Dr_Ish - Slashdot User

Submission + - Storms and Video Streams

Submitted by

Dr_Ish

on Sunday September 14, 2008 @01:30PM

Dr_Ish writes: "Living in an area that has been in the blast zone for Hurricanes Gustav and to a lesser extent Ike, keeping up to date on what is happening can be important during and after the events. In 2005, during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, one of the best ways of keeping informed was via live video streams from local TV stations and national media. Often times broadband connections would remain live, even after the power had gone out. This year though there has been a noticeable change. The increasing use of Silverlight and Windows Media formatted streams has made it increasingly difficult to find streams that can be used on non-Windows (i.e. Linux) computers. It is bizarre to be able to get news more easily from the BBC, than from local stations. This seems to be an increasing trend. Other than having a special Windows set up for such events, do any slashdot readers have any suggestions on how to deal with this issue? During times of crisis, this could be important."

Submission + - Yaari.com: Spam 2.0? (louisiana.edu)

Submitted by Dr_Ish on Thursday March 27, 2008 @03:07PM

Dr_Ish writes: I run a large mailing list for professional philosophers, called PHILOSOP. The list has been around a long time and is quite large. Most posts to the list are mundane notices about conferences and the like. Recently though a message was distributed inviting subscribers to become a 'friend' of one of the list subscribers. This message clearly violated the mailing list terms of use. As a general rule, the mailing list has some quite robust anti-spam measures in place. This one managed to circumvent them all. However, a little investigation showed that the message had not been sent by the user themselves. It seems that the social networking site Yaari.com has come up with a novel way of attracting new users. When someone subscribes to the site from a Gmail, or a Yahoo e-mail account (there may be others too), the user is prompted for their password on those systems and cannot register without providing it. The terms of use of Yaari, which the user has to agree to, gives the site permission to send out invitations to everyone in the users address book. This naturally includes mailing lists like PHILOSOP. Although this issue is clearly mentioned on the registration page, it seems that not all users actually read the warnings (there is a surprise!) There was a little coverage of this issue last year, most notably at Pulse2 and the Profy.com blog. The Yaari.com site has now been added to our blacklist. May I politely suggest that others do likewise?

Submission + - Skype Down (louisiana.edu)

Submitted by

Dr_Ish

on Thursday August 16, 2007 @10:29AM

Dr_Ish writes: "It seems that the popular and free VoIP application service Skype has run into a software problem today. An announcement on their support web site claims that the problem arises with logging into their system and should be resolved in 12 to 24 hours. In the meantime, downloads of their software hyave temporarily been suspended."

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