I figure it'll work just as well as any other tactic: it's new until it's old. The first time it's done intentionally, people will eat it up. The second, it'll raise some eyebrows. Thereafter, regardless of intent, anytime a douchebag PR representative acts out, people will point at the hiring company and say "look, this company is intentionally hiring douchebags for 'viral' PR."

In this case, N-Control's marketing success (regardless of whether or not this was intentional) depends entirely on them successfully distancing themselves from the original PR firm. If you're tagged as intentionally hiring douchebags, that's going to be a lot more difficult to accomplish.

The success of this tactic is still not decided; in fact, we won't know until N-Control releases sales information. Any number of things can happen:

• Initial product exposure could increase sales
• Likewise, customers may not be able (or willing) to differentiate between N-Control and its PR firm, and sales may be lost.
• People may see N-Control's response and decide to buy the product in support of their corporate anti-douchebaggery.
• People may want to send the message to companies that one should carefully profile one's PR firm, and boycott or cancel orders.

Either way, it's an interesting new circumstance; let's wait and see!

A common solution is to have multiple versions of encryption/decryption software (such as TrueCrypt) alongside the actual encrypted partition/blob. What you would do is plug it into the "strange" computer, install the software, and then have access your otherwise-encrypted valuable blob data. Depending on the situation, you can even have multiple encrypted blobs/partitions for different levels of trust.

So cool, they have developed a function p = F(x) where x is an image, and p is True if the image is photoshopped and False otherwise. Seems useful, and I'm sure it will be.

However, if this ever becomes deployed widely and if the verdict p = True ever has a negative financial effect on the image producers, then all the producers will do is acquire their own F and incrementally photoshop their images until it reads them as False. End result? Maybe photos will be photoshopped to a slightly less degree.

So for those who haven't watched the "annotated" version, allow me to summarize. The production presents a series of film industry professionals talking about how they think things "should" be, why piracy is "not right", and dropping some of the classic inflated statistics that we all know and love. Each annotation is overlayed on top its respective scene to act in shallow rebuttal. The annotations present very few (if any) actual facts in rebuttal, rather relying on the same appeal to emotion and common sense that the original production pursued.

I hope I'm not the only one who was gravely disappointed with these "nuh-uh!"-style counterpoints. Rather than "and yet the film industry made record profits", let's drop some actual numbers. If our premise - that these guys have failed to make their case to support SOPA - is correct, then all of the world's facts should back us up.

If you're going to rebut a video, have something more inspiring and concrete than "and yet you want to censor the Internet."

A page on a medium is a medium-full of information. In print, that medium is paper, so a page is a piece of paper. In the tablet world, a page is a screen-ful of information.

Continuous scrolling is good in some cases, but Opera isn't proposing to replace continuous scrolling with pages; they're proposing to add the option and let sites formally choose to do that.

Not to take sides on the absolute issue here, but there is a huge difference between patenting something and actually using it. This is part of why the patent system is so horrible.

There are plenty of scenarios that can lead to a company filing a patent. To list a few:

• A team of research employees devises a series of techniques to track users.
• Maybe one employee on his "Google Friday" (or equivalent) decided to track people as a pet project.
• Maybe you just acquired a company who, along with other intellectual property, had developed a novel method for tracking users.
• Maybe you just woke up in the morning with a cool idea.

Bottom line is that if Facebook spends money researching, developing, and/or devising a technique, they will patent it, regardless of whether or not it will ever see the light of day. There's no downside. Worst-case it sits there and they waste trivial amounts of money. Best-case they use it to gain significant market advantage. Everything in between, from licensing to lawsuits, just raises the company's bottom line, and the mere possession of such a patent increases the company's overall worth and also makes it more threatening to would-be rivals or other lawsuit-threatening companies.

Furthermore, Facebook is easily able to deploy the technique regardless of whether or not they patent it. The main reason for acquiring a patent is to increase your intellectual inventory, which has nothing to do with real-world operations.

Now granted, patents like this are stupid... and Facebook is evil, so they're probably doing this and much worse.

The VirtualBox guest extensions were released under the Oracle PUEL. IANAL, but the PUEL itself doesn't seem to say what you think it says.

The actual PUEL seems to center around the following restriction (emphasis mine):

2 Grant of license. (1) Oracle grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce, install, execute, and use internally the Product a Host Computer for your Personal Use, Educational Use, or Evaluation. “Personal Use” requires that you use the Product on the same Host Computer where you installed it yourself and that no more than one client connect to that Host Computer at a time for the purpose of displaying Guest Computers remotely. “Educational use” is any use in an academic institution (schools, colleges and universities, by teachers and students). “Evaluation” means testing the Product for a reasonable period (that is, normally for a few weeks); after expiry of that term, you are no longer permitted to evaluate the Product.

In other words, it looks like the word "personal" is not a restriction on non-commercial versus commercial, but rather a limitation (of one) to the number of simultaneous users who may display guests remotely. The rest of the license doesn't seem to be changing this, so it seems to me that this is an accurate representation of their intentions. (On the side, it is one of the best-written comprehensible licenses I've seen in a while, so props Sun/Oracle). What they seem to want is for people to use this individually (commercially or non-commercially) and not try and use VirtualBox to set up an enterprise virtualization solution. This is consistent with the software itself, whose interfaces and features are very-much geared towards a single-user multiple-system scenario.

Now, historically, prior to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, VirtualBox's still released closed extensions; this was just accomplished by releasing two versions of VirtualBox side-by-side. One of them was a limited open-source bundle, while the other was a full bundle released by Sun under a similar PUEL. The main difference is that the previous model released two separate versions, while the current model releases a single open-source core version and a set of closed extensions that augment the open-source version's functionality to that of the previously-separate closed-source PUEL bundle. In other words, VirtualBox under Sun seems to be operating roughly equivalently to VirtualBox under Oracle.

VirtualBox is an excellent piece of virtualization software ... highly-recommended to those who are using VMWare Player to run/test multiple systems in a development context. I, personally, feel it beats VMWare's pants off in that specific scenario.

Not that you're incorrect, but that's exactly what companies like Canonical (Ubuntu), Red Hat (RHEL, KVM), and EnterpriseDB (PostgreSQL) are there to do. It's perfectly reasonable for large investments to require the backing of companies with technical expertise, support, warranties, and liability. That shouldn't be a barrier of entry, however, as the open-source world has its own representation in those areas.

Writing, sure, but you could have the BIOS refuse to boot any MBR not signed by its password/key.

From what I can see, the actual story is that one bookseller has considered boycotting Amazon in response to one strong-selling Amazon book.

Headline makes it sound like this is an industry-wide trend, but then again, this is Slashdot...

while( ! article.isWorthwhile() ) { article.generalize(); } article.publish();

Cool, then the next-best one will win ... and so on. Either way, MS will get something useful for $200K, and in your best-case scenario lots of worthwhile products will be monetized to improve security.

Researchers demonstrated a clearly fatal flaw in SSNs. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current SSN system is unsuitable for usage. They did this years ago ... and nothing has changed. It's not a political talking point. There's no proposed solution sweeping in to correct the problem. SSNs still are the gateway to every American's private information, and there's no sign that this will stop being the case, despite clearly-fatal flaws.

I welcome anything that makes this scary enough for people to demand that SSNs be immediately deprecated. This article is just the same researchers shouting louder, but the system does need to change.

You're absolutely correct. Most engineers want to focus on ... well, engineering. Once in a while, you get an engineer with good business skills, and there's your industry leader.

Stocks, politics, money, marketing, sales... those are all critical things in any business. The argument isn't that an engineer should be put in charge of all of those; it's that the priorities, direction, and approach a technical company makes should be entirely governed by a (suitable) technologist. They will obviously delegate to specialists as-needed.

There's a difference between privacy through anonymity and privacy in general. Presumably such a network would use well-designed cryptographic algorithms and protocols to exchange information. It could leverage existing technologies, such as SSL/TLS or IPSec. The data, in transit, would still be secure. The difference is twofold:

• The ".secure" infrastructure would know who sent any given encrypted packet, and
• The intended recipient (and only the intended recipient) of the encrypted packet would know who sent the decrypted information.

Honestly, this approach makes a lot of sense to me. Maintain the current anonymous Internet in its full glory. You would continue to use it for most things! However, if you want to bank, purchase, or administer, both you (the client) and the server site (Amazon, Bank of America, etc.) have the option to push that transaction onto an encrypted and attributable infrastructure.

Now, the same suite of Internet problems will still exist on the secure domain, but that extra de-anonymizing information goes a long way towards addressing them. If you are attacked by a bot on the secure network, you know who is infected. You can send them a notification and rapidly suspend or deny their secure network access. If someone is probing your site for vulnerabilities, you also know who it is, which may harm the white-hats (not that solutions couldn't be worked out), but will certainly hinder the black-hats. These are all good capabilities that I want my banking sites to have!

So do I want a completely-deanonymized Internet? Hell no. It'd be inefficient (traffic-wise) and it would cost me several critical rights. However, I would love to elevate all critical and financial assets to an elevated attributable domain. There is no good reason they should inherently have to accept anonymous traffic, nor should each of them be independently responsible for (in their own manner) establishing client identities.