Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Privacy

India To Have Automatic Communications Monitoring 96

Posted by timothy from the top-down-with-a-vengeance dept.
angry tapir writes "India plans to set up a centralized system to monitor communications on mobile phones, landlines and the Internet in the country, a minister has told the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament. Indian laws allow the interception and monitoring of communications under certain conditions, including to counter terrorism. A pilot of the new Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) is to be started by June next year, subject to clearances by other government agencies."
The Internet

The Men Who Fix the Internet 162

Posted by kdawson from the physical-side-of-things dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Remember all those undersea cables breaking? PopSci.com introduces John Rennie, who '... has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by UK-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie — a congenial, 6'4", 57-year-old Scotsman — patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables.' The article goes on to outline the physical infrastructure of the Internet, including some of its points of vulnerability."

Comment Re:Better late than never (Score 1, Funny) 69

by phantomflanflinger (#26762685) Attached to: RIAA Drops Enforcement Case To "Sort Out" Inaccuracies
Indeed; the British government never underestimated the IRAA. Thankfully, the permanent ceasefire brought peace to Northern Ireland. Or rather, it stopped IRA bombs going off in England, which is all the British Government (and the British public) ever cared about.

I'm just glad I live in Britain - yes, the IRA used to be a threat to me, but the RIAA never will.
Space

Black Hole At Center of Milky Way Confirmed 392

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-can-see-it-from-here dept.
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso). The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."
Graphics

Silverlight On the Way To Linux 475

Posted by timothy from the howl-at-the-moonlight dept.
Afforess writes "For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports 'In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.' Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works."
Games

UK Opens National Video Game Archive 121

Posted by Soulskill from the grandaddy-pac-man dept.
BBC News reports that the UK is acknowledging video games as a "key component of modern culture" by opening the National Videogame Archive inside the National Media Museum. "'The National Videogame Archive is an important resource for preserving elements of our national cultural heritage,' said Dr Newman. 'It's not just about cartridges and consoles, it's also about video game culture, the ways in which people actually play them. Unlike film and music, it's very difficult to walk into a retail store and walk out with a bunch of games from the 1970's,' said Dr Newman. He feels that games should be archived in the same way that music, books and film are preserved, as we often use them as markers in our culture and history." There's a similar archive at the University of Texas at Austin. What games would you put on display?
Programming

Becoming a Famous Programmer 347

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lemme-tell-you-about-1=1 dept.
An anonymous reader writes "GrokCode analyzes more than 200 famous programmers to determine what types of projects made them famous. Inventing a programming language, game, or OS ranked among the top projects likely to lead to fame. Most programmers became famous through their work on only one project. The article also shows that among famous programmers, the ratio of males to females is much larger than among normal programmers."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft to buy back $40bn of its shares

Submitted by phantomflanflinger
phantomflanflinger writes: As you may have heard already, Microsoft have announced their intentions to buy back $40 billion in stock from their investors, in the biggest single buy-back plan in business history. The announcement has given Microsoft shares a small gain but they still stand significantly below their level in January — before Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo!. The announcement of the plan has also created new speculation about a now-or-never deal with Yahoo!.
Space

Submission + - One of the coolest place in the Universe

Submitted by phantomflanflinger
phantomflanflinger writes: The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.

According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space.

The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson.
The Internet

The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters 192

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-remember-everything dept.
NotableCathy writes "CNet has an interesting retrospective write-up documenting the most notable dotcom disasters and now-defunct Websites that were massive in their day, detailing what happened to them and what they led to. Nupedia didn't escape a slating (remember Larry Sanger's memoir?), or indeed Beenz, whose founder and CEO once said 'would become the universal currency, supplanting all others,' according to The Register seven years ago."

Slashdot Top Deals

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

Close