362005
story
Tech.Luver writes
"A man from New Jersey has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for sending more than a million spam messages to AOL users. 'Todd Moeller was sentenced ... after he was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails advertising a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the profits ... Moeller told the informant via instant messaging he could conceal the source of the e-mails through his access to 40 different servers and had profited $40,000 a month from other spam e-mail scams that promoted stocks, prosecutors said.'"
361867
submission
The Goggles They Do Nothing writes:
Back in the day (late 1980s onward), Amigas supported "colorfonts", where individual glyphs had multicolored data — very useful for fancy (or cheesy) video titling, graffiti-themed GUIs and so on (and some applications even supported colored+animated glyphs IIRC!). Though in those days, most fonts were bitmaps, and on today's high-res displays you really want outlines, so the completely obvious thing would be to support multicolored (and perhaps even animated?) outline glyph data in fonts. However, the closest I could find to that in a casual search was Harold's fonts where Harold has made sets of monochrome outline fonts suitable for careful overlaying in different colors to produce multicolored glyphs — a clever hack, but a hack. I can't quite believe there's no way to store RGB or CMYK (or whatever colorspace) multicolored outline glyphs in modern outline font file formats (though I could believe people omitting animation...), yet I can't seem to find anything about it online. Sooo... Am I just ignorant — is there a contemporary standard for such things? If so, hey, is there already linux support for it?
361849
submission
Z80xxc! writes:
A few months ago, a video was released on YouTube showing a new way of resizing images, called "Content-Aware Image Sizing". What is special about the software that does this is that when an image is resized to different proportions, the subject of the image remains intact. Now, a beta release of the software to do this has been made available for free download.
361837
submission
frdmfghtr writes:
Our very own CmdrTaco has made the cover of November's IEEE Spectrum magazine. The article talks about the evolution of Slashdot, the Slashdot Effect, and even takes a light jab at Digg ("People on Digg "have the feeling that they are the ones determining what goes on the main page, and administrators on the site are all too happy to let that delusion persist," he says. "[But] stories randomly disappear. Obviously there are higher powers at work.""). It's a good read, although it makes a somewhat disturbing revelation: " It's midmorning at Slashdot as Malda bounds into his office. There's a doll of Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail on his desk and a lamp filled with marbles. Anime posters cover the wall. When his cellphone rings with the presumably ironic ringtone of Britney Spears's "Baby One More Time," Malda taps the mute button. He has work to do."
