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America Online

AOL engaged in polite comment spam?->

Submitted by
Botch the Crab
Botch the Crab writes "My blog gets the occasional unremarkable comment spam, but one I received yesterday is worth mentioning. First, it's so polite:
"hello , you have a very nice site, but Im hired to leave advertising comments on sites, sorry i hate to do it but i have to . If you dont like advertising comments please send me an email with your site address to tedirectory(at)yahoo(dot)com and I will not write on your site. Sorry for inconvenience."
What's really interesting is that the promotional link is to love.com, AOL's Personals site. I found this comment spam has been posted in over 300 places throughout the net and love.com is the only URL ever used. The IP [72.9.235.218] belongs to Global Net Access in Georgia, so it's not completely damning proof, but is AOL now engaged in (very polite) comment spam?"
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Java

Java Urban performance legends

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Pop quiz: Which language boasts faster raw allocation performance, the Java language, or C/C++? The answer may surprise you — allocation in modern JVMs is far faster than the best performing malloc implementations. This article pokes some holes in the oft-repeated Java performance myth of slow allocation in JVMs."
Security

ATI Driver Flaw Exposes Vista Kernel to Attackers-> 1

Submitted by Shack0ption
Shack0ption writes "An unpatched flaw in an ATI driver was at the center of the mysterious Purple Pill proof-of-concept tool that exposed a way to maliciously tamper with the Windows Vista kernel. The utility, released by Alex Ionescu and yanked an hour later after the kernel developer realized that the ATI driver flaw was not yet patched, provided an easy way to load unsigned drivers onto Vista — effectively defeating the new anti-rootkit/anti-DRM mechanism built into Microsoft's newest operating system. Ionescu confirmed his tool was exploiting a vulnerability in an ATI driver — atidsmxx.sys, version 3.0.502.0 — to patch the kernel to turn off certain checks for signed drivers. This meant that a malicious rootkit author could essentially piggyback on ATI's legitimately signed driver to tamper with the Vista kernel."
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It's funny. Laugh.

Laptop thief shown on web fined->

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "A video of a man stealing a laptop computer posted on YouTube and Google video has resulted in a man being convicted for the theft. The video showed a man walking past a computer shop and then going into the store. He walked around the shop for some time before closing the lid on a laptop and walking away from it. He then walked back to the laptop and put it under his coat before leaving the shop."
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Supercomputing

NASA to build largest Supercomputer ever-> 1

Submitted by Onlyodin
Onlyodin writes "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has given the green light to a project that will build the largest ever supercomputer based on Silicon Graphics' (SGI) 512-processor Altix computers.

Called Project Columbia and costing around $160-million, the 10,240-processor system will be used by researchers at the Advanced Supercomputing Facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

What makes Project Columbia unique is the size of the multiprocessor Linux systems, or nodes, that it clusters together. It is common for supercomputers to be built of thousands of two-processor nodes, but the Ames system uses SGI's NUMAlink switching technology and ProPack Linux operating system enhancements to connect 512-processor nodes, each of which will have more than 1,000G bytes of memory.

Full Story at Linuxworld"
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PC Games (Games)

Id Goes Full Steam Ahead

Submitted by Dr. Eggman
Dr. Eggman writes "Today, quite wisper and rumors became fact as two FPS giants, Id and Valve joined forces to bring Id games back catalog to Valve's Steam. This marks a huge influx of old classics as well as opening up the possibility of bringing some of the newest, most anticipated Id games to Steam. Expect to hear more from Valve's appearance at Quakecon soon."

Comment: Re:A BLack hat attendee hacked? (Score 1) 260

by Bob 535604 (#20101089) Attached to: Point-and-Click Gmail Hacking Shown at Black Hat
Hah, no kidding. If I were at a black hat conference, I know I would be tunneling ALL my traffic somewhere safe first, in addition to using HTTPS.
Also, gmail only uses https if you tell it to. Last time I checked, it uses http by default.
And lastly, I don't think facebook has any info on there that I wouldn't want made public anyways, so it's probably not necessary for them.
Businesses

Australian court rules eBay auctions as binding

Submitted by
Ellis D. Tripp
Ellis D. Tripp writes "An Australian court has ruled that an eBay seller cannot back out of an auction sale once it is successfully completed. The court has ordered a seller to hand over a vintage airplane to an eBayer who bid just over the reserve price of $128,000, despite a subsequent non-eBay offer of over $200,000. More details here:

http://www.comcast.net/news/technology/index.jsp?c at=TECHNOLOGY&fn=/2007/08/03/730424.html"

Power is the finest token of affection.