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The Internet

Blizzard Previews Revamped Battle.net 188

Posted by Soulskill from the find-out-precisely-how-bad-you-are dept.
Blizzard updated the official StarCraft II site today with a preview of how the revamped Battle.net will function. They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps. Quoting: "When the legacy Battle.net service introduced support for user-created mods such as DotA, Tower Defense, and many others, these user-created game types became immensely popular. But while Battle.net supported mods at a basic level, integration with tools and the mod community wasn't where it needed to be for a game releasing in 2010. The new Battle.net service will see some major improvements in this area. StarCraft II will include a full-featured content-creation toolkit — the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single-player campaign. To fully harness the community's mapmaking prowess, Battle.net will introduce a feature called Map Publishing. Map Publishing will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the service. This also ties in with the goal of making Battle.net an always-connected experience — you can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. Finding games based on specific mods will also be much easier with our all-new custom game system, placing the full breadth of the modding community's efforts at your fingertips."
Image

Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project Screenshot-sm 687

Posted by samzenpus from the duck-and-cover dept.
garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"
Media

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.
plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."
Linux

Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released 744

Posted by samzenpus from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.
palegray.net writes "The latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been released. Offering numerous enhancements for both desktop and server environments, this release includes notable features like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images, the Ubuntu One 'personal cloud,' and Linux kernel version 2.6.31. Please be sure to use a release mirror close to your geographic location to help reduce the stress on Ubuntu's primary servers; using BitTorrent for downloads can help alleviate the load even more. If your organization has adequate network and server resources, please consider hosting a mirror as well."
Encryption

Submission + - 512-bit RSA factoring in your spare time (unitedti.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The 512-bit RSA signing keys for several Texas Instruments (TI) calculators have been factored, allowing the installation of custom software, including operating systems. A forum member at unitedti.org reportedly used sophisticated factoring software developed by the open source GGNFS and Msieve projects. After the original poster cracked the key for the TI-83, the unitedti.org community mounted a distributed computational effort, quickly obtaining several more keys. Also mentioned were some interesting statistics:

-The factorization took, in total, about 1745 hours, or a bit less than 73 days, of computation. (I've actually been working on this since early March; I had a couple of false starts and haven't been able to run the software continously.)
-My CPU, for reference, is a dual-core Athlon64 at 1900 MHz.
-The sieving database was 4.9 gigabytes and contained just over 51 million relations.
-During the "filtering" phase, Msieve was using about 2.5 gigabytes of RAM.
-The final processing involved finding the null space of a 5.4 million x 5.4 million matrix.

This case is particularly notable, as the goal was to compromise live keys. Furthermore, the goal was accomplished using modest resources within only a few weeks. Invoking the DMCA, TI immediately moved to suppress the propagation of the keys, resulting in an even wider distribution.

Comment So fuckin' what (Score 1) 232

by zeridon (#28353463) Attached to: Palm Pre Does Not Get US Tethering Either

First of all i am not a layer
Second i work in exactly the telecom env
third i am not in the us but in Europe

so taking all that in mind i still got a suckin idiotik phone that is used only as a phone (it does it's job as a phone) as are most of the people in the telco business (excluding managers). In my personal opinion the moment you can use your phone as a regular Modem you are basically unstoppable. And you know using a modem to connect is nothing new revolutionizing or whatever.

Some people said you are going to draw more bw ... then why they are seling unlimited. If it is unlimited it means UNLIMITED. It does not mater that you are one of the measly 0.5% that uses more than 2 TB a month because you know how and can make good use of it.

Also take in mind the following: As much as i despise the Iphone and similiar stuff for claiming being a phone they really are marketed as a multimedia computing platform ... so phone features are just a bonus not main driver (if you don't know/care/dare to use the other features ... well you need simpler "stick that can talk". Any Goddamn forsaken stupid app that can leach at tremendous rates even being deployed on a "phone" is not a wise move and they've called it upon themselvs so they've got to live with it

Everybody oversells, telcos oversell enormously and of course win enourmously.

End point of the topis is "If i can get to the modem i can and i will use it and nobody can prove otherwise"

PS: excuse my typing mistakes ... it's a bit late and i am up for about 60 hours already ...
Security

'Cybot' Development For Network Defense 51

Posted by Soulskill from the paging-bill-adama-to-oak-ridge dept.
lwbrown writes with this excerpt from Government Computer News about a concept being explored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: "UNTAME is the product of a long-term program by the division's Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Group to develop futuristic security functionality for increasingly large, complex environments. The cybots differ from traditional software agents in that they form a collective and are aware of the condition and activities of other cybots in the collective. 'You give it a mission and tools to work with, such as mobility and intrusion sensors, and it uses those tools and cooperates with other cybots to accomplish the mission," said Lawrence MacIntyre, one of the project's developers.'"
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Linux Info Share For Geeks Site ShareMyApps.org (sharemyapps.org)

Submitted by
EmErgE
EmErgE writes: "We would like to present you a new service, it's called Share My Apps and it allows you to share information about your GNU/Linux system with other people.

It's a site that allows you to create a profile and display information such as installed packages, the amounts of memory, processor type, the Linux distribution in use, the wallpaper and many more similar interesting things.

After creating your profile you will be able to search, vote and comment applications, systems and users and share your experiences with others."
Portables

Submission + - new energy-efficient microchip developed by MIT (newsdaily.com)

Submitted by
L Shlen
L Shlen writes: "A new energy-efficient microchip designed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Instruments is reputed to be 10 times more efficient than current chips, according to an MIT news release. The chips could be used in cell phones and medical devices, among other applications. The energy savings is due to a high efficiency DC-to-DC converter that involves fewer components than are found on other chips."
Be

Submission + - Visiting Haiku's Kernel Debugging Land (haiku-os.org)

Submitted by
kokito
kokito writes: "Haiku is a project started in 2001 whose goal is to create a modern reimplementation of BeOS. One of the Haiku lead developers, Ingo Weinhold, has posted an interesting tutorial on how to use Haiku's built-in kernel debugger to the Haiku website, where he describes the most important commands, introduces the kernel tracing feature recently added to Haiku, and includes an example KDL session in which an inter application deadlock is debugged. According to Ingo, "Haiku's kernel debugger is a powerful tool whose usefulness does not end in the kernel domain. It can also help with certain userland problems, that would otherwise be tricky to tackle.""

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