gregoryb - Slashdot User

Submission + - Skype worm infects Windows PCs (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

walterbays

on Monday September 10, 2007 @04:34PM

walterbays writes: "Skype Ltd. warned its users today that a worm targeting Windows PCs is spreading through the service's instant messenger... After hijacking contacts from an infected machine's Skype software, it sends messages to those people that include a live link. Recipients who blithely click on the URL — which poses as a JPG image but is actually a download to a file with the .scr extension — wind up infected."

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows on Thursday August 30, 2007 @11:57AM

paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).

Submission + - Contest gets SysAdmins to sing their own praises (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

bednarz

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @11:39AM

bednarz writes: "To the musically inclined, here's a contest for you. It's part of the annual SysAdmin of the Year award and asks entrants to put the daily duties of systems administrators to music. Here's a sample, credited to Eric "Maverick" Garner: "I download all the patches and fixes/ and countless system updates/ I push 'em out to all the servers/ So nobody escalates." The chorus goes even further to sing the praises of the system administrator: "SysAdmin Rockstar, I'm your IT go-to guy/ SysAdmin Rockstar, I'll make it work do or die." First prize gets a $500 Amazon.com gift certificate. Network World has the story. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/083007-sysad mins-singing-contest.html"

Submission + - Nothing more important than plugging memory leaks

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30, 2007 @11:31AM

An anonymous reader writes: This article addressed CPU, I/O, and threading issues as some of the pieces of the performance puzzle in Eclipse-based rich-client applications. Memory leaks are another possible cause of performance problems. Learn about how to monitor your application's memory usage, and how to identify critical memory leaks you'll experience when developing rich-client applications, and new techniques for solving them.

Submission + - Undercover reporter flees DefCon

Submitted by on Monday August 06, 2007 @06:03PM

An anonymous reader writes: Dismayed hackers witnessed an undercover television reporter flee DefCon according to a newspaper in Sydney, Australia. Hacker 'Priest' says the reporter had refused to wear a press pass and intended to secretly film Federal agents and conference delegates. In response, DefCon organizers staged a honeypot event and told delegates that a reporter was in the room. A person later described by wire service AFP as a 'Dateline NBC associate producer' suddenly shoved delegates aside before fleeing the building and escaping in a vehicle.

Submission + - Google to pony up 4.6 Biilion for 700MHz Auction

Submitted by

heelrod

on Monday July 30, 2007 @06:20PM

heelrod writes: "With all the recent talk about cell phones and Americans being in the stone age with regards to wireless here on slashdot, I was curious as to why nobody mentioned this.

A few weeks ago Google made a press release about their intentions to meet the reserve for the 700Mhz Spectrum in the upcoming auction later this year but under certain circumstances.

Some people (CTIA-The Wireless Association) have been harsh to their ideas calling it "Silicon Valley Welfare". They have spent alot of web work to let you know this is a bad idea for Americans.

It's nice to see "maybe" somebody doing something about the mess America is in with regards to it's wireless technology model."

Submission + - Plant grown insulin could be a diabetes cure. (ucf.edu) 2

Submitted by

MamaEri

on Monday July 30, 2007 @06:17PM

MamaEri writes: "In a study by UCF professor Henry Daniell, he found that by genetically splicing insulin into Tobacco and Lettuce plants, these produce an insulin laced plant. Then he gave a freeze-dried powder of these plants to mice with diabetes. After 8 weeks the mice had normal sugar levels and were producing their own insulin."

Submission + - Acer boss: entire industry disappointed by Vista

Submitted by

thefickler

on Monday July 30, 2007 @06:14PM

thefickler writes: "Windows Vista has been slammed by the president of PC manufacturer Acer, Gianfranco Lanci (pictured), who said Microsoft's new operating system is a massive disappointment, having failed to boost PC sales.

"The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista," said Lanci. "I do not think that anyone really buys a new PC because of Vista."

He also said the situation won't improve for at least another six months, because Vista wasn't mature when it was released."

Submission + - Watch Out For Fake Windows Domains (circleid.com)

Submitted by netcacker on Monday July 30, 2007 @05:50PM

netcacker writes: A post on CircleID is referring to findings by some security experts about several windows related domain names being registered using the letter 'v' twice back to back for 'w'. The focus seems to be on Windows update downloads. Group involved is reported to be affiliated with the infamous VxGame Trojan. Registered names include a new site called vvindowsupdate(dot)com — that's a double 'v' that can look very confusingly similar to 'w' with certain fonts.

Submission + - New Tools for PHP Developers (kiweecommerce.org)

Submitted by crrobinson14 on Monday July 30, 2007 @05:48PM

crrobinson14 writes: ITema has released two Open Source modules for PHP developers. The first, Blackbird ESB, is the first enterprise service bus for PHP. The second, KiweeCommerce, is an e-commerce package for the MODx content management system. Both packages are licensed under the GPL.

Submission + - Attempted IP infringement to be criminalized (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by ianare on Monday July 30, 2007 @05:32PM

ianare writes: Good news for the MAFIAA! H.R. 3155, the "Intellectual Property Enhanced Criminal Enforcement Act of 2007", has been introduced in Congress by Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH). In most cases, the bill appears to simply double existing penalties. One big change however, is that people could now be charged with criminal copyright infringement even if such infringement has not actually taken place. Not surprisingly, the EFF has condemned the legislation. Another of their concerns is that small changes could have big effects on casual file-sharers for a different reason: P2P users could face greater penalties for infringement after statutory damages are expanded.

Submission + - Russia wins International Math Olympiad (imo2007.edu.vn)

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Monday July 30, 2007 @05:20PM

prostoalex writes: "Russia, China and Vietnam took the top prizes of 48th International Mathematics Olympiad that this year took place in Hanoi, Vietnam. The problem sets are available on the official Web site in a variety of languages."

Submission + - Resolving IP to MAC address across a router

Submitted by Bengie on Monday July 30, 2007 @04:55PM

Bengie writes: From what I know about networks, you can't find out the MAC of an IP across a router. At some point I stumbled across a program that does just this. The only google hits I get talk about Netbios. Being able to do this would help out IT dept because our back-up registration page pulls MAC info from our DHCP server, but the DHCP database only syncs with our back-up database every 24 hours. If we build a new computer to replace an old one, our registration page can't get the new MAC for the Wake-on-LAN info until 24 hours later. We could use netbios if we had to, but that's kind of shady and won't work for our Mac computers since they don't have netbios. Is there a way of resolving the MAC of an IP across routers?

Submission + - Number crunching: Baseball favors the underdog (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday July 30, 2007 @04:26PM

coondoggie writes: "As if the baseball season isn't long enough. According to physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in order to guarantee that the best team in baseball actually wins the World Series teams would need to play 256 games per team, well beyond the 162 games each Major League Baseball team currently plays in the regular season. Specifically, the researchers says in order to make sure the best team wins the total number of games played in a season should be roughly the cube of the number of teams involved. For the 16 team National League, that means 4096 regular season games altogether and 2744 games for the 14 team American League. In their report, "Effiency of Competitions," researchers said the world of sports provides an ideal laboratory for modeling competition because game data are accurate, abundant, and accessible. Sports nicely demonstrate that the outcome of a single competition is not predictable. Over the past century the lower seeded team had an astounding 44% chance of defeating a higher seeded team in baseball. This inherent randomness has profound consequences. Even after a long series of competitions, the best team does not always win, the researchers said. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/17974"

Submission + - The History Of Activision (gamasutra.com)

Submitted by simoniker on Monday July 30, 2007 @04:23PM

simoniker writes: Nowadays, Activision is a massive worldwide publisher, responsible for the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero franchises, among many others. But it all started with just four game developers leaving Atari in 1979, and there's a new history of the first ever third-party publisher, with insight from company co-founder David Crane, up on Gamasutra. From the piece: ""A memo was circulated from the marketing department showing the prior year's cartridge sales, broken down by game as a percentage of sales. The intent of the memo was to alert the game development staff to what types of games were selling well," Crane recalled. "This memo backfired however, as it demonstrated the value of the game designer individually. Video game design in those days was a one-man process with one person doing the creative design, the storyboards, the graphics, the music, the sound effects, every line of programming, and final play testing. So when I saw a memo that the games for which I was 100 percent responsible had generated over $20 million in revenues, I was one of the people wondering why I was working in complete anonymity for a $20,000 salary.""

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