Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - The Ambitions And Challenges Of Mesh Networks and The Local Internet Movement (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by Lashdots
Lashdots writes: Recently, a pair of artists in New York put forward an unusual plan for teaching middle school students about the Internet: specifically, by teaching them how to get off it and build their own. With a private social network and a wireless "darknet," OurNet is part of a growing movement that aims to consider and build alternative digital networks. Using affordable, off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software, communities around the world are assembling small, independent, nonprofit wireless mesh networks... And yet, while the decentralized, ad hoc network architecture appeals philosophically to tech-savvy users fed up with monopolistic ISPs, nobody’s found a way to make mesh networks work easily and efficiently enough to replace many home Internet connections. Meanwhile, in spite of the challenges, hackers and artists have located a broader educational and philosophical element to these projects. Says Dan Phiffer, an artist and programmer: "We kind of realize that none of these systems that we use are inevitable."

Comment The challenge is wrong (Score 1) 144

Voice, patterns, signs... anything but a keyboard. The input area is just too small.

Even if someone do manage to invent something clever, it's not going to be anywhere near the usability of a full-sized keyboard. There's a reason Apple won't make smaller laptops: they know a usable keyboard needs to be a minimum size.

Submission + - French parliament approves new surveillance rules (bbc.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The French parliament has approved a controversial law strengthening the intelligence services, with the aim of preventing Islamist attacks.
The law on intelligence-gathering, adopted by 438 votes to 86, was drafted after three days of attacks in Paris in January, in which 17 people died.
The Socialist government says the law is needed to take account of changes in communications technology.
But critics say it is a dangerous extension of mass surveillance.
They argue that it gives too much power to the state and threatens the independence of the digital economy.

Main provisions of the new law:

Define the purposes for which secret intelligence-gathering may be used

Set up a supervisory body, the National Commission for Control of Intelligence Techniques (CNCTR), with wider rules of operation

Authorise new methods, such as the bulk collection of metadata via internet providers

Comment Accessing the data being deserialized (Score 1) 230

by tepples (#49622887) Attached to: Singapore's Prime Minister Shares His C++ Sudoku Solver Code

If you had a hard requirement such as "has to be ASCII-based" or "char must be 8 bits wide", then I'd wonder where it comes from.

The fact that Internet protocols use 8-bit bytes and either ASCII or its superset UTF-8.

For requiring char to be of some specific width, there's hardly a reason, unless you're improperly (de)serializing.

Last time I checked, the C standard offered no facility for networking, graphics, or even enumeration of the files in a directory. This means most nontrivial interactive programs will need to use POSIX or Windows functions, which are defined in the POSIX and Win32 specifications but are undefined behavior from the perspective of the C standard, in order to access the data that the program is (de)serializing in the first place. Or is there a portable way to do this that I'm somehow missing?

Submission + - GOG Announces Open Beta For New Game Platform (gog.com)

Submitted by Donaithnen
Donaithnen writes: Like many geeks I'm against the idea of DRM in general and have championed GOG.com's DRM-free approach to selling games online. Yet like many geeks I've also often succumbed to the temptation of Steam because of the convenience of tracking, installing, and playing my PC game purchases through the launcher, the compulsion of collecting achievements, and the OCD-ness of (and occasional dismay from) tracking the total playtime for my favorite games. Now GOG has announced the open beta for GOG Galaxy, an entirely optional launcher to allow those who want (and only those who want) to have all the same features when playing GOG games.

Comment Re:2-Butoxyethanol (Score 1) 328

And all it would take would be a home mechanic spilling a bottle of one of those products to get to that same parts-per-trillion levels in their own well water.

It would take a lot more than that, in all likelihood. It's usually not trivial for something you spill to wind up in your well unless you've got an open well, and you spill into it.

Comment Re:Why isn't the Water Dept filtering the water? (Score 2) 328

The reason these chemicals are expensive to dispose of is that they are difficult to destroy by any means other than sweet, cleansing flame — and a whole hell of a lot of it. Throwing it in your campfire won't do it. Anything that can't be gotten out of your water by relatively simple means isn't filtered out by your municipal water department.

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Close