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Privacy

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How can someone foil identity theft?

Submitted by MagicPants
MagicPants writes: A friend of mine recently had her identity stolen and is going through a rough time as the banks haven't been much help. She froze one of her credit files with an agency (Equifax) but the thief was able to contact them and get her address changed to a random P.O. Box in a different state. She's getting that cleared up but doesn't have much faith in the system. Supposing that she has the P.O. Box number what are some practical steps she could take to catch the thief?
Piracy

Submission + - 4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Website

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following a call to arms yesterday, the masses inhabiting the anonymous 4chan boards have carried out a huge assault on a pair of anti-piracy enemies. The website of Aiplex Software, the anti-piracy outfit which has been DDoSing torrent sites recently, is currently down having been DDoS’d. They are joined in the Internet wasteland by the MPAA’s website, also currently under huge and sustained attack.
Games

Submission + - Wipeout recreated with an RC car (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you’ve owned any of Sony’s PlayStation consoles then there’s a good chance you’ve also played one of the Wipeout, games. It’s a high-speed racing game that helped make the PSOne popular, and it’s now been recreated using a remote control car.

The project is the idea of Malte Jehmlich. He decided to create a track out of cardboard reminiscent of the Wipeout tracks. He then hooked up a wireless camera
to a remote control car, and modified the controller to be an arcade cabinet with a wheel and forward/reverse selector.
Movies

Submission + - Why bad 3D, not 3D glasses, gives you headaches (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: The most common complaint about 3D is that the glasses give you a headache, but that's not actually true, according to the man who teaches the pros how to make better 3D. Speaking at the BBC in London, Buzz Hays, chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center in Culver City, California, explained: “It’s not the technology’s fault, it’s really the content that can cause these problems. It’s easy to make 3D but it’s hard to make it good – and by ‘good’ I mean taking care to make sure that this isn’t going to cause eyestrain.” He went on to detail some of the mistakes made by inexperienced 3D film makers, from poor composition of shots, through uncomfortable convergence settings, to overuse of on-set monitors without viewing their content on a big screen. But the biggest admission Buzz made was that not even the 'experts' know all the tricks yet, which is why 3D should only get better from here. In the same seminar, Buzz also explained why 3D glasses are here to stay — at least for the next few years.
Google

Submission + - Its official - Site speed is a ranking factor!

Submitted by iceonlinemarketing
iceonlinemarketing writes: Just over a week ago we were discussing how valid code and web design could affect rankings, particularly in terms of how fast a site loads. Whilst never been taken very seriously, the speed at which your site loads has always been a speculative factor in how sites are ranked.

Now it’s official and according to Google Webmaster Blog, site speed is now a ranking factor.

Google has always been obsessed with speed and take even the smallest details into consideration on their own products. Now they’re suggesting something regular users of the internet have always known; people don’t like hanging around for a website to load. If a site doesn’t load, then it isn’t relevant to their query because they can’t even get an answer to their query.

Of course, few sites will be affected by this new announcement and Google suggest that less than 1% of all search queries are affected by this factor. If you’re in a competitive market and noticed your rankings change, this might be why.

We’re guessing that for competitive markets, speed will certainly be more important to your SEO strategy than if you have a small, niche website but when you focus on SEO, you should try and optimise for every factor so in the coming days we’ll offer tips on how to speed up your website and WordPress optimisation tips.
Microsoft

Submission + - MICROSOFT drops support for OOXML (polishlinux.org)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Multi-trade International Corporation for Research of Office Software Open Format Technologies (MICROSOFT) has announced their surprise decision, that they cease to support OOXML document format (Office Open XML), acknowledging at the same time, that the ANSI-developed & supported TXT format will be a better, universal, solution.

The decision of backing up TXT format by MICROSOFT means, that the OOXML format name will have to be changed and its development & research will be passed on to another company or organization.

Darks Blanc, chairman of MICROSOFT acknowledges, that this decision is already causing anger and disapprovement among OOXML supporters. Joe Bloggs, the founder of J&J International, and a hard-line OOXML supporter believes that corporation's decision has no real impact and OOXML format will still have the wide-spread support among all civilized micro-world. Quoting him, "one can gain much more effectively utilizing globally advanced efforts to popularize the format, than trying to change their way."

As of December 5th, 2007, it seems that just after the www.opendocumentfoundation.org address has ceased to respond, also the Corporation's website — www.microsoft.org has disappeared.

Got it Microsoft? Got it Jasow Matusow? Any misread acronym can make sensational headline.
Software

Submission + - BitTorrent 6.0 beta closed source, Windows only

Submitted by makomk
makomk writes: The BitTorrent (Mainline) 6.0 beta has been released, and it's a rebranded version of uTorrent. Unfortunately, it's also closed source and Windows-only. (Apparently, BitTorrent Inc always planned that the next version of Mainline would be closed-source, even before they decided to base it on uTorrent.) It also comes with a mysterious content delivery system called BitTorrent DNA, which appears to consist of a single invisible background task, dna.exe.

Does the original, open source BitTorrent client have a future, or is it time for its users to switch to one of the many other BitTorrent clients?

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