akratic - Slashdot User

Norway Outlaws iTunes 930

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday January 25, 2007 @10:37PM from the run-out-of-town dept.

haddieman notes that while many people are getting more and more annoyed at DRM, Norway actually did something about it. The PC World article explains: "Good intentions, questionable execution. European legislators have been giving DRM considerable attention for a while, but Norway has actually gone so far as to declare that Apple's iTunes store is illegal under Norwegian law. The crux of the issue is that the Fairplay DRM that is at the heart of the iTunes/iPod universe doesn't work with anything else, meaning that if you want access to the cast iTunes library, you have to buy an iPod."

Submission + - US Military Tests out Non-Lethal Heat Ray

Submitted by

URSpider

on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @11:54PM

URSpider writes: "CNN.com is reporting on a US military test of a new antipersonnel heat ray. The weapon focuses non-lethal millimeter-wave radiation onto humans, raising their skin surface temperature to an uncomfortable 130 F. The goal is to make the targets drop any weapons and flee the scene. The device was apparently tested on two soldiers and a group of ten reporters, which makes me wonder how thoroughly this thing has been safety tested ..."

Submission + - Military Develops Non-Lethal Ray Gun

Submitted by sup2100 on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @11:39PM

sup2100 writes: The military's new weapon is a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they will catch fire. The technology is supposed to be harmless — a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons... While the sudden, 130-degree Fahrenheit heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite.

Submission + - The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won't Let you Hear

Submitted by

FunkeyMonk

on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @11:38PM

FunkeyMonk writes: "Slate.com has an article by Paul Collins explaining that the iTunes music store has thousands of tracks that you can't buy in the U.S. From the article:
The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page's upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you're dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you've never even heard of. And they're nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S.

The article goes on to mention a few workarounds if you want to purchase foreign tunes. But this brings up a good point — why shouldn't iTunes be the great mythical omniscient music repository where all the world's music is available instantly? Is this a case of **AA greed, or simply a marketing decision?"

Submission + - This is what happens when you don't RTFA

Submitted by SQLGuru on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @08:18PM

SQLGuru writes: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070124/sc_nm/germs_sp onges_dc_3

People who read the article the other day that talked about how 2 minutes in the microwave would kill 99% of the bacteria on the sponge were complaining that they tried it and it ruined their microwave. Apparently, reading the whole article should have clued them in that the sponge needed to be wet. It isn't just Slashdot where people don't RTFA.

Submission + - Switzerland bans the use of GPS units in cars.

Submitted by on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @03:55PM

An anonymous reader writes: If you're traveling with a GPS in your car to Switzerland, be very careful! As of January 10th, the Swiss authorities (ASTRA) have forbid the use of GPS systems in cars. They also banned the selling of car GPS units throughout the country.
The reason is that the software running on these devices reveal the location of traffic radars, through which less people have been fined in the recent years and thus Swiss authorities miss a lot of money. The controversial ban has been created a large commotion inside and outside the country, forcing the authorities to put an official document online [pdf — in Germans], with answers to most frequently asked questions.
GPS devices such as TomTom, Garmin, Mio, Navman, Medion, Route 66, Packard stand Ring, Sony and ViaMichelin are all in the banned list.

Dell Sells Open Source Computers 341

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @10:51PM from the ahhhhhh dept.

Lo5 writes with the excellent news that Dell is selling desktop computers without Windows preinstalled. They are called "n Series"; you can choose from Dimension E520, E521, or C521 desktops. The hard drive comes unformatted.

Submission + - NIST Announces Contest to Replace SHA-1 Algorithm

Submitted by mplex on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @09:34PM

mplex writes: From the article:
'The National Institute of Standards and Technology today announced a public competition to pick a new cryptographic hash algorithm that would become the new federal information processing standard. This evaluation process is expected to run a minimum of three years.'

This is overdue given the known weaknesses with SHA-1 and it's variants

Submission + - iTunes: Music with borders

Submitted by gsn on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @07:34PM

gsn writes: Slate has an article detailing the restrictions that prevent you from buying music on iTunes across national borders. iTunes appears to have a "look but don't touch" policy which allows you to browse music from other countries, but forbids you from paying for it with a U.S. credit card. This artificial trade restriction allows the recording industry to maintain different pricing in different countries, but prevents access to some really great music. Can we ever hope to see unified pricing across the board? Will the 'i' ever mean international?

Submission + - Over One Fifth of Windows Installs Non-Genuine?

Submitted by

snib

on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @03:24PM

snib writes: "Microsoft disclosed Monday that, according to reports collected by the notorious Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool on millions of users' PCs, 22% of all Windows installs do not pass its validation tests and have therefore been deemed non-genuine. From the article: 'Since WGA launched in July 2005, over 512 million users have attempted to validate their copy of Windows, Microsoft said. Of those, the non-genuine rate was 22.3 percent. 56,000 reports have been made by customers of counterfeit software, which grants that user a free replacement copy of Windows.'"

Submission + - Usenet is dying - what next?

Submitted by fotoguzzi on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @03:05PM

fotoguzzi writes: I'm not a power user, but Usenet made me feel like one. By traversing topic trees or keyword searching Google Groups, I was often delighted to learn that my wide-ranging quests had already been answered, or at least I could find an audience receptive to those questions. This seems no longer true for Usenet, and Google searches of the entire Internet do not seem to uncover similar sects. Has anyone adequately explained the fall of Usenet? Is there a new, improved way to find and communicate with scattered peoples who share a common interest?

Submission + - Blu-ray DRM defeated

Submitted by

Aryabhata

on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @02:58PM

Aryabhata writes: "The hacker who broke the DRM technology of HD DVDs is reported to have cracked the copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs.
muslix64 used much the same plaintext attack in both cases. The latest Blu-ray hack was performed by muslix64 using a media file provided by Janvitos, through the video resource site Doom9, and applied to a Blu-ray copy of the movie Lord of War. BD+, the second type of content protection on Blu-ray, is yet to fall by crackers but this is something of a moot point today as the technology is yet to be widely applied on discs."

Submission + - FSG and OSDL to merge; form Linux Foundation

Submitted by

nanday

on Monday January 22, 2007 @12:04AM

nanday writes: "Newsforge (like Slashdot, owned by OSTG) is running a story announcing the merger of the Free Standards Group (FSG) and Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), two of the major non-profit corporations dedicated to promoting open source software. The new organization is called The Linux Foundation and will be led by Jim Zemlin, the former FSG executive director. The merger will be legally complete in early February, but work on the practical details will begin immediately."

Submission + - Xfce 4.4.0 Released

Submitted by

kelnos

on Sunday January 21, 2007 @11:05PM

kelnos writes: "After more than two years since our previous stable feature release, the Xfce Team is proud to announce the release of Xfce 4.4.0. This release features our new file manager, Thunar, as well as many improvements and feature additions to Xfce's core components.

Head over to our brand-new website and take a look at our visual tour, or go straight to the downloads."

Submission + - Xfce 4.4.0 Released

Submitted by linux pickle on Sunday January 21, 2007 @08:16PM

linux pickle writes: The long awaited 4.4 version of the Xfce desktop environment has been released by the Xfce Team. In this version, Xfce has undergone a major revamp and has been improved in many areas. XFFM, Xfce's original file manager has been removed in favor of Thunar, a modern but lightweight replacement. The window manager now has built-in support for transparency and has undergone some major themability improvements and the panel plugin system has been reworked, making it much more stable overall. A visual tour is available here and the release is available for download here.

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