Slashdot

MOBE2001 writes "There is widespread disagreement among experts on how best to design and program multicore processors, according to the EE Times. Some, like senior AMD fellow, Chuck Moore, believe that the industry should move to a new model based on a multiplicity of cores optimized for various tasks. Others disagree on the ground that heterogeneous processors would be too hard to program. The only emerging consensus seems to be that multicore computing is facing a major crisis. In a recent EE Times article titled 'Multicore puts screws to parallel-programming models', AMD's Chuck Moore is reported to have said that 'the industry is in a little bit of a panic about how to program multicore processors, especially heterogeneous ones.'"

KrispyRasher writes "Even internally, Microsoft couldn't agree on what the base requirements to run Vista were, but that didn't stop it from inaccurately promoting the OS as running on some hardware. 158 pages of Microsoft internal emails reveal scandalous truths about the squabbles that took place in the lead up to Vista's launch."

georgetirebiter writes "At least one large, very successful financial services organization in the last few days fell victim to the Unix year 2038 problem when trying to create a standard 30 year risk contract in their proprietary financial software. The problem occurred when trying to make a standard time call in sql. I wonder how many other programmers have had to try to solve this problem in legacy systems? What solutions did they use? Is this really an incipient and perhaps more serious successor to the Y2K bug?"

pkarage writes "There is only one way to defeat online piracy and it's pretty simple: charge the users for downloading stuff. ISP's will join the arena in the battle against piracy and start charging users for every byte of traffic that is not classified as "fair use" of the Internet, thus resulting in the end of online piracy and the Internet as we know it. Our times will be remembered as the last days of the "free" Internet, but eventually people will find other means to exchange information for free."
http://p.karageorgakis.com/blog/the-end-of-online-piracy-and-the-internet-as-we-know-it/

Keep Your Domain Safe writes "After the charges of domain name front running made earlier this week, Cnet reports that Network Solutions will soon only register domains when people search for domains from the company's home page not from the company's Whois search page, will offer only an "under construction" page for sites that it has reserved, and newly reserved pages won't be linked to the numerical Internet addresses that allow Web browsers to locate the pages. Meanwhile ICANN says it is taking steps to combat domain name tasting the practice of allowing domain name registrars to park domain names for a five-day Add Grace Period (AGP) at no cost that many observers blame for the recent issues concerning Network Solutions. After the operators of the ".org" suffix won approval to charge companies that make too many returns, the number of deletions dropped to 152,700 in June, compared with 2.4 million in May, after the new fee took effect. The same change for ".com" suffixes could take months or years to be approved."

TheRealSync writes "Doing a spin-out from One Laptop per Child, Pixel Qi — manufactorer of displays for the somewhat failing OLPC project — sets out to provide laptops at $75 a piece. From their website: Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO, while leveraging a larger market for new technologies, beyond just OLPC: prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of the key technology advances. Pixel Qi will give OLPC products at cost, while also selling the sub-systems and devices at a profit for commercial use."
http://www.pixelqi.com/

Rob writes "Hit me baby one more time! Yes that's right; Linux is officially scorching hot — hotter than both Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Never mind One Night in Paris, how about One Night of Open Source? What on earth am I banging on about? I'm glad you asked. CBR has used Google's Zeitgeist search trends analysis tool to compare the frequency and volume of searches for 'Linux' with those of 'Britney' and 'Paris Hilton', between June 2004 and June 2007 (the latest date for which data is available)."
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2008/01/linux_is_hotter.html

Paul sends us word on a new exploit seen in the wild that attacks Windows systems completely outside of the control of the OS. "Unfortunately, all the Windows NT family (including Vista) still have the same security flaw — MBR [Master Boot Record] can be modified from usermode. Nevertheless, MS blocked write-access to disk sectors from userland code on VISTA after the pagefile attack, however, the first sectors of disk are still unprotected... At the end of 2007 stealth MBR rootkit was discovered by MR Team members (thanks to Tammy & MJ) and it looks like this way of affecting NT systems could be more common in near future if MBR stays unprotected."

A malicious Facebook Widget actively spreading on the social networking site ultimately prompts users to install the infamous "Zango" adware/spyware. The tremendous success and lightning fast expansion of Facebook empowered the social networking giant with an impressive user base. Needless to say, in a digital world where web traffic equals money, such a user base attracts spammers, virus/spyware seeders, and other ethic-less online marketers like honey would attract flies.
http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=898

Intel resigned from the One Laptop Per Child Project's board of directors after refusing a request to abandon its Classmate PC program, according to a source familiar with the situation.
http://rss.macworld.com/~r/macworld/feeds/main/~3/211081605/olpcintel.html

carvell writes "According to reports, it looks like Intel have pulled out of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, citing "philosophical" differences as the reason. Back in May 2007 the OLPC founder, Nicholas Negroponte said that Intel should be ashamed of themselves, as they had planned a "rival" "classmate" laptop, intended to drive out the OLPC competition. Could this latest development be related to the classmate at all? Although OLPC appear to be using AMD processors, surely the loss of a major company backing the project will have repercussions for the OLPC project as a whole."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7171201.stm

An anonymous reader writes "Is Mono really ready for production? Many claim it will never be but a recent Icaza's post shows quite the opposite!

It looks like one of the coolest-looking Linux Desktop applications, plastic, is entirely running on Mono/WinForms, and still walking the portability road. Screenshots running on MacOS and different linux distros can be found at flickr and their blog.

So, is Icaza really wasting his time with Mono as Asay asserted on his CNET column? Is there really a need to have a portable .NET implementation or developing software using C/C++/Java/Perl (Rails?) is more than enough?

At the end of the day it turns out to be that great looking applications can be designed and implemented on *any* language, and the screenshots above clearly show that MonoWinForms is already a solid foundation. Have you ever seen such a nice apps written on Java?

Let the discussion flow..."
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-03-1.html

siddesu writes "Intel has pulled out of the OLPC project, citing "philosophical differences". An Intel representative, Chuck Molly has commented that OLPC project has asked Intel to drop support for "rival" low-cost PC projects, including Classmate PC, and "to focus on the OLPC platform exclusively. At the end of the day, we decided we couldn't accommodate that request."

The OLPC has not yet commented on the story.

More available on the BBC site and here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119940537839566305.html"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7171201.stm

Aviv Raff, an Israeli researcher known for his work in hunting browser bugs revealed Thursday a Firefox spoofing vulnerability which could allow Identity thieves to dupe users into giving up their password. According to Mr. Raff Firefox fails to sanitize single quotes and spaces in the "Realm" value of an authentication header. Raff was quoted as saying "This makes it possible for an attacker to create a specially crafted Realm value which will look as if the authentication dialog came from a trusted site."

Mr. Raff then outlined two possible attack vectors. One in which a malicious site that included a link to a trusted site — a well-known bank, say, or a Web e-mail service such as Gmail or Hotmail — that when clicked would display its usual log-on dialog. But in the the background, however, the attacker would have crafted a script that exploited the Firefox vulnerability to redirect the username and password entered by the user to the hacker's server instead of the real deal. The other involved a more classical rigged email image or one embedded in a blog or website which would then present the user when clicked with a legitimate looking login dialog.


This vulnerability was shown to be in the latest Firefox, version 2.0.0.11 and until Mozilla fixes this vulnerability Mr. Raff recommends in his blog "not to provide username and password to Web sites which show this dialog."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140997-pg,1/article.html

smithberry writes "The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has not to look far for its troubles lately, as stories on /. over the last few weeks prove. The BBC are now reporting that Intel are removing their support. The article is very brief, but it says

Citing "philosophical" differences, Intel has withdrawn its funding and technical help from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

Arstechnica say it changes very little because OLPC are committed to AMD, but I wonder what the long term outlook for OLPC is now? Is this the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end? Have they simply paved the way for some similar project to come along with newer and cheaper hardware and gain from the OLPC concept? So many questions, and only time will tell."