Alanceil - Slashdot User

Comment Re:It's all down to ridiculous password rules... (Score 1) 247

by Alanceil on Saturday August 08, 2009 @04:26PM (#28998089) Attached to: Poor Passwords A Worse Problem Than Poor Antivirus

May I suggest a Firefox addon as a remedy ?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/469 (Passwordmaker)

Like in TFA, I find it hard to make up many good passwords, so I'd rather use one strong one to create passwords that are unique for each login.

Submission + - HD DVD returns (zdnet.com)

Submitted by

Way2Random

on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @02:22PM

Way2Random writes: "Interesting article on HD-DVD getting another run. Just when Blu-ray thought it had clear sailing, a tempest has risen in the East: China Blue Hi-definition Disk (CBHD). Toshiba has licensed its HD DVD to them and it will be the unit world leader in HD optical technology in just 12 months. Why? The Times Online reports that the CBHD players are outselling Blu-ray in China by 3-1 and the CBHD disks cost a quarter of Blu-ray. http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=562&1=1"

Submission + - Apple censor's the dictionary. 1

Submitted by Ouchie on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @02:19PM

Ouchie writes: While I will admit I am not an Apple fan, their recent actions have not been persuasive in changing my mind any. It appears that beyond denying and attempting to cover up hazardous defects in their product lines they have now resorted to censoring a dictionary app.

"We were rejected for objectionable content. They provided screenshots of the words 'shit' and 'fuck' showing up in our dictionary's search results. What's interesting is that we spent a good deal of time making it so that you must type vulgar words in their entirety, and only then will we show you suggestions in the search results. For instance, if you type 'fuc', you will not see 'fuck' as a suggestion. This is in contrast to all other dictionaries we're aware of on the App Store (including Dictionary.com's application), which will show you 'fuck' in the search results for 'fuc', 'motherfucker' for 'mother', etc." http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/05/apples-new-low-censoring-a-dictionary/#continued

Submission + - OCZ's Colossus 1TB SSD Coming Soon

Submitted by eihab on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @01:58PM

eihab writes: OCZ has recently announced that it will introduce a new line of solid state drives (SSD) called the "Colossus" which will introduce massive storage capacities to the SSD world. Computer World reports that Colossus drives will be available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB priced at $300, $650, $1200 and $2200 respectively. The drives will sport the Indilinx controller and are expected to be released in the next couple of weeks.

Submission + - Britain wants to ban airbrushed images (nymag.com)

Submitted by

dougrun

on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @01:44PM

dougrun writes: "Britain is continuing its battle against Photoshop. Liberal Democrats are in an uproar over recent Oil of Olay ads featuring Twiggy with glowing, almost perfect skin. Amazing for a woman of her age. But then photos of the model shopping at Marks & Spencer surfaced, and she looked — dare we say it — her own age, with actual wrinkles and jowls, making the image in the ad seem downright silly. Lawmakers are getting their brows furrowed worrying over what effect this could have on young girls."

Submission + - Critical Windows 7 Bug May Hinder Launch (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by Glenn2372 on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @01:18PM

Glenn2372 writes: According to Randall C. Kennedy of Infoworld, multiple sources have confirmed that RTM build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that could crash the OS in a matter of seconds. The bug is a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility when run against a secondary hard disk using the "/r" parameter. Whether this is an actual showstopper that halts the August 6th release for MSDN or the October 22nd commercial release is unclear, but this definitely doesn't bode well for the boys at Microsoft.

Submission + - DIY CPU thermal grease - using diamond dust! (inventgeek.com)

Submitted by

tygerstripes

on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @06:35AM

tygerstripes writes: "The dysfunctor has spotted an impressive project over on InventGeek.com; an innovative chap has developed his own thermal compound for improved CPU cooling, using diamond dust — the best available material for thermal conduction — as the key ingredient.

In spite of the quick-&-dirty DIY nature of the project, the gains in cooling performance are remarkable, especially considering the material cost was only $33. Given the price many enthusiasts will pay for a top-end cooler, it's easy to imagine this product coming to market quite soon."

Comment Re:Much as we hate TPM here on /. (Score 1) 192

by Alanceil on Saturday August 01, 2009 @08:23PM (#28913085) Attached to: Bootkit Bypasses TrueCrypt Encryption

Why not use a shellscript at boot-time for this ?
Something along the lines of "dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 2> /dev/null | sha1sum",
it should be enough to check for differences in output.

Submission + - AT&T Censors 4chan server 13

Submitted by on Sunday July 26, 2009 @06:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/94pf2/att_is_now_blocking_all_access_to_img4chanorg/ Details how img.4chan.org (home of the notorious /b/ — "Random" image board) is being actively blocked by AT&T. According to the scant details available on 4chan and Reddit there are reports that img.4chan.org has become inaccessible from California to Texas and some reports claim as far east as Connecticut. Supposedly this is to stop a ring of pedophiles, but as one Reddit poster said it best "First the came for the pedophiles and I was not a pedophile..."
Disturbing news indeed.

Submission + - AT&T blocks img.4chan.org from customers (reddit.com) 11

Submitted by

bmecoli

on Sunday July 26, 2009 @03:40PM

bmecoli writes: "AT&T seems to be blocking img.4chan.net which hosts the infamous /b/ (random) board, as well as /r9k/. Those who have contacted AT&T representatives were told that the site is in fact blocked, so this isn't a technical problem, and all the other 4chan subdomains work fine."

First Light Images From Herschel Satellite Released 35

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 20, 2009 @09:47AM from the pretty-pictures dept.

davecl writes "The first images from the Herschel satellite have been released by ESA. The images are of the galaxy M51 and show a lot of structure and other features never seen before. Coverage of these results can be found on the ESA website and on the Herschel mission blog. There's a lot of work still to be done on tuning the satellite and instruments for optimum performance, but these very early results already show the promise of this mission. I work on this project and can say that these results are really impressive at this early stage!"

Submission + - Microsoft Sabotaging Firefox With Sneaky Add-Ons 4

Submitted by Slashdot on Saturday May 30, 2009 @09:09PM

Slashdot writes: The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, unleashed in February, forces an undisclosed Firefox extension on Windows users, which not only injects a serious security vulnerability into Firefox (also present in Internet Explorer), but it disables the uninstall button, meaning the only way to get rid of it, is to edit the Windows registry.

**you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste**

http://startupearth.com/2009/05/31/microsoft-sabotaging-firefox-with-sneaky-net-updates/

Comment Had a look at Mikrokopter ? (Score 4, Informative) 259

by Alanceil on Monday May 25, 2009 @05:43PM (#28087977) Attached to: Best Way To Build A DIY UAV?

Have a look at this project: http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/Mikrokopter-Get-started
They offer assembly instructions and software.

Some pictures: http://gallery.mikrokopter.de/main.php
and videos: http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/VideoListe

Windows 7 Gaming Performance Tested 179

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @07:50AM from the take-with-a-beta-grain-of-salt dept.

Timmus writes "Gamers holding onto Windows XP may not have to fear sluggish performance when Windows 7 debuts. While Windows Vista's gaming performance was pretty spotty at launch, the Windows 7 beta build seems to handle most games well. Firingsquad has tested the Windows 7 beta against Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1 on midrange and high-end gaming PCs across 7 different games. While the beta stumbles in a couple of cases, overall it performs within a few percentage points of Windows XP, actually outrunning XP in multiple benchmarks."

Submission + - Boeing: We zapped a UAV with a laser (cnet.com)

Submitted by

mytrip

on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @04:04AM

mytrip writes: "Boeing is seeing a glimmer of progress in its work toward fielding laser weapons.

The defense industry giant on Monday said tests of its Laser Avenger system in December marked "the first time a combat vehicle has used a laser to shoot down a UAV," or unmanned aerial vehicle. In the testing, the Humvee-mounted Laser Avenger located and tracked three small UAVs in flight over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and knocked one of the drone aircraft out of the sky.

Boeing didn't go into much detail about the shoot-down. In response to a query by CNET News, it did say this much about the strike by the the kilowatt-class laser: "A hole was burned in a critical flight control element of the UAV, rendering the aircraft unflyable.""

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