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Censorship

Submission + - Australian police chief seeks terror reporting ban (news.com.au)

Submitted by DJMajah
DJMajah writes: News.com.au reports that Australian Federal Police chief Mick Keelty has called for a media blackout on reporting of terrorism investigations and cases before trial in a speech to the Sydney Institute last night. Although he doesn't believe public institutions be immune from public accountability, he goes on to say that public discussion should be delayed until information is made available by the courts or legal proceedings are complete. This all comes after last years widely reported case of Dr. Mohammed Haneef who was detained then later deported from Australia on evidence described as weak — and seen by some including Haneef as a conspiracy.
The Military

World's Most Powerful Rail Gun Delivered to US Navy 615

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the wanting-what-you-can't-have dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The world's most powerful functional rail gun capable of accelerating projectiles up to Mach 8 has been delivered to the Navy. The new rail gun is a 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun. The Navy eventually hopes to have 64-megajoule ship mounted rail guns. 'The lab version doesn't look particularly menacing -- more like a long, belt-fed airport screening device than like a futuristic cannon -- but the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot. That, of course, is the problem with rail guns: Like lasers, they're out of step with modern-day generators and capacitors. Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation.'"
Education

Dvorak Slams OLPC As 'Naive Fiasco' 740

Posted by Zonk from the snark-snark-snark dept.
theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak has a unique take on the cute One Laptop per Child XO-1, deeming the OLPC project a naive fiasco waiting to unfold that sends an insulting 'let them eat cake' message to the world's poor. When it comes down to a choice of providing African kids living in absolute poverty with access to Slashdot or a $200 truckload of rice, Dvorak votes for the latter. Buy ten OLPCs if it assuages your guilt, says Dvorak, but 'I'll donate my money to hunger relief.'"
Communications

Submission + - Skype caught out over video enhancement 'hack' (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by
superglaze
superglaze writes: "When Skype signed a deal with Logitech to enable "high quality" video calls, what it didn't make clear is that an option already existed within Skype to manually boost video quality. But Skype removed the feature, possibly to protect its new partnership. Guess what? The users of that feature cried foul, and now Skype has been forced to do a U-turn, reintroducing the option to manually increase resolution. Surely a victory for the consumer, albeit of a free product. I wonder how this will affect Skype's ongoing problem with being profitable."
Intel

Intel Updates vPro Platform and Features 77

Posted by kdawson from the chain-of-trust dept.
MojoKid writes "Intel's has certified the Core 2 Duo E6550, E6750, and E6850 processors for vPro, and is releasing the new low-power Q35 Express chipset with a companion ICH9-DO Southbridge, and 82566DM Gigabit Network controller. With these new chispets and technologies, the vPro platform offers next-generation Intel Active Management Technology, enhanced Intel Virtualization Technology, and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (aka Intel TXT). vPro also supports next-generation management standards like WS-MAN and DASH (draft 1.0 spec) and v1.2 of the Trusted Platform Module. Intel has plans to provide continual updates to the vPro platform and will likely enhance vPro further after the launch of their 'Montevina' platform in the first half on 2008."

Feed The Register: Sun's handling of Java security update prompts concerns (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Some users more equal than others

Sun Microsystems in the next few days plans to issue an update that plugs a serious security hole in the most recent version of its Java Runtime Environment, more than a week after providing a fix for the same vulnerability in an earlier version of the program. The lag has prompted a prominent security researcher to lambaste the effectiveness of the company's security team.
Privacy

Submission + - Pirate Bay WILL NOT Be Shutdown After All (zeropaid.com)

Submitted by
Jared Moya
Jared Moya writes: "Considers filing charges for slander or official misconduct against the Swedish police officer involved.The decision to not include the Pirate Bay in this week's blocklist merely reinforces the fact that the charges were dubiously propagated by people higher up the chain in a bid to smear the Pirate Bay and get it shut down for good. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8891/The+Pirate+Bay+W ILL+NOT+Be+Shutdown+After+All"
Patents

Submission + - Johnathan Schwartz comits to patent defense?

Submitted by mowa
mowa writes: Following on the heals of his widely praised (and linked) initial response to Microsoft's patent threat; Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, seems to commit to a position of mutual defense with FOSS leaders Redhat and Ubuntu against patent aggression. It's good to see Sun taking an increasingly constructive and consistent stand.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft kills off J# language

Submitted by
twofish
twofish writes: "Microsoft have announced that J#, its Java clone for .NET, and the Java Language Conversion Assistant will be discontinued and will not appear in the next version of Visual Studio. At the same time they have announced pans for a 64-bit version of the J# Redistributable this year."
Linux Business

Submission + - Samba Success in the Enterprise?

Submitted by
gunnk
gunnk writes: "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is "amateur" software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"

The NSFW HTML Attribute 273

Posted by Zonk from the thought-provoking dept.
phaln writes "Over at The Frosty Mug Revolution, PJ Doland makes a compelling case for a new HTML attribute in the spirit of the highly-regarded 'nofollow' attribute promoted by Google — the NSFW attribute (rel='nsfw'). His original idea has been refined and expanded by positive comments from readers, resulting in a semantic solution to the issue he raises in the original post. From the article: 'Content creators can apply the attribute to paragraph tags, div tags, or any other block-level element. Doing so will indicate that the enclosed content is not safe for work. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of just the content enclosed by the flagged block-level element. This isn't about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content.'"
Editorial

Greatest Task of Web 2.x: Meta-Validation 161

Posted by kdawson from the vetting-the-metadata dept.
CexpTretical writes "This Technology Review article about Web 2.x problems fails to mention the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to fulfilling the dreams of the Semantic Web — i.e., assumptions about the validity of metadata or tagging schemes. We can add all of the metadata and/or tags we want to web resources but that does not mean that the 'data about the data' honestly or accurately describe the resource or are 'about the data' at all. This is why Google does not place much importance on the metadata already contained in HTML document headers for search ranking, because it cannot be trusted. And to validate it would require more effort than to search and index that data from scratch. Ensuring or verifying the validity of metadata would be a task equal to that of initially creating it, but would have to be repeated on an ongoing basis. Hence all of the talk about 'trusted networks,' which then require trusting the gatekeepers of those networks. Talk about 'semantics.'" Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation offer one example of getting useful metadata in a non-trusted environment.

Ubuntu Hacks 138

Posted by samzenpus from the 101-things-to-do dept.
Ravi writes "I recently got hold of a very nice book on Ubuntu called Ubuntu Hacks co-authored by three authors - Kyle Rankin, Jonathan Oxer and Bill Childers. This is the latest of the hack series of books published by O'Reilly. They have made available a rough cut version of the book online ahead of schedule which was how I got hold of the book but as of now you can also buy the book in print. Put in a nutshell, this book is a collection of around 100 tips and tricks which the authors choose to call hacks, which explain how to accomplish various tasks in Ubuntu Linux. The so called hacks range from down right ordinary to the other end of the spectrum of doing specialised things." Read on for the rest of Ravi's review.

Tridgell Uses Plugfest Against Microsoft 29

Posted by Hemos from the go-tridge-go-go dept.
inkslinger77 writes "Andrew Tridgell helped the European Commission's defense of its 2004 Microsoft antitrust ruling at the Court last week by talking about Plugfest, and revealing Microsoft's lack of participation. In an interview after the court had adjourned for the day, Tridgell explained that for the past six years Microsoft has boycotted the event, where engineers from around the world meet up to test their software for interoperability. "

Life on the Other End of the Tech Support Line 337

Posted by Zonk from the better-than-some-gigs dept.
Ant writes to mention a PC World article about life on the other end of the tech support line. From the article: "According to interviewees, entry-level jobs at U.S. tech support firms pay about $7 an hour. Workers for a third-party tech support firm in New Delhi, India, make less than half that. Akanksha Chaand, who holds an advanced degree in computer science and had a job fielding calls for Hewlett-Packard at Business Processing Outsourcing in New Delhi, India, made the equivalent of $13,000 a year working in tech support--significantly more money than many less fortunate people in India earn. In contrast, a tech support pro who now lives in Arizona says she was barely scraping by on her $7-an-hour salary with no benefits. The rep, who asked that her name not be used, said it was only a bit better than her previous job--delivering pizzas. She said she received two weeks of training before taking calls from the public. "

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