nacs - Slashdot User

Skype may be sold...to its founders-> 1

Submitted by EricTheGreen on Friday April 10 2009, @10:46PM

EricTheGreen writes "NYT article detailing how Skype's founding duo may be working to buy it back from eBay, thereby furthering our collective descent into bizarro world. I'd love to be the proverbial fly on the wall for the valuation meeting..."
Link to Original Source

Microsoft offers licenses for fake Windows XP 0

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Tuesday October 02 2007, @04:17PM

Stony Stevenson writes "In the latest sign that Microsoft expects to support its Windows XP operating system for the foreseeable future, the company has introduced a new licensing program designed to let users of fake or pirated copies of the business version of the OS upgrade to fully licensed copies. To qualify, users of illegitimate versions of Windows XP Pro must pledge to use only genuine Microsoft software going forward and agree to have their software infrastructure audited. Resellers who push the Get Genuine Windows Agreement to customers will get a cut of any new license fees they generate, Microsoft said."

SEED: Why 99.9% of S. Korea's Shackled to Windows

Submitted by

baron

on Friday January 26 2007, @02:27AM

baron writes "What would you say if I told you that there was a nation that was at the forefront of technology, an early adopter of ecommerce, leading the world in 3G mobile adoption, in wireless broadband, in wired broadband adoption, as well as in citizen-driven media. Sounds like an amazing place, right? Technology utopia? Wrong. This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions because all encrypted communications online in this nation must be done with Active X controls."

Favorite Logout Method

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday January 25 2007, @11:43PM

Anonymous Coward writes "Poll suggestion,
title "Favorite Logout Method", feel free to add Cowboy Neal reference

1) logout
2) exit
3) ^D (EOT)
4) Clicking X
5) The master breaker switch"

All PSP firmwares now hackable!

Submitted by on Thursday January 25 2007, @08:23PM

An anonymous reader writes ""Just a little while back, Fanjita wrote a small article on the people with non-homebrew-able PSPs should do. Waiting for an exploit was the only sensible thing to do in my opinion. And boy! people didn't have to wait very long; the Noobz team has just come out with a new exploit which works on all firmwares upto v 3.03 , which is all the Sony has been able to come up with."

Sony beaten again. Is it time to stop adding security updates with every firmware?"

Testing commercial 2-factor authentication systems

Submitted by Fry-kun on Monday January 15 2007, @01:40PM

Fry-kun writes "I recently became interested in setting up a 2-factor authentication system for my laptop. With that in mind, I bought a fairly inexpensive USB key. Although it seems to work, I can't bring myself to trust it completely: Kensington claims that the system is secure, but there is no independent security lab analysis of the product. In other words, for all I know, there may be a gaping hole in their security setup.
Worse yet, there are apparently no reviews of the product, no mention of anyone trying to test it and no hardware hackers tried to make it work in Linux, even though it's been out for over 2 years.

How would you go about making sure that a security product does what it claims to?"

Google Panorama Viewer Released by UCL

Submitted by

Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith

on Monday January 15 2007, @01:26PM

Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith writes "University College London has released a simple methodology for viewing 360x180 degree panoramas direct in Google Earth. Using backface culling it is possible to project a image onto a sphere and then navigate inside of it within Google Earth. A step by step tutorial is provided as well as a series of files, the examples could be the first of many panoramas to spring up in Google Earth."

PayPal offers password key fob

Submitted by

superwad

on Monday January 15 2007, @03:33AM

superwad writes "The device displays a new one-time password in the form of a six-digit code about every 30 seconds. PayPal clients who opt to use the device will enter this password along with their regular credentials when signing into the service. The key fob is meant as another weapon in the battle on data-thieving phishing scams."

Decryption Keys For HD-DVD Found, Confirmed 473

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 13 2007, @01:14PM
from the house-of-cards dept.

kad77 writes "It appears that, despite skepticism, 'muslix64' was the real deal. Starting from a riddle posted on pastebin.com, members on the doom9 forum identified the Title key for the HD-DVD release 'Serenity.' Volume Unique Keys and Title keys for other discs followed within hours, confirming that software HD-DVD players, like any common program, store important run-time data in memory. Here's a link to decryption utility and sleuthing info in the original doom9 forum thread. The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"

Cisco Lost Rights to iPhone Trademark Last Year? 162

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday January 13 2007, @10:07AM
from the use-it-or-lose-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An investigation into the ongoing trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple over the name "iPhone" appears to show that Cisco does not own the mark as claimed in their recent lawsuit. This is based on publicly available information from the US Patent and Trademark office, as well as public reviews of Cisco products over the past year. The trademark was apparently abandoned in late 2005/early 2006 because Cisco was not using it."