sheepoo - Slashdot User

Submission + - DDoS extortionists get 8 years in Russian slammer

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Friday March 30, 2007 @03:42PM

netbuzz writes: "And we get to see their sad faces, too, thanks to F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen, who spoke with the Russian prosecutor while at a conference in London and posted a photo of the bad guys getting the bad news in court.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1319 9"

Private File Sharing To Remain/Become legal In EU 147

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 30, 2007 @03:14PM from the nice-change-of-pace dept.

orzetto writes "Italian newspapers are reporting that the European parliament's Commitee for Legal Affairs approved an amendment presented by EMP Nicola Zingaretti (PSE, IT), that makes piracy a felony—but only if a monetary profit is made. As in the EU parliament's press release: 'Members of the Legal Affairs' committee [...] decided that criminal sanctions should only apply to those infringements deliberately carried out to obtain a commercial advantage. Piracy committed by private users for personal, non-profit purposes are therefore also excluded.' The complete proposal was passed with 23 votes in favour, 3 against and 3 abstained, and is intended to be applied to copyright, trademark, design and other IP fields, but not patent right which is explicitly excluded. The proposal has still to pass the vote of the parliament before becoming law in all EU countries, some of which (like Italy) do have criminal laws in place for non-profit file sharing. A note: Most EU countries use civil law, not common law. Translation of legal terms may be misleading."

Feed TJX lost up to 45.6m card numbers (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Friday March 30, 2007 @01:53PM

King of breaches

TJX has taken the crown for presiding over the largest credit card heist ever, with a tally of 45.6m numbers lost to unknown thieves who intruded on the US-based retailing giant's networks over a span of 17 months. Personal information, often including social security numbers, for at least 451,000 was also lifted.

Submission + - BitTorrent Leading Race To Deliver HD Content

Submitted by

Dr.E

on Friday March 30, 2007 @01:47PM

Dr.E writes: "While Sony and Toshiba hype their supposed "format war" between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, BitTorrent continues to lead the way as the premier delivery platform for HD content. While stand alone players will always offer superior ease-of-use, BitTorrent remains the clear leader in terms of content availability, cost, and freedom of use. The reasons for BitTorrent's supremacy include community involvement, open source software, and freedom from licensing restrictions.

Full Story"

Feed Oracle touts Linux deals (com.com)

From feed by cnetfeed on Friday March 30, 2007 @01:32PM

Blog: Oracle on Wednesday trotted out a list of 26 customers who are paying the database and applications software company to support...

Feed What's the quickest route from California to Stockholm? (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Friday March 30, 2007 @01:12PM

Turn right then swim the Atlantic, according to Google

Google Maps seems to have got itself a sense of humour, if its recommended route from Stanford, California, to Stockholm is anything to go by.

Feed Linux to help the Library of Congress save American history (slashdot.org)

From feed by lcfeed on Friday March 30, 2007 @11:52AM

The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America's history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish...

Submission + - Google blocks academic

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30, 2007 @10:26AM

An anonymous reader writes: It appears that Google takes a very dim view of people "screen scraping" their content (slightly ironic, given that this is how Google gets the content in the first place). An academic, Associate Professor Michael Schwartzbach at the University of Aarhus, Denmark has been offering a service to other academics to enable them to find their h-index (a measure of how often their articles are referenced by others) from Google Scholar. Because this involves screen scraping Google Scholar, Google has blocked his website from accessing their servers. Google has apparently not replied to his requests to allow him to do this for academic and research purposes.

Feed PayPal Battling Back Against The Phishers (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed on Friday March 30, 2007 @10:12AM

The idea of authenticating email as a means of stopping spam and phishing has been talked about for some time, but for various reasons, including standards disputes, the concept hasn't really gone anywhere. Now PayPal, the most popular target among phishers, is proposing a slightly different take on the concept that sounds sort of interesting. The company is urging popular webmail providers like Google and Yahoo to automatically deny any emails coming from a @paypal.com address unless it's authenticated with an established digital signature. So far, the company hasn't gotten any takers, but it would be an interesting experiment to try. Of course, this wouldn't stop attackers from sending emails from different addresses that looked like PayPal's, but these are likely to be less effective anyway. Ultimately, no one solution is going to be a magic bullet for stopping phishing, but anything that can reduce its volume while still allowing legitimate email to get through is a step in the right direction.

Submission + - In-car iPod handling hinders driving ability - stu

Submitted by andyh3930 on Friday March 30, 2007 @10:07AM

andyh3930 writes: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/30/ipod_drivi ng_survey/ A US university has proved what most of us realised already: using an iPod while driving makes you more likely to have an accident. According to a study conducted by Philadelphia's Drexel University, it's as dangerous as handling a mobile phone.

Submission + - AMD/ATI Catalyst 7.3 drivers BSOD Windows Vista

Submitted by on Friday March 30, 2007 @09:55AM

An anonymous reader writes: ExtremeTech has a workaround for users experiencing a BSOD in Windows Vista after "upgrading" their Radeon cards to the Catalyst 7.3 drivers.

Submission + - IBM and Red Hat Debate GPL vs Apache licenses

Submitted by darthcamaro on Friday March 30, 2007 @09:48AM

darthcamaro writes: Which license is more open? Apache 2.0 or GPL 2? Not an easy question and one that IBM and Red Hat are arguing about according to this article on internetnews.com.
"The Apache community model is based on diversity and promotes contribution and participation from anyone that wants to be active in the project not just employees of one particular company," Paul Buck, director of IBM WebSphere said.
And Red Hat's view?:
"LGPL and GPL enable us to provide stability for the community that is building out the technology," Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for the JBoss division at Red Hat told internetnews.com. "Customers want the platform they can bet their business on and not fragmentation or forks that come off of it."

Submission + - Microsoft to Release Bulked Up Xbox 360

Submitted by Galbi on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @10:59AM

Galbi writes: Microsoft Corp. will sell a version of its Xbox 360 with a 120-gigabyte hard drive and a souped up high-definition video connection, in a bid to broaden the appeal of its popular console beyond video games Earlier versions of Xbox 360 came with 20 gigabytes of storage. But that filled up too quickly with movies, TV shows and games from the Xbox Live Marketplace online store, said Peter Moore, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment group.

Submission + - FSF releases 3rd draft of GPLv3

Submitted by

johnsu01

on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @10:31AM

johnsu01 writes: "The Free Software Foundation has announced publication of the third discussion draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3. Because quite a few changes have been made since the previous draft and important new issues have surfaced, the drafting process has been extended and revised to encourage more feedback. The most significant changes in this draft include refinements in the "tivoization" provisions to eliminate unwanted side effects, revision of the patent provisions to prevent end-runs around the license, and further steps toward compatibility with other free software licenses. The FSF has also explicitly asked the community whether the new patent provisions should apply retroactively to the Microsoft-Novell deal."

Submission + - Croquet SDK hits 1.0

Submitted by

arik181

on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @08:52AM

arik181 writes: "Julian Lombardi recently announced the release of the Croquet SDK 1.0 and the creation of the Croquet Consortium, a nonprofit group of academic and corporate partners devoted to building a community around Croquet. Croquet is open source, and is among the most promising technologies currently being developed for the construction of rich interoperable 3D applications and virtual worlds. Insert obligatory William Gibson/Snow Crash/Matrix reference here."

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