CaseyG - Slashdot User

Submission + - 20 Million Copies of Vista Sold

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:57PM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has sold 20 million copies of Vista during the first two months of availability to consumers. This exceeds the same period following XP's release by 18%, during which time 17 million copies were sold. It seems as though the general public isn't as turned off to the new product as those on Slashdot (and the Apple commercials) would like to believe.

Submission + - Wireless LAN security myths that won't die

Submitted by

maggard

on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:27PM

maggard writes: "George Ou is a Ziff Davis / TechRepublic writer who actually knows his beat: Security.

Several years ago he wrote "The six dumbest ways to secure a wireless LAN", which articulated what most folks who do WiFi security (as opposed to repeat rumors about it) already knew. The article is still well regarded as a powerful document to be presented in IT staff discussions and to under-informed IT decision makers ("PHBs") dispelling accrued misinformation.

Ou has just written a follow-up column revisiting wireless security, what works, what is worth the effort, and what is just wasting time & effort that could be better spent on real security measures. Titled "Wireless LAN security myths that won't die" he makes strong cases against useless & even counter-productive WiFi security technologies & strategies.

Best of all, Ou names names and provides supporting hyperlinks, all in about 15 tightly written paragraphs. The entire article is well worth reading, however for general WiFi owners users the last two sentences in the article are probably the most important:

For small businesses and homes, all you need to do is use WPA-PSK security with a random alpha-numeric pass-phrase that's a minimum of 10 characters long. If WPA security isn't available to you, at least run WEP as a 10-minute deterrence mechanism.

I've regularly seen folks post here about how they're "hiding" their SSID "for security"; here's an easy introduction to the fact you're actually lessening your security by doing so. Also for those relying on static IP / MAC address filtering this is a reminder that all of your painful manual management, time that could have been spent on other more productive duties, can be trivially undone in a few seconds to minutes of automated cracking."

Submission + - The world's first iPod - made in 1924

Submitted by

surburban

on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:19PM

surburban writes: "The Mikiphone was the grandfather of portable music players and was billed as an orchestra of music in the palm of your hand. The player was made in Switzerland and marked a trend for portable players. It comes in a silver tin and can play 10in records. But before you can listen to your favourite tracks, you have to assemble together the Mikiphone which was tricky without the manual. Instead of batteries, the Mikiphone is a wind up gadget, and instead of headphones or speakers, a resonator is used to play the sounds."

Submission + - IBM to demonstrate high-speed chip

Submitted by

Hedbonker

on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:31PM

Hedbonker writes: "http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_5523978 IBM will demonstrate a new chipset today that can download a high-definition movie in a single second, compared to the current time of 30 minutes or more. The company said its optical transceiver chipset transfers information eight times as fast as currently available components. Such high speeds would have a significant impact on the way people share and access media and informmation, from video to music to corporate financial data."

Rethinking the MMOG 163

Posted by Zonk on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:13PM from the do-it-better-and-make-it-funner dept.

Gamasutra is running a piece right now called Rethinking the MMO. Game designer Neil Sorens takes issue with some of the consistent blights on the traditional Massive gaming experience, like the phenomenon of the 'ordinary' hero, and the extremely large time investment required to 'get anywhere'. Though he doesn't offer a lot in the way of concrete solutions to these issues, his appraisal of the genre is sure to spark a few conversations: "As long as developers and publishers do nothing but copy what is successful, they--and gamers--will continue to miss out on these games' staggeringly awesome potential. And as long as [MMOGs] are designed by and for stat geeks (whom I know and love and sometimes am) with little regard for traditional game design fundamentals, they will continue to waste that potential."

Submission + - Movie Pirates Try to Throw Dogs Off Scent

Submitted by YesL on Monday March 26, 2007 @01:08PM

YesL writes: Movie pirates are spraying chemicals on their bootleg DVDs to confuse two U.S.-loaned dogs that helped Malaysian authorities sniff out nearly 1 million illegal discs, an official said Monday. The two female Labradors have been trained to detect polycarbonate chemicals used in manufacturing discs. But officials received a tip that bootleggers are using chemical sprays to throw Lucky and Flo off the scent, said Fahmi Kassim, the Domestic Trade Ministry's enforcement chief in southern Johor state.

Submission + - NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts

Submitted by

Maggie McKee

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @06:22PM

Maggie McKee writes: "NASA will likely shut down its Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funds research into futuristic — and often far-out — ideas in spaceflight and aeronautics, officials say. "This is one of the few places at NASA that embodies far-thinking, new stuff," NASAWatch editor Keith Cowing says. "When they're cutting stuff like this, they're desperate, or stupid, or both." The move was apparently motivated by a lack of money in NASA's budget — a problem that led to much criticism last year, when the agency cut science funding to pay for overruns in the shuttle program. But shutting down the institute to save $4 million in NASA's annual $17 billion budget shows NASA is now "going after nickels and dimes," Cowing says."

Submission + - Microsoft gives in to the EU

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @05:44PM

An anonymous reader writes: Redmond Developer News reports that Microsoft has given in to EU threats of further fines and opened up a whole host of protocols, including the Exchange protocol, under a licence.

http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?ed itorialsid=192

It doesn't say what the licence will look like though.

Submission + - NFL Caught Abusing the DMCA

Submitted by

Implied Oral Consent

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @05:33PM

Implied Oral Consent writes: "You know how the NFL puts up those notices before every game saying "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited"? Well, Ars Technica is reporting that Wendy Seltzer thought that that was over-reaching and posted a video of the notice on YouTube. Predictably, the NFL filed a DMCA Take Down notice on the clip. But Ms. Seltzer knows her rights, so she filed a DMCA Counter Notice. This is when the NFL violated the DMCA, by filing another Take Down notice instead of taking the issue to court — their only legitimate option, according to the DMCA. Unfortunately for the NFL, Ms. Seltzer is a law professor, an EFF lawyer, and the founder of Chilling Effects. Oops!"

Submission + - How MediaSentry Poisons P2P

Submitted by

Quid custodiet ipsos custodes?

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @04:51PM

Quid custodiet ipsos custodes? writes: "Ars Technica has an interesting tour of MediaSentry's operations. MediaSentry, best known for putting fake files on P2P networks, apparently has no less than 60 employees, 2,000 geographically diverse co-located servers, and 9 GBps of bandwidth which it uses to attack P2P networks that serve files it has been hired to protect. They use no less than four different tactics: decoy files, some of which are now advertisements; spoofing results to P2P network search requests; spamming uploaders with download request to eat their bandwidth; and swarming, where they join BitTorrent or similar swarms and serve bogus data to slow or corrupt the downloads. While some of this has been known for a while now, it would be interesting to see how this admission to the details of their operation plays in court. Given that the RIAA has offered little more than screenshots as evidence on infringement, could they not be mistakenly accusing people based on spoofs they paid MediaSentry to create?"

Submission + - AT&T/Cingular Blocking legitimate phone number

Submitted by

kickassweb

on Friday March 16, 2007 @03:05PM

kickassweb writes: "PennPIRG is reporting that AT&T/Cingular is blocking calls to the popular, and competing, service, FreeConferenceCall.com, as well as other similar services.

PennPIRG has learned that AT&T/Cingular recently began blocking phone numbers on its wireless service used by consumers to access free conference call services, such as those provided by Free Conference Call.com. The telephone giant has argued that calls to free conference call services are resulting in millions of dollars in losses to the company due to re-routing and termination fees, and has sued free conference call services and local phone companies in Iowa over the fees.

The article goes on to state that the free conference call service being blocked competes directly with Cingular's conference call service, and that this is the type of anti-consumer action we can expect on the internet if Net Neutrality is not mandated."

Comment Re:please... (Score 4, Insightful) 322

by CaseyG on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @03:37PM (#18170622) Attached to: Vanishing Honeybees Will Affect Future Crops

I hope you have learned from this that there can be no sarcasm so obvious that it will not be taken seriously.

-c.

Submission + - MySpace Not Responsible for Sexual Assault

Submitted by

Common Sense

on Thursday February 15, 2007 @03:51PM

Common Sense writes: "Those looking to cash in after meeting sexual predators on websites like MySpace have been dealt a serious legal setback. The US District Court in Austin, Texas ruled in favor of MySpace in the $30 million lawsuit questioning whether it was responsible for allowing a 13 year old girl to lie about her age and meet a man who turned out to be a sexual predator. Judge Sparks wrote in his ruling that, "if anyone had a duty to protect [the victim], it was her parents, not MySpace." Score one for common sense."

Submission + - Possible 25 million year old frog found

Submitted by dispatch on Thursday February 15, 2007 @03:47PM

dispatch writes: A frog was found that researchers in Mexico City are saying could be 25 million years old! According to the article, "The chunk of amber containing the 0.4-inch frog was uncovered by a miner in southern Chiapas states in 2005 and was bought by a private collector, who lent it to scientists for study." Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as though the scientists will be allowed to drill into the rock at the owner's request which means we're going to have to wait a while longer before we can make Jurassic Park a reality...

Submission + - Bulletproof USB flash drive not so bulletproof

Submitted by emakinen on Thursday February 15, 2007 @03:41PM

emakinen writes: Pretec is marketing it's USB flash drive as bulletproof. Well, it seems that it does withstand shot from .357 Magnum, but .44 Magnum is too much. There's a video of the test made by a finnish IT-magazine Tietokone.

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