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Spam

Submission + - Fun with US anti-spam laws.

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Just look at last few lines on this web-page. Today I got a SPAM from them and they say that as they disclose the contact information so they have the right to spam. WTF is this. Any suggestions on what should be done with them.
Programming

Submission + - Subversion 1.4.4 released (collab.net)

Submitted by
odiug
odiug writes: "One of the Subversion committers blogs about the release of Subversion 1.4.4, which happened last Friday. This release includes a couple of bugfixes and a low-risk security issue. The Subversion 1.5 release, which will include Merge Tracking, is still on track."

Submission + - Databases for Small Recruiting Firms?

Submitted by Aeron65432
Aeron65432 writes: I'm the DBA of a small IT recruiting/consulting firm in the Northeast, hired a few months ago. The database program we use is awful, outdated, too expensive and quite buggy. We are looking for a database program that we can index thousands of resumes and then quickly and easily search them by keywords. (C++, java, oracle, University of Michigan, etc.) Because I have to train the rest of the employees in this database, it has to be fairly simple and an easy GUI. What kind of database do you use for small firms? Is there an open-source solution?
United States

Submission + - Pentagon Sought To Build A 'Gay Bomb'

Submitted by nam37
nam37 writes: CBS 5 has an interesting article about a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviwing the documents.
United States

Classified US Intel Budget Revealed Via Powerpoint 364

Posted by CmdrTaco from the woops-they-did-it-again dept.
Atario writes "In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed."
Censorship

Submission + - What is the deal anyway? whats news vs. whats not

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm so angry! -that I don't know where to start. I read slashdot a few times per day, 'almost' every day. I've tried to submit a story several times about some new hardware that revolutionizes both home and office. A drastically different piece of hardware than anything else out there. But My story got tossed I don't know how many times. I re-wrote it different ways, each time making sure it was not an "advertisement" for a company, but an awareness article. -all to no avail.

THEN I see stories on the FRONT page of slashdot, such as "what is your favorite way to make coffee?" (just to pull out a recent one) and I about lost it!

For years I have thought that slashdot was for latest breaking news about software, hardware, issues, and for news surrounding computers, IT, security etc.. but I cannot understand why my story of a powerful and unique piece of hardware cannot make the news.. but "how I like my coffee" can..

I give up... I'm beginning to think that concerned readers/posters, who are truly concerned about what slashdot has always been about, have all left the building. And, that I'm beginning to wonder what the people are like who are reading this now. How can a question of 'How I like my coffee' or 'what is my favorite soda' make the front page.. but not something revolutionary in the computer industry... I just cannot understand..

so my question is.. what is most important for you to read about in slashdot?
What is missing in slashdot? -I hope to see this question come online, because I really want to know.
Businesses

Submission + - Big Boxes Squeezing Small Computer Stores

Submitted by
Jack Action
Jack Action writes: "Small computer stores, even those with a few locations are being squeezed by big boxes like Best Buy and Staples using PC's, especially notebooks, as loss leaders. According to the Globe and Mail, spending on computer products at small retailers in the Canadian market dropped in half over the last year, while at the same time jumping by 29% at big box stores. Elsewhere, even large chains like CompuServe and Circuit City are in trouble.

Small retailers in the Canadian market have had to make innovative changes to stay alive: slashing staff, paying for assembly by the piece, negotiating bulk orders from vendors, and emphasizing customs orders for the geek market — but still its a struggle. Is the loss of the local neighbourhood computer store the inevitable outcome of the market, or will something valuable be lost if they all go down the tubes?"
Security

Submission + - When does a cyber-attack lead to conventional-war?

Submitted by Nymz
Nymz writes: A recent wave of cyber-attacks has been directed at multiple Estonian institutions, including government ministries, political parties, news organizations, and banks. The scope of attacks suggest the entire country is the target, and with no clear solution for dealing with this type of situation, one has to wonder if an escalation to a conventional-attack or war is far off.
Science

Fruit Flies Show Spark of Free Will 375

Posted by samzenpus from the sorry-about-all-those-bio-labs dept.
Lucas123 writes "A study performed at the Free University Berlin on human free will has produced some unexpected results showing that fruit flies may have a spark of free will in their tiny brains." From the article: "Their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy's distribution ... Future research delving further into free will could lead to more advanced robots, scientists added. The result, joked neurobiologist Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin, could be "world robot domination."
Censorship

Submission + - Amazon announces DRM free music services

Submitted by
newt0311
newt0311 writes: "Amazon just announced that it will launch a DRM free music service to compete with Apple iTunes. Story here [online.wsj.com] along with many more details. Maybe, DRM really is pretty much dead..."
Security

GMail Vulnerable To Contact List Hijacking 139

Posted by Hemos from the in-special-circumstances dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "By simply logging in to GMail and visiting a website, a malicious website can steal your contact list, and all their details. The problem occurs because Google stores the contact list data in a Javascript file. So far the attack only works on Firefox, and doesn't appear to work in Opera or Internet explorer 7. IE6 was un-tested as of now."
The Internet

Wikipedia Blocks Qatar [Updated] 204

Posted by Hemos from the the-law-of-unintended-consequenceas dept.
GrumpySimon writes "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?" Update: 01/02 13:32 GMT by Z : Jim Wales wrote in the comments that the story is 'completely false'. Either way, the ban has been lifted and anonymous editing is once again possible from Qatar.
Microsoft

Submission + - A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protectio

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Peter Gutmann's article featured in latest Risks digest. See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.txt for review of Vista's DRM protection. Executive Summary — Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.
Security

Submission + - Banks need to boost web-based security

Submitted by
oKAMi-InfoSec
oKAMi-InfoSec writes: "Banks will be instituting a variety of new identification and authorization methods in 2007. This article by Sherry Slater covers many of the ways and means that banks will be beefing up their security, apparently in response to guidelines issued by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Some methods of choice include:
  • Pictures and phrases chosen by the user and displayed when they login — to prevent phishing attacks
  • Identifying the user's computer(s) based on unique identifiers — to prove the user's identity
  • Use of an expanded selection of questions- to prove the user's identity
  • Use of transaction tracking software — to red flag suspicious activity
  • One-time passwords — to authorize especially large transactions
The second to last paragraph was probably the most pertinent: 'No amount of security and software on the bank’s part can make up for carelessness on customers’ parts, however.'"

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