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Hardware Hacking

Antec Releases "Skeleton" PC Case 124

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the case-but-not-a-case dept.
ThinSkin writes "It is appropriate to say that Antec was 'thinking outside the box' when the idea of the 'Skeleton' PC Case sprung to mind. The Antec Skeleton is an open-air PC case with a pair of shelves for the motherboard and other components — held up by arching arms. There are no side panels. This is ideal for the computer user who is constantly fidgeting with his PC parts, or someone who wants to show off his fancy components. Just have a compressed air can nearby. There is also a slideshow of Antec Skeleton images available."
Censorship

Prosper "P2P Lending - Web 2.0" Censors Di->

Submitted by
Greebo
Greebo writes "Prosper Marketplace Inc., aka Prosper, previously discussed here, is a nearly 2 year old Peer-to-Peer lending site that touts itself as a proponent of the "Web 2.0" concept "taking the systems that operate our markets and society out of the hands of the elites and putting them into the hands of the masses". Yet, while they profess to be leaders of the power to the people movement, they blatantly censor open discussion by the masses they claim to be empowering. This week they launched a new blog site which openly fools comment posters into thinking their comment has been accepted, by deceptively using cookies to fake submission acceptance.

What is Prosper? The concept is simple: Don't make borrowers go to banks for money — create a community network where individuals can get loans from individuals. Prosper serviced the loan and linked borrowers to lenders.

Obviously, a concept like this would be exploitable — but for two years, the lending and borrowing community at Prosper has diligently worked to make the Prosper concept work. Lenders and borrowers alike would discuss the loans available for bidding, offer advice to financially strapped borrowers on how to fix their finances and credit reports, and point out listings that were particularly good or bad looking. Most importantly, Lenders could get true numbers from other Lenders and see that the risk involved in Prosper was hardly as safe and secure as Prosper would have you believe.

For nearly two years, Prosper supported this discussion by allowing them to take place on their own forums. However, just after Thanksgiving, Prosper shut down the old forums (partial archive available here) and replaced them with fully moderated forums. At first, while under full moderation, Prosper allowed through most posts, whether pro- or con- Prosper. This didn't last long — pretty soon Prosper deleted anything remotely negative and stopped allowing most posts through. For a while, Prosper was even openly changing posts that pointed to an un-moderated off-site discussion forum to redirect back to their own site (a move which earned accusations of deliberate mis-representation of poster's remarks by Prosper). When called on it, they stopped the practice, and then deleted all posts referring to it from their site, as if it never happened.

This week, however, they've gone a step further in their efforts to keep the "peer" out of peer-to-peer lending. They opened a new http://blog.prosper.com/" target="_blank">blog site to talk about how wonderful Prosper is, and they openly invite comments. When you post a comment, it LOOKS like your comment has been accepted. However, if you dig just a little, a review of your cookies will show that you have a new cookie for blog.prosper.com, and your comment is actually stored there. Delete the cookie, and your comment vanishes! It's another way to keep anything negative from getting posted, while ingeniously fooling the poster into thinking that Prosper is allowing their comments to be heard.

Relevant links: http://www.prosper.com/ P2P "Web 2.0" so-called proponent http://www.prospers.org/forum — Open forum discussion of Prosper (registration required)"
Link to Original Source
The Internet

Finally We Get New Elements In HTML 5 378

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the not-so-patiently-waiting dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Pure HTML enhancements hardly grew at all in the last eight years. Forward motion basically stopped in 1999 with HTML 4. Now the future looks bright. Recently, HTML has come back to life with HTML 5. Tons of new elements will be available for structure (article, nav, section, etc.), block semantic elements (aside, figure, dialog), and several other functions."
Software

Crash IE6 with Single line of Code 2

Submitted by
ashwanigl
ashwanigl writes "From I'm Mike: A Japanese blogger who goes by the name Hamachiya2 has discovered a single line of HTML and CSS that crashes IE 6. The line is: <style>{position:relative}</style><table><input></ table> click here to try it out. The code is rendered correctly in Firefox, Safari and Opera (didn't get a chance to try any other browsers, but presumably they work too). But in IE 6 it raises a fatal error in mshtml.dll. Here is the link to the main story."
Microsoft

Google Calls For More Limits On Microsoft 270

Posted by kdawson
from the keeping-watch-a-while-longer dept.
teh_commodore writes "Scientific American is reporting that Google is now asking a Federal judge to extend the government's anti-trust oversight of Microsoft, specifically with regard to desktop search software. Microsoft had already agreed to modify Vista to allow rival desktop search engines, but Google says that this remedy will come too late — specifically, after (most of) the anti-trust agreement expires in November. What makes this political maneuver interesting is that Google went over the heads of the Department of Justice and US state regulators, who had found Microsoft's compromise acceptable, to appeal directly to the Federal judge overseeing the anti-trust settlement." Update: 06/26 17:20 GMT by KD : The judge is unwilling to play along with Google; she said she will likely defer to an agreement on desktop search forged between Microsoft and the plaintiffs in the case: i.e. Justice and the states.
Novell

Mono Coders Hack Linux Silverlight in 21 Days 409

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the break-out-the-red-bull-and-go-go-go dept.
Etrigoth writes "After the recent announcement of Silverlight by Microsoft at their Mix event in Vegas, Miguel de Icaza galvanised his team of developers in the Mono group at Novell to create a Linux implementation, a so-called 'Moonlight'. Remarkably, they achieved this in 21 Days. Although they were first introduced to Silverlight at the Las Vegas Mix, de Icaza was invited by a representative of Microsoft France for a 10 minute demonstration at the Paris Re-Mix 07 keynote conference, should they have anything to show.
Joshua, a blogger for Microsoft has confirmed that the Mono team did not know anything about Silverlight 1.1 before its launch. Other members of this team have blogged about this incredible achievement, Moonlight hack-a-thon. It's worth noting from a developer perspective that Moonlight is not Mono and doesn't require Mono to work"
Operating Systems

Inside ReactOS

Submitted by
Andareed
Andareed writes "Alex Ionescu, a lead developer of ReactOS (an open-source, source and binary compatible clone of Windows NT) recently gave a talk on the internals of ReactOS. In this talk, Ionescu also discusses how ReactOS is nearing complete kernel compatibility with Windows Server 2003. Interestingly, Ionescu hints that there are no plans for ReactOS once the kernel has been completed."
Google

Google Launches New Privacy Policy

Submitted by
* * Beatles-Beatles
* * Beatles-Beatles writes "When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses) — but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-step s-to-further-improve-our.html"

You never know how many friends you have until you rent a house on the beach.