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Spam

Submission + - CAN-SPAM Plaintiff Ordered to Pay $111,000 (spamnotes.com)

Submitted by
Eric Goldman
Eric Goldman writes: "Everyone hates spam, but that doesn't mean every anti-spam lawsuit is meritorious. In a recent ruling, a federal court in Washington state ordered James Gordon, a notorious anti-spam plaintiff, to pay the defendants $111,000 for attorneys' fees and costs incurred defending Gordon's lawsuit. The court says "Plaintiffs' instant lawsuit is an excellent example of the ill-motivated, unreasonable, and frivolous type of lawsuit that justifies an award of attorneys' fees to Defendants.""
Operating Systems

Submission + - Which tagging file systems are out there?

Submitted by
Jonathan M Lee
Jonathan M Lee writes: "I want to start organizing and querying my own local burgeoning heap of files in a way similar to using Delicious to handle bookmarks and Flickr to handle pics. I use Wintels, Macs and GNU/Linux, so I'd appreciate everyone's suggestions. I did some googling and came up with ingenious uses of Spotlight on the Mac, promises of still-to-come WinFS goodness and two neat hacks (1, 2) on GNULinux. What am I missing? Anyone know of other options? I'm interested in neither application-level support for tags nor in currently-in-early-design-stage projects, but instead in general, filesystem-level solutions which work today. Thanks :-)"
Businesses

Submission + - Penalizing for Poor Health 2

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Perhaps laying the groundwork for Sicko II, Clarian Health announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index is over 30. Even slim-and-trim employees have to worry about their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels — they'll be dinged $5 for each standard they don't meet. Smokers get a sneak preview of the policy starting next year, when they'll find $5 less in each check. Clarian credited new government HIPPAA rules that became effective July 1st for giving it the courage to follow its penalize-for-poor-health convictions."
Space

Submission + - Illuminated Smoke Plume From Phoenix Spacecraft (stormvideographer.com)

Submitted by
StormVideo
StormVideo writes: "Here is a very cool picture from the launch yesterday of the Delta II rocket that carried the Phoenix Spacecraft on it's journey to Mars. The pic is of left over's from the launch of the rocket smoke trail and gas plume. It was very cool as the gas plume was being illuminated by the sun that was still below the horizon making for a awesome scene in the dark morning Florida sky."
Censorship

Submission + - Corporate CEO targets teenage blogger 3

Submitted by
marylouluddite
marylouluddite writes: "A corporate CEO named Patrick Byrne, who runs a company called Overstock.com, has sicced his Director of Communications, Judd Bagley, on a teenage blogger who lampooned him.

The blogger's name is Zac Bissonnette, a college freshman and 19 years old. Zac blogs on stocks at AOL, and also has a parody website, wwww.hedgefunnies.com.

One of his items lampooned Patrick Byrne, and he has also been critical of Byrne in Blogging Stocks. See http://hedgefunnies.com/2007/07/30/patrick-byrne-u nveils-irrefutable-proof-of-naked-short-selling

Byrne struck back by having Bagley attack Zac on Wikipedia, and by threatening to do an item about him in antisocialmedia.net, a website dedicated to attacking critics of Patrick Byrne.

An investigative reporter, Gary Weiss, has the scoop on his blog: http://garyweiss.blogspot.com/2007/08/overstockcom -sinks-to-new-low-targets.html

It's really a shame that a big company is so paranoid and sensitive to criticism that it has to chase after a teenage blogger."
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Second Life Financial Sector in Crisis? (sl-investors-bank.com)

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes: Second Life's micro-economy is currently in the grip of a financial crisis, its real, its here and its now! This all started some months ago and is in part thanks to Linden Lab's sheer incompetence and greed. Many things have led SL economy to the edge of collapse, many of them had to do with the way Linden Lab handles matters. They keep slapping `residents` in the face, with mainland market flood, age verification threatening, which is by the way illegal in many countries, lies, poor communication, and last but not least, gambling ban.
Biotech

Submission + - The physics of beer bubbles

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Yesterday, I told you about virtual beer. Today, let's follow two North America researchers who are studying the physics of real beer bubbles. 'Singly scattered waves form the basis of many imaging techniques such as radar or seismic exploration.' But pouring beer in a mug involves multiply scattered acoustic waves. They are more complex to study, but they can be used to look at various phenomena, such as predicting volcanic eruptions or understanding the movement of particles in fluids like beer. They also could be used to monitor the structural health of bridges and buildings or the stability of food products over time. Read more for additional references and a photo showing how the researchers monitor beer bubbles."
Security

Submission + - The Physical Hacks at DefCon (physorg.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "As we all know, DefCon is occurring in Vegas this weekend but Saturday held a room that focused on possibly the oldest form of hacking — lockpicking. That's right, as software security becomes better and better, the focus may instead shift towards simple hacking tips like looking over someone's shoulder for their password, faking employment or just picking the locks to gain access to the building where machines are left on overnight. This is nothing to sneeze at, "Medeco deadbolt locks relied on worldwide at embassies, banks and other tempting targets for thieves, spies or terrorists can be opened in seconds with a strip of metal and a thin screw driver, Marc Tobias of Security.org demonstrated for AFP ... Tobias says he refuses to publish details of 'defeating' the locks because they are used in places ranging from homes, banks and jewelers to the White House and the Pentagon. He asked AFP not to disclose how it is done." I'm sure all Slashdot readers are savvy enough to use firewall(s) but do you know and trust what locks 'physically' protect your data from hacks like these?"
Graphics

Submission + - New Milestone Demoscene Releases. (pouet.net) 4

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: With over 3000 visitors one of the biggest computer festivals, the Assembly 2007, just closed doors. The event saw the release of some of the best demoscene productions of this year. Among them the first good demos for the XBOX 360, but also for platforms as obscure as the Atari VCS2600 from 1976. The main demo competition was won by Lifeforce, one of the most acclaimed demoscene demos ever. Other releases can be found here.
Programming

Submission + - Hackers Extract Main Key to iPhone Unlocking (gizmodo.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After reverse-engineering Nucleus, the iPhone's radio/multimedia chip RTOS, the iPhone Dev Team has achieved the next big milestone to free the iPhone from the AT&T network: they have extracted the full content of the S-Gold2 chip's NOR memory. Bluntly put, these are the plans for the damn Death Star and "is the main key to achieve true unlocking." They are also calling for donations to help them keep their efforts.
Google

Submission + - Google employee perks versus state prison perks

Submitted by
Wee
Wee writes: "Google recently topped Fortune's list of "100 Best Companies to Work For" partly due to its huge set of employee perks. But who really has the best perks: Google or your local state prison?

Mike Nicholson wrote a cleverly humorous article on Google employee perks compared to the stuff that prisoners are entitled to. The verdict? If you're really after perks, you should commit a major crime rather than work for Google."

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