Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Businesses

Battle Over Minimum Pricing Heating Up 272

Posted by kdawson from the can't-charge-that dept.
The Wall Street Journal is covering developments in the gathering battle between manufacturers and retailers / discounters, especially online ones, over minimum prices. Earlier this year the Supreme Court upheld the right of manufacturers to enforce price floors for their products. Since then, manufacturers have increasingly been employing service companies like NetEnforcers to snitch on discounters who offer goods below "minimum advertised prices" (or MAPs), and to send DMCA takedown notices to the likes of eBay and Craigslist for below-minimum offers. Separately, the Journal reports that a coalition of discounters and retailers is using eBay as a stalking-horse in a campaign to get consumers, and then politicians, fired up enough to pass legislation outlawing MAPs.
The Media

BBC Brings DRM-Free Content To Linux Users 131

Posted by timothy from the gnu-linux dept.
eldavojohn writes "The BBC is planning to release some of its programmes to users of GNU & Linux. You won't see Doctor Who or Dragons' Den on there anytime soon, but they have been working with Canonical & Collabora on getting this out there for Totem users. The developer blog mentions that the sheer number of options in the open source world actually makes this difficult to accomplish."
Privacy

Submission + - E-mails of Yahoo! iPhone users exposed

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo! is one of the lucky few default e-mail providers on the iPhone; sadly it looks like Apple didn't insist on encryption from Yahoo! Unlike the other default providers (gmail, etc.) Yahoo! doesn't use encryption for either downloading or sending messages. Incoming messages are downloaded in plaintext over the standard imap port. Outgoing mail is a bit harder to find, it is apparently sent by an HTTP post request slightly obscured inside a bundle of XML, but security through obscurity isn't very effective. While the GSM protocol is cracked, this is probably of more concern to users who use the iPhone's built in Wi-Fi.
Privacy

Submission + - Yahoo exposes emails of iPhone users

Submitted by iamthekingofthesees
iamthekingofthesees writes: Slashdot recently covered Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop's exposing authentication information. It turns out that other Yahoo! applications are affected, although to a lesser degree. Yahoo! is one of the lucky few default e-mail providers on the iPhone; sadly it looks like Apple didn't insist on encryption from Yahoo! On the iPhone, authentication is encrypted, but you can see all the messages sent and received in plaintext. Incoming messages are downloaded in plaintext over the standard imap port. Outgoing mail is a bit harder to find, it is apparently sent by an HTTP post request wrapped up inside a bundle of XML, but security through obscurity isn't very effective. Yahoo! & Apple really need to step up their game when it comes to encryption.
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Tapping the iPhone, brought to you by Yahoo!

Submitted by tdalek
tdalek writes: You may remember the recent Slashdot article about Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop exposing authentication information. It turns out that more that other Yahoo! applications are affected, although to a lesser degree. With Yahoo!'s desktop program, it transmitted the usernames and passwords in plaintext. Yahoo! is one of the lucky few default e-mail providers on the iPhone; sadly it looks like Apple didn't insist on encryption from Yahoo! On the iPhone, authentication is encrypted, but you can see all the messages sent and received in plaintext. Incoming messages are downloaded in plaintext over the standard imap port. Outgoing mail is a bit harder to find, it is apparently sent by an HTTP post request wrapped up inside a bundle of XML, but security through obscurity isn't very effective. If you have Yahoo! mail on your iPhone (and since its one of the default accounts, I'm assuming quite a few do), now would be a good time to forward it elsewhere for the time being, and using that account instead.
Security

Submission + - iPhone exposes emails in plaintext for Yahoo users 1

Submitted by
holdenkarau
holdenkarau writes: "You may remember the recent Slashdot article about Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop exposing usernames & passwords. It turns out that more than just Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop is affected, although to a lesser degree. With Yahoo!'s desktop program, it transmitted the usernames & passwords in plaintext. Yahoo! is one of the lucky few default e-mail providers on the iPhone; sadly it looks like Apple didn't insist on encryption from Yahoo! On the iPhone, authentication is encrypted, but you can see all the messages sent and received in plaintext. Incoming messages are downloaded in plaintext over the standard imap port. Outgoing mail is a bit harder to find, it is apparently sent by an HTTP post request wrapped up inside a bundle of XML, but security through obscurity isn't very effective. If you have Yahoo! mail on your iPhone (and since its one of the default accounts, I'm assuming quite a few do), you might want to look at forwarding it somewhere else for the time being, and using that account instead."

Comment Suggestions from another student group (Score 5, Interesting) 185

by xSquaredAdmin (#25093897) Attached to: Re-purposing a Student Tech Service Group?
I'm currently the president of the Computer Science Club at another Canadian university. We, too, have a variety of machine architectures, and provide web/email accounts to students. We've stopped seeing as many signups for the web hosting and email side of things, and we've shifted our focus recently to a number of other things. For example, we're starting to run tutorials to introduce first year students to both the University's undergraduate computing environment as well as our own, and advertising some of our more powerful machines as a method for students who want to run processor/memory-intensive experiments to do so cheaply. One other thing we did was to make a deal with the web-design club at our school so that they now host all club sites which they design on our servers, since we have the ability to set up subdomains under our university's domain on their behalf. Lastly, one other thing which we're working on improving is setting up a proper library with copies of the various textbooks needed by students, as well as various other recommended reference books.
Security

Gaping Holes In Fully Patched IE7, Firefox 2 303

Posted by kdawson from the just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe dept.
Continent1106 writes "Hacker Michal Zalewski has ratcheted up his ongoing assault on Web browser security models, releasing details on serious flaws in fully patched versions of IE6, IE7 and Firefox 2.0. The vulnerabilities could cause cookie stealing, page hijacking, memory corruption, code execution, and URL bar spoofing attacks." Here is Zalewski's post to Full Disclosure.

The Trouble With Software Upgrades 356

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the upgrades-just-introduce-new-bugs dept.
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "When software makers urge upgrades, it isn't always in users' best interest, the Wall Street Journal reports. Many upgrades bring advertising or other unwanted features; some iTunes users felt this way about a recent upgrade. But for many programs, downgrading can be a headache--Yahoo generally doesn't link to old versions of software, and Apple says iTunes can't be downgraded. Some websites can help with the problem. OldVersion.com, for instance, offers more than 600 versions of about 65 different programs. The site's 16-year-old administrator says, 'Companies make a lot of new versions. They're not always better for the consumer.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Close