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Woman Wins Libel Suit By Suing Wrong Website 323

Posted by samzenpus from the close-enough dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the 'y' at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it."
News

Ray Kurzweil Responds To PZ Myers 238

Posted by Soulskill from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.
On Tuesday we discussed a scathing critique of Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain written by PZ Myers. Reader Amara notes that Kurzweil has now responded on his blog. Quoting: "Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn't at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain."

Comment Re:I can believe it... (Score 1) 179

by iburrell (#32930360) Attached to: Millions of Home Routers Are Hackable

Except they don't have access to the router. The attack is tricking the user's browser into attacking their router. The router can be completely locked down on the WAN side. The router is vulnerable on the LAN side because of insecure password or some other attack. But that normally only works when you are inside someone's house. This is tricking the browser into performing the attack. The browser isn't compromised; it is just accessing a site normally and running some JavaScript.

This is tricking the little kid inside the car to unlock it for you.

Comment Re:There will be a lot more TCP (and IPv6) queries (Score 3, Informative) 58

by iburrell (#32672280) Attached to: Dot-Org TLD Signed For DNSSEC

DNSSEC requires EDNS. EDNS allows for UDP packets larger than the original 512-byte limit of DNS over UDP. There could be problems with fragmented packets which are larger than the MTU. Some experiments show that responses with DNSSEC and IPv6 are larger than 512-bytes but smaller than typical MTU of 1500 bytes.

There are some old firewall equipment that mistakenly prohibits DNS packets longer 512 bytes over UDP but those have caused problems for a while.
Education

Gulf Oil Spill Disaster — Spawn of the Living Dead 228

Posted by timothy from the less-on-your-plate dept.
grrlscientist writes "A recently published study, intended to provide data to commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico so they maximize their catch of Yellowfin Tuna, Thunnus albacares, whilst avoiding bycatch of critically endangered Atlantic (Northern) Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus, suggests that the Deepwater Horizon oil leak may devastate the endangered Atlantic bluefin population, causing it to completely collapse or possibly go extinct."
Handhelds

New Handheld Computer Is 100% Open Source 195

Posted by kdawson from the small-wonder dept.
metasonix writes "While the rest of the industry has been babbling on about the iPad and imitations thereof, Qi Hardware is actually shipping a product that is completely open source and copyleft. Linux News reviews the Ben NanoNote (product page), a handheld computer apparently containing no proprietary technology. It uses a 366 MHz MIPS processor, 32MB RAM, 2 GB flash, a 320x240-pixel color display, and a Qwerty keyboard. No network is built in, though it is said to accept SD-card Wi-Fi or USB Ethernet adapters. Included is a very simple Linux OS based on the OpenWrt distro installed in Linksys routers, with Busybox GUI. It's apparently intended primarily for hardware and software hackers, not as a general-audience handheld. The price is right, though: $99."
Media

Low-Level Format For a USB Flash Drive? 252

Posted by timothy from the back-from-the-living-dead dept.
Luyseyal writes "I unwittingly bought one of these terrible flash cards at Fry's and have managed to nuke two of them, successively. I have a USB flash card reader that will read/write the current one at USB 1.0 speed, but it locks up every Ubuntu and XP machine I've come across in high-speed access mode. I have read that if I low-level format it that it could be fixed, though my current one doesn't support it. My Google-fu must be weak because I cannot seem to find a USB flash reader that specifies that it will do low-level formatting." Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?
Government

Are We Ready For a True Data Disaster? 113

Posted by timothy from the no-no-no-no-and-no dept.
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions how long we can go before a truly catastrophic data disaster strikes. 'The lure of potential profits in the information economy, combined with the apparent ease with which data can be gathered and a lack of regulation, creates a climate of recklessness in which a "data spill" of the scale of the Deepwater Horizon incident seems not just likely, but inevitable.' Witness Google mistakenly emailing potentially sensitive business data to customers of its Local Business Center service, or the 1.5 million Facebook accounts and passwords recently offered up on an underground hacking forum. 'These incidents seem relatively minor, but as companies gather ever more individually identifiable data and cross-reference these databases in new and more innovative ways, the potential for a major catastrophe grows.'"
United States

State Senator Caught Looking At Porn On Senate Floor 574

Posted by samzenpus from the let's-vote-on-this-instead dept.
Everyone knows how boring a debate on a controversial abortion bill can get on the Senate floor. So it's no wonder that Florida State Sen. Mike Bennett took the time to look at a little porn and a video of a dog running out of the water and shaking itself off. From the article: "Ironically, as Bennett is viewing the material, you can hear a Senator Dan Gelber's voice in the background debating a controversial abortion bill. 'I'm against this bill,' said Gelber, 'because it disrespects too many women in the state of Florida.' Bennett defended his actions, telling Sunshine State News it was an email sent to him by a woman 'who happens to be a former court administrator.'"

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2, Informative) 132

by iburrell (#32045890) Attached to: DNSSEC May Cause Problems On May 5

DNS uses UDP by default. If the response is too big for UDP, then it switches to TCP. The limit for UDP packets used to be 512 bytes but extensions allow the size to be much larger. Old firewalls think that 512-bytes is the limit of DNS over UDP and block any longer packets.
Image

365 Days of Photojournalism With Stormtroopers 30

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-good-to-have-friends dept.
Lanxon writes "Wired reports that for one French fan, the Stormtrooper has become an obsession. Stormtroopers 365 is a collection of wacky, witty, and artistic photographs that its creator Stéfan Le Dû has been adding to daily since 3 April 2009 when the project began. 'I got a new camera and I had some Stormtrooper figures sleeping in their blister packs for months. I wanted to start something a bit challenging on Flickr, and I had previously seen some awesome Star Wars toys pictures, and other "365" projects that I really liked,' he says. The two starring Stormtroopers — TK455 and TK479 — have run into cats, clocks, various household implements, and even a DeLorean sports car."
Graphics

64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha 172

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-shiny dept.
Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."
Software

The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3 104

Posted by timothy from the people-of-earth-you're-on-your-own dept.
Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."

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