mswope - Slashdot User

Submission + - Managing a data-center from within Second Life

Submitted by

Matt Rechenburg

on Monday January 01, 2007 @01:44PM

Matt Rechenburg writes: "The idea is to use "Second Life" as a 3D-user-interface to manage a physically existing data-center. The openQRM-team has created an initial implementation to map and connect virtual server-objects in SL to real server-systems in the "First World". It allows to perform basic administrative tasks in a virtual data-center like starting an application-service or shutting down a server. These virtual actions are then transferred to a data-center in the "real world" by a special proxy-server. The proxy-server also provides informations about the data-center status so the virtual server-objects in SL can update their states. As a prove-of-concept the team created a small video which you can find at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6nRu51gogU It shows an avatar in "Second Life" administrating a "real world" data-center. Please find a full description of this topic at: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?threa d_id=31313574&forum_id=47394 Happy New Year + stay tuned !"

Submission + - European Internet Connectivity Crash?

Submitted by

DamonHD

on Monday January 01, 2007 @01:34PM

DamonHD writes: "Is hungover New-Year-Europe having an Internet outage to go along with the mandatory seasonal glitches in the banking networks ("I was standing in the pub and suddenly all my cards stopped working")?"

Submission + - Flying to the US? Pay in Cash

Submitted by pin_gween on Monday January 01, 2007 @01:30PM

pin_gween writes: According to the Telegraph, British travelers using a credit card to purchase their ticket may now have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities. The US has demanded more information about travelers after 9/11 and this past October, an agreement was reached by the EU on 34 items the airlines may hand over. Much of it is routine but some elements will prove more contentious, such as a passenger's email address, whether they have a previous history of not turning up for flights and any religious dietary requirements. Initially, such material could be inspected for seven days but a reduced number of US officials could view it for three and a half years. Should any record be inspected during this period, the file could remain open for eight years.

The US states it will "encourage" US carriers to reciprocate any requests by European governments.

Submission + - Will OLPC Pressure all Other Desktop OSes?

Submitted by g8orade on Monday January 01, 2007 @01:12PM

g8orade writes: As this article says, for the OLPC, the software is more important than the hardware. A generation or more of children in developing countries will learn about computers using a computer not running the Mac nor MS desktops. Will the OLPC software finally be the licenseless tool, the uncharged-for value add that makes it too hard for the other OS makers to compete given the same hardware?

Submission + - Wii Security Flaws

Submitted by prinneh on Monday January 01, 2007 @01:08PM

prinneh writes: http://www.youtube.com/v/uTx2MAOspS4

Aside from being linguistic Comedy Gold, the news and theories discussed in the presentation by tmbinc surely are the best news this year :)

While he states that homebrew is not currently a possibility, this is not a final verdict (If I understand his version of English correctly).

What do you think?
Both the excitement of eventually being able to copy your Wii games, but also how you think this might affect the console "war".

Bookmark How can you get exposure at work place? (merinews.com)

by merinews on Monday January 01, 2007 @12:34PM

The Problem With Driver-Loaded Firmware 229

Posted by Hemos on Monday January 01, 2007 @12:24PM from the crippleware-in-the-physical-world dept.

Kadin2048 writes "If you've gone to a big-box store and purchased a wireless card recently, you might have had some trouble getting it to work under Linux, or any non-Windows OS for that matter. One reason for this is that more and more manufacturers are producing hardware that are useless without proprietary firmware. While these new designs allow for lower parts counts and thus lower cost, it presents a serious problem for F/OSS software because it can sometimes guarantee no out-of-the-box compatibility. Jem Matzan has produced a detailed article, "The battle for wireless network drivers," on the subject, including interviews with manufacturers' representatives and OS developers, including Theo de Raadt. The bottom line? In general, Asian hardware manufacturers were far more responsive and liberal about firmware than U.S. manufacturers (Intel included). Look for more firmware issues in the future, as not only wireless hardware, but regular wired Ethernet cards, take the driver-loaded firmware approach."

The End of Minitel 39

Posted by Hemos on Monday January 01, 2007 @11:17AM

ZeldorBlat writes "The French Minitel service is closing it's doors at the end of today. Started in 1982, Minitel provides several services now widely available on the web including phone listings, train ticketing, and many other third-party content. Many prefered it to the web for it's simplicity and perceived security. The system is to be replaced with Le Compte Achats, available to businesses only. The notice can be found here."

GMail Vulnerable To Contact List Hijacking 139

Posted by Hemos on Monday January 01, 2007 @11:09AM from the in-special-circumstances dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "By simply logging in to GMail and visiting a website, a malicious website can steal your contact list, and all their details. The problem occurs because Google stores the contact list data in a Javascript file. So far the attack only works on Firefox, and doesn't appear to work in Opera or Internet explorer 7. IE6 was un-tested as of now."

Submission + - Preventing Spam: Bulletproof Solutions

Submitted by on Monday January 01, 2007 @11:08AM

An anonymous reader writes: Spam is probably one of the most difficult problems we have to deal with. E-Mail-filters, such as those used in GMail, provide accurate results, but not every company is willing to use extern services for its private mails. The problem occurs when web-developers have to display e-mail-addresses on a web-page. So how can you make sure that not a single spam mail will find its path to the inbox of your client? This article presents modern bulletproof solutions and techniques in a brief overview.

Submission + - "pwn" gets owned by banished words list

Submitted by

chemdoc

on Monday January 01, 2007 @11:04AM

chemdoc writes: "Lake Superior State University (in the Upper Peninsula of MI) generates an annual list of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. This year, among others, is the word "pwn". Readers can submit suggestions for the list."

Journal Journal: Vulnerability found in gmail

Journal by neutrino38 on Monday January 01, 2007 @10:53AM

Here is a big one for the new year. A guy has found a vulnerability that enables web sites to obtain your gmail contacts list as long as you are logged in when you display the page.

Submission + - Wikinomics

Submitted by

peterwayner

on Monday January 01, 2007 @10:51AM

peterwayner writes: "If you're jazzed by the communitarian impulses driving Wikis, idea agora, Web 2.0 and other collaborative happenings, you'll be pleased to know that the new book Wikinomics is a great gift for that boss, spouse, or friend who doesn't quite grok it yet. The only logic bomb hidden in this statement is that much of what is wonderful in this book is wonderful because it's a book printed on pulp and written by two and only two authors. That is, the book is good because it's not a wiki.

This statement isn't exactly true. The authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, have a wiki site at www.wikinomics.com devoted to the book. You can edit the wiki and have your say, but that's not what they're asking folks to buy. For the price of the book, you get a well-designed collection of thoughtful anecdotes stitched together by two talented business writers and polished by a good editor. They've made a good attempt to cover most aspects of the topic and they do an excellent job of explaining why the ideas are important for CEOs that are struggling to move their business forward. All of this is almost as portable as an iPod , dramatically less expensive and guaranteed never to need new batteries.

The tone of the book is bright and optimistic about how openness and wiki principles will help companies. We hear about how the wikipedia covered the London subway explosions, the way that Innocentive is opening up the R&D process for companies and the surprising inventiveness of Google maps users. The descriptions are thorough and well-researched, as far as they go, and when they're done going, the writers summarize them well. It's clear that the writers feel that the word "wikis" should be the new one word answer that CEOs should trot out when faced with the kind an impossible question, the kind of question that they the answered with "Internet" during the 1990s and "China" after the turn of the millenium.

The great advantages of the pulp-bound book become clear as you work your way through the text. In one section, for instance, Tapscott and Williams dismiss Jaron Lanier's worry that wikis can devolve when a smart mob develops the the same kind of "mass stupidity" that brought us Pol Pot or the Stalinist movement. "The winners will outnumber the losers", say the authors and conclude that Lanier "ran afoul". I don't really agree with the easy way that they dismissed the danger and if I had a wiki edit button in front of me, I would change the text to amplify Lanier's warnings. I've watched the mob rule delete perfectly good information from the wikipedia for no other reason than it wasn't "notable". The revision wars are legendary and any savvy wiki reader knows that skirmishes are more common than we would like. The well-meaning editors at the Wikipedia have probably destroyed more knowledge in the name of notability than the book burners of history. At least it's still there in the article history. But since Tapscott and Williams wrote a book that doesn't come with a wiki edit button, the text is better off because I didn't glue in my own divergent rant.

The optimism of the book is contagious and it would be a shame for it to be limited by a neutral point of view. Wikis organize casual information like how to install software , and this is the kind of job that is very important to business. Wikis may just be the wrong tool for, say, capturing political truthiness, but the book gives several good examples of how they energize corporations by making it easier for divisions, groups, and project teams to cooperate without going through traditional channels. If a business wants to formalize its collective intelligence, a wiki offers an ideal amount of flexibility.

If the book needs any editing, it would be to add more skepticism. At the beginning, they hint that they will address the kind of concerns that led Bill Gates to wonder about how society will pay for innovation if there's no profit incentive, but analyzing the limitations of the wikiworld isn't really their goal. There's little discussion of endeavors that have largely failed like Wikinews. That experiment with collaborative reporting had two articles on the day I wrote this and one article on the day before. (December 19 and 20th).

I've begun to feel lately that there is a real danger that free information will drive out paid information in much the same way that economists note that cheap money drives out the dear.

It's probably too early for us to have a firm grasp on the downsides to the wiki world and so it might be unfair to expect the book to be much of a buzz kill. One of the biggest logical problems I've found with the wikipedia is the inconsistent way that the movement treats traditional scholarship. On one hand, we're supposed to revel in the way that the wikipedia is often better than traditional mechanisms, but on the other hand the wikipedia gives more weight to outside sources. On the day I wrote this, the guide counseled, "Avoid weasel words such as, `Some people say ...' Instead, make your writing verifiable: find a specific person or group who holds that opinion and give a citation to a reputable publication in which they express that opinion." If the wikis become good enough to rival if not replace original sources, where will the wikis find the outside beacons of authority? Any strict logician will realize that there's a danger of proving 1=0 with this system, although I realize that all grown ups know that life is filled with logical inconsistencies like that.

The book, for instance, doesn't really question why the Wikipedia worked but the Wikinews didn't, something that no one may really know. The tone is closer to Ray Kinsella than Crash Davis. It celebrates Cory Doctorow, the famous editor of BoingBoing.net, a wonderful blog that I read daily. The authors explain how Doctorow gives away digital copies of his books because "his problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

Perhaps that's true, but a deeper question is how the wikis, mashups, and mixes will find their benchmarks of authority, their geodetic markers in memespace, their means of support. To test this danger, I wrote this greasemonkey script to count the words in a webpage between certain tags. On the day I wrote this, the admittedly imprecise script found 11788 words on the front page of Boing Boing, of which 6472 were between <blockquote> tags. That's about 50% borrowed text.

So far, this non-stop homage, this pantheon of fair use sells ads and seems to do quite well — Wikinomics suggests that BoingBoing's "readership now eclipses most mainstream media outlets." So why bother playing by the old school rules when you can just let others do the work while you push the boundaries of fair use and make money? There is a real danger that the original sources will find themselves starved for air as the Wikipedia and others fair use devotees suck up the top search rankings.

This may be why I think the book was right to bring these wiki worlds to the business community. At first I thought it was rather cynical to package up the wiki ideals into a neat bundle for the business leaders, but now I think that businesses are the ones who can really use and support the ideals. We now know that wikis can't be trusted for important, contentious areas of truthiness like politics, news, history, or any place where there's a difference of opinion about the facts, but it can still be ideal for semi-closed environments with outside means of support. I can imagine that wikis would be great for a corporation that needed to manage communication between the two divisions in different states. Openness gets rid of the natural inertia of bureaucracies. And it's clear that every company should have a wiki devoted to the user's guide so the customers can add what the manual writers never anticipated. Wikis allows one groupto move ahead without asking another "mother may I". The umbrella business can pay the bills for keeping the lights on.

My guess is the folks in business who need to get things done may be the only ones who support the wikiconomy in the long term after the average joe gets a bit bored and tosses the wikis onto the pile of amusing distractions with the CB radios. The businesses are the ones with the real incentives to embrace the values of wikiness. And if you've spent a few years in the cubicle trenches, you know that words like "truthiness" have a certain ring to them.

Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and 12 other books."

Games On Demand Service For Mac 78

Posted by Hemos on Monday January 01, 2007 @10:49AM from the try-before-you-buy dept.

Torrey Clark writes "MyMacGames is preparing to launch a new 'games on demand' service for Mac users ($8-20 per month) in the third quarter of 2007 that will feature roughly 100 games at launch. They are currently offering a free beta."

Wikipedia Blocks Qatar [Updated] 204

Posted by Hemos on Monday January 01, 2007 @10:30AM from the the-law-of-unintended-consequenceas dept.

GrumpySimon writes "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?" Update: 01/02 13:32 GMT by Z : Jim Wales wrote in the comments that the story is 'completely false'. Either way, the ban has been lifted and anonymous editing is once again possible from Qatar.

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