Comment Re:I never heard it on my satellite provider... (Score 1) 451
I heard something like that listening to it on a car radio tuned to an NPR station. Sounded like a delayed feedback loop of the alert with amplified noise.
Comment Re:Between closing the lid and spinning the HDD do (Score 1) 557
There's a difference between optical media and hard drives. I have a external DVD-RW drive that will scratch the optical disks like the Xbox if it is moved while running.
Submission + - Skype protocol has been reverse engineered 1
An anonymous reader writes: One researcher has decided he wants to make Skype open source by reverse engineering the protocol the service uses. In fact, he claims to have already achieved that feat on a new skype-open-source blog. The source code has been posted for versions 1.x/3.x/4.x of Skype as well as details of the rc4 layer arithmetic encoding the service uses. While his intention may be to recreate Skype as an open source platform, it is doubtful he will get very far without facing an army of Microsoft lawyers. Skype is not an open platform, and Microsoft will want to keep it that way.
Comment Re:Size of the solar system? (Score 1) 370
Just off the top of my head, I'd say 32 digits of pi, but I'm probably wrong.
Submission + - Man upgrades Internet Explorer 1.0 to 9.0 [video] (winrumors.com)
FrankNFurter writes: "As seen on winrumors:
Some will remember the video of Andrew Tait upgrading Windows from 1.0 to 7. He did another one — this time installing all major versions of IE from 1.0 to 9.0."
Some will remember the video of Andrew Tait upgrading Windows from 1.0 to 7. He did another one — this time installing all major versions of IE from 1.0 to 9.0."
Submission + - Original Doom Ported To A Calculator (omnimaga.org)
Anonymous Coward writes: "For years, students could spend their math classes playing various stripped-down clones of Doom and on their graphing calculator, but thanks to MRaklopaz, now they can even play the real game from ID software on the TI-Nspire. A video of the game in action is available there. It seems that Doom is on anything with a screen, these days."
Submission + - Do Hobbies Decrease Chances of CS Success?
theodp writes: "Who knows what lexical analysis is?" asked the CS prof. "No one? What, don't you guys do this constantly in your spare time?" Quips like that, and fellow students who never seem to leave the computer lab, make CS student blogger Carolyn sometimes wonder if she really belongs in programming because she doesn't program all the time. "While I don't live to program, I do love to program," she explains, and in the end has decided that's good enough. Somewhere, the late, great, always-room-for-outside-interests Jeff Raskin is smiling.
Submission + - NBC / SNL Stealing Ad Revenue? (donyougorouninrountorero.com) 2
DontLickJesus writes: "In a time when television networks are working hard to deal with the changes presented to them, NBC has been very successful in transition, providing much of their content online. However, it would seem this media giant doesn't want to shoulder all of the cost, to the detriment of their advertisers. Saturday Night Live recently featured skits with urls to see the skit again. These sites first load an intro page, simply showing an image of the skit which the user may click on to load the video. This may seem simple enough, but why the extra step?
Upon further examination, these pages have frames loaded first with advertisements which the user never sees. Both http://donyougorouninrountorero.com/ and http://www.badnewswurtz.com/ use this technique, helping us to understand this wasn't a simple coding mistake. I've collected the responses from requesting these sites at http://pastebin.com/Vj0TL08M in case they are changed later.
I cannot personally verify NBC's ties with the companies involved. However, it is not common for sites to be coded in the manner shown (though not unheard of). In my experience the most common use of the techniques involved are when sites are attempting to steal ad revenue or circumvent user anti-tracking mechanisms."
Upon further examination, these pages have frames loaded first with advertisements which the user never sees. Both http://donyougorouninrountorero.com/ and http://www.badnewswurtz.com/ use this technique, helping us to understand this wasn't a simple coding mistake. I've collected the responses from requesting these sites at http://pastebin.com/Vj0TL08M in case they are changed later.
I cannot personally verify NBC's ties with the companies involved. However, it is not common for sites to be coded in the manner shown (though not unheard of). In my experience the most common use of the techniques involved are when sites are attempting to steal ad revenue or circumvent user anti-tracking mechanisms."
Submission + - #china revolution set to start 2pm Shanghai time (blogspot.com) 2
h00manist writes: Online pages call for protests in 13 cities in China, at 2:00 pm Shanghai time, 1:00 am EST, Twitter tag being used is #cn220. In spite of China censoring Middle East protests, now known as "Jasmin Revolutions", Chinese people are inspired. Instructions for participating are being censored, help re-posting is requested. They keep disappearing, and then popping up everywhere on the net, and being censored again. Yes, I used the google translated version to understand Chinese.
Submission + - Police Chief Teaches Parents to Hack Facebook 3
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "LiveScience reports that James Batelli, the police chief of Mahwah, N.J., and his detectives conduct seminars that teach parents how to outfit a computer with keystroke logging software, giving them access to the full spectrum of the kids' online activities. Batelli explains that kids put themselves in potentially dangerous situations online every day, especially on Facebook, where they run the risk of coming into contact with child predators who troll the social networking site. "Read the paper any day of the week and you’ll see an abduction [or] a sexual assault that’s the result of an Internet interaction or a Facebook comment,” says Batelli. "When it comes down to safety and welfare of your child, I don’t think any parent would sacrifice anything to make sure nothing happens to their children." But not everyone agrees with Batelli's recommendations. “It’s a slippery slope to spy on your kids,” says Edi Goodman, chief privacy officer for Identity Theft 911, who has two young children. “Hopefully I can teach my kids the skill sets to be aware about these [online] dangers, because I can’t be with them all the time.”"
Submission + - Is AT&T throttling Netflix? (att.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The AT&T forums are full of irate customers claiming that Netflix and other streaming has been unusable since at least the start of the month. Streaming via a VPN seems to work, suggesting AT&T is throttling video.
Submission + - Feds Pay Millions for Bogus Spy Software (nytimes.com)
gosuperninja writes: The U.S. Government paid tens of millions of dollars to Dennis Montgomery because he said that he had created software that could decode secret Al-Qaeda messages embedded in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. Even though the CIA figured out that his software was fraud in 2003, other defense agencies continued to believe in it. To date, the government has not prosecuted Montgomery most likely to save itself the embarrassment.
Submission + - Is Google Poisoning PDF?
theodp writes: As much as Google is crying about Microsoft paying too much attention to the details of how its software works, one may wish that Google would learn to do the same. Especially in the case of Google Chrome's built-in PDF viewer, which the search giant imposed on users last year, quietly enabling it by default. Not everyone is thrilled with how things turned out. "I got the impression that this built-in PDF viewer was never user tested before it went live," says one unhappy camper. "I was very annoyed to find that google had hijacked my PDF settings and implemented their own viewer," complained another. "I am not able to save PDFs from my internet-banking site any more," laments a third. A "horrible piece of software," is another's take. If you can't live with acknowledged bugs and feature omissions while its engineers "try to make this better," a Googler suggests: "type 'chrome://plugins' into the address bar, find the 'Chrome PDF Viewer' and click 'Disable.'" How intuitive. So, unless some kind of licensing agreement was struck, or there's a private action underway, why isn't Adobe crying foul over this switcheroo, which is causing product confusion and support headaches?
Submission + - Fantasy Novel Starring J.R.R. Tolkien Incurs Wrath (associatedcontent.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Author Stephen Hillard has written a novel entitled "Mirkwood" which appears to be a fantasy epic in which none other than J.R.R. Tolkien appears as a character. The
Tolkien estate is not amused and has issued a cease and desist letter.
Hillard has responded by suing the Tolkien estate preemptively.
Tolkien estate is not amused and has issued a cease and desist letter.
Hillard has responded by suing the Tolkien estate preemptively.
