753403
submission
aunt edna writes:
Claudine Beaumont of the UK's Daily Telegraph reports:
"Google has been ordered to hand over the personal details of everyone who has ever watched a YouTube video, potentially threatening the privacy of tens of millions of internet users.
The US court judgment is part of an ongoing legal battle between Google, which owns YouTube, and the content provider Viacom, which accuses Google of hosting copyright material on its popular video-sharing site."
Here's the link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/07/03/dlgoogle103.xml
712149
submission
aunt edna writes:
Having been advised by a friend that DVDs (and CD-RWs, come to that) are not the best choices for back-up medium, I had a look around the web and came across this site: http://www.backupcritic.com/backup-media/dvd/durability.html
To quote, "The bottom line is that DVD durability can be quite good, but can never be counted on. Store your recordable DVDs vertically, protected from sunlight, in a room that avoids wide variability in temperature and humidity. Do not label the actual surface or write on it if you can avoid it (if you do write on it, write on the inner hub where there is no data, and use a pen specifically sold for writing on CDs or DVDs).
With proper care, your recordable DVDs should easily be able to last a decade. However, there is absolutely no way to guarantee that an individual disc does not have a defect that will cause it to fail earlier. Thus, as with all backup media, the safest course is to always have crucial data stored in more than one place, and have a regular program for checking the data integrity of your backups."
All I personally care about is securing my (small-sized as far as data goes) Ubuntu system.
Do you have any thoughts or experiences to relate with respect to DVDs (preferably RW) as a good/bad medium for the home-user to back-up their less-than-critical data?
616408
submission
aunt edna writes:
Steve Gibson of SpinRite fame has a nice description of the effect of sub-pixel rendering — LCDs only — that promises significantly better quality viewing in the horizontal plane (no effect in the vertical).
The article can be found here: http://www.grc.com/ct/ctwhat.htm
Extracted from this article: "By 'borrowing' sub-pixels from adjacent whole pixels, we can fine-tune the placement and width of typeface features with three times more horizontal accuracy then ever before!"
One of those pleasing innovations, but: how long before it's implemented? The article doesn't say.
However, you can see it in action:
Steve, having shown how graphics can be improved, goes on:
"Useful as those diamond-shaped graphics are as proof of concept, sub-pixel rendering really comes into its own when it's used to render text. And since it's the sort of thing that I'd imagine you might want to mess around with on your own machine, I've turned the sub-pixel concepts and technologies into reality with a lightweight (35k byte) 32-bit Windows FREEWARE demonstration program .."
517468
submission
aunt edna writes:
The Register has: "ISPs are calling on the record industry to put its money where its mouth is on illegal file-sharing, by underwriting the cost of lawsuits brought by people who are wrongly accused of downloading or uploading music."
517424
submission
aunt edna writes:
Th UK Daily telegraph has: "People caught illegally downloading music and films could be banned from the internet as part of a planned [UK] Government crackdown to be announced next week."
Here's the link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/12/npiracy112.xml
164937
submission
aunt edna writes:
Microsoft is asking open-source software users to pay royalties on 235 alleged patent violations.
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?news id=8817
109105
submission
aunt edna writes:
The Register reports that Sun seems to have caught a Microsoft infection:
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/03/13/netbeans_ phone_home/
It's not clear whether or not users are prompted to allow such internet access back to Sun. Given the typical user of NetBeans would be a bit savvy (uh-oh), firewall alerts should have been noticed — or does it just look like Java's going off to check for an update?
106210
submission
aunt edna writes:
Pushed by the advent of Vista, my PC is heading off to Linux.
One of the many benefits I have enjoyed over the years from using Windows has been the availability of good games. (ok, you can re-phrase)
What games that run on Linux would slash-dotters recommend?
All types welcome — strategy, fps, whatever.
27980
submission
aunt edna writes:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/10/27/myspa ce_accounts_compromised_by_phishers.html
Oh, I can't be bothered writing a story ... here:
"Netcraft has discovered that the social networking site, MySpace, appears to have been compromised by phishers who have presented a spoof login form on the main site. This modified login form is designed to submit the victim's username and password to a remote server hosted in France."
Time-lined Posted by Paul Mutton at 12:51 PM UTC on Oct 27, 2006
Enjoy!
