Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

MA Proposes Two Year Jail Term for Online Gambling 248

Posted by Zonk from the little-harsh-for-some-blackjack dept.
tessaiga writes "The Boston Globe reports that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is trying to sneak a provision to criminalize online gambling. The bill, if passed, would make online gambling punishable by up to 2 years in prison and $25k in fines. Ironically, the provision is buried deep within a bill to allow the construction of three new casinos in Massachusetts to bring more gambling revenue into the state. 'If you were cynical about it, you'd think that they're trying to set up a monopoly for the casinos,' said David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Democratic House representative Barney Frank, who earlier this year introduced federal legislation to legalize regulated online gambling, also criticized the move as 'giving opponents an argument against him.' Indeed, groups such as the Poker Player's Alliance, who were previously supportive of Patrick's plans to open the new casinos, have already announced opposition to the bill because of the online gambling clause."
Media

Submission + - Dan Rather uncovers flaws in touchscreen voting

Submitted by goombah99
goombah99 writes: Dan Rather Reports has posted a lengthy YouTube teaser of their upcoming touchscreen voting expose (to air tuesday at 8 or 11pm ET) This is sort of a "60-minutes" style investigation of touchscreen voting. It's apparently not a rehash either. Rather turns up some new evidence such as tracking down the dilapidated plant where the ES&S ivotronic touchscreens were assembled. There they were having a 30 to 40% rejection rate on the screen themselves. Apparently the issue here was a rush to market to meet the election schedule. They needed lots of machines, fast. So plant workers say the rejects got shipped too. The "rush to market" aspect demonstrates an often overlooked strength of the use of open source software with commodity hardware and a multiple vendor business model like open voting consortium. This should be much less subject to single source point failures and has a built-in adversarial oversight nature that might lend some quality control. I just hope their conclusion is not "we need perfect machines and perfectly trained operators" and instead is we need a different approach that is transparent, robust and self correcting in the face of errors.
Editorial

Submission + - Development in Open Source

Submitted by
Liran Tal
Liran Tal writes: "Development in Open Source

Open Source projects have gained in the past few years an entirely different reputation in the public eye, in a good sense.
Now-days we are seeing things happening in the Open Source arena, beautiful things, that most of us didn't expect to take
place so fast and so intense. Among these, are the huge amount of endorsement in terms of project sponsorship coming from
Fortune 500 companies as well as funds that keep pouring on either existing Open Source projects to support them or even
more intensively the acquisition of these projects that later become commercial companies with Free Software concept roots.

The adaptation and awareness of Open Source software by the general public keeps growing rapidly.
Government offices and major firms are taking active roles and exhibit participation in forums, mailing-lists, patches submission
and code contribution, not to mention the attendance of these firms in seminars, exhibitions and conferences all around the
world just to be kept in-the-loop and updated with all the new technologies that has surfaced out.
It is all happening for a reason — the benefit of the widely accepted development methodology of sharing knowledge through
collaboration is simply priceless, and it seems that everyone realize it sooner or later.

The effect of all the buzz around GNU/Linux and Open Source drives one of the most basic needs in each of us, as
a human-being. That is, to be a part of a whole. We long to be a part of a community, of a bigger good and as a consequence
we are witnessing more and more involvement in projects of all kinds of development, whether it's language translations,
code contributions and documentation writing. Each involvement, as small contribution as it may be is causing a butter-fly
effect that triggers others to contribute and participate in this beautiful, open world of technology and knowledge sharing.

X-WRT is such a project that is reflecting all of the above concepts that we discussed.
Some may be familiar with the OpenWRT project which aims to provide an alternative firmware to the one that is shipped
with (wifi) routers, like the popular Linksys WRT-54G model and others.
The X-WRT project was born in order to bring a more powerful and professional web interface to the OpenWRT firmware,
and indeed the project proved a great success. In short time, it received an enormous feedback from users who wanted
more features to be presented as well as users who wanted to get involved in the development of X-WRT.

X-WRT is taking all the goods of Open Source and Free Software concepts and put them to show.
The participation is widely welcome and all that is needed to join as a developer is a registered berlios account
and an email to the project admin (thepeople). Approximately 6 hours later you are given access to the svn
repository and you may start with active development on both branches of the project. There are no committees
to question your skills or examine your CV background. Everyone are treated equal and given equal voice to be heard.
I'm an active developer of X-WRT and I enjoy every bit of involvement. The team is sharpened-skilled, open minded
and most of all, good people.

To summarize, projects of Open Source nature will continue to revolutionize the technology industry and take us
further into new grounds of socialism with recognition that knowledge sharing produces good things. If most of
these projects will take the form of X-WRT's great qualities then the future looks like a good place to be a
developer.

Liran Tal,
active developer of X-WRT."
The Internet

Monday is Wiretap the Internet Day 264

Posted by Zonk from the i-had-other-plans-but-okay dept.
Alien54 wrote with a link to a Wired blog entry noting that May 14th is the official deadline for internet service providers to modify their networks, and meet the FBI and FCC's new regulations. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires that everyone from cable services to Universities give them access, within certain parameters, to the usage habits of customers. "So, if you're a broadband provider (separately, some VOIP companies are covered too) ... Hurry! The deadline has already passed to file an FCC form 445, certifying that you're on schedule, or explaining why you're not. You can also find the 68-page official industry spec for internet surveillance here. It'll cost you $164.00 to download, but then you'll know exactly what format to use when delivering customer packets to federal or local law enforcement, including 'e-mail, instant messaging records, web-browsing information and other information sent or received through a user's broadband connection, including on-line banking activity.'"
Patents

Submission + - Meeting with a Digital Rights Management proponent

Submitted by
JoeLinux
JoeLinux writes: "I just had what I thought was going to be a boring meeting with a friend of the family.

It turns out this person is a Senior VP in charge of Rights and Title Administration for Sony Pictures. (Translation: She is in charge of preventing piracy).

Over the course of a half hour, we had a conversation discussing the best way to combat online piracy. This person has obviously been seeing things from the point of view of the movie industry. (I.E. the movie industry exists on a 4-5% profit margin, Canada is to blame for most of the movie piracy, etc.)

They were surprised to learn about some of the indiscriminate lawyering practices of the RI- and MP-AA., but then quickly rallied with, "Well, if the ISPs have the logs, doesn't that prove they were downloading?" They also had no clue as to what DRM is, or its implications (I.E. they are not very geek-oriented).

While I could have argued with them for a good long time, the particulars of the evening did not allow for me to hash it out.

What I am asking for is a concise, non-trollish, "Joe Six-Pack-friendly" explanation of DRM, piracy, with plenty of numbers to back up the claims (No brown numbers please). This is our chance to educate someone in the upper ranks of Sony Pictures with our concerns regarding DRM, why we think its a bad idea, and, most importantly, propose an alternate solution.

Any geek references will have to be explained thoroughly. We are talking to someone of a more upper-management point of view. However, knowing their personally, this person does listen.

Once again, this is for someone who is willing to hear us out. Please do not troll, grief, etc."
Security

Journal Journal: Damn....breakin attempt foiled by $2 hardware screw 12

Journal by nizo

Someone tried to break into my house; it looks like they shot a hole in the window with a pellet gun and tried to undo the latch. Thanks bastards for cracking my window, but little did you know that short of a crowbar, you will never move the little $2 screw thingy that keeps the windows shut. Luckily it was one of the windows I wanted to replace anyway, but still damn....
Intel

Submission + - Paul Murphy: "Intel Macs Are Killing the Plane

Submitted by Leeenux
Leeenux writes: According to LinuxInsider's Paul Murphy, Apple's migration from PowerPC to Intel processors resulted in a massive spike in power consumption that has hurt economic diversity of the US and devastated the environment. Even worse, he suggests, it involves scandal on the part of Apple board member Al Gore. RDM disagrees: Paul Murphy's 'Intel Macs Are Killing the Planet' Myth.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Are .tmp files necessary or just bad programming?

Submitted by planckscale
planckscale writes: After spending another hour deleting .tmp files from a bloated XP machine I started to wonder, is the .tmp file necessary when coding an application on the MS platform? Why do so many apps produce .tmp files and is it just because of bad coding or does the use of them dramatically speed up an app? Don't coders use dev/null to reduce them in linux? I can understand the use of them in case an app crashes for recovery purposes, but why don't more apps have the capacity to delete their own .tmp files once they are done with them? Is it too much to ask to at least have the option when closing an app to delete your temp files?
Security

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Gets Hacked

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A group of hackers has stolen a list of all 1.6 million usernames and passwords for registered users of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Computer Sweden reports that the sensitive information was accessed by a group calling itself Angry Young Hackers (Arga Unga Hackare — AUH). Source: http://www.thelocal.se/7280/20070511/
Microsoft

Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion? 535

Posted by Zonk from the hats-would-be-really-weird-looking dept.
rs232 writes "'Apple has one. So does the Java community, Oracle, IBM, and Google. Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman. But does anyone really worship the Gods of Redmond?' While many Microsoft employees are pumped to work there, article author Michael Singer explores why even enthusiastic Microsoft-watchers acknowledge that customers and product developers are unenthusiastic about the software giant. He theorizes that it comes down to passion: Microsoft lost that a long time ago, he says, and so passionate people gravitate to other projects and products."
Graphics

What LAMP-Based Gallery Software Would You Use? 62

Posted by Cliff from the show-off-your-photography-skills dept.
Zanguinar asks: "I've been a Gallery user for years now. I have a ton of photos, organized by albums, mainly just for use by my family and close friends. However, some of my friends have begun using Flickr. I can't say I blame them, since it's got a great design, and I love the tagging concept. However, I'm not eager to store my photos on somebody else's server, and don't want to pay for the privilege, especially since I already run my own web server. The problem is, I can't find any Flickr-like software to run on my home LAMP setup. All I want is to be able to tag my photos like Flickr and be able to display them by tag, tag intersection, date, and other such fields. Is there an OSS that is doing this?"
Linux Business

Submission + - recommend Linux and get fired ..

Submitted by
rs232
rs232 writes: "The Bexley school district announced May 8 that it acted on the recommendations of a recently released technology audit and fired 11-year district Network Manager Curtis Mason'

Linux was my idea, Mason said."
Operating Systems

Version Control for Important System Files? 71

Posted by Cliff from the so-you-can-roll-back-when-things-go-wrong dept.
TokyoCrusaders92 asks: "Like a lot of other organizations (800 staff, 5000 students) we have a mix of Windows, Novell & Linux (primarily Linux) for our IT infrastructure. We now have a multitude of config files, firewall rule bases, shell scripts, and so forth which are managed by multiple people and groups. Recently, we started using RCS for version control of the firewall rule-base, but this doesn't seem like it would scale up to larger groups of users. While thinking about this, it would seem that the critical features would include: version control; logging; multiple users; secure authentication; and integrity checking. What are other people using to manage their config files?"
Education

OLPC Project Rollout Begins In Uruguay 248

Posted by Zonk from the go-get-em-kids dept.
Acer500 writes "The One Laptop Per Child project became a reality Thursday in Uruguay, as the 160 children of school number 24 in the humble town of Cardal received their XO computers. The learning tools came directly from the hands of president Tabaré Vazquez. It has become a matter of national pride that Uruguay is the first country to realize the project's goal. The target is that by 2009, every school-age child in Uruguay will have one, and an initial 15 million dollars have already been allocated to the project. From the newspaper articles: 'The happiness of having a PC in their hands, some of them for the first time, had the kids in ecstasy, which didn't wait to turn on their computers, introduce their personal information (required the first time they're turned on), choose the screen colors, and start experimenting with them. What initially made them more enthusiastic was the possibility of taking photographs and filming each others with the included webcams.'" More information below.
Privacy

RFID Guardian Protects Your Privacy 65

Posted by CowboyNeal from the don't-look-at-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new device devised by Amsterdam graduate student Melanie Rieback is designed to serve as a portable firewall for RFID tags. The portable battery-powered RFID Guardian uses an access control list to filter RFID queries, blocking queries that aren't approved. Rieback, who is also known for being the first researcher to develop a proof of concept RFID virus, hopes to offer version 3.0 of the RFID Guardian to the public at cost."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra

Close