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The Internet

Submission + - P2P Source Arrested, OiNK.cd Raided, Shut Down (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "A British man was arrested who was allegedly the source of a distribution supply chain for leaking albums & movies to file sharers. He operated OiNK which was by invite only and would post files to be distributed which would then show up hours later further down the supply chain on other file sharing sites. This scheme stretched across many nations and is the result of a two year investigation by the IFPI. They hope that by infiltrating these layers of abstraction to the source, they can stop the early leaking of media."
Data Storage

Submission + - Simple data transfer for my Family?

Submitted by rsilvergun
rsilvergun writes: As the family tech, I'm often stuck transferring data from old to new computers. These days, the process can take hours, what with gigs of mp3s, avis and jpegs. What I want is disk imaging software that makes autorunning dvds that prompt to extract the image to a folder, and then prompt for each disk in the set. That way I can make them sort out the data instead of me. I've looked at solutions from Acronis, Runtime and even Norton, and every one of them is just too technical. What do /.'ers do when stuck with this chore?
Science

Baiji River Dolphin May or May Not Be Extinct 175

Posted by Zonk from the they-don't-want-to-go-on-the-cart dept.
ozmanjusri writes "Major news outlets are reporting that after 20 million years, Baiji (Yangtze River Dolphin) are now officially extinct. This is apparently actually old news; it was announced on a Baiji conservation website in December of last year. One outlet, though, is claiming they may not quite be completely dead yet. The same scientist that filed the report leading the the declaration of extinction is still hopeful: '"This is only one survey and...you can't have a sample in a survey, so you cannot say the baiji all is gone by the result of only one survey," he said. "For example, there is some side channels or some tributaries [where] we cannot go because of a restriction of navigation rules, and also we don't survey during the night-time so we may miss some animals in the Yangtze River." Professor Ding says based on anecdotal evidence, he remains confident the dolphins are still out there. "I'm pretty much sure there are a few of them left somewhere in the Yangtze River," he said. "I keep receiving reports from fishermen, they say they saw a couple of baiji somewhere, sometime."'"
Power

Submission + - Untapped Energy Below Us (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by
EskimoJoe
EskimoJoe writes: "BASEL, Switzerland — When tremors started cracking walls and bathroom tiles in this Swiss city on the Rhine, the engineers knew they had a problem. "The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang," Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner, recalls. "I thought a truck had crashed into the building." But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth's crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world's search for new sources of energy. On paper, the Basel project looks fairly straightforward: Drill down, shoot cold water into the shaft and bring it up again superheated and capable of generating enough power through a steam turbine to meet the electricity needs of 10,000 households, and heat 2,700 homes. Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world's annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment. A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S."
Education

Submission + - Indiana University Dumps Google for ChaCha

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha. The move was announced by new IU President Michael McRobbie, who until recently sat on ChaCha's Board of Directors (5-29 SEC filing, PDF). IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha, which IU notes is backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion."
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - iPhone Not the Cause of Duke's WLAN Problem

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago, Slashdot covered the news of Apple iPhone flooding the WLAN at Duke University. Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke's Office of Information Technology, blamed the built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flooding sections of Duke's pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, which temporarily knocked out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Today, Macworld quoted Julian Lombardi saying the iPhone may not be the problem after all.

Duke University is taking a softer stance on the cause of its wireless networking problems on Friday. Earlier in the week Duke administrators put the blame squarely on Apple's iPhone, but a report due today from the university may exonerate the iPhone. "We are presently looking into it and we have not been able to conclusively pinpoint where the problem is," said Julian Lombardi, assistant vice president of academic services technology support for Duke University. "We hope to have a resolution in the next few hours."
Oops! Shame on Duke's IT people for going public with hastily drawn conclusion and blaming Apple for "one-way communication".

Feed BBC, ITV to launch free satellite HDTV in UK by 2008 (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Although there's a lot of grumbling in the UK about that £135 ($270) yearly television license fee (only $87 for a black and white set!), it's hard to complain that the BBC doesn't try to use all that money in cool ways. Adding to their already-ambitious plans to distribute HDTV through torrent, datacasting, and IPTV, the Beeb announced today that, after years of delays, they've been approved to pair up with ITV and launch a free 200-channel HD-capable satellite service called Freesat in the spring of 2008. The move is designed to provide digital service to the estimated 25% of the British public that can't get the successful Freeview DVB-T service, but it'll also be free to any license payer who ponys up for one of the several available interactive receivers. Hmm, that's an interesting version of "free," must be the British spelling.

[Via TechDigest]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Security

Submission + - Weak GMail Security

Submitted by
Martins
Martins writes: "About a year ago, I was sent an invite to GMail to my email account at the time at Telus. I set the account up but didn't use it immediately. A month later, I changed my ISP and email to Shaw. I then tried to get into GMail but had forgotten my password. I clicked on the appropriate link, and instead of asking me the security question as I'd expected, GMail emailed my password to my old Telus account, which had since been registered by someone else. I've tried contacting Google support to get my account back, even providing them with the original invite email that my friend had sent to me. However, I get back one or two form replies stating that they cannot help me because I don't have the received invite email — the one that has been appropriated by the user @ telus.net. After the form reply, Google tech support ignores my emails. This seems to me to be a huge security risk, what with the transiency of email accounts, to have a forgotten password automatically emailed without a verifying security question first. I was also hoping for better technical support from Google. I don't think my expectations are that unrealistic."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows Longhorn Server Beta 3 Review

Submitted by
odin749
odin749 writes: "Windows Longhorn Server Beta 3 is currently feature complete however there are still many bugs limiting its overall performance and even in some cases as with Active Directory Right Management Service the bugs were bad enough to stop the application from installing. Overall Longhorn will be an evolutionary release containing many new features however many businesses will have trouble justifying the expense of the upgrades."
Google

Submission + - Google Deletes Rogue Ads, Dangers Persist

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has removed ads that appear alongside Google search results that re-directed users to malicious sites. But, according to security experts, the fix is temporary and search engine users should not assume sponsored links are all trustworthy.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004248 .html

"Search engines are just too easy a target for bad guys," says Roger Thompson of Exploit Security Labs. On April 25, Exploit Prevention Labs reported that malware distributors were using advertisements placed via Google's automated AdWords system to infect unsuspecting end-users with spyware designed to capture bank login user names and passwords.
Supercomputing

Submission + - Mouse brain simulated on computer

Submitted by philippic
philippic writes: The BBC is reporting that "US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer. The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer."

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