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Privacy

Submission + - Retroactive immunnity for gov't wiretaps voting

Submitted by hal9000(jr)
hal9000(jr) writes: eWeek has an article about how "the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee delayed Nov. 8 a scheduled vote on whether telecommunications carriers should be granted immunity for cooperating with the White House's domestic spying program of telephone wiretapping and e-mail surveillance. The panel hopes to vote on the provision as soon as next week." If you want to make your voice heard, contact your senator today!
Censorship

Submission + - Will newspapers end up paying to report the news?

Submitted by Jyms
Jyms writes: Racing, rugby and now cricket all seem to want to "protect" their "product", but when does their right to protect their product interfere with your right to access news?

"The broader picture is even more scandalous. In heedlessly, greedily following the lead of the Rugby World Cup organisers over the use of photographs on the web, and the flat racing authorities in Britain before them, Cricket Australia have chosen to ignore an inescapable verity. To wit, the written media provide the best free advertising in town. When newspapers here were asked to stump up a fee to print racing cards a few years ago, a one-day blanket blackout by the editors was all it took to force a rapid rethink and red-faced retraction.

Can you imagine a world in which Warner and his multitudinous Brothers charged correspondents for the privilege of sitting in dingy screening rooms and reviewing their movies? Or where Sony imposed a fee on those charged with reviewing their CDs? Or where correspondents were obliged to stump up money to cover a General Election? Easier to picture a racoon winning the Tour de France without the aid of a copious helping of drugs, right?"

"The world's top three global news agencies — Agence France-Presse , Reuters and Associated Press — have suspended all coverage of the season unless a deal can be agreed. The stand-off also involves Getty Images, who provide photos to newspapers and websites across the world."
Encryption

Submission + - First use of RIPA to demand encryption keys (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by kylehase
kylehase writes: The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is being used for the first time to force an animal activist to reveal encryption keys for encrypted files she claims to have no knowledge of. According to the article, she could face up to two years if she doesn't comply.
The Internet

Submission + - Demonoid's server company threatened by CRIA

Submitted by Gelthoth
Gelthoth writes: When checking for a few torrents, I came across this message at Demonoid: "The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding."
Toys

Gadgets Have Taken Over For Our Brains 311

Posted by Zonk from the let's-get-started-with-the-implants dept.
skotte writes "According to a Trinity College survey released Friday, the boom in mobiles and portable devices that store reams of personal information has created a generation incapable of memorizing simple things. In effect, the study argues, these devices have replaced our long-term memory capabilities. 'As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes. When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of close family relatives, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.'"
Privacy

Submission + - Is Your Printer Spying on You?

Submitted by
gnujoshua
gnujoshua writes: "In 2005, the EFF alerted the world to how laser printers are spying their users by providing tracking information in the form of a unique smattering of barely detectable yellow dots that appear on every printout. Revitalizing this issue, the Computing Counter Culture Group at the MIT Media Labs has launched Seeing Yellow. They provide instructions to see the tracking dots, as well as provide you with a list of clever questions, and appropriate contact information so that you can confront your laser printer manufacturer. Let's act before this issue slips through the cracks again and send the message that manufacturers' must respect our privacy and our right to anonymous free speech."
Media

Fewer People Copy DVDs Than Once Thought 333

Posted by Zonk from the except-among-our-users dept.
MasterOfMagic writes "According to a survey reported at the NY Times, very few people actually have and use DVD copying software. The survey reports that only 1.5 percent of computer users have DVD copying software, and of those 1.5%, 2/3rds of them don't even use it. The survey also revealed that users were more likely to download DVDs than copy DVDs that they borrowed or rented, and that about half of all downloaded DVDs are pornography. According to the survey's lead analyst, 'With music, part of the appeal is sharing your own playlists and compilations with your friends ... I'm not sure people share their porn the way they share their music.'"
XBox (Games)

Submission + - Microsoft admits all 360s sold so far are flawed

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNN reports that Microsoft has admitted all xbox 360 consoles sold in the past 19 months suffer from a design flaw. But it does not have any plans to start a recall program.

It seems like everyone with a functional (like myself) are lucky. This seems to be a bad time for Microsoft. But as a 360 owner, I am glad they actually admitted this instead of denying and repeating their line on how the actual failure rate is very low.
Handhelds

Submission + - Where in the US can you get JUST a Cell Phone? 6

Submitted by arakon
arakon writes: I am looking around for a cell phone for my technically challenged mother and all she wants is just a phone, and yet there seem to be no carriers in the US that carry a plain cell phone with good reception and battery life. All of them bundle camera's, pda's, mp3 players and a kitchen sink with a battery life of 2 hours, all for the low price of $350 or more...

Having looked around, the Motorola F3 is exactly what she wants but it doesn't seem to be available in the US. If we order it online will it work on US carriers? Are there any comparable products out there with a similar feature set and price range available for US networks? I appreciate the help.
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Kaspersky antivirus failed VB100 test

Submitted by thisispurefud
thisispurefud writes: Antivirus software from three global vendors has failed a major series of malware tests, the VB100. Products from Kaspersky, Grisoft, and F-Secure all failed to detect 100 percent of the in-the-wild malware signatures in the database of testers Virus Bulletin, although each company has passed before. Of the 37 products submitted for testing, 10 failed to demonstrate the detection abilities required for VB100 certification. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.2.621 failed to detect a network worm called allaple. According to Kaspersky's senior technology consultant David Emm, Kaspersky first added a signature for the worm in February. At the time of the test, Kaspersky was "optimising" its allaple signature, and the signature wasn't in the Kaspersky database, Emm explained. Kaspersky said it is confident that no customers running its security suite were affected at the time of the test, because the security suite includes a firewall, behavioural analysis and heuristics, and the product was tested in a manner that precluded behavioural analysis. "That doesn't help in our disappointment at not passing the test, but at least we know our customers weren't affected," said Emm. Grisoft AVG 7.5 Professional Edition also failed the VB100. AVG is a popular free anti-malware application, which has widespread use. Larry Bridwell, global security strategist for Grisoft, said that the part of its anti-malware application, AVG 7.5 Professional Edition, that detects signatures had failed to detect one of the W32 agobot Trojan variants, but that the anti-spyware part of the product had picked it up. "Testing is on-access, at the hardware level, which is scanned," Bridwell told ZDNet.co.uk. "When [AVG 7.5 Professional Edition] was tested, we picked up the bot on the spyware side, which is on-demand [the program has to start to be executed before it is halted]. We should have detected it on-access."
United States

Submission + - Terrorists must register before entering U.S. (usatoday.com)

Submitted by Soft
Soft writes: Citing Islamist terrorists traveling with European passports as a threat to America, the Secretary of the DHS announces that visitors to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver program will have to register online 48 hours in advance, and fill out a questionnaire. According to other articles, this would include personal data such as previous travel destinations and credit card number; this in addition to data already requested directly from airlines, from name and address to luggage ticket number and frequent flier miles collected. Presumably the questions will also include whether the traveler intends to blow himself up in the coming 90 days, or has ever done so in the past? The questions on the back of Form I-94 also come to mind.
Biotech

Submission + - Man Bleeds Green Like Vulcan (11alive.com)

Submitted by
VE3OGG
VE3OGG writes: "While Star Wars might be overtaking Harvard, an individual at Vancouver, British Columbia's St. Paul's Hospital was re-enacting Star Trek, by bleeding green like a Vulcan. The condition, know as sulfhemoglobin "[is] so rare that we don't have a perfect understanding how it happens, but some drug donates a sulphur group that binds to the hemoglobin molecule and prevents it from binding to oxygen," Flexman explains. "And that gives it the green colour." Of course, this isn't quite Vulcan anatomy 101, as it was a copper bonding agent in the Vulcan's blood that caused it's greenish hue."
Media

The Future of Creative and the Sound Card Market 351

Posted by Zonk from the they-still-make-sound-cards-huh dept.
Hanners writes "Elite Bastards investigates the future of Creative Labs, and in particular their PC sound card business, which is facing a number of big challenges during 2007. Windows Vista has seen some large changes to the driver model required by audio devices, the abilities of on-board solutions have improved somewhat, and the amount of competition in the market place has ballooned. So what does all of this mean for the traditional leader of this market? As well as outlining all of these issues, they speculate as to what measures Creative may need to take to thrive once more in this changing market."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft: Format War is Over

Submitted by
jeevesbond
jeevesbond writes: "Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones, whose work has centered around the Open XML document format, now says the so-called format war with OpenDocument is officially over. The winner, he says, is both.

"I think at this point we can really move onto more productive and collaborative discussion and admit that we are no longer in any sort of "file format war."
My translation: Sharepoint (and its tight integration with Office 2007) is what's important now, something FLOSS has no equivalent for."

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