PhreakOfTime writes "For the first time the rising ocean levels have washed away an inhabited island. Lohachara island was at one point home to some 10,000 people. It, along with several other spits of land near the Indian mainland, is now permanently underwater. From the article: ' As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago ... the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.'"

mytrip writes to tell us that Google has announced that they will not be getting in on the digital music sales market anytime soon. Analysts have been predicting the response of a "GTunes" service for months but Chris Sacca, head of business development at Google, dispelled those rumors in a recent address at the annual National Association of Recording Merchandisers conference in Florida. Sacca emphasized the need for "ecosystem development" and partnerships within the industry stating that they were the "big opportunity" in the digital music business.

Udo Schmitz writes "It's official now. Reuters confirms the rumors that Microsoft wants to take on Apple's iPod and iTunes. From the article: 'Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it plans to release a new music and entertainment player and accompanying software under the "Zune" brand this year, in a belated attempt to challenge the dominance of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod player ... Microsoft sources said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, is working with J. Allard, vice president of its Xbox team, on the digital media player/software project.'"

lfescalante writes to mention a unique synergistic melding of television and gaming: A Dance Dance Revolution TV show. From the article: "Dance Revolution, said all parties involved, is a live-action television series based on Konami's extremely popular video game franchise Dance Dance Revolution. Notes published by DIC and Konami describe this series as one in which 'tweens' and teens bring their freshest moves to this sensational new dance competition where teams of dancers display their innovative routines."

Cjattwood writes "Mac OS rumors has an article describing a possible implementation of a Bittorrent client into Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", including a unique sharing reward system where the user can share bandwidth and get rewards, such as credit in the iTunes store."

John Seyton asks: "A recent posting regarding Internet Explorer 7 has me pondering what impact this next release will have on the web market. Firefox has fought hard to make a small dent in Internet Explorer's armor, to the point that we can browse most of the web with no loss of functionality, yet if Internet Explorer 7 recaptures a sizable chunk of that market share, web authors might once again create offensive 'please upgrade to Internet Explorer' web pages. Based upon the known features, what does the Slashdot community think the impact of Internet Explorer 7 will be on the web in general? Will we be forced to live a two-browser life once again?"

moto writes "ThinkCE has some news of the world's slimmest phone. From the article: 'Slimmer than a stick insect with the runs, the new world's thinnest phone comes in the shape of the EV-K100 handset, an ultra-thin gizmo made by Korean cell phone makers KTF Technologies. Measuring a wafer-thin 7.9-millimeters, the EV-K100 grabs the "world's slimmest" crown from local rivals VK, whose VK2010 and VK2100 phones measured up at a comparatively lardy, pie-scoffing 8.8mm (with Motorola's RAZR being a positively obese 14.5-mm thick).'"

Ant writes to tell us SearchSecurity.com has an article touting the latest "reality show" idea from the Georgia Tech College of Computing, Information Security Center, and Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center. The "Tiger Team" competition promises to be an "American Idol for security geeks." Students "prep, sweat and show their stuff while a panel of critics decides their fates. But unlike the popular 'reality' TV show, judges aren't determining who can best carry a tune. Instead they weigh students' ideas for making information security more user-friendly, with $50,000 -- enough cash to fund a project for 12 months -- hanging in the balance."

lessthan0 writes "In Mac OS X, the root account is disabled by default. The first user account created is added to the admin group and that user can use the sudo command to execute other commands as root. The conventional wisdom is that sudo is the most secure way to run root commands, but a closer look reveals a picture that is not so clear." The article is about OSX but the debate is a little older ;)

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.16 has been released after two months and two weeks of development. You can check the comprehensible changelog (text mirror of the site). The new features include OCFS2, a clustering filesystem contributed by Oracle, new unshare(), pselect()/ppoll() and *at() system calls, support the moving of the physical location of pages between nodes in NUMA systems, support for the Cell processor, cpufreq support for G5s plus thermal control for dualcore G5s, improved power management support for many devices and subsystems (libata, alsa...), a new mutex locking primitive, high-resolution timers, per-mountpoint noatime/nodiratime, 64-to-32-bit ioctl compatibility for the v4l2 subsystem, IPv6 support for DCCP, the TIPC protocol (Transparent Inter Process Communication, ACL support for CIFS filesystem, HFSX filesystem support, new configfs filesystem (which complements sysfs, not replaces it), support for running executables from v9fs (plan9 9P distributed filesystem), support for many new devices, improved support for others and lots of other changes. Check it out from kernel.org"

David asks: "I've come across a need for a single sign-on solution needing the ticket services of KRB5 and the backend store of LDAP for an enterprise system involving multiple operating systems. KRB and LDAP are required components. In short the solution needs to authenticate users and authorize host/group/client services such as SSH based on time-of-day/day-of-week schedule. With PAM, time-of-day is easily arranged in a flat file: /etc/security/time.conf using pam_time.so. Unfortunately, this is a single host-based answer, and the complex collection of systems in use means this isn't feasible. It's certainly easy to extend a KRB5 schema for LDAP to store this information, but I haven't found any place that utilizes such a setup. In contrast, this is found on Microsoft but that isn't a solution we're willing to engage. So the question is, are there any resources available where this feature of pam_time.so is pushed into the Kerberos/LDAP interaction or do I need another layer dictating authorization values to KRB?"

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at some of the recent faux pas of Google and what implications they might have. The articles's conclusion: They should hire a chief marketing officer to avoid such gaffes. From the article: 'Recent missteps that have whipsawed or irked investors include the inadvertent release of sales projections and an agreement to censor its own search results in China. Then on Mar. 8, Google used a vaguely worded blog on its site to disclose a settlement of as much as $90 million in a case concerning click fraud. That came days after the company said the case was without merit and told investors the impact of click fraud on advertisers is immaterial.'"

QMan asks: "I, like many others here at Slashdot, am an avid gamer. Recently, I've been thinking about upgrading my gaming PC, but with all the mish mash of components in the box, I don't really know which components are slowing down the rest, and would be an ideal candidate for replacement. I'm looking for advice on how to discover the inherent bottlenecks in my system, whether they be from my video card, RAM, CPU, or other components. I've tried various benchmarking utilities, but they generally give an overall performance rating, but not much info on which device(s) had the most impact in limiting that rating. I'd imagine many of you out there have encountered the same problem, and might have ideas on where to start."