17103402
submission
RichiH writes:
You might remember Constable Adam Josephs aka Officer Bubbles, the policeman who threatened and then arrested a woman for blowing bubbles during the G20 protests in Toronto, Canada. YouTube user ThePMOCanada based some comics on this bizarre event which seems to have been deleted, along with the account, by YouTube. While the account has been re-enabled by YouTube only minutes ago, the videos in question are still missing. Not having heard of the Streisand Effect before, Mr. Josephs is now suing YouTube for $ 1.25 million Canadian and the identity of 25 John Does. The Toronto Police Service declined to comment both on the suit and on Mr. Josephs' behavior during the G20 protests.
16208384
submission
RichiH writes:
According to a twitter post, the HDCP master key has been leaked. Engadget has a minimal story about this. Take it with a sack of salt and if it turns out to be true, print it on a t-shirt.
12056784
submission
RichiH writes:
There have been several discussions about alternative on-screen keyboards on slashdot over the years. I dimly rememer a discussion about a modified ATOMIK (see latter link) keyboard and a sort of shifting field with an alphabetical, vertical field of letters of different sizes according to their likelyhood of coming next in a given word. Said fork of ATOMIK had two 'e' fields and other modifcations to accomodate the writing of most short, common words in one swipe. With the advent of more and more touch devices, these concepts are becoming more and more important. Trying to help fostering these new methods, I tried to find a reference, name, discussion, homepage, anything regarding said modified for years. Having gone through another iteration of searching just now, I have two questions to to /. crowd at large. 1) Can you point me to what I am looking for? 2) What new, exciting, weird, implemented, barely thought-out and other input concepts for touch devices are you aware of?
6721579
submission
RichiH writes:
The Grml project is happy to announce the immediate release of Grml 2009.10 aka "Hello Wien". Including lots of new versions and packages, this Linux Live CD is geared towards power users and sysadmins. Coming with a highly tuned Z Shell by default, it includes everything you need for backups, system recovery, network management and much much more. Also included are several light-weigth Window Managers, highly advanced netboot capabilities and Google's stressapptest. The release notes can be found here and the isos live here
5240789
submission
RichiH writes:
My girlfriend managed to delete her photo directory. After restoring 17783 images with foremost, I do have her data, but renaming and re-sorting that many files would be a huge task. If I remember correctly, FAT 'deletes' by changing the first letter of any given filename to a question mark. Which poses the question of how to restore the files including filenames and directory structure on a FAT32 partition. Several dd images of the partition in question are available so destructive measure would be acceptable. Preferably, I would do this in Linux, but Windows is OK as a last resort. Another interesting question is which other filesystems allow this level of easy restoration. Afaik there are none. Please try to stay on topic, which means no discussion about 'why were there no backups' ;)
1957569
submission
RichiH writes:
Games usually need more patches than most other FLOSS software. Sometimes, they are not maintained by their original developers anymore, sometimes upstream does not care about Unix-compatibility or they won't accept the changes that are required to make games work properly. Traditionally, maintainers of every distribution had to create their own patches and fixes to provide similar funcionality. After successful collaboration between several major distributions, we decided to take this to the next level. Well over 50 members of Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Fink, FreeBSD, Gentoo, OpenSolaris, PC-BSD, NetBSD, Slackware, SuSE, Ubuntu and Yellow Dog as well as Gnome and KDE have decided to join forces and start working together on games@lists.freedesktop.org and #freedesktop-games on irc.freenode.net. Collaboration on upstream level is common these days, but distributions have largely remained islands and it's time to fix that. Thus, we want to invite everyone, upstream, maintainers and anyone else who might be interested to join us in this collaborative effort. To the best of our knowledge, this effort is unique. But if anyone could share experience or even start something like this in their own fields of interest, it would be great :)
1329865
submission
RichiH writes:
This is not an article. It is a plea for help!
With each and every redesign, you break /. for Konqueror users who use the text mode in various fun & unexpected ways.
Normally, I file bugs or sit it out, but that the moment, reading articles on the main page is impossible as the tags etc are overlayed over the text.
I know this is is unconventional and I expect this to get rejected in no time, but PLEASE for all that is holy (relative to $deity): Poke the weg dev guy(s) about Konqueror & text mode!
It's not _that_ hard to take a quick glance to see if the site is useable (I don't care about pretty. Just make it _useable_).
Thanks,
Richard
1230645
submission
RichiH writes:
Most of you will be the free IT staff of friends and family, just as I am. One of my largest headaches is backing up their data. What I am looking for allows for off-site storage on multiple server machines running Linux, has Linux & Windows clients that Just Work and require zero everyday effort (largish effort setting them up is just fine), allows for granular access control, is versioned and will, ideally, allow me to grab data automagically, as well (think photo pool for your family where your mother, sister, etc share each other's photos). This is something I have been looking for for years, but never found anything even closely resembling what I want. With the Wall Street Journal handing out its Technology Innovation Award to Cleversafe recently, I was once again reminded of this particular itch which needs scratching. Before I deploy it, I want to ask the /. community about its opinion on that piece of software and on potential alternatives. How do you solve this problem?
1215583
submission
RichiH writes:
Want to know how much you will pay in taxes once a new president is elected? Quantrix and Jeffrey Gramlich of the University of Southern Maine released an online tax estimator which makes an educated guess based on the positions & statements of the candidates. The short version: Under McCain, you will pay minimally less than under Bush. Under Obama, you will pay noticeably less.
1201439
submission
RichiH writes:
Off-site, versioned storage is great, but for some things, you just can't beat a thumb drive. While I don't needlessly abuse my gear, I will not pamper it, either. I gave various drives a try, but they all broke within weeks or months, sometimes even days. What I am looking for is an USB thumb drive that will fit onto a keychain and still be able to take a beating. Ideally, this drive has a metal keyring hole, a cap that will not come off too easily and thus protect the USB plug, is not much larger than an actual thumb and has 4 GiB of storage or more. What drives did you use over time and with what results? How long did they survive?
668408
submission
RichiH writes:
This is bad, real bad. From the Debian Security Announcement: Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's
openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect
Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a
result, cryptographic key material may be guessable. Long story short, everyone who used OpenSSL in the widest sense to generate within the last two years on either Debian or Ubuntu has a massive problem on their hands. If this is the case you must regenerate and replace your keys as soon as possible!
Read Debian's announcement and Ubuntu's announcement for further information.
627334
submission
RichiH writes:
thedailywtf.com has a real WTF today: An Oklohoma state agency using SQL queries in their URLS, allowing everyone to get at the personal data of thousands of people. After being contacted about it, they implemented minimal (read laughable) 'security' measures. Only after being told that the table named MSD_MONTHLY_MEDICAL_ACTIVITY, which lists employees of the agency, is world-readable as well did they take down the page. As of right now, the page is unavailable and bidding for creating a new system is is open.
349723
submission
RichiH writes:
On November 9th, the German parliament will most likely vote in favour of a law which will make logging of all connections, be they over Internet, landline or cellular phone, mandatory (German source). As an added bonus, the Cybercrime Convention of the European Union will ensure that a total of 52 countries will have access to this data without review by a judge, restriction of commensurability or even a mandatory expiration date for the prosecution of any and all actions that are against the law in the requesting country. This list includes countries with long-standing records in human rights like Azerbaijan, Russia or Moldova. If you live in Germany, hold a German passport or simply think your voice should be heard, please head over to this site and write an open letter to the members of the German parliament. In anticipation of the approval of the law, please also join the first ever German class-action law suit before Germany highest court by adding your personal data here.
Do not let this pass without action. It is that last chance you are likely to have.
