There's a movie teaser line that you may have seen recently, that goes like this: "What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?" The answer is "I'd try." The teaser's actually for another movie, but that's the story that's told in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth": it starts with a man who, after talking with scientists and senators, can't get anyone to listen to what he thinks is the most important thing in the world. It comes out on DVD today.

chr0.ot writes "Metasploit creator HD Moore has released an open-source search engine that finds live malware samples through Google queries. From the article: 'The new Malware Search project provides a Web interface that allows anyone to enter the name of a known virus or Trojan and find Google results for Web sites hosting malicious executables.' The tool then searches for actual malware signatures and uses the signature output from ClamAV to find the name of the malware. This is then used in conjunction with a PE signature matching method to form a Google query. Afterwards the malware can then be downloaded directly from Google."

Most of us have had the unfortunate opportunity to have worked tech support at some point, whether it was for a paycheck or for a relative. The Register has offered up a vote for several of their favorite support stories but I'm sure there are many more out there to be had. My favorite horror story was while working a tech support call for a governmental employee, when asked to take her mouse and click on the "start" button all I could hear over the phone is what I later found out was the user banging her mouse against the monitor. What other horror stories have people seen from the trenches?

blamanj writes "Apple has joined the list of over fifty companies (most in Silicon Valley) that possibly mishandled stock options by backdating them. The technique is not illegal, but it can cause a company to improperly deduct employee compensation expenses and result in an underpayment of taxes. So far, Apple is conducting the investigation itself, but it has notified the SEC."

Yesterday's post about a Wall Street Journal article critiquing the current allocation of distributed number-crunching projects drew a huge range of comments, some favoring the proposition that seemingly quixotic distributed-computing endeavors (specifically, the alien-hunting SETI@home project) were diverting resources better spent on closer-to-home, pragmatic research, such as cancer or climate prediction, or perhaps best never converted to electricity in the first place. Read on for the Backslash summary of the conversation.

Most commenting readers scoffed at Kent State University's new policy (noted on Slashdot yesterday) forbidding athletes from using profiles on Facebook. The arguments offered (legal, moral, and practical) mostly berated the school for limiting their students to no good end, but some thought-provoking comments exposed at least some complexities which make the issue less clear-cut than a straightforward case either of censorship or contractual freedom. Read on for a sampling of the comments which typified the conversation.

JohnnyCakes writes "MacBook Pro batteries are apparently swelling, then failing. MacFixIt has some grotesque pictures of their own swollen MBP battery, which looks like it has suffered an internal explosion. Apple is replacing batteries on a case-by-case basis, but hasn't yet admitted any wide-scale issues."

An anonymous reader asks: "I have a telephone on a plain old land-line, with the option of subscribing to caller-id. I would like to filter incoming phone calls, diverting them to either the handset or answering machine, based on whether the caller-id matches a list of trusted phone numbers. Considering that many of today's land-line telephone handsets can display caller-id and store a list of favourite phone numbers, I don't think this is technologically difficult. AI am not interested in: subscribing to a service provided by my telephone company. I would prefer the filtering occurred on my side of the phone line, or implementing a software solution on my PC. Frankly, that is overkill, and I don't want my PC turned on permanently. I would prefer something like a small, solid-state hardware device. Is there any such thing available?"

Random Utinni writes "The director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (part of Homeland Security) claims that terrorist hackers are poised to create total chaos. He predicts all sorts of scenarios, from changing the formulae for medications to causing cars to explode after a few weeks of driving. Is this guy fearmongering for an increased budget, or is he on to something here?"

The winner of the contest is Alex Bendiken. He will receive a new laptop as well as bragging rights as the creator of the new look of Slashdot. You can see his winning design in a near complete form now. Feel free to comment on any compatibility issues. We plan to take this live in the next few days. There will undoubtedly be a few minor glitches, but please submit bug reports and we'll sort it out as fast as possible. Also congratulations to Peter Lada, our runner up. He gets $250 credit at ThinkGeek. Thanks to everyone who participated- it was a lot of fun.

joshmo97 writes "Tom's Hardware has found that the Pentium D 805 runs stable at 4.1 GHz and outperforms Intel and AMD's flagship offerings in many benchmarks. From the article: 'The Pentium D 805 is a budget CPU, but it puts lots of processors from AMD and Intel to shame. Although it is not based on the latest 65 nm core, this CPU remains stable even when operating at amazing 4.1 GHz. The Pentium D 805 ascends to the throne as the new King of overclocking, knocking out the AMD Opteron 144.'"

scottzak writes "Hail to the Chief! Stephen Colbert addressed the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday (attended by the President, the elite of Washington politics, and the White House Press Corps) and told the truth. Jaws dropped. Eyes popped. The live audience gasped. Scalia laughed his ass off. You want to see a brilliant comic display some real courage? Look no further. Enjoy the reaction shots, and Colbert's audition for Press Secretary job." The BBC covers the act just prior to Mr. Colbert's, where the President and a look-alike took turns making fun of his speaking skills.

xzvf writes "Dvorak claims OS X and Apple in trouble. He suggests open sourcing OS X for an epic battle with Linux. In many ways, this is just insane rambling, but it's certainly entertaining on some levels." From the article: "That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes. Let's start at the beginning. There's been a lot of fuss over Apple's rollout of the unsupported Boot Camp product, which lets Mac users run Microsoft Windows easily on an Intel-based Macintosh. I got into various levels of trouble when I suggested that Apple was going to gravitate towards Windows since it would be easy to do and there was some evidence that the company might want to do it."

modapi writes "StorageMojo is reporting that a company at Storage Networking World in San Diego has made a startling claim of 25x data compression for digital data storage. A combination of de-duplication and calculating and storing only the changes between similar byte streams is apparently the key. Imagine storing a terabyte of data on a single disk, and it all runs on Linux." Obviously nothing concrete or released yet so take with the requisite grain of salt.

John Seyton asks: "A recent posting regarding Internet Explorer 7 has me pondering what impact this next release will have on the web market. Firefox has fought hard to make a small dent in Internet Explorer's armor, to the point that we can browse most of the web with no loss of functionality, yet if Internet Explorer 7 recaptures a sizable chunk of that market share, web authors might once again create offensive 'please upgrade to Internet Explorer' web pages. Based upon the known features, what does the Slashdot community think the impact of Internet Explorer 7 will be on the web in general? Will we be forced to live a two-browser life once again?"