Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Here's a list: (Score 1) 979

by eric76 (#25506287) Attached to: ACLU Creates Map of US "Constitution-Free Zone"

We had a drug dog in town for a while.

I like dogs. When I'd see the cop and the dog around town, often as not, I would have the cop let him out of the car so I could play with him.

The cop told me that the people he thought were likely to be involved in drugs tended to stay as far away from the dog as they could.

Since then I've wondered if a drug dog could sense that reluctance and hit on that instead of drugs in some instances.
Microsoft

Submission + - IIT Bombay, Microsoft at loggerheads over OOXML (rediff.com)

Submitted by
heytal
heytal writes: "Microsoft has courted a major controversy in India by complaining to the government of India that those who voted against OOXML were working against "national interests". Prof. D. B. Phatak from IIT Bombay has raised his voice against this complaint and has demanded an apology from Microsoft. He says "... the complaints have painted these organisations and their representatives, including the Indian delegation which attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM in Geneva this February), as acting against Indian national interests. This is the most derogatory accusation to any Indian...," The letter adds: "I have a special word of thanks to the officials of Microsoft, some of whom have been personal friends for years... I, of course, still await the action from Microsoft which I have requested, viz., formal withdrawal of all complaints, and a formal apology to my institute." More details at Rediff.com"
Television

Journal Journal: 80 minutes of ads for a kids movie? 7

Journal by Cy Guy

My wife and I were excited to see that Disney was bringing back 'family movie night' on ABC this Summer. For both of us that brings back memories of youth watching a movie with (our respective) families after Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, or 60 Minutes had ended.
Puzzle Games (Games)

Submission + - 2008 Google Puzzle Chamnpionships

Submitted by
eric76
eric76 writes: "For those of us who like to work puzzles, we have our chance to rank ourselves against a wide variety of other puzzled people on June 14 in the 2008 U.S. Google Puzzle Championship.

Somehow I missed last year and the previous year my results were okay, but nothing to brag about. Time to unplug the telephone and try again.

The web page is at: World Puzzle Federation: Team USA, The registration link is on the right."
The Courts

Submission + - Dell found guilty of fraud (pcworld.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: For all those who have had use what Dell calls "Tech Support" there may finally be some relief:
"The Albany County Supreme Court found that Dell deprived customers of technical support that they bought or were eligible for under warranty in several ways, including by requiring people to wait for very long times on the phone, repeatedly transferring their calls and frequently disconnecting their calls."
Security

Submission + - Shape-shifting malware hits the web

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Security experts have warned that new developments in malware are allowing criminals to stay one step ahead of security software. Marc Henauer, head of the cyber-crime division at the Swiss Justice and Police Department, said in an interview last week that viruses and other malware now have the capability to change their signature every few hours. This means that the attackers are often one step ahead of protection software. Geoff Sweeney, chief technology officer at Tier-3, a behavioural analysis IT security firm, echoed the remarks. "It automatically adapts to the anti-spam and anti-malware engines that it encounters," he said.
Privacy

Submission + - Most Think Selling Personal Info Is Prohibited

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Online privacy grabs the big headlines, but a new report from UC-Berkeley discusses offline privacy. The survey probes individuals' knowledge of whether ordinary, offline businesses, such as pizza delivery companies, can sell personal information of customers. The authors find: "In six of those contexts (pizza delivery, donations to charities, product warranties, product rebates, phone numbers collected at the register, and catalog sales), a majority either didn't know or falsely believed that opt-in rules protected their personal information from being sold to others." The Chronicle reports on it here.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Advice on response to the RIAA? 2

Journal by Slimee
So, I live in Eastern Pennsylvania, and work at Princeton University. I recently received a letter notifying me that the RIAA caught me downloading music. the letter doesn't say what I downloaded, but says I'll get a settlement letter soon. My question is, is there any chance fighting this; without paying top dollar for an attorney? I know some states have universities with law schools helping students fight the RIAA, is there anyway of finding out if there's school's like that in my area?
Biotech

Submission + - Help Design Super-Rice with your Spare CPU Cycles (worldcommunitygrid.org)

Submitted by
kpearson
kpearson writes: "Nutritious Rice for the World, a new distributed computing project by World Community Grid, is using the spare CPU cycles of volunteers' computers to predict the structure of proteins of major strains of rice. This research will "help farmers breed better rice strains with higher crop yields, promote greater disease and pest resistance, and utilize a full range of bioavailable nutrients that can benefit people around the world, especially in regions where hunger is a critical concern." The project runs on the BOINC distributed computing platform and requires very little effort to install."
Mars

Submission + - SPAM: NASA: Harder, colder picture of Mars emerges

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Turns out that the surface of Mars is stiffer and colder than previously thought. New observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate that any liquid water that might exist below the planet's surface and any possible organisms living in that water would be located deeper than scientists had suspected.NASA made the discovery was using the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument on the Orbiter, which revealed long, continuous layers stretching up to 600 miles or about one-fifth the length of the United States. The radar pictures show a smooth, flat border between the ice cap and the rocky Martian crust, NASA said. On Earth, the weight of a similar stack of ice would cause the planet's surface to sag. The fact that the Martian surface is not bending means that its strong outer shell, or lithosphere, a combination of its crust and upper mantle, must be very thick and cold. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Censorship

Submission + - Quake Reveals Holes in the Great Firewall of China (foxnews.com)

Submitted by The Aethereal
The Aethereal writes: The massive 7.9-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands in China this week revealed a breach in the communist nation's outbound flow of online information.

Chinese bystanders were able to send images and videos quickly to the rest of the world in the hours following Monday's quake, exposing holes in the "great firewall of China," media and technology experts say.

"They [the Chinese government] have strong controls over information that comes into the country, but they've never thought of and, until this moment, they've never needed censorship of outbound data," said Clay Shirky, a faculty member at the interactive telecommunications department at New York University.
The Courts

Rambus Wins Appeal of FTC Anti-Trust Ruling 52

Posted by timothy from the oh-please-let-this-be-the-last-time dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Rambus has won its appeal in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision said that it wasn't sufficient to prove that Rambus lied or harmed competitors; the FTC had to prove that it harmed consumers in order to fall under anti-trust law. This is, unfortunately, a very dangerous ruling in light of some of Microsoft's activities relating to OOXML because it raises the bar on the proof required to act against such behavior. However, the ruling in the Rambus case was merely vacated and remanded for further proceedings, not overturned. So, if the evidence warrants, the lower court might be able to decide that consumers were actually harmed by Rambus' conduct and rule against them. Alternatively, this ruling could be appealed to the Supreme Court by filing a petition for a writ of certiorari, but the Supreme Court only grants a few of those per year."
Security

Researchers Infiltrate and 'Pollute' Storm Botnet 261

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'm-infiltrating-see-yeah dept.
ancientribe writes "Dark Reading reports that a group of European researchers has found a way to disrupt the massive Storm botnet by infiltrating it and injecting "polluted" content into it to disrupt communication among the bots and their controlling hosts. Other researchers have historically shied way from this controversial method because they don't "want to mess with other peoples' PCs by injecting commands," said one botnet expert quoted in the article.
Microsoft

Bill Gates On the GPL — "We Disagree" 778

Posted by timothy from the doesn't-that-mean-disagreeing-with-copyright dept.
Dionysius, God of Wine, writes with a link to an Ars Technica story, quoting Bill Gates: "'There's free software and then there's open source' he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, 'there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.' Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: 'I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,' he said, adding with a shrug: 'That may seem radical."

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Close