ONU CS Geek - Slashdot User

DIY USB Servo-Guided Water Gun 66

Posted by timothy on Friday December 26, 2008 @05:50AM from the seasonally-inappropriate dept.

An anonymous reader writes "What better way is there to learn something than by making your own DIY gadget? Here's a new video showing how to use a common hobby servo, in conjunction with a small water pump, to create a USB controlled water gun! You can use your keyboard to aim and fire at an unsuspecting passerby. Both fun and educational, this project looks like a great DIY weekend project for any IT guy, wanting to make sure people think twice before asking a stupid question!"

Submission + - Ohio University finds key to getting RIAA to stop 7

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @03:26PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, has found the key to getting the RIAA to stop inundating it and its students with "settlement" letters. According to the university's student online publication, the university paid $60,000, plus $16,000 per year "maintenance", to Audible Magic, the business partner of the RIAA's all-purpose expert witness Dr. Doug Jacobson, for its "CopySense" filtering software. Once it made the payments, the letters stopped. This of course raises a lot of questions as to the 'disinterestedness' of Dr. Jacobson, whose deposition in the UMG v. Lindor case was the subject of interesting Slashdot commentary."

Why Are T1 Lines Still Expensive? 556

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @05:55PM from the unpredictable-market-forces dept.

badfrog asks: "Over the last 10 years, DSL and cable modem has upped its speed (although in some instances only slightly) and dropped its price. However, the price of a T1 has stayed almost exactly the same. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have predicted any geek that wanted to would have fiber or their own T1 line to the house by now. What is with this sad state of affairs that a 'business class' 1.544Mbit connection is hundreds of dollars more than a 6Mbit cable connection? Is it a legitimate case that a high upload rate should increase cost so significantly?"

Submission + - SFEE acquired by CollabNet

Submitted by anomalous cohort on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:35AM

anomalous cohort writes: Both CollabNet and VA Software have announced that VA Software has sold their SFEE product to CollabNet.

My questions for the /. community are this. Who is CollabNet? What are your experiences with CollabNet? What do you think CollabNet will do with SFEE? Does SFEE compete directly with CollabNet Enterprise Edition or are these two complimentary products that serve different market segments?

Submission + - CollabNet buys SourceForge Enterprise Edition

Submitted by rca66 on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @07:47AM

rca66 writes: Yesterday CollabNet and VA Software announced in a press release, that CollabNet will take over the SourceForge Enterprise Edition Business from VA Software. As part of this deal several employess from VA Sofware will change to CollabNet. CollabNet is specialized on the development of distributed applications and supports the Open Source project Subversion. VA Software will concentrate on the the online media of its subsidiary OSTG, which owns Slashdot, SourceForge, NewsForge, Linux.com and Freshmeat.

Submission + - Testing commercial 2-factor authentication systems

Submitted by Fry-kun on Monday January 15, 2007 @02:40PM

Fry-kun writes: I recently became interested in setting up a 2-factor authentication system for my laptop. With that in mind, I bought a fairly inexpensive USB key. Although it seems to work, I can't bring myself to trust it completely: Kensington claims that the system is secure, but there is no independent security lab analysis of the product. In other words, for all I know, there may be a gaping hole in their security setup.
Worse yet, there are apparently no reviews of the product, no mention of anyone trying to test it and no hardware hackers tried to make it work in Linux, even though it's been out for over 2 years.

How would you go about making sure that a security product does what it claims to?

Submission + - Week of Oracle database bugs gets cancelled!

Submitted by

kantaguru

on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @05:49PM

kantaguru writes: "Do you remember so called Week Of Oracle Bugs (WOOB) announced by
security researcher Cesar Cerrudo last week on 21.11 also at Slashdot: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/21/173 3208

Well guess what?

WOOB is no more, woop! It's gone, its nowhere to be found!

It got suspended, from http://www.argeniss.com/woodb.html where Argeniss writes:

"The Week of Oracle Database Bugs

We are sad to announce that due to many problems the Week of Oracle Database Bugs gets suspended.

We would like to ask for apologizes to people who supported this and were really excited with the idea, also we would like to thank the people who contributed with Oracle vulnerabilities."

Would anyone like to know what possible problems they had for trying to run the Week of Oracle bugs?

I'd guess they got pretty much quiesced by Oracle PR or lawyers :(

Aren't we sad now too? Maybe we can try it again next week!

Any volunteers up for this?"

Feed Feds Relent on Security Hacker (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @04:12PM

A grad student who posted a fake boarding pass generator to illuminate a security hole, only to get raided by the FBI, avoids prosecution. But he says his treatment will make the nation less safe. In 27B Stroke 6.

Journal Journal: The Microsoft ROKR

Journal by DingerX on Sunday November 26, 2006 @05:41PM

I'm loving this Zune thing. Only a couple times a season does a consumer electronic launch end in such a tragic mess of champagne, blood and flailing body parts. As far as catastrophes go, the Zune has to work for mindshare: I mean, we've got the PS3, both Blue-Ray and HD-DVD, and increasingly cool videos of Li-Ion fires. But the Zune had a really great launch: before the band could stop playing, the Zune had slipped to the deep, leaving its only trace a few bubbles that would intermitten

Submission + - NTP sues Palm with Patent Infringement Suit

Submitted by

WebHostingGuy

on Monday November 06, 2006 @08:14PM

WebHostingGuy writes: "As reported by C|Net NTP filed a patent lawsuit against Palm asserting that Palm's products, services, systems and processes infringe on NTP's patents. Specifically, NTP is claiming that Palm infringes on seven of its patents, five of which it successfully proved RIM had violated. Palm's line of Treo smart phones, the Palm VII, Palm i700 and Palm Tungsten and their associated software applications and services, are each named as infringing on NTP's patents."

Submission + - Mac Mini Portable Project - Tablet Edition

Submitted by

artypete

on Monday November 06, 2006 @08:06PM

artypete writes: "Peter Green (me!) has just released details of his latest Mac Mini Portable — the 'Tablet Edition' MkIII.

This actually turns out to be the worlds LIGHTEST (1.9kg) Mac portable, and (probably) the only Mac Intel (Core Solo 1.5Ghz) with a 8" tablet touch screen panel with 3 hours battery life.

"Apple don't make a tablet palmtop, so I made one for them..."

Whilst this might at first sight seem just like any old other Mac mod, it actually sends both an important design message to Apple about consumer requirements, but also delivers a very capable and usable 'for purpose' design.

Apple, make me one so I don't have to DO IT AGAIN!! :-)

http://homepage.mac.com/peter_green/MMP_MkIII_Tabl et/

Construction pictures on site, with video of MMP MkIII Tablet Edition in action coming in the next few hours!!"

Submission + - Guitar Hero Is Big Hit With Bands

Submitted by

Carl Bialik from WSJ

on Monday November 06, 2006 @07:55PM

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes: "An unlikely but growing group of rock stars are also avid players of Guitar Hero, a PlayStation title that uses a miniature plastic guitar to let gamers pretend to be, well, rock stars, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Michael Einziger, the 30-year-old guitarist for the hard-rock band Incubus, says he was "shocked at how hard it was" to play the videogame's version of his song "Stellar." He admits he was handily beaten by his then-14-year-old sister, Ruby Aldridge, when the two of them squared off earlier this year. "It doesn't have anything to do with playing guitar," Mr. Einziger says. "It's all rhythmic." When the four members of the punk-pop band the Donnas got together to play Guitar Hero last week, guitarist Allison Robertson took some good-natured ribbing from her bandmates, says drummer Torry Castellano. That's because Ms. Robertson had a hard time playing along with the band's own song "Take It Off." "Expectations for her are pretty high because she's the guitar player and because she's so good at videogames in general," says Ms. Castellano.'"

Submission + - SSN disclosures and the law

Submitted by on Monday November 06, 2006 @07:33PM

An anonymous reader writes: I recently recieved an email from a US based publicly traded company that I used for income tax services. The content of the email was a screenshot which prominently displayed my SSN. I expressed concern to the company that they chose to send this information over the web in an unencrypted format. The company's response was to offer a verbal apology, explain that it was a one time violation of company policy, and offer a year of credit monitoring service. I think their mishandling of an SSN probably would result in some legal trouble for the company if reported to the government. What sort of fines/other punishment is the company liable for in this case if pursued in court? I'm trying to decide if it's worthwhile to sue them or take the monitoring service and let it go.

Submission + - Power outage knocks LiveJournal offline again

Submitted by brickbat on Saturday November 04, 2006 @06:27PM

brickbat writes: For the second time in less than two years, LiveJournal has been knocked offline due to a power loss at its data center. Information is limited, but it appears that power maintenance which began at the data center late Friday night has caused "unexpected issues". On January 14, 2005, a power outage at the Internap data center took LiveJournal down for more than 24 hours. The service has since moved to its parent company SixApart's data center in San Francisco.

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