SirFozzie - Slashdot User

Submission + - Wikipedia's 2008 donation campaign kicks off (wikimedia.org) 1

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Thursday November 06, 2008 @04:01PM

David Gerard writes: "It's that time of year again: Wikipedia needs your money. The Wikimedia sites don't have ads — it all runs on donations. This year, the Wikimedia Foundation is hitting the theme that Wikipedia, the most popular Wikimedia site, is useful to you every day so deserves your support. The goal this time is six million dollars, which is approximately nothing to run a top 10 site (#8 on Alexa, #4 on ComScore). They're at almost $2 million so far. There's blog buttons and radio/podcast PSAs too. The site had its greatest traffic ever on election night, falling over for a short time under the strain."

Submission + - RIAA Victim Wins Attorney's Fees

Submitted by

VE3OGG

on Wednesday February 07, 2007 @12:46PM

VE3OGG writes: "Debbie Foster, one of the many caught-up in the RIAA's drift-net attacks who was sued back in 2004 has recently seen yet another victory. After having the suit dropped against her "with prejudice" several months back, Foster filed a counter-claim, and has just been awarded "reasonable" attorney's fees. Could this, in conjunction with cases such as Santangelo be showing a turning of the tide against the RIAA?"

Submission + - Console Makers Sued Over Controller Ports

Submitted by

njkid1

on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @06:15PM

njkid1 writes: "Will the madness ever end? Yet another patent infringement case has surfaced regarding video game controllers. This time Texas-based Fenner Investments is suing the big three console makers for supposedly violating the "Low-Voltage Joystick Port Interface" patent. http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=1492 5&ncid=AOLGAM000500000000010"

Supreme Court Clears Patent Invalidity Suits 120

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @06:11PM from the open-season dept.

The Empiricist writes "The United States Supreme Court has cleared the way for entities to sue over the validity of a patent — even while paying user fees to the patent holder. The eight-to-one Medimmune v. Genetech decision, written by Justice Scalia, held that by paying royalties to a patent holder, one does not necessarily waive the right to challenge the validity of the patent."

Submission + - Spoke.com is selling your address book

Submitted by

chimpo13

on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @06:07PM

chimpo13 writes: "Phil Yanov talks about how Spoke.com is stealing your soul. Spoke says that it launched it's free service in August and that they have added 3 million new names since August. How did they do that? It was easy! To get access to Spoke's "free" service, you must install the Spoke toolbar. The Spoke toolbar then copies all of the information from your address book into the Spoke database. It's at this point you should be able to smell the burning sulfur. Spoke can sell those names, titles, companies, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers (listed and unlisted), passwords and PIN numbers to direct marketing organizations."

HellGate London To Be For-Pay Online Experience 56

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:45PM from the no-freebie-for-you dept.

The long-in-development HellGate: London, which finally has a release date, has been announced as a for-pay MMOG-style game. From the article: "Drawing similarities to ArenaNet's Guild Wars, Hellgate's online is heavily instanced. Group and solo PvE is the game's main focus; PvP will exist in a small scale form, but is not a major element of the initial launch. It will also feature a Hardcore mode similar to that found in Blizzard's Diablo II, a game on which many members of the Hellgate team worked. Hellgate's multiplayer will contain all of the missions and story from the single-player aspect of the game, as well as exclusive gameplay modes and content. Like the single-player game, it will be comprised of dynamically generated areas and items. Further content will be continually added over time by a dedicated Flagship team."

Submission + - Return of Netwosix

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:44PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "On DistroWatch i read a good news: "Remember Netwosix? It used to be a great security-oriented Linux distribution designed for specialist tasks, such as penetration testing. That's until its founder, Vincenzo Ciaglia, decided to take a paid position with Guardian Digital, the developers of EnGarde Secure Linux, and abandoned the project. The good news is that Netwosix is now back: "Yes, Netwosix will be re-born! After I decided to leave Guardian Digital, I'm working on NETWOSIX-NG, with the primary goal of introducing complete support for SELinux. My goal is still to create one of the best secure-by-default GNU/Linux distribution. If you have comments or any kind of suggestion please let's discuss it together here." For more information please read this post on Netwosix.org.""

Submission + - The race to beat Google

Submitted by yavori on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:40PM

yavori writes: In an article in the January 1st 2007 issue of NYTimes, reporter Miguel Helft writes about the race in Silicon Valley to beat Google. Certainly the future of search has been much talked about lately. Last year Read/WriteWeb had a number of big posts on this topic, including Emre's Search 2.0 and my post about vertical search. We have also profiled many search players, including Retrevo, Hakia, Quintura, Pluggd, Microsoft Live Search, Snap and ChaCha. Since we have been following the battle closely, we are excited to see the coverage in New York Times — which signals that the search space has heated up enough to be worthy of attention by a tech-savvy mainstream audience.

Submission + - Xbox360 HDDVD addon working on your PC in 5 Mins

Submitted by kefler on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:16PM

kefler writes: "...I can now install and run the thing in less than 5 minutes. So I wanted to share my experiences so that none of you would have as hard a time as me. Below — I'll start with Nvidia users and laptops.... In following threads I'll go onto ATI owners...."

Submission + - Would you admit to reading Slashdot?

Submitted by MagicM on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:16PM

MagicM writes: While considering potential job-interview questions, I considered: "Are there any publications/blogs/websites that you regularly read?" Every industry has their hallmark websites, and whether an interviewee knows them could be an indication of their professionalism. However, if you were asked this question, would you list Slashdot as part of your daily dose of information?

Gates Pegs Nintendo, Not Sony, as Toughest Competition 178

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @04:56PM from the when-white-plastic-fights dept.

njkid1 writes "Microsoft's Bill Gates thinks that because of the 'impressive strength' of the company and its new Wii console Nintendo is now Microsoft's biggest competition when it comes to videogames. This is somewhat understandable, given Nintendo's new projections for this year. The Japanese game maker plans to sell an impressive 100 Million DS games this year, along with 21 Million Wii games and some six million consoles. This may seem to be just more flack, to go along with Peter Moore's dismissive comments towards Sony at CES this week, but news of the Halo DS game that almost was puts credence to Microsoft's new priorities."

Submission + - CliffyB on designing Gears of War

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @04:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: Great story on Pastemagazine.com about the development of Gears of War, and about CliffyB's work methods — including what it's like around his office, and why he doesn't mind boiling his games into executive PowerPoints. He also talks about his submission to last year's GDC game design challenge, where he had to conceive a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize.

As usual with CliffyB there are lots of good quotes: "We make games about guns because making games about talking is hard and not interesting yet. The basis of interaction is, 'what is the easiest way I can touch this environment?' And when you're using your gun, you're touching everything."

Wii Outselling PS3 in Japan 385

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @04:29PM from the white-plastic-over-black-plastic dept.

saintory writes "Apparently the Japanese console consumers are sinking their teeth into the modest Wii and are not as interested in the power-packed PS3. In fact, the Wii is outselling Sony's new console by a factor of almost 2:1. The number of PS3s sold into the Japanese market (466,716) falls well short of the million Sony had planned for the end of 2006. 989,118 Wii consoles have been sold in Japan in the same time span. From the article: 'Both Sony and Nintendo are projecting selling 6 million consoles by the end of March. Sony expects to start shipping the PS3 to Europe sometime that month as well. Straggling far behind Sony and Nintendo in the Enterbrain survey was Microsoft's Xbox 360, which had sold 290,467 since its Japan debut in December 2005. Selling machines in large numbers is crucial in the gaming business because it encourages software companies to make more games to play on the machines, which in turn boosts console sales.'"

Submission + - VeriSign puts Flaw Bounty on Vista, IE7

Submitted by

rchris1172

on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @04:13PM

rchris1172 writes: "VeriSign's iDefense Labs has placed an $8,000 bounty on remote code execution holes in Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7. As part of its its controversial pay-for-flaw VCP (Vulnerability Contributor Program), iDefense said it will pay the reward for each submitted vulnerability that allows an attacker to remotely exploit and execute arbitrary code on either of the two Microsoft products. In addition to the $8,000 award for the flaw, iDefense will pay between $2,000 and $4,000 for working exploit code that exploits the submitted vulnerability."

Submission + - Disclosure for 70 million websites

Submitted by sectest on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @03:59PM

sectest writes: CSO posted an article about the shifting landscape of vulnerability disclosure from shrink-wrapped software to real-world websites. "Grossman (CTO, WhiteHat Security) claims XSS vulnerabilities can be found in 70 percent of websites." ... "If you apply those number to a recent Netcraft survey, which estimated that there are close to 100 million websites, you've got 70 million sites with XSS vulnerabilities. Repairing them one-off, two-off, 200,000-off is spitting in the proverbial ocean." Also unclear is the legality of even finding a vulnerability in a public website. Recent high profile prosecutions have cautioned security researches about sharing their discoveries. And if those people stop looking, "That leaves the malicious ones, unconcerned by the legal or social implications of what they do, as the dominant demographic still looking for Web vulnerabilities." Good news for the hackers, bad for the rest of us.

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