Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I wonder what really got fixed... (Score 1) 129

by zaajats (#25778615) Attached to: Apple Quietly Releases Safari 3.2

The question is: why is Apple so quiet about rolling this update out and what it fixes, and since when does a minor Safari update require a reboot?!!

I'm not sure (lousy memory etc), but I believe (some) previous Safari updates have required a reboot too. It might have something to do with the Webkit engine being used by apps other than Safari
Microsoft

IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise? 329

Posted by Soulskill from the not-too-promising dept.
An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting: "In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."
It's funny. Laugh.

Chinese Restaurant Suffers Large Translation Error 364

Posted by kdawson from the invisible-and-insane dept.
linuxwrangler writes "Preparing for English-speaking visitors, a restaurant in China recently ran its name through an online translator, took the result, then purchased and mounted a large sign displaying the English version of their name: Translate Server Error." This one has been around for a couple of weeks but it's destined to become a classic.
Cellphones

FSF's "Defective By Design" Targets Apple Genius Bars 838

Posted by timothy from the win-friends-and-influence-people dept.
mjasay writes "At OSCON this year, MySQL's Brian Aker made this bold statement: 'Microsoft is irrelevant ... We're more worried about Apple.' The Free Software Foundation appears to have caught the hint, and has turned its attention to all-things-Apple with a 'denial of service' attack on the Apple Genius Bars. The idea is to completely book all Genius Bars and then ask the 'geniuses,' over and over again, a few questions about Apple's proprietary ways (while, apparently, real customers with support issues are left to flounder). Lost in this anti-Apple fervor, however, is the Free Software Foundation's complete and conscious failure to protect the web. Richard Stallman has long felt that software that doesn't sit on his desktop doesn't affect his freedom, but isn't the opposite true? Why is the FSF focused on Apple when the bigger concern should be Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and other web players, a point made by Tim O'Reilly recently at OSCON?" Defective by Design is just one of many FSF projects, remember; it hardly seems fair to say that the FSF has been ignoring the implications of software as a service.
Handhelds

Inside Apple's iPhone SDK Gag Order 495

Posted by samzenpus from the the-first-rule-of-iPhone dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager takes a closer look at Apple's iPhone SDK confidentiality agreement, which restricts developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with others, thereby leaving no room for forums, newsgroups, open source projects, tutorials, magazine articles, users' groups, or books. But because anyone is free to obtain the iPhone SDK by signing up for it, Apple is essentially branding publicly available information as confidential. This 'puzzling contradiction' is the 'antithesis of the developer-friendly Apple Developer Connection' on which the iPhone SDK program is based, Yager contends. 'You'll see arguments from armchair legal analysts that the iPhone developer Agreements won't stand up in court — but those analysts certainly won't stand up in court on your behalf.' Anyone planning to launch an iPhone forum or open source project should have 'a lawyer draft your request for exemption, and make sure that the Apple staffer granting it personally commits to status as authorized to approve exceptions to the iPhone Registered Developer and iPhone SDK Agreements,' Yager warns."
Censorship

Comcast Blocks Web Browsing 502

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers have found that Comcast has quietly rolled out a new traffic-shaping method, which is interfering with web browsers in addition to p2p traffic. The smoking gun that documents this behavior are network traces collected from Comcast subscribers Internet connections. This evidence shows Comcast is forging packets and blocking connection attempts from web browsers. One has to hope this isn't the congestion management system they are touting as no longer targeting BitTorrent, which they are deploying in reaction to the recent FCC investigations."
Google

Submission + - Some anti-spam vendors blocking and slowing Gmail (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by fiorenza
fiorenza writes: Google's Gmail (and corporate mail) are being throttled and sometimes blocked by some anti-spam services, including MessageLabs and Antigen. Ars Technica reports that the blocking is a result of the Google CAPTCHA crack (previous /. coverage), which has allowed a deluge of spam from Gmail's clusters. Most users won't get blocked mail, but Ars confirmed with MessageLabs that Gmail delivery delays are to be expected. Is Gmail destined to become another cesspool of spam?
Windows

Submission + - Windows 7 - What we know so far... (apcmag.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Anti-Coward
Anonymous Anti-Coward writes: "We're still in the long dark before 7's dawn, but the earliest signs are encouraging: a new streamlined kernel, an inbuilt VM for running old software, a revised and simplified UI... there's every chance that Microsoft intends Windows 7 to rise from the ashes of Vista and be what Mac OS X was for Apple.'

Vista was released on January 30 2007 at which time it became available to one and all.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, the number of people who bought Vista was much closer to 'one' than 'all'."
Microsoft

Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML? 340

Posted by Zonk from the and-here-i-am-buying-stuff-like-food dept.
a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"

Armed Police Bots with Stun Guns 219

Posted by Zonk from the we-don't-serve-their-kind-here dept.
foniksonik writes "'On 28 June, Taser International of Arizona announced plans to equip robots with stun guns ... the new stun-capable robots could be used against civilians.' Non-lethal weapons experts are concerned that the robots will have to stun the suspected criminal for longer periods of time while awaiting human police to come make the official arrest. "If someone is severely punished by an autonomous robot, who are you going to take to a tribunal?" asks Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK."
United States

DOJ Accidentally Gives Lawyer Wiretap Transcript 319

Posted by Zonk from the terry-gilliam-to-make-the-movie dept.
good soldier svejk writes "'It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls. You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.' That is what happened to Washington D.C. attorney Wendell Belew. His lawsuit takes on special significance given today's Sixth Circuit Court ruling that surveillance victims can only sue the DOJ if they can prove they were affected."
The Internet

Submission + - Owner of Rizon to serve time for DDOS attacks. (spamfighter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A man from Kentucky is sentenced for prison after being convicted in Detroit of charges that he carried out attacks on computers numbering in thousands and cutting them off from the Internet, as per the news published by Crime-research on June 22, 2007.

Jason Michael Downey, 24 and belonging to Dry Ridge, Kentucky admitted having committed computer fraud in order to operate a botnet. When Downey was pleading guilty in the court, the information presented there served as evidence of Downey's ownership of the Rizon.net Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network from June 18, 2004 to September 5, 2004.

Downey infected large number of computers with various kinds of bot viruses after which the computers responded to Downey's commands. He built a network with about 6,000 computers he had infected.

Through the Internet Relay Chat network, Downey controlled and issued commands to the botnet to hurl a series of 'Denial of Service' (DoS) attacks on different kinds of computer systems connected to the Internet. The attacks overloaded the systems with network data and therefore could not operate properly.

Rizon themselves have not issued any statements regarding the charges, they can be found at http://www.rizon.net/

More of the story can be read at http://www.spamfighter.com/News-8671-Man-Pleads-Gu ilty-To-Cyber-Crime.htm

The full U.S. Department of Justice briefing and sentencing guidelines can be found at the following address.
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/mie/press/2007/2007-6-20 _mdowney.pdf
The Internet

Submission + - 35 Different Ways of Looking at Social Networks (socialcomputingmagazine.com)

Submitted by jg21
jg21 writes: Social Computing Magazine has just published a list of thirty-five perspectives on online social networking reflecting how protean and difficult to pin down the phenomenon is. It was compiled by Malene Charlotte Larsen, a PhD student at Aalborg University in Denmark, who has been doing research on Danish youngsters and online social networking. She ends with an open request for further perspectives.

[From the article "I must say that I certainly do not agree with all of the mentioned perspectives, but some of them do represent the opinions (or prejudices) I hear when I am out giving lectures to adults."]

Slashdot Top Deals

One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.

Close