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It just seems immensly more likely that he got infected by malware from surfing porn sites, than getting infected by porn from having malware.

Honestly, who cares what these people think about gaming consoles. What's next? Reporting on what Hamas or Al Qaeda or some other terrorist organization thinks about the XBox 360?

Google has begun blurring faces in its Street View service, which has spawned privacy concerns since its introduction last year.

My understanding is that people in public should have no expectations of privacy. Or is that just a U.S. thing? Furthermore, as their algorithms get better, will Google skip blurring the faces of famous people? They certainly have no expectations of privacy in public.

An anonymous reader writes "Anti-game Jack Thompson has circulated a document saying that if a court ruling goes against him, the Florida Bar will look like a bombed-out building, and he has supplied a picture of the famous Hiroshima Dome. He says he is speaking "figuratively.""
http://gamepolitics.com/2008/03/07/jack-thompson-florida-bar-will-look-like-bombed-out-building/

German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany's top police officer, Joerg Ziercke, said. "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10477899

Arashtamere writes "If Samy Kamkar plays his cards right, he may be allowed to visit MySpace again in just a few months. For the time being, however, he's not even allowed to touch a computer, following a January 2007 guilty plea for creating what many consider to be the first Web 2.0 worm: the Samy worm. Samy's worm wasn't malicious, but it did force News Corp.'s MySpace social-networking site to shut down in late 2005 after forcing more than 1 million users to declare Samy a "hero" on their profile pages. Last week, Samy, who is now 21, made his first public appearance since his conviction, attending a conference hosted by eBay in California. He was treated like a celebrity at the show, but there were some complications. Under the terms of his plea agreement, he can only use computers for work, so he was forced to show slides that he'd dictated to a friend on a computer that was operated by a conference staffer. "When I wrote the worm, it initially wasn't a worm. Initially I was just trying to spruce up my MySpace profile. I also wanted to show off to a couple of friends...So I wrote a little code and what ended up happening is whenever someone viewed my profile, they would automatically add 'But most of all, Samy is my hero' at the end of their hero section on their profile. And after that, I thought, 'If I can make this person my friend, if I can make myself their hero, couldn't I just copy this code onto their profile?' I didn't think this would be a big deal, so I tried it out. I thought maybe I'll get one friend tomorrow and a few in maybe a few days. It went quickly. Apparently, MySpace is a bigger place than I assumed.""
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;2033178109;fp;16;fpid;1

An anonymous reader writes "InfoWorld has a story on how hackers are taking advantage of a privilege escalation bug in the SafeDisc DRM that ships with Windows XP and Server 2003. What I wonder is why did Microsoft include this more subtle DRM at all, and can't users simply remove the secdrv.sys file and avoid what could be a slimy patch/secret DRM upgrade?

Read: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/06/Hackers-exploiting-bug-in-DRM-shipped-with-Windows_1.html"

Matt Barton writes "I thought Slashdotters might be interested in our History of the Commodore 64, the first in a set of six planned features on gaming platforms at Gamasutra. Bill Loguidice and I look at why the C-64 was so overwhelmingly popular, as both a personal computer and a brilliant gaming platform. We also give advice to modern gamers interested in emulating the platform and playing its games: "The 'Commie' is still the best personal computer ever to grace the living room.""
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1991/a_history_of_gaming_platforms_the_.php

solareagle writes "A weekly newspaper has received grand jury subpoenas seeking information on who visits their Phoenix weekly's Web site. Maricopa County authorities want every story New Times has written about Sheriff Joe Arpaio since Jan. 1, 2004, including one that revealed the sheriff's address. The subpoenas also seek online profiles of anyone who read four specific articles about Arpaio and profiles of anyone who visited the paper's Web site since Jan. 1, 2004. Also sought was information on what Web users did while on the site. When the newspaper published a story revealing the subpoenas, its editor was arrested for revealing grand jury information. He now faces up to six months in jail and $2500 in fines. Former New Times reporter John Dougherty, whose original story about Arpaio's address sparked the controversy, said: "We're not harboring state secrets, we're not harboring terrorists, we're just straight up reporting on issues they don't want us to report on.""

There's a nasty worm hole in America Online's standalone AIM (instant messaging) software that won't be patched until the middle of October. This vulnerability, first reported to AOL by researchers at Core Security more than a month ago, is caused by the way AIM supports the rendering of HTML content via an embedded Internet Explorer server control. AOL coordinated with Core on the release of the advisory on the understanding that the flaw was patched in the latest beta version but, as security researcher Aviv Raff discovered, the underlying vulnerability was never fixed. In the demonstration, Raff simply sent an IM to trigger the launch of the calculator application. The attack scenario works without the target clicking on a link and only requires that the AIM user is logged on and accepting incoming messages.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=542

"Google is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers, but would blur people's faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws..."

By pumping nutrient-rich water to the surface, millions of ocean pipes could help reduce CO2 in the atmosphere - but they might also make matters worse

http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=62f4fdf534168ffe0cd1e780fc277428

mytrip writes "A security expert who once worked for Microsoft has said he may dump the company's Windows Media Center in favor of Ubuntu-affiliated LinuxMCE after struggling with the software giant's digital-rights management software.

Johansson said that DRM software is not only ineffective, but a waste of money that is damaging businesses attempting to use it to control the way consumers use copyright material.

"How many billions has the industry spent on DRM schemes that the bad guys break in weeks? How many perfectly legitimate users has the industry annoyed and driven away? How many lost DVD sales has it caused? How many lost sales of Microsoft's Media Center software and Windows Vista has it caused because the DRM subsystem randomly decides that you must be a criminal?" Johansson wrote."
http://www.news.com/DRM-troubles-drive-ex-Microsoft-employee-to-Linux/2100-1016_3-6210131.html?tag=nefd.top

thefickler writes "Whatever IT is, you can find IT on eBay... including other members' credit card numbers (with three digit CVV2 number), usernames, and contact information. Has eBay been hacked? Or, is this just a hoax schemed by tricksters? 1,200 eBay users' usernames, home addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, and email addresses were posted in multiple threads on the eBay forum early this morning by an attacker using multiple eBay usernames."

dautelle writes "Last week, I was invited at the Space 2007 conference to introduce Javolution (open source Java library) to rocket scientists. Here is the paper presented. This might seem like good news for the Java platform. But is Java ready for use in safety critical applications? Or in other words would you trust your life to a Java program?"
http://javolution.org/doc/AIAA-2007-6184.pdf