LeCaddie - Slashdot User

Why is Facebook spamming my email contacts ? 1

Submitted by

IMarkov

on Thursday July 23 2009, @12:02AM

IMarkov writes "I've seen several people complain about Facebook invitations sent on their behalf to their friends and relatives. This happened to me too. When I wanted to invite several new people two weeks ago, Facebook offered to import my contacts from my gmail account, and I keyed in my login/password (silly me). Facebook then offered checkboxes to select people to invite, however, it eventually invited everyone, including the mailing lists from which I received messages many years ago. It even sent second reminders a week later, and I didn't see how to stop it. Granted, a number of people signed up, but this was awkward, and several people complained about receiving four invitations sent on my behalf through several mailing lists. I wonder why Facebook is doing this — this does not look like a innocent bug, or lack of social skills. But doing this deliberately can quickly backfire. In any case, one should probably _not trust their account info to even best-known Web sites."

Australia Has Become Larger by 2.5M sq. km 0

Submitted by LeCaddie on Wednesday April 23 2008, @05:33PM

LeCaddie writes "According to Nature, Australia has become the first country to successfully claim an extension of its rights to the sea floor. Resources and energy minister Martin Ferguson announced on Monday that the United Nations had extended the area of the country's continental shelf by 2.5 million square kilometres. "I'm pleased to announce that Australia, the largest island in the world, has been dramatically increased in size," he said."

Gross DNS Subversion - Thank Earthlink & Baref 0

Submitted by LeCaddie on Monday April 21 2008, @12:18AM

LeCaddie writes "According to a Wired blog, Earthlink (ISP) planned to make money by displaying ads to users who mistyped domain names, such as webmail.google.com. Instead of showing an error message in plain English, they redirected browsers to their UK partner BareFruit, which "endeavors to ensure online security while providing an improved internet user interface by replacing unhelpful and confusing error messages with alternatives relevant to what the user was seeking." But the title bar in the brower still suggests that it's the official Google site. Needless to say, an exploit of BareFruit servers was demo'ed in short order, by the same guy (Dan Kaminsky) who exposed the Sony rootkit .

From the same Wired blog: Earthlink isn't alone in substituting ad pages for error messages, according to Kaminsky, who has seen similar behavior from other major ISPs including Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast and Qwest. Earlier this month, Network Solutions, one of the net's largest domain name registrars, was caught creating link farms on nonexistent subdomains of websites owned by its own customers.

Hmm... where do we go from here ?"

CS/CE majors get higher salaries 0

Submitted by

LeCaddie

on Wednesday March 26 2008, @05:38PM

LeCaddie writes "According to fresh employment statistics from the CRA bulletin and the National Science Foundation, recent CS/CE graduates are having less trouble finding jobs and get higher salaries than most other BS and MS degree holders. CS graduates with bachelor's degrees had a median salary of $45,000, which was tied for second with health majors. CS graduates with master's degree made $65,000, tying engineering majors for first. Apparently job outsourcing to Asia does not seem to be adversely affecting the job market overall, and the oft-heard complaints about CS/CE being difficult have a good explanation — the skills learned CS/CE by students are actually useful in the real world (vs students writing essays about zombie books)."

Police raid 51 CeBIT stands over suspected piracy 2

Submitted by LeCaddie on Saturday March 08 2008, @01:21AM

LeCaddie writes "On Thursday (March 6) German investigators raided 51 exhibitor stands at CeBIT, the German information technology fair in Hanover, looking for goods suspected of infringing patents. Some 183 police, customs officers and prosecutors raided the fair on Wednesday and carried off six cartons of electronic goods and documents including cellphones, navigation devices, digital picture frames and flat-screen monitors. Of the 51 companies raided, 24 were Chinese, including three from Hong Kong, 12 from Taiwan, nine from Germany and one each from Poland, the Netherlands and Korea. Most of the patents concerned were related to devices with MP3, MP4 and DVB standard functions for digital audio and video, blank CDs and DVD copiers, police said."