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Comment Re:45th in order of discovery or just RTFWikipedia (Score 1) 232

by dezent (#29768171) Attached to: 12M Digit Prime Number Sets Record, Nets $100,000
If you read the wikipedia article.. "It is not known whether any undiscovered Mersenne primes exist between the 39th (M13,466,917) and the 47th (M43,112,609) on this chart; the ranking is therefore provisional. Primes have also not been discovered in increasing order. For example, the 29th Mersenne prime was discovered after the 30th and the 31st. Similarly, the current record holder was followed by 2 smaller Mersenne primes, first 2 weeks later and then 8 months later."
The Internet

Yet Another Premature Declaration of Email's Death 266

Posted by kdawson from the to-from-subject-dammit dept.
mvip tips the latest in a long line of premature announcements of the demise of email. "The Wall Street Journal article Why Email No Longer Rules is making the rounds online. Fast Company provided a fast response, highlighting the technical shortcomings of trying to replace email with Facebook and Twitter (where do the attachments go?). Email Service Guide points out that Facebook and Twitter are ineffective for one-off communications. With Google Wave on the horizon, we'll probably have to go through the whole charade yet again."
Privacy

Montana City Requires Workers' Internet Accounts 836

Posted by timothy from the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been dept.
justinlindh writes "Bozeman, Montana is now requiring all applicants for city jobs to furnish Internet account information for 'background checking.' A portion of the application reads, "Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.' The article goes on to mention, 'There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.'"
Security

Norton Users Worried By PIFTS.exe, Stonewalling By Symantec 685

Posted by timothy from the and-nobody-saw-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes that "[Monday] evening, on systems with Norton Internet Protection running, users began to see a popup warning about an executable named PIFTS.exe trying to access the internet. The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder. There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly. These actions — whether actively covering up, or simply not well thought through — have spurred people to begin crafting conspiracy theories about the purposes of this PIFTS program. I for one am blocking the program until more information becomes available." The current top link on Google for "PIFTS.exe" links to one of these deleted questions on Norton's support boards, which sounds innocent enough: "I searched this forum but did not see PIFTS.exe. Any idea what this is?"
The Internet

FTC Kills Scareware Scam That Duped Over 1M Users 329

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-let-it-happen-to-you dept.
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today got a court to at least temporarily halt a massive 'scareware' scheme, which falsely claimed that scans had detected viruses, spyware, and pornography on consumers' computers. According to the FTC, the scheme has tricked more than one million consumers into buying computer security products such as WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner, ErrorSafe, and XP Antivirus. The court also froze the assets of Innovative Marketing, Inc. and ByteHosting Internet Services, LLC to preserve the possibility of providing consumers with monetary redress, the FTC stated."

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