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China

McAfee CSO Issues Warning On the 'New Cold War' 77

angry tapir writes "The Cold War between the USA and the USSR may have ended in 1991, but a new conflict involving the same enemies has emerged on the digital frontier, according to McAfee's US chief security officer. Brett Wahlin, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) counter intelligence agent, told Computerworld Australia that the RSA token hack in March this year – where the token information was used to infiltrate US defense contractor Lockheed Martin – used the same espionage tactics he encountered while serving as an agent from 1987 to 1991 with the US army for NATO."
Communications

Twitter Sued By British Soccer Player 264

norriefc writes "Here in the UK super injunctions are all the rage. These are injunctions that bar the press from even mentioning that the injunctions exist. Recently a Twitter account exposed several of these super injunctions and named several people involved and what their alleged indiscretions were. Now one 'famous' soccer player is trying to sue Twitter and the yet to be named tweeters for invasion of privacy, apparently in ignorance of the Streisand effect. I'm doubtful of an American company paying much attention to UK anti-free-speech laws"

Comment No one knows about delete? (Score 1) 447

Using the awesome bar and some result is coming up that you don't like? Select it with the arrow keys and hit the delete key; *poof*, it's gone from the awesome bar. Doesn't matter if it was history or bookmarks or whatever, it's just gone.

Idle

Submission + - Motorcycle accident results in bionic bottom. (telegraph.co.uk) 2

Noishe writes: A man involved in a motorcycle accident in the UK has been given an alternative to the dreaded colostomy bag. He now carries around a remote control to activate his "bionic bottom" made out of muscles taken from above his knee. The muscles were wrapped around his sphincter and then attached to electrodes that are controlled by a remote control he now carries in his pocket.
Google

Google Buys a Piece of a Cable To Japan 78

Googling Yourself writes "Google announced that they will be part of a six-company consortium that will build a high-bandwidth sub-sea fiber optic cable linking the US and Japan. The new cable system, named Unity, is expected initially to increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second of bandwidth across the Pacific. The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs. Rumors that Google would join the consortium had originally surfaced in September last year but the company had declined to confirm or deny the news."
Programming

Microsoft Releases Office Binary Formats 259

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."
Government

UK Commissioner Seeks To Ban Ultrasonic Anti-Teen Device 552

mikesd81 points out a Times Online article that discusses the legality of the Mosquito sound device, which is used to annoy and drive off younger people with sounds that are too high-pitched for most adults to hear. We discussed how annoying this device can be a couple years ago. From Times Online: "Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, the Children's Commissioner for England appointed to represent the views of the country's 11 million children, has set up a campaign — called Buzz Off — that is calling for the Mosquito to be banned on grounds that it infringes the rights of young people. 'These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving,' Sir Al told the BBC. 'The use of measures such as these are simply demonizing children and young people, creating a dangerous and widening divide between the young and the old.'"
Space

Is There Such a Thing As Absolute Hot? 388

AlpineR writes "Is there an opposite to absolute zero? An article from PBS's NOVA online explains several theories of the maximum possible temperature. Maybe it's the Planck temperature, 10^32 K, beyond which the known laws of physics break down. Or maybe just 10^30 K, the limit of some versions of string theory. If space is actually 11-dimensional then the maximum temperature could even be as low as 10^17 K, attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. Or maybe infinite temperature wraps around to negative temperature and absolute hot is the same as absolute cold."
Operating Systems

Commodore 64 Still Beloved After All These Years 463

techsoldaten writes "CNN is running a story about the Commodore 64 and how people are still devoted to it after all these years. "Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.'"
Software

Games All Downhill Since Pong? 403

In a recent article Nolan Bushnell laments the current state of gaming, stating that modern games are nothing more than a "race to the bottom" resulting in complete and utter trash. In order to combat what he sees as the downward spiral in game quality he continues to work on his new dining experience uWink that features tabletop games and a "reasonably priced meal". RPS weighs in on the subject arguing that, while the unhealthy obsession with Halo 3 might be a bit misplaced, there are plenty of gems to be found amidst the flotsam and jetsam.

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