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Submission + - "Global Katrina" Solar Storm in 2013 (ft.com) 1

Submitted by
iONiUM
iONiUM writes: "The Financial Times writes "Senior officials responsible for policy on solar storms – also known as space weather – in the US, UK and Sweden urged more preparedness at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington." The Solar Storm in 2013 is predicted to cost the world economy upwards of $2 trillion, and potentially shut down trading systems as dates become unreliable. In addition, it's widely expected that GPS satellites will also go down."
Privacy

Submission + - Facebook Password Requests Suspended

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Washington Post reports that Maryland's Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has suspended a roughly year-old practice of asking prospective employees to voluntarily divulge their user names and passwords to social media Web sites such as Facebook. In a statement, the department said requests for user names and passwords had been voluntary, and had not been taken into account when evaluating job applicants. Nonetheless, "in light of these concerns raised by the ACLU and because this is a newly emerging area in the law, the department has suspended the process of asking for social media information for 45 days to review the procedure and to make sure it is being used consistently and appropriately.""
Cloud

Submission + - Microsoft Offers Free Azure Trial (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Hoping to lure developers to cloud computing, Microsoft is offering up a free trial of its Azure service. Participants of the free trial can choose one of two options: 750 hours of use on an Extra Small Compute Instance, or 25 hours on a Small Compute Instance. An Extra Small Compute Instance offers the equivalent of a 1GHz processor with 768MB of working memory, which normally costs $.05 an hour. The Small Compute Instance has a 1.6GHz processor, 1.75GB of working memory, and typically costs $0.12 an hour. 'This extended free trial will allow developers to try out the Windows Azure platform without the need for up-front investment costs,' a Microsoft blog entry explained."
Television

Submission + - BigMedia shuts down Ivi.TV (www.ivi.tv)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "A notice to all ivi TV subscribers and interested parties.

As you may be aware we have been in a fight to provide affordable Cable TV for the Internet.

Today the Southern District Court of New York granted a preliminary injunction in the case 1:10-cv-07415-NRB. We will be appealing the decision in the second circuit but in the interim we must shut-down most of our broadcast channel offerings."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Comment Re:The silver lining (Score 1) 152

by jaronc (#31256400) Attached to: AU Internet Censorship Spells Bad News For Gamers

Under the current system, which I believe is intended to continue, they don't actually search the internet for RC'd material. Instead they only act on pages to which someone has submitted a complaint about. Only then do they go and check to see if it would be RC'd. If yes, they add to the secret black list.

Comment Re:..so? (Score 1) 430

by jaronc (#31003376) Attached to: Using Windows 7 RC? Pay Up Or Auto Shutdown Warned

> 1. Vista was considered to be crap. EVERYBODY was saying it, the NYT, CNN, everybody.

Ran fine for me. Apart from the first month when there was no drivers for my soundcard. I even ran it on my gaming machine with no issues. If anything I was always mystified at how much trouble everyone else seemed to be having with it.

But yes, it did get a lot of bad press.

Comment Oh for the love of........ (Score 4, Informative) 430

by jaronc (#30991464) Attached to: Using Windows 7 RC? Pay Up Or Auto Shutdown Warned

Isn't this story perhaps a little hysterical? When the RC came out they were very clear that this would happen, they even gave the dates. They were also very clear you may not be able to upgrade from the RC.

Now it's about to happen and people are surprised? People agreed to help test an RC and in return they got almost a years worth of free use out of a fairly stable OS. Trials over, pay up.

Comment Re:Oh well (Score 1) 488

by jaronc (#30803176) Attached to: NY Times To Charge For Online Content

If every free web based news site were to go behind a pay wall I would have far more time at work for work. I would just devolve to watching free to air news on TV. Though I would probably set up my PVR to tape it and watch it at my convenience.

Comment Re:Vista (Score 1) 414

by jaronc (#29751645) Attached to: Revisiting the Original Reviews of Windows Vista

It stops my in-laws from screwing over their machine. I told them, "If that pops up and you didn't do anything to make it pop up, decline it". They also know that random web visits should not pop UAC up. Nor should things that people send them. Some updates confuse them, but over time they've created a handwritten whitelist of programs that might pop it up that it is ok to say yes to.

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