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Hidden Digital Recorder Reveals NYPD Manipulating

Submitted by mliu
mliu writes "The New York Police Dept has long denied the existence of quotas in arrests. However, as making a recording in NY only requires a single party's consent, a Brooklyn cop carried a digital voice recorder with him and surreptitiously recorded his superior and fellow cops as he went about his job. The recordings reveal that in addition to quotas backed by threat of discipline, the cops also were pressured to suppress attempts to report crimes in order to make crime statistics appear more favorable for the department and the mayor. As the article describes, this perfectly dovetails a survey released earlier this year wherein retired NYPD supervisors described "intense pressure" to show declines in crime by manipulating statistics. After his whistle blowing, his commander had him forcibly committed to a mental ward."

Comment: Road usage tax (Score 1) 891

by cpm80 (#28544789) Attached to: GPS-Based System For Driving Tax Being Field Tested
The issue is how to fairly collect taxes to pay for maintenance of roads and highways. How do we make those who use public roads and highways the most pay the most for their maintenance? Using GPS data to determine this is a poor solution. An good solution is to build the increased cost of road maintenance into a tax for new tires sold for on road use in the United States.
Media

Streaming March Madness On Linux? 120

Posted by timothy
from the when-you-can-snatch-this-pebble-from-my-hand dept.
neersign writes "March Madness is here and NCAA.com is streaming all of the games over the internet for free. The downside is they are using Microsoft technologies to do so. The standard player lists Windows XP/Vista, IE6, and WMP 9 as the base requirements. The High Quality Video Player requires Silverlight 2. So my question is: how would a Linux user be able to work around these requirements and watch the games?"
Security

Intel CPU Privilege Escalation Exploit 242

Posted by timothy
from the they-never-offer-the-purple-pill dept.
Eukariote writes "A paper and exploit code detailing a privilege escalation attack on Intel CPUs has just been published. The vulnerability, uncovered by security researchers Joanna Rutkowska (of Blue Pill fame), Rafal Wojtczuk, and, independently, Loic Duflot, makes use of Intel's System Management Mode (SMM). Quote: "The attack allows for privilege escalation from Ring 0 to the SMM on many recent motherboards with Intel CPUs. Rafal implemented a working exploit with code execution in SMM." The implications of this exploit are severe."

Comment: Re:As always, amatuers like you fail at stocks (Score 1) 429

by cpm80 (#26458865) Attached to: Steve Jobs Takes Leave of Absence From Apple
People aren't spending money unless they have to (check the government's December retail sales report if you don't believe me). When people are forced to buy a new computer do you think they'll buy a $700 Dell or a $1400 Apple when both have the exact same hardware specifications? Sure the Apple looks prettier and the OS is superior to Windows, but for $700 more? In difficult financial times the value isn't there for most people. As a result I see Apple's recent market share gains retreating rapidly as the recession lingers.
United States

DashCam Catches Officer Threatening Motorist

Submitted by januth
januth writes "I just finished reading about this incident, in which a St. George, Missouri police officer was caught on a motorist's personal dashcam threatening to invent charges to arrest him even though the motorist had done nothing wrong.

"The incident began at around 2am. Darrow [the motorist] was to meet a friend who was working late and was going to pick him up. Darrow headed toward a 24-hour commuter parking lot in an unincorporated part of Saint Louis County in his 1997 Nissan Maxima. He put on his turn signal and entered the lot which, aside from Kuehnlein's cruiser, was essentially vacant. After stopping the car, the police officer approached and began questioning Darrow about what he was doing. When Darrow declined to discuss his personal business, the police sergeant exploded. Although the video clearly shows Darrow driving properly and using his turn signal, the police officer insisted that Darrow had broken the law."

Had Darrow not had his own video camera running it would have been his word against the police officer's. He has had another interesting run-in with the police that he captured on video as well. In both cases he's merely asking the questions any citizen should be able to ask of a police officer. In both cases, the police do not respond well."
Yahoo!

Yahoo Power Mailer?->

Submitted by
cpm80
cpm80 writes "I logged onto Yahoo mail today and noticed a message at the bottom of the screen stating "Thanks for being a Yahoo! Power Mailer", which means I can send up to 20MB per email message at get free IM based support. At first I was worried that I had inadvertently signed up to pay Yahoo! $$$ and it was going to be a pain to get out of the contract. After some Googling I noticed a blog entry from last week — http://www.tribbleagency.com/?p=328. I agree with the founder at Tribble Ad Agency that it's just a marketing gimmick, but am worried that because Yahoo! couldn't be this stupid, or expect their customers to be, I'm missing something important?"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Set the tone (Score 1) 541

by cpm80 (#20392083) Attached to: Transitioning From Developer To Management?
I think the most important thing any *people* manager can do is set the tone for the entire team. I highly recommend reading "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't" (amazon link - http://www.amazon.com/Asshole-Rule-Civilized-Workp lace-Surviving/dp/0446526568). The world doesn't need anymore assholes in management. Good luck!
The Almighty Buck

Our ATM is broken, so you go to jail?->

Submitted by Actually, I do RTFA
Actually, I do RTFA writes "A short while ago, slashdot featured an article about possible criminal prosecution for people who took advantage of faulty slot machine software. At the time, many people drew an analogy to an ATM that dispensed too much money. Well, apparently, that too may result in criminal charges. Interestingly, although they suspect that someone may have tampered with the ATM, they are considering charging anyone who withdrew money from the ATM.

This also provides an interesting rejoinder to 'if they can build a secure ATM, why cannot Diebold build a secure electronic voting machine.'"
Link to Original Source
GNUStep

Etoile Project releases Mac-like environment->

Submitted by pschmied
pschmied writes "Today the Étoilé Project released v0.2 of its Desktop Environment. Not only does Étoilé share user interface similarities with Mac OS X, Étoilé enjoys some source-level compatibility with Mac OS X as well. Many Slashdotters undoubtedly remember NeXT, the revolutionary computer / development environment that gave rise to the first web browser and later became the foundation of Mac OS X. Étoilé uses the FSF's own implementation of the NeXT development environment, GNUStep, making this a close technological relative of OS X. Screenshots and a source tarball are available."
Link to Original Source

Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing. -- The Mad Dogtender