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Security

IT Departments Fear Growing Expertise of Users 499

flatfilsoc recommends a long article in CIO magazine on users who know too much and the IT leaders who fear them. Dubbing the universe of consumer technology the "shadow IT department," the article highlights the extent to which the boundary between users' workplace and home have broken down. It notes the increasing clash — familiar to anyone who works in a company with an IT department — between users' home-grown productivity boosters and IT's mandate to protect corporate data. The inherent tendency of the IT department to want to crack down and control technology that it doesn't supply should be resisted at all costs, according to CIO. The article outlines strategies for co-existence. It just might persuade some desperate CIO somewhere not to embark on a career-limiting path of decreeing against gmail and IM.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Surgical success linked to skill at video games

mjh writes: According to The Guardian, "A study has found a direct link between skill at video gaming and skill at keyhole, or laparoscopic, surgery. Young surgeons who spent at least three hours a week playing video games in the past made 37% fewer errors, were 27% faster, and scored 42% better overall than surgeons who had never played a video game at all." The sample size they quote seems rather small, but it suggests that Steven Johnson might be right.
Internet Explorer

Submission + - IE7 No longer a critical update?

Gene K writes: While running a handful of newly-installed machines by Windows Update today, I noticed that the Internet Explorer 7 'critical update' is no longer listed. Is this simply an oversight or has Microsoft finally buckled in the face of incompatibility?
User Journal

Journal Journal: Drug patents threatening cheap drugs

This was a story I tried to submit but was rejected by Slashdot's editorial staff. Not grousing, saving my composition here for posterity, as I do with other of my rejected stories.
Music

iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax 311

holy_calamity writes "The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB has burst open a musical fraud in the usually staid world of classical piano. Albums by the much vaunted British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, are identified by the iTunes player as belonging to other performers. A more scientific analysis by an audio remastering firm has found that none of Hatto's works appear to be hers. Her husband, who produced all her albums, says he 'cannot explain' the similarities."
Windows

Submission + - Vista's RAM sweet spot: 4GB

jcatcw writes: David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Divison and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. With more RAM, there's more caching.
Operating Systems

Submission + - The Open Source in Mac OS X Server

DECS writes: Apple has used open source to rapidly build a server business after its previous efforts fell flat in the mid 90s. Open Source in Mac OS X Server explains how Apple balances its commercial and open developments, why the criticism of Apple's Darwin project is inevitable, and how open source has fueled rapid progress in five versions of Mac OS X Server.
The Internet

Submission + - Technology Behind Entertainment

Pink Fluffy Dinosaur writes: Web 2.0 applications pop up daily in the virtual scenery. www.flickrcombat.com is a mashup that is offering an effective process to involve the community in revealing the best Flickr photos (sourced via the flickr.com API) and at the same time to keep things interesting and entertaining. In the good web 2.0 spirit, the users exercise an influence over the content and the more they get involved, the more value they add to the application. So what is FlickrCombat all about? Two pictures in each combat, seven categories to choose from, and a top 21 that says it all. The rank of a picture is determined by the defeats, wins and number of combats (more details on the algorithm here. )
Security

Submission + - When IT security gets physical

ancientribe writes: A social engineering firm is forced to actually steal the laptop of a technology-savvy suspected employee-gone-bad to investigate his actions for a large corporate client, and things get physical — literally, as they wrestle over the machine, according to this column in Dark Reading. Steve Stasiukonis, vice president and founder of Secure Network Technologies, recounts the sting operation that led to a scuffle, as well as getting the goods on the culprit.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=117 531&WT.svl=tease3_2
Privacy

Submission + - Scientist make quantum encryption breakthrough

Madas writes: "Scientists working in Cambridge, England have managed to make quantum encryption completely secure by putting decoy pulses in the key transmission stream. According to the story this paves the way for safe, encrypted high-speed data links. Could this allow completely private transmission of data away from snooping eyes and ears? Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when travelling on the internet?"
Software

Submission + - Lightroom vs. Aperture

Nonu writes: Adobe has officially released its Aperture killer, Lightroom, and the reviews are starting to pop up. Ars looks at Lightroom and concludes that it's a better choice for those without bleeding-edge hardware. 'Aperture's main drawback is still performance as it was designed for bleeding edge machines. On a quad Core 2 Duo Xeon, it is very usable but Lightroom just feels faster for everything regardless of hardware. Since Aperture relies on Core Image and a fast video card to do its adjustments (RAW decoding is done by the CPU), it's limited to what the single 3-D card can do. Lightroom does everything with the CPU and so it is likely to gain more speed as multicore systems get faster.'
Microsoft

Journal Journal: Gates announce AIDS vaccine initiative

From the article:

Canada will be the site of a new facility to manufacture and test vaccines to fight HIV/AIDS, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates announced Tuesday in Ottawa. Ottawa will contribute up to $111 million toward the new Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative, while the Microsoft founder, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will donate up to $28 million.

Programming

Submission + - Open vs. Closed Source Security

ChelleChelle writes: "Which is more secure — open or closed source systems? It's a question sure to start a heated argument among any group of developers. But why bother to argue if you don't know all the facts? This article takes a close look at this debate and defines its essential elements."

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