Submission + - Cellphone interception at Defcon (tombom.co.uk)

Submitted by ChrisPaget on Sunday July 25, 2010 @09:08PM

ChrisPaget writes: I'm planning a pretty significant demonstration of GSM insecurity at Defcon next week, where I'll intercept and record cellular calls made by my attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphones is a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the law; this blog post is an attempt to reassure everyone that their privacy is being taken seriously despite the nature of the demo. I'm not just making it up either — the EFF have helped significantly with the details.

Submission + - Online game study proves human interaction theory (imperial.ac.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 25, 2010 @05:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: A new study analysing interactions between 300.000 players in an online game universe (www.pardus.at) has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80 year old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in PNAS, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks.

The study: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1004008107
The game: http://www.pardus.at/

Comment Re:Bring back copyright renewal (Score 1, Insightful) 331

by tayjo on Thursday December 31, 2009 @08:08PM (#30611156) Attached to: What <em>Would</em> Have Entered the Public Domain Tomorrow?

All that does is shoot down the little guy. A big corporation would have no problem paying those fees.

Submission + - Amazon Kindle proprietary format broken (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 22, 2009 @09:47PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Register reports that the proprietary document format used by Amazon's Kindle and the Amazon online store have been successfully reverse engineered, allowing these DRM protected documents to be converted into the open MOBI format.

Users of alternative E-book readers rejoice.

Submission + - Canadian blogs get same protection as newspapers (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by roju on Tuesday December 22, 2009 @08:15PM

roju writes: The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian Supreme Court created a new defence against claims of defamation allowing for reporting in the public interest. They specifically included bloggers as eligible, writing:
the traditional media are rapidly being complemented by new ways of communicating on matters of public interest, many of them online, which do not involve journalists. These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets.
and
A review of recent defamation case law suggests that many actions now concern blog postings and other online media which are potentially both more ephemeral and more ubiquitous than traditional print media. While established journalistic standards provide a useful guide by which to evaluate the conduct of journalists and non-journalists alike, the applicable standards will necessarily evolve to keep pace with the norms of new communications media. For this reason, it is more accurate to refer to the new defence as responsible communication on matters of public interest.

Submission + - Best filesystem to use for external drives? 1

Submitted by rufey on Tuesday December 22, 2009 @06:04PM

rufey writes: I've recently embarked on a project to rip my DVD and CD collection to a pair of external USB drives. One drive will be used on a daily basis to access the rips of music and DVDs, as well as store backups of all of my other data. The second drive will be a copy of the first drive, to be synced up on a montly basis and kept at a different location. The USB drives that I purchased for this are 1 TB in size and came pre-formatted with FAT32. While I can access this filesystem from all of my Windows and Linux machines, there are some limitations. Namely, the filesize on a FAT32 filesystem is limited to 4 Gb (4 Gb less 1 byte to be technical). I have some files that are well over that size that I want to store, mostly raw DVD video. I'll primarily be using these drives on a Linux based system, and initially, with a Western Digital Live TV media player. I can access a EXT3 filesystem from both of these, and I'm thinking about reformatting to EXT3. But on Windows, it requires a 3rd party driver to access the EXT3 filesystem. NTFS is an option, but the Linux kernel NTFS drivers (according to the kernel build documentation) only has limited NTFS write support, only being safe to overwrite existing files without changing the file size). The Linux-NTFS project (www.linux-ntfs.org) may be able to mitigate my NTFS concerns for Linux, but I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable. At some point I'd like whatever filesystem I use to be accessible to Apple's OS-X.

With those constraints in mind, which filesystem would be the best to use? I realize that there will always be some compatability problems with whatever I end up with. But I'd like to minimize these issues by using a filesystem that has the best multi-OS support for both reading and writing, while at the same time supporting large files.