tulare - Slashdot User

Journal Journal: "Only" being paid $200k is a "constitutional crisis" 10

Journal by Cyberdyne on Monday January 01, 2007 @06:21AM

According to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, paying his colleagues a "mere" $200k, with federal district court judges languishing on just $165k, is "inadequate" and "has now reached the level of a constitutional crisis."

Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot 154

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 01, 2007 @06:02AM from the whatever-it-takes dept.

Daedius writes "My comrade Hugh Perkins is living in Asia and he has been without reliable internet connectivity for many days. He uses l33t hacks to get his daily dose of Slashdot in desperate times." From the posting: "The Taiwan earthquake has brought telecommunications in the Taiwan/Hong Kong region to a standstill. I am living in Shenzhen and am unable to read Slashdot directly for several days. Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth and local servers and both continue to work perfectly from the region. Could there be some way to use Google or Gmail to read Slashdot? A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results."

Submission + - What are you Optimistic About? Why?

Submitted by vix86 on Monday January 01, 2007 @05:51AM

vix86 writes: Last year's "World Question" from The Edge was "What is your Dangerous Idea?" So to kick off the off the new year:
As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.

What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!

Submission + - GMail Vulnerable To Contact List Hijacking

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday January 01, 2007 @03:28AM

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 which can be found here. 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."

Vista and the Music Industry 438

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 01, 2007 @02:54AM from the locked-down dept.

BanjoBob writes "Vista locks down all the DRM functionality and actually reduces the quality of playback of some media. This includes both audio and video content. As a company creating music and video products, how can we use Vista to create, distribute, and use legal media? I have read nothing to indicate that Vista has a model to allow 'authorized' use without causing problems. Currently we use Windows 2000 and Linux products. If what we understand is true, Vista and future Microsoft products won't be viable options for us since prior to publication, media must be copied multiple times, edited, moved around, re-edited and often modified into various forms (trailers, etc.) before, during, and after production. This naturally includes backups and recovery. If Vista is intent on prohibiting these uses, then Microsoft is intent on keeping their products out of the realm of content creation and editing. How do others deal with these issues?"

Submission + - Wikipedia blocks Qatar from posting

Submitted by

nwetters

on Monday January 01, 2007 @02:28AM

nwetters writes: "Qatar is a small country on the Arabian Peninsula. As is the way in many parts of the world, Internet traffic is censored through a proxy server, and this has led to the whole country being blocked from posting to prevent vandalism."

Submission + - Microsoft "in-car" deal with ford

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01, 2007 @01:47AM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is teaming up with Ford to offer in-car connectivity. Apparently this will be based on Bluetooth allowing hook-up of "iPod[s] or cellular telephones" in a market Microsoft "has long wanted to enter". Yeah right. More me-too-ism from Seattle.

Submission + - Small Business Switches to Ubuntu

Submitted by

firenurse

on Monday January 01, 2007 @01:28AM

firenurse writes: "The Inquirer is running a story about how one small business switched to Ubuntu. The article can be found here http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36 635

YOU NEVER QUITE wrap your head around how anti-consumer Microsoft's policies are until they bite you in the bum. Add in the customer antagonistic policies of its patsies, HP in this case, and vendors like Promise, and you have quite a recipe for pain. Guess what I did today?"

Journal Journal: The Problem with Driver-Loaded Firmware

Journal by Kadin2048 on Sunday December 31, 2006 @11:01PM

(Submitted as a story on 12/31/2006)

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 gua

Submission + - IMAP Brute Force the latest script kiddie craze?

Submitted by flyingfsck on Sunday December 24, 2006 @05:13PM

flyingfsck writes: Are IMAP password attacks the latest annoyance?

The Nessus toolkit includes THC Hydra http://www.thc.org/thc-hydra/, a fast, parallelized login brute forcer. I noticed the following in my mail server logs today:

BSN-61-107-201.dial-up.dsl.siol.net[86.61.107.201]
Dec 24 14:27:53 ns imapd[28250]: imap service init from 64.5.44.212
Dec 24 14:27:53 ns imapd[28248]: imap service init from 64.5.44.212
Dec 24 14:27:53 ns imapd[28251]: imap service init from 64.5.44.212
Dec 24 14:27:53 ns imapd[28248]: Command stream end of file, while reading line user=??? host=UNKNOWN

This doesn't bode well for the new year.

A simple fix would be to add a 'sleep(10)' to the IMAP server login routine to discourage brute forcing, but that means I have to get the source code, do some reading and compiling. Thank GNU for open source software though, since without the source I'd be in trouble.

Submission + - Track Santa in Google Earth, Live!

Submitted by

ink_polaroid

on Sunday December 24, 2006 @02:53PM

ink_polaroid writes: "It appears that the guys at Google have equipped Santa with a GPS tracker this year. Head over to the site and download the Santa Tracker KML file. It's the coolest screensaver you'll find! (You'll need the latest version of Google Earth 4 to run the tracker. Get it here.)"

Submission + - Gmail users missing everything in their accounts

Submitted by BrianOfMN on Sunday December 24, 2006 @02:24PM

BrianOfMN writes: Beginning with a report dated December 19 on Google Groups, dozens of Gmail users are reporting that everything in their Inbox, Sent Mail, Contacts, and other folders, is gone. Some users are reporting that there is a message indicating that this is a result of an attack, while some users have had their account settings changed to forward all their email to a different email address. Many of the users had their browser open to Gmail before they noticed their items missing and got script errors, and many of themwere using Firefox 2. Has Gmail been hacked?

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