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Submission + - Amazon.com acquires dpreview.com

Submitted by Streetlight
Streetlight writes: Digital Camera Review (http://www.dpreview.com/) announced May 14, 2007, that they had been acquired by amazon.com.



"We're proud and excited to announce that Dpreview has been acquired by the world's leading online retailer, Amazon.com. Started as hobby site in 1998, dpreview.com has grown to be the number one destination for anyone interested in digital cameras and digital photography. Each month dpreview.com has seven million unique visitors (over 22 million sessions) who read over 120 million pages. 'We've worked very hard over the last eight years to deliver consistently high quality content to our readers', founder Phil Askey said. 'It will be fantastic to be able to expand and build on that without compromising our quality or independence. With the support and resources of Amazon we can achieve this.'"
Security

Submission + - Distributed Open Proxy Honeypot Project Results

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Honeypot Project is capturing live web attack data with sensors placed around the world to provide concrete examples of the types of attacks occurring "in the wild," in addition to raising awareness and developing effective countermeasures to new threats. Since January, the Honeypot Project has logged nearly one million web requests and here are the results.
Google

Submission + - Goolgle Indexes Links Found Only in Gmail?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, I purchased a domain to use for a pro bono website I'm building for a local, annual event. I put up a placeholder site, pointed the domain at it, and mailed my contact at the organization (using my Gmail account) to tell her about the domain. This is the only place that the domain was ever mentioned — neither of us have mentioned it to anyone else or any any other website, and have sent no traffic there by any other means than typing the URL into our browsers or clicking on the links in the email. We didn't want anyone to see it yet, since it's not done (or even yet begun, for that matter). When I registered it (several weeks ago), numerous relevant Google keyword searches as well as an explicit search for the domain turned up no results. Now any of these searches brings up this site as the first hit.

From the Gmail Privacy Policy:

When you use Gmail, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).
So my hypothesis is that Google gleaned address out of my email via its URL-tracking voodoo and then indexed it, and this possibility does seem covered by their privacy policy. But I still find this pretty disturbing: can't I email someone a URL without the whole world finding out about it? What if the contents of this site fell into what the broader Google Privacy FAQ classifes as "sensitive information"?

..information we know to be related to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, political or religious beliefs or sexuality and tied to personal information.
Math

Submission + - $25,000 question: Is this Turing machine universal

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, is offering a 25k prize to anyone who can prove or disprove his conjecture that a particular 2-state, 3-color Turing machine is universal. If true, it would be the simplest universal TM, and possibly simplest universal computational system — even simpler than rule 110. The announcement comes on the 5-year anniversary of the publication of NKS, where among other things Wolfram introduced the current reigning TM champion.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Best way to run Linux Programs in Real-Time

Submitted by sabre86
sabre86 writes: I'm researching using Linux as the operating system for a (preferably hard) real-time, distributed (with approximately ten nodes) environment running on multicore commodity — not embedded — x86 hardware. What Linux and/or open source solutions exist for real-time applications and how do they compare with commercial offerings such as VxWare, RTLinux and QNX?
Security

Submission + - Prof. Johan Pouwelse to Take on RIAA Expert

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Marie Lindor has retained an expert witness of her own to fight the RIAA, and to debunk the testimony and reports of the RIAA's expert" Dr. Doug Jacobson, the "reliability" of which has been challenged by Ms. Lindor in her Brooklyn federal court case, UMG v. Lindor. Ms. Lindor's expert is none other than Prof. Johan Pouwelse, Chairman of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group of Delft University of Technology. It was Prof. Pouwelse's scathing analysis of the RIAA's MediaSentry "investigations" (pdf) in Foundation v. UPC Nederland in the Netherlands which caused the (pdf) courts (pdf) in that country to direct the ISP's there not to turn over the names and addresses of their subscribers, thus nipping in the bud the RIAA's intended litigation juggernaut in that country. Prof. Pouwelse testified in the Netherlands that the RIAA's MediaSentry investigation — upon which Dr. Jacobson relies and the veracity of which he 'assumes' — was 'limited' and 'simplistic', failing to "resolve... relevant technical problems such as superpeer hopping, NAT translation, and firewall relaying....[failing to implement] "actual complete file transfer....simply [taking] filenames at face value and ...[failing to make] any correction for pollution on Kazaa [despite] [p]ollution levels [on Kazaa which] can be as high as 90% for some files....[not being aware of] the limitations of Kazaa in file searching.....[failing to take] computer hygiene precautions ..... [with respect to] multi-peer downloading contamination. Therefore, [making it] ... difficult to establish the contribution of the various IP-addresses ...[it being] possible that some IP-addresses contributed 0 Bytes to an actual download, [with] ... involvement [but] ...no actual contribution". The notice of designation of expert witness and his curriculum vitae are here."
Businesses

Journal Journal: Easy 2 Get Credit Cards

Journal by DavidWhalin
Fast Easy Credit Cards At Discount-Swapmeet.Com I found this site while searching for easy to qualify credit cards and to my surprise this site has the easiest cards I have ever found. The thing is I have tried to get cards from the some of the same card companies that they offer before but I was turned down. Discount-Swapmeet.Com have a high approval rate for anyone through some of the toughest card companies in the world. The reason is the card companies allow them to use an automated system
Space

ESA's Cluster Spacecraft Makes Shocking Discovery 137

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the celestial-shocker dept.
A recent observation by the ESA's Cluster Spacecraft was able to finally prove a 20-year-old theory. "On 24 January 2001, the four Cluster spacecraft were flying at an approximate altitude of 105 000 kilometres, in tetrahedron formation. Each spacecraft was separated from the others by a distance of about 600 kilometres. With such a distance between them, as they approached the bow shock, scientists expected that every spacecraft would record a similar signature of the passage through this region. Instead, the readings they got were highly contradictory. They showed large fluctuations in the magnetic and electric field surrounding each spacecraft. They also revealed marked variations in the number of solar wind protons that were reflected by the shock and streaming back to Sun."
Businesses

Submission + - The real secret of Mechanical Turk

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Has anyone ever made any decent money completing hits on Mechanical Turk? After "working" for three hours writing trivia questions, I made enough to pay the shipping for my next order at Amazon and then never went back. Obviously it's not for average people like me to make a little extra vacation money. Whatis.com has a new theory — the purpose of Mechanical Turk is to make natural language search a reality. So what's the big deal about natural language search? You need it for enterprise search. It's a whole different animal with a whole different set of issues. Go Bezos!
Programming

Submission + - Eiffel Wins Prestigious Software Systems Award

Submitted by
Coryoth
Coryoth writes: "The ACM award for Software Systems for 2006 is to be awarded to Bertrand Meyer for the Eiffel programming language. This is a highly presigious award, putting Eiffel among extremely distinguished company — previous winners include UNIX, TeX, TCP/IP, the World Wide Web, Postscript, Apache, and Java. Note that Eiffel, and the EiffelStudio IDE are now GPL software; grab a copy for your OS of choice."
Intel

Submission + - Samsung puts finishing touches on DDR3 memory

Submitted by
HostAdmin
HostAdmin writes: "Buckle your seatbelts, boys and girls! DDR3 is almost here (well, 2009 is "almost here", isn't it?)

DDR3 is the long-awaited successor to DDR2 memory, now the most common memory type used in PCs. The newer chips will offer data transfer speeds up to 1.6Gbps, twice the memory bandwidth of DDR2. That means better performance for both 3-D graphics and multithreaded applications that tap the power of multi-core processors. The chips will also consume less power — around 1.5 volts compared to 1.8 volts for DDR2 — which means longer notebook battery life, Samsung said.
"
The Internet

Submission + - information categories

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: maybe i'm just naive but 9 years ago i wrote to altavista with the following suggestion but got shrugged off — for the last century almost the whole world has classified information according to the system used in libraries. why can't internet pages be indexed in this way ? (instead of such vagaries as 'lifestyle' etc).
Software

Submission + - Hackers hacking over hacked hackers-haven

Submitted by MrShaggy
MrShaggy writes: The folks over at the PirateBay, are admitting that they have been hacked. User-names and passwords. Although they are encrypted they are urging members to update their passwords, not only on that site, but on any other website that you might have used the same pass on.

Here is the link in the Inquirer;http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?a rticle=39591 http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39 591
Security

Should Vendors Close All Security Holes? 242

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the limited-resources dept.
johnmeister writes to tell us that InfoWorld's Roger Grimes is finding it hard to completely discount a reader's argument to only patch minimum or low security bugs when they are publicly discovered. "The reader wrote to say that his company often sits on security bugs until they are publicly announced or until at least one customer complaint is made. Before you start disagreeing with this policy, hear out the rest of his argument. 'Our company spends significantly to root out security issues,' says the reader. 'We train all our programmers in secure coding, and we follow the basic tenets of secure programming design and management. When bugs are reported, we fix them. Any significant security bug that is likely to be high risk or widely used is also immediately fixed. But if we internally find a low- or medium-risk security bug, we often sit on the bug until it is reported publicly. We still research the bug and come up with tentative solutions, but we don't patch the problem.'"

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