Beryllium Sphere(tm) - Slashdot User

Submission + - Bipartisan effort to repeal indefinite detention (senate.gov)

Submitted by Beryllium Sphere(tm) on Monday December 19, 2011 @05:23PM

Beryllium Sphere(tm) writes: A Republican from Utah, a Democrat from California, and other cosponsors have introduced Senate bill S.2003, to forbid imprisoning people forever without trial or charges.

This would repeal the detention provisions of the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act.

Opencongress.org makes it easy to contact the people who represent you and tell them what you think.

Submission + - Fresh allegations about 2004 US election (intrepidreport.com)

Submitted by Beryllium Sphere(tm) on Monday July 25, 2011 @03:07PM

Beryllium Sphere(tm) writes: Filings in a lawsuit against former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell claim that

Processing of Ohio votes was abruptly transferred out of state to a company called Smartech in Tennessee
Smartech has extensive ties to the Republican Party
The architecture of their system made it possible for Smartech to alter the votes database
The failover system that transferred the processing was designed by a Bush family and Karl Rove IT guy
In the designer's deposition, he swore that the transfer was not a failover

The article includes links to the court filings and architectural diagrams.

Submission + - How to future-proof home wiring? 1

Submitted by Beryllium Sphere(tm) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @02:28AM

Beryllium Sphere(tm) writes: Now is my last chance to run wiring semi-cheaply before useful areas get insulated and sheet-rocked. I'd like to put in wiring that won't leave me needing a retrofit in ten years. In other words, the answer to the question "But just what is it you want to accomplish?" is "to allow for things I haven't thought of yet".

Some things are obvious, like making everything a home run to the wiring closet and not skimping on cable quality.

But what to put in the walls?

One option is something called bundled cable which consolidates into one easily pullable jacket two RG6 coax cables, two UTPs, and two multimode fibers. One of those per room should take care of most networking needs but might not support future multimedia projects.

Another option is to buy N cable reels and a lot of cable ties and make my own bundle. Two or three Cat 6a's would be logical, but what else? HDMI?

Still another option is to install conduit and avoid having to guess the future. Friends with a construction background have warned me that this is much harder to do than it sounds.

Then of course there's the option of doing nothing, on the assumption that everything will be wireless in the future and that 60 GHz equipment will make it down the price curve to the mass market.

If you were buying a house, what kind of built-in wiring would make you smile and relax?

Submission + - Microsoft gets company's code-signing cert revoked

Submitted by Beryllium Sphere(tm) on Tuesday August 21, 2007 @02:48AM

Beryllium Sphere(tm) writes: Australian firm Linchpin Labs released a free tool called Atsiv on July 20 to allow 64-bit Vista users to install unsigned drivers.

It was a simple hack: a signed driver that could install other drivers without checking their signatures.

By August 2, Microsoft had persuaded Verisign to revoke Linchpin's code signing certificate. The revocation takes effect the next time a computer is rebooted.

Scott Field of Microsoft said "Microsoft is committed to protecting its customers from potential as well as actual security threads[sic]".

History buffs may remember a similar incident from 1997 in which the author of an ActiveX control to shut down a computer found his certificate revoked.

Lockergnome coverage of the Linchpin Labs story.
Microsoft announcement of revoking Linchpin's certificate and adding them to the blacklist in Windows Defender as "potentially unwanted software".

Submission + - Diagnostic software that actually works?

Submitted by on Sunday August 27, 2006 @09:46PM

Beryllium Sphere(tm) writes: The hard disk I just replaced was kicking up symptoms right and left under every piece of software from Windows to Grub. All symptoms vanished when I put in a new one. Boring. Except that there was one way to make it work perfectly.

It would run for days under the test software at the repair shop, never gave a hiccup under the software IBM bundled with my Thinkpad, and was within spec on all the S.M.A.R.T. parameters.

Which reminded me that I've never once been able to diagnose a hardware problem by using diagnostic software.

What are some programs, if any, that you have actually gotten useful results from in the field?

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