes "The solar storms that cause the stunning aurora borealis and aurora australis (or northern and southern polar lights) also have the potential to knock out telecommunications equipment and navigational systems and cause blackouts of electrical grids. With the frequency of the sun's flares following an 11-year cycle of solar activity and the next solar maximum expected around 2013, scientists are bracing for an overdue, once-in-100 year event that could cause widespread power blackouts and cripple electricity grids around the world. It sounds like an insurmountable problem but a new NASA project called 'Solar Shield' is working to develop a forecasting system that can mitigate the impacts of such events and keep the electrons flowing."
Star Wars Prequels

The Empire Strikes Back Vader Costume For Sale 167

Now is your chance to own an original Darth Vader costume from the best of the Star Wars movies. Christie's auction house plans on putting it up for sale on Nov. 25 and it would be unwise to underestimate the value of this costume. From the article: "The jet-black helmet, mask and armor worn by the intergalactic villain are expected to sell for between 160,000 pounds and 230,000 pounds ($250,000 and $365,000) at a sale of pop culture memorabilia next month."
Security

Submission + - China Penetrated NSA's Classified Operating System 2

Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. The result? The Chinese kept the plane for three months and eventually reverse-engineered the plane’s NSA.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” says Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them—what we could intercept and they could not.” Despite initial skepticism, over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done" prompting some black humor from US naval officers. “This is one hell of a way to go about getting a new operating system.”""

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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