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68% of UK Universities and Colleges Use Firefox 215

Posted by Zonk from the british-insight dept.
An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."

Will Ad Networks Compete for Your Ads? 48

Posted by samzenpus from the pick-me dept.
bokelley writes "TechCrunch has an article today about a new product called RMX Direct that holds a real-time auction for every ad on a site. Networks and advertisers bid based on the quality of the user (geography, site, time of day, etc). This could be game-changing for sites and blogs; if networks have to compete, will we see AdSense disclose more about its payouts to publishers? Will other networks like Advertising.com and ValueClick participate, or will they continue to force publishers to make hard choices? In a lot of ways, this has similarities to the challenges that Linux faces in a Windows world. The open source community has been fighting for more than a decade to make the progress it has, and we're not there yet — will online media be different?"

RIAA Wants to Depose Dead Defendant's Children 560

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-you-can't-believe dept.
Exchange writes "In Michigan, in Warner Bros. v. Scantlebury, after learning that the defendant had passed away, the RIAA made a motion to stay the case for 60 days in order to allow the family time to "grieve", after which time they want to start taking depositions of the late Mr. Scantlebury's children. Recording Industry vs The People have more details"

Compress Wikipedia and Win AI Prize 324

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-does-this-mean dept.
Baldrson writes "If you think you can compress a 100M sample of Wikipedia better than paq8f, then you might want to try winning win some of a (at present) 50,000 Euro purse. Marcus Hutter has announced the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge the intent of which is to incentivize the advancement of AI through the exploitation of Hutter's theory of optimal universal artificial intelligence. The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids. Matt Mahoney provides a writeup of the rationale for the prize including a description of the equivalence of compression and general intelligence."

OpenOffice.org Security 'Insufficient' 184

Posted by CmdrTaco from the taunting-crowds dept.
InfoWorldMike writes "IDG News Service's Robert McMillan reports that researchers at French Ministry of Defense say vulnerabilities with open source office suite OpenOffice.org may rival those of Microsoft's version. With Microsoft's Office suite now being targeted by hackers, researchers at the French Ministry of Defense say users of the OpenOffice.org software may be at even greater risk from computer viruses. "The general security of OpenOffice is insufficient," the researchers wrote in a paper entitled In-depth analysis of the viral threats with OpenOffice.org documents. "This suite is up to now still vulnerable to many potential malware attacks," they wrote. The OpenOffice.org team has already fixed a software bug discovered by the researchers, and the two groups are in discussions about how to improve the overall security of the software. "The one real flaw in the programming logic has been fixed," said Louis Suarez-Potts, an OpenOffice.org community manager. "The others are theoretical.""

Dangerous Apple Power Adapters? 240

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-thats-just-no-good dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Even with all these exploding Dell notebooks and other notebook safety problems, Apple has seemed relatively immune. Every once in a while, some odd thing came along, but it seemed like relatively calm waters. Not anymore — Apple's notebook power adapters appear to be the source of some serious safety concerns. Every iBook and PowerBook user should read this and keep a close eye on their adapter — the adapters suffer from very poor design including wires that seem prone to short out and burn and zero short circuit protection."

Samsung Develops World's First three-inch VGA LCD 173

Posted by Hemos from the teeny-tiny dept.
Nomad05 writes "Samsung announced this week it has developed the world's first three-inch VGA LCD panel that "directly meets industry interface standards for digital still cameras." What this means is that future LCD screens on digital cameras will allow multimedia to be viewed at a resolution of 640x480. Presently, a majority of camera LCDs only display multimedia at a resolution of 320x240 — significantly lower in quality than Samsung's new LCD. In layman's terms, expect significantly brighter, more detailed LCD displays, which will enable you to review your photography more thoroughly after you take an exposure. This innovation will make it easier to spot blurry images and ensure your photo is framed properly. "

The Self-Modifying EULA? 279

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "Years ago, when I first installed Windows 2000, I accepted its EULA. Despite serious defects in the product, I resisted installing Service Packs because they modify the original EULA. Now even Homeland Security is on my back to upgrade and install a fix. I would be happy to install SP4 and all the security patches BUT ONLY IF IT IS DONE UNDER THE ORIGINAL EULA. Otherwise, Microsoft has made me an unwilling zombie. The clear fact is that Microsoft delivered a defective product- should not allow them to redefine our agreement. I cannot think of any other market that successfully browbeats its customers in this manner. Can this be legal? Has it been tested in court?"

Dvorak Adores YouTube 193

Posted by Hemos from the and-someday-we'll-have-a-real-business-model dept.
prostoalex writes "MarketWatch columnist John C. Dvorak tells the public to stop fretting about YouTube's business model and just start enjoying the functionality: "Since I like to run videos on my blog this turns out to be a great way to both transcode and save bandwidth since YouTube picks up the tab on the video stream. Would I pay for this service, yes. I have seriously looked at the alternatives to YouTube. With no exceptions they are all flawed.""

VMware, XenSource Join Forces For Linux 63

Posted by Hemos from the a-brighter-tomorrow dept.
porjo writes "Peace has been established on at least one front: XenSource and VMware are working together to improve virtualization in the Linux kernel. Their original disagreement has been displaced by a commitment to work on a solution together, says Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, the company that builds products around Xen virtualization software. The two are trying to come up with a common approach to virtualization support in the Linux kernel. [snip] The work now under way would let hypervisors from Microsoft, VMware, and Xen work together in the same data center. Under such a scenario, it would be possible for a Xen virtual machine, trapped on a piece of failing hardware, to be automatically moved over to a VMware hypervisor on another piece of hardware."

Firefox Analyzed for Bugs by Software 226

Posted by CowboyNeal from the killing-bugs-dead dept.
eldavojohn writes "In a brief article on CNet, a company named Coverity announced that Firefox is using software to detect flaws in Firefox's source code. Even more interesting is the DHS initiative for Coverity to use this same bug detection software on 40 open source projects." An interesting tidbit from the article: "Most of the 40 programs tested averaged less than one defect per thousand lines of code. The cleanest program was XMMS, a Unix-based multimedia application. It had only six bugs in its 116,899 lines of code, or .51 bugs per thousands lines of code. The buggiest program is the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, or AMANDA, a Linux backup application first developed at the University of Maryland. Coverity found 108 bugs in its 88,950 lines of code, or about 1.214 bugs per thousand lines of code." We've covered this before, only now Firefox is actually licensing the Coverity software and using it directly.

Blue Pill Myth Debunked 128

Posted by CowboyNeal from the setting-the-record-straight dept.
njyoder writes "As previously posted about, Joanna Rutkowska claimed to have discovered an allegedly undetectable vulnerability in Vista that takes advantage of AMD cpu's virtualization capabilities. a virtualization professional (Anthony Liguori of the Xen project) has now voiced his opinion to state this is bunkum. There are two parts two this — the ability to take over the machine and seamlessly drop the OS into a VM (which is very difficult, but possible) and the ability to have windows run in the VM undetectably (which is impossible). In fact, Rutkowska's prototype is VERY detectable. This is unfortunate mistake that people make when they jump to conclusions based on what is unfounded speculation and that includes the assumption that this would somehow be Vista specific, if it worked (noting that Vista doesn't run with administrator privileges by default)."

Microsoft Port 25 interviews Miguel de Icaza 202

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-read dept.
Ben Galliart writes "Microsoft's Port 25 blog, the voice of MS Linux Labs and a spin-off from the MS Channel 9 blog, has an interview with Miguel de Icaza where they discuss the Gnome and Mono projects. It is a nice change of pace to see Microsoft go from attacking Novell and Linux to interviewing a Novell employee about a Linux desktop system. Port 25 has come under some fire since they can not always be trusted. Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor and a security guide attacking Red Hat for not providing security updates for Red Hat v9 despite that Red Hat ended support back in 2004. They have also released a password synchronization daemon for Red Hat, AIX, HPUX and Solaris that must run as root and makes several calls to strcpy() (which violates Microsoft's guidelines for doing secure coding)."

First Blu-ray Drives Won't play Blu-ray Movies 329

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thanks-for-warning-us dept.
aapold writes "Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney yesterday, all the while acknowledging that there's significant room for improvement before the product is viable for integration into media centre PCs. Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format." All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

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