Tom DBA - Slashdot User

Comment It's photomicroscopy, not tiny, tiny pictures (Score 1) 80

by Tom DBA on Sunday February 07, 2010 @05:39PM (#31055062) Attached to: 19th-Century Photographer Captured 5,000 Snowflakes

A microphotograph is a very small photo. Like the micro dots spys used to send under postage stamps or the flaps of envelopes. A photomicrograph is a photo taken through a microscope. I think he took photomicrographs or micrographs.

Submission + - My Second Day of Gmail Outage

Submitted by Tom DBA on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @05:11PM

Tom DBA writes: This is my second day of Gmail outage. Cnet has a report on yesterday's outage at http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10323306-264.html . Previously I've had a few minutes outage, max. This forces me to rethink my using Gmail, assuming Google makes that possible again. It's not email if it's Error 502. Clouds of fault tolerant, failing over servers which pick up where other drop off, eh? I had avoided signing up for Google Voice because I didn't want Google to accumulate even more data on me. Now I think what life would be like if for a couple of days people knew how to get me using my Google Voice number and Google Voice was as reliable is Gmail is showing itself to be. I don't quite see how I am a member of a small subset of subscribers suffering a loss of availability in Silicon valley as the Cnet article describes. I'm in Austin.

Submission + - Artistic tendencies linked to 'schizophrenia gene'

Submitted by Tom DBA on Friday July 17, 2009 @09:46AM

Tom DBA writes: New Scientist reports http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17474-artistic-tendencies-linked-to-schizophrenia-gene.html "We're all familiar with the stereotype of the tortured artist. Salvador Dali's various disorders and Sylvia Plath's depression spring to mind. Now new research seems to show why: a genetic mutation linked to psychosis and schizophrenia also influences creativity."

British Men Jailed For Online Hate Crimes 778

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 11, 2009 @02:33PM from the don'tcha-just-hate-online-crime dept.

chrb writes "Two British men have become the first to be jailed for inciting racial hatred online. The men believed that material they published on web servers based in the United States did not fall under the jurisdiction of UK law and was protected under the First Amendment. This argument was rejected by the British trial judge. After being found guilty, the men fled to Los Angeles, where they attempted to claim political asylum, again arguing that they were being persecuted by the British government for speech that was protected under the First Amendment. The asylum bid was rejected and the two were deported back to the UK after spending over a year in a US jail."

Submission + - Kindle Spying (philosecurity.org)

Submitted by

Sherri Davidoff

on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @03:02PM

Sherri Davidoff writes: "Josh Wright recently purchased a new Kindle. Surprisingly, when he downloaded one of his books onto the new Kindle, it offered to open it to the page where he had left off on his old Kindle. In other words, Amazon tracked not just the books he was reading, but specifically which sections of the book he was looking at. 'Amazon is able to determine what pages I've read and which I've skipped,' Josh said. 'They can determine the pages I've re-read (such as the hacking U3 drives section in my Kindle copy of Hacking Exposed), which could potentially be used against me as evidence in a court of law, for example. They could even monitor how much time I spend reading, and when (useful information for an employer who might want to know when their employees are slacking off and not working). I'd like to find out what Amazon's privacy policy is about this data, and what they are retaining long-term. Do they record only the last page read for each of my books, purging this information after a period of time, or is it more nefarious?'"

Submission + - Court IP addresses not "personally identifiabl (mediapost.com)

Submitted by yuna49 on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @10:32AM

yuna49 writes: Online Media Daily reports that a federal judge in Seattle has held that IP addresses are not personal information. "In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer," U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision. Jones issued the ruling in the context of a class-action lawsuit brought by consumers against Microsoft stemming from an update that automatically installed new anti-piracy software. In that case, which dates back to 2006, consumers alleged that Microsoft violated its user agreement by collecting IP addresses in the course of the updates.

This ruling flatly contradicts a recent EU decision to the contrary, as well as other cases in the US. Its potential relevance to the RIAA suits should be obvious to anyone who reads Slashdot.

Submission + - FireFox To Get Multi-Process Separation

Submitted by on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @10:22AM

An anonymous reader writes: FireFox 3.5 is a very strong contender in the browser market but one feature it lacks that Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 has is multi-process browsing. Multi-process browsing gives the browser ultimate stability and performance for computers with multiple processors or CPU cores by having each page or tab, run in a separate process. This means each tab could theoretically could be on separate processors or cores giving you a performance boost over having just one process (the browser) running on just one CPU or core. We gain not only performance from this type of process separation, we also gain security because if one page ends up being malicious its process can be closed and is segregated from the remaining browser processes.

Submission + - Do your company provide private home-folders? 2

Submitted by fluor2 on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @04:51AM

fluor2 writes: Most companies provide a home dir which is pretty much private for the user. Here, the user can store documents only intended for private storage. E.g. internal job applications, personal letters to the boss and other similar data. The boss tells us, the IT department, to get rid of the home directory for our users.

Arguments are that we do no longer want to store any "private data", thus we can open up most of the data at all levels in our company. Private data should be stored on the local disk (a separate C:\Private or similar), or on private USB equipment or similar. In conclusion: out of sight from the company. I personally fear that people will bring private equipment into work and thus increase the chances of 3rd party driver crashes and similar. And I do not want people to spend time on backing up private data. After all, it's only a few gigs at average per user.

What is Your company's policy on home-folders?

Submission + - BT drops Phorm -- More Pressing Priorities? 1

Submitted by Tom DBA on Monday July 06, 2009 @07:54PM

Tom DBA writes: The Register reports in http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/06/bt_phorm/ that "BT has abandoned plans to roll out Phorm's controversial web monitoring and profiling system across its broadband network, claiming it needs to concentrate resources on network upgrades...BT's announcement comes a day before MPs and peers of the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group are due to begin an investigation of internet privacy. Their intervention follows the EU's move to sue the UK government over its alleged failure to properly implement European privacy laws with respect to the trials, drawing further bad publicity to the venture."

Shouldn't the story read BT "have"?

Submission + - Did someone try to steal Goldman Sachs' secrets? (reuters.com)

Submitted by

ctmurray

on Sunday July 05, 2009 @08:33PM

ctmurray writes: "Did someone try to steal Goldman Sachs' secret sauce?

While most in the US were celebrating the 4th of July, a Russian immigrant living in New Jersey was being held on federal charges of stealing top-secret computer trading codes from a major New York-based financial institution--that sources say is none other than Goldman Sachs.

The allegations, if true, are big news because the codes the accused man, Sergey Aleynikov, tried to steal is the secret code to unlocking Goldman's automated stocks and commodities trading businesses. Federal authorities allege the computer codes and related-trading files that Aleynikov uploaded to a German-based website help this major "financial institution" generate millions of dollars in profits each year.

Above from Reuters. Last week GS dropped off the NYSE programmed trading list, which is unusual since GS is one of the largest programmed traders. This created quite a bit of concern but no one knew why. GS basically had to stop trading entirely since a competitor with your secret algorithms could "trade against" GS to cause them to loose money."

Comment The more things change (Score 2, Interesting) 224

by Tom DBA on Saturday July 04, 2009 @02:15PM (#28581627) Attached to: AOL Shuts Down CompuServe

Before all the tubes got connected business cards were full of email addresses. One had at least a Compuserve address, a Prodigy address, an AOL address, a company VAXMail address, a company VM/VMS address and perhaps a DARPA/ARPA address.

All that is changed now.

Now we list Company main telephone number, Company direct dial number, Company fax number, Home number, Company cell number and perhaps a Skype id.

Copyright Should Encourage Derivative Works 136

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 03, 2009 @03:47PM from the greed-is-a-powerful-drug dept.

Techdirt has an interesting look at copyright and the idea that an author is the originator of a new work. Instead, the piece suggests that all works are in some way based on the works of others (even our own copyright law), and the system should be much more encouraging of "remixing" work into new, unique experiences. "Friedman also points back to another recent post where he discusses the nature of content creation, based on a blog post by Rene Kita. In it, she points out that remixing and creating through collaboration and building on the works of others has always been the norm. It's what we do naturally. It's only in the last century or so, when we reached a means of recording, manufacturing and selling music — which was limited to just those with the machinery and capital to do it, that copyright was suddenly brought out to 'protect' such things."

Comment Re:Test: How? (Score 3, Insightful) 329

by Tom DBA on Thursday July 02, 2009 @08:19PM (#28566595) Attached to: HIV/AIDS Vaccine To Begin Phase I Human Trials

Actually, there are tons of people available for the Phase II and III trials. There's a whole generation of young gays who are catching HIV left and right because they don't use protection.

Comment Is this it? Small chance (Score 1) 329

by Tom DBA on Thursday July 02, 2009 @07:56PM (#28566359) Attached to: HIV/AIDS Vaccine To Begin Phase I Human Trials

http://www.hvtn.org/science/trials.html Many trials have come, gone, failed, are in the works. HIV is very complicated. Is THIS IT? Likely this is a low news day or a University of Western Ontario alum day. Phase I is just to prove people don't die from taking the vaccine. A far cry from a real, successful vaccine.

Submission + - Swine Flu May Be Human Error.

Submitted by Tom DBA on Tuesday May 12, 2009 @07:04PM

Tom DBA writes: The swine flu could have been accidentally made in a lab, says the World Health Organization in Bloomberg.com News. Swine Flu May Be Human Error, Scientist Says; WHO Probes Claim. "The World Health Organization is investigating an Australian researcher's claim that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error. Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu drug, said in an interview today that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said that he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint."

Time to drag out the conspiracy theories about how HIV/AIDS came into the world?

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