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Wireless Networking

Duke Wireless Problem Caused by Cisco, not iPhone 195

Posted by CmdrTaco from the egg-on-someone's-face dept.
jpallas writes "Following up to a previous Slashdot story, it now turns out that the widely reported problems with Duke University's wireless network were not caused by Apple's iPhone. The problem was actually with their Cisco network. Duke's Chief Information Officer praises the work of their technical staff. Does that include the assistant director for communications infrastructure who was quoted as saying, "I don't believe it's a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form?""
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Joomla! GPL Compliance Issues Sparks Upheaval (linux.com)

Submitted by
jascat
jascat writes: "An article at linux.com highlights the recent flap with developers of closed-source extensions to the Joomla! Content Management System after Open Source Matters, Inc., the organization created by the Joomla! developers to serve as protector of Joomla! and copyright owner, announced that such extensions violate the GPL.

Joomla! project leader Louis Landry and his colleagues want to protect the project they love. That's why, after two years of allowing proprietary plugins for the open source CMS, the group has decided to ask third-party developers for voluntary compliance with the terms of the GNU General Public License, under which Joomla! is licensed. Those developers are complaining that it's unfair for Joomla! to reverse its position after "a bunch of companies spent millions," according to one developer employed by a company that markets the proprietary extensions. Landry says he and the Joomla! team were wrong to have allowed the exceptions, and a return to compliance is essential in order to legally protect the open nature of Joomla!."
The Internet

Visualizing the Wikipedia Power Struggle 174

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ban-everything-and-let-wales-sort-em-out dept.
todd450 pointed us to a nifty visualization of Wikipedia and controversial articles in it. The image started with a network of 650,000 articles color coded to indicate activity. The original image is apparently 5' square, but the sample image they have is still pretty neat.
Security

Submission + - Scanning Ajax for XSS Entry Points

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ajax code loaded in browser can have entry points to XSS and it is the job of the security analyst to identify these entry points. It is difficult to decisively conclude that possible entry points to an application can be exploited. One may need to do a trace or debug to measure the risk of these entry points. This paper introduces you to a quick way to identify XSS entry points in an application.
Television

Submission + - Robert Adler, co-inventor of TV remote, dead at 93

Submitted by
yroJJory
yroJJory writes: "Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died. Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made the couch potato possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

Adler also was considered a pioneer in SAW technology, or surface acoustic waves, in color television sets and touch screens. The technology has also been used in cellular telephones.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published his most recent patent application, for advances in touch screen technology, on Feb. 1."
The Courts

Submission + - GPL click-through licenses?

Submitted by Kuciwalker
Kuciwalker writes: It seems that every other open-source program I download includes the GPL as a click-through license during the install. What's the point of this? If the GPL is a distribution, not use license then I don't do anything by agreeing to it during installation. Are we just so acclimated to clicking "yes" to an EULA, or are there valid legal reasons it's put there?
Biotech

Submission + - Search for New Autism Genes

Submitted by
iuvasago
iuvasago writes: "The largest search for autism genes to date, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has implicated components of the brain's glutamate chemical messenger system and a previously overlooked site on chromosome 11. Based on 1,168 families with at least two affected members, the genome scan adds to evidence that tiny, rare variations in genes may heighten risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD). [Read More] from Physorg.com"
Toys

Tech Toys Dominate Toy Fair 2007 48

Posted by Zonk from the take-me-to-your-elmo dept.
Edis Krad writes "An CNN Money article previews the Hot Toys for 2007 from this past week's Toy Fair. The article is a great place to start looking through the hundreds of new products that were on display at the annual industry event. Among those featured in the article, I was particularly impressed with the Video Journal (blogging for kids?), the virtual bicycle (apparently, riding a real bicycle isn't cool enough anymore), and last but not least, the robotic parrot, that oddly reminds me of the replicant owl in Blade Runner. For more details on tech toys at the event, IEEE Spectrum has a rundown on the nerdier toys available. Artificial snow and a pre-assembled Mentos/Coke kit were two of that journalist's favorites. For different perspectives Forbes has a look at the toy business as it stands since last week, and Wired's Luddite column crabs that kids have too many techie toys nowadays. Dagnabit."
Businesses

Submission + - New bill that will curb outrageous cell phone tax

Submitted by
ziggz
ziggz writes: "If you have a cell phone, then you are probably aware that you are paying much more each month than the calling plan you signed up for. Why? Greedy Uncle Sam is hitting you up with double digit taxes. Everyone is required to pay a 6.05% federal tax plus all kinds of various trumped up state taxes. Baltimore, for example, simply decided to add a $3.50 additional tax to their residents' bills in 2005. A USA today article breaks down the total taxes you are paying by state, most averaging 15% or more. States have gotten so ridiculous in hiding taxes on your cell phone bill that Congress has finally stepped up by introducing the Cell Phone Tax Freedom Act of 2007. You can also have emails sent to your congressmen."
Programming

Submission + - "Happy 2nd Birthday, AJAX!" Say Pre-AJAX P

Submitted by jg21
jg21 writes: AJAXWorld Magazine celebrates the second birthday of the coining of AJAX by going behind the scenes and asking the early pioneers of rich applications delivered into web browsers how it was for them from February 18, 2005, when suddenly a single, easy-to-comprehend term arrived to help them propagate their new-web goals.
Mozilla

Submission + - EverQuest II embeds Mozilla browser

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: EverQuest II's next release will include an embedding of the Mozilla browser. It's currently live on the test server and has a few issues that will hopefully be resolved before release.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?st art=15&topic_id=347230

Some interesting uses of the browser such as automatically searching for quest hints are being discussed on the interface board:

http://www.eq2interface.com/forums/showthread.php? t=7846
Data Storage

Submission + - Google paper on disk reliability

Submitted by oski4410
oski4410 writes: The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract:

"Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported."

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