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Businesses

Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Spammers You Know? 333

Posted by timothy from the oh-you-mean-legal-things-right? dept.
courteaudotbiz writes "For years, a business named Compu-Finder has been sending spam all around the province of Quebec, Canada. In their emails, there is a phone number where we can reach them, and an unsubscribe link that you can click and seems to work, but even after asking them on the phone, by email or with their unsubscribe link, to unsubscribe me, I still receive 10 — 15 spams a week coming from this company. Many bloggers, journalists and radio chroniclers talked about them, but they seem to be untouchable. Still, it is easy to find the names, addresses and phone numbers of the shareholders and administrators of the company. How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?"

Submission + - Russian asteroid-nuking project is 15 years old (google.ru)

Submitted by jamax
jamax writes: According to this article here (russian only, google's translation is here) Russias' State Rocket Center (http://makeyev.ru/rocspace/ — english version available) has finished drawing up plans for anti-asteroid nuclear missle comlpex to either convert incoming asteroids into rubble by a nuclear explosion on its surface or pushing them off-course by exploding nuke near it.
The system consists of two vehicles — recon module "Caissa" and payload module "Kapkan" (snare in russian) and is to be launched on top of either Soyuz-2 or Rus-M carriers.
They claim the projected system to be able to take care of asteroids with diameter up to 300 meters.
The SRC presentation stressed the fact that the two space vehicles were developed by SRC alongside two other institutions for the past 15 years, so threre is an actual chance that it is not more vapourware we get so much of from Russian space agency in the last 5-10 years..
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox 5 Fixes Security and Improves Browsing (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Mozilla released Firefox 5.0 that fixes several security issues, stability issues and introduces new features. Privacy-aware users will be happy to learn that the Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability. The developers tuned HTTP idle connection logic for increased performance and also improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas. Linux users can expect improved desktop environment integration and WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures.
Graphics

Upscaling Retro 8-Bit Pixel Art To Vector Graphics 325

Posted by timothy from the awesomeness-defined dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Two researchers — Johannes Kopf from Microsoft, and Dani Lischinski from The Hebrew University — have successfully created an algorithm that depixelizes and upscales low-resolution 8-bit 'pixel art' into lush vector graphics. The algorithm identifies pixel-level details (original paper — PDF) to accurately shade the new image — but more importantly, the algorithm can create smooth, curved contour lines from only-connected-on-the-diagonal single pixels. At long last, we might be able to play Super Mario Bros. on a big screen without stretching our beloved plumber's pixels to breaking point. You really must look at the sample images." Scroll down in the paper to see how their technique stacks up against some others, including Adobe's Live Trace.
Science

Submission + - Is there life inside black holes? (arxiv.org)

Submitted by jamax
jamax writes: From TFA: "Inside the rotating or charged black holes there are bound periodic planetary orbits, which not coming out nor terminated at the central singularity. The advanced civilizations of the third kind (according to Kardashev classification) may inhabit the interiors of supermassive black holes, being invisible from the outside and basking in the light of the central singularity and the orbital photons. "

That's a preprint from arxiv.org, of an article by Vyacheslav Dokuchaev, a russian physisist, working at Institute for Nuclear Research at Russian Academy of Sciences..

While no actual proof (even theoretical) is provided for the existence of life, author argues that under certain circumstance, some black holes may indeed harbour stable planetary systems, even if planetary orbits are a far cry from ellipse-shaped orbits we see everywhere else.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Chinese Magical Hard-Drive (jitbit.com)

Submitted by jamax
jamax writes: From TFA: "A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film."
    Apparently the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image)..
  And it was a clever hack too — if ever an attempt was made of writing a file that's too large it got sort of cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!
Open Source

Submission + - Have You Heard of AUSTRUMI Linux? (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Susan Linton installs the 199MB Slackware-Linux based Latvian distro and finds it is fun, lightening fast and smart (LibreOffice, Gimp, Opera).
Microsoft

Submission + - Office 15 to have Facebook integration? (winbeta.org)

Submitted by
BogenDorpher
BogenDorpher writes: "Microsoft's Careers Web site today posted a job listing that describes an interesting new feature set to debut in Microsoft's next productivity suite, Office 15. Apparently, Office 15 will feature integration of instant messaging services and social networks such as Facebook."
Android

Submission + - Android web browser can not upload files (google.com)

Submitted by MichaelSmith
MichaelSmith writes: I have an android phone and wrote a photo blogging application so that I could upload pictures directly from the phone. When I finally got around to testing from the browser on android the <input type=file> tag turned into a message Uploads Disabled. So I googled around and found this hilarious bug report which unfortunately confirms that Android can not upload files.
Bug

Submission + - Adobe Confirms Flash Bug, To Release Fix Next Week (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
iamrmani
iamrmani writes: "Adobe is planning to release the fix for a "critical" vulnerability that affected certain versions of its flash player during the week of March 21, 2011.

Adobe rated the bug as "critical," which, if exploited would allow malicious native-code to execute, potentially without a user being aware. In other words, the bug could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/122830/20110315/adobe-flash-flash-player-bug-zero-day-bug-patch-vulnerability-excel-authplay-microsoft-adobe-reader.htm#ixzz1GfTnuinb"

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And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

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