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angelwolf71885 writes "there are screen shots over at jojo.org.. http://www.joejoe.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=13849 of what looks like to be very convinceing screen shots of windows 7 build 6519....you will notice that it looks an afull lot like windows vista... but if you remember windows xp..looked an afful lot like windows 2000...and the early builds of vista/longhorn looked an afful lot like xp.... but the build number is correct....so who knows mabe it is the real deal now lets hope now that we have screen shots..we will see a full leak some time soon LOL"
http://www.joejoe.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=13849

njdube sent in this Space.com story about the money behind SETI that opens, "It's a risky long shot that burns up money and might never, ever pay off. So is searching for intelligent creatures on unseen worlds worth the candle? After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"

wwrmn writes "There's a debate going on over at bugs.launchpad.net on whether it's the Ubuntu, BIOS, hard-drive manufacturer, or pick-any-player's fault, but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature / acpi bug / OS configuration. Regardless of where the fault lies or how it's fixed, you might want to take some actions now to try to prevent the damage."

nfras writes "Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded the Order of Merit by HM Queen. There are only 24 members of the Order at any time and is a personal award from the Queen. He joins the company of Florence Nightingale, Winston Churchill and Edward Elgar as members of the OM."

user24 writes "We all remember the Blue Security DDOS attack, and now it looks like the same group of spammers who took them down are attacking several high-profile anti spam forums in a similar co-ordinated botnet DDOS.

zdnet has the scoop:

"The spammers behind last year's destruction of Blue Security are back with a vengeance, using a variant of the 'Storm Worm' malware to launch a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack against three anti-spam services.

SpamhausThe ongoing attacks, which use botnets of hijacked Windows computers, successfully shut down the Web servers that power the Spamhaus Project, URIBL (Realtime URI Blacklists) and SURBL (Spam URI Realtime Blocklists (SURBL)."

Check out the castlecops forum, where members of these antispam groups are picking over the details of the attack."

InfoWorldMike writes "EBay has pulled all of its paid search ads from Google AdWords network in the U.S in an eyebrow-raising move likely to be interpreted in the industry as a sign of deteriorating relations between the two Internet giants. An eBay spokesman characterized the decision to pull the U.S. Google ads as an instance in a continued experiment eBay does to determine the best allocation of its advertising and marketing budget. But a source familiar with the situation said the move is an angry reaction by eBay's management to Google's decision to hold a protest party concurrent with the start of eBay Live, the company's annual conference for merchants."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/13/EBay-pulls-ads-from-Google-ad-network_1.html

SlinkySausage writes "Google is offering ISPs the opportunity to turn over their entire email operation to Google, with all customer email hosted as Gmail accounts. This would allow Google to grow its user base rapidly (Google is a distant third with 51M users compared to Yahoo's 250M and Hotmail's 228M). There are some obvious benefits to end users — Google is offering ISPs mailboxes of up to 10GB per user. APCMag.com has posted an interesting piece looking at the dark side of Google's offer. Not least is in its reinforcing of the attachment people have to their ISP's email address, making it harder to change ISPs if a better deal comes along."

cnet-declan writes "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is asking Congress to make 'attempted' copyright infringement a federal crime. The text of the legislation as well as the official press-release is available online. Rep. Lamar Smith, a key House Republican, said he 'applauds' the idea, and his Democratic counterpart is probably on board too. In addition, the so-called Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 would create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software in some circumstances, expand the DMCA with civil asset forfeiture, and authorize wiretaps in investigations of Americans who are 'attempting' to infringe copyrights. Does this go too far?"

mrogers writes "Infowars brings us the following news from the UK, which is fast becoming the front line of the war on privacy:

"Read my lips...." used to be a figurative saying. Now the British government is considering taking it literally by adding lip reading technology to some of the four million or so surveillance cameras in order identify terrorists and criminals by watching what everyone says.

Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about."

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

For those dwelling in England who enjoy a touch of privacy in their day to day lives, help could be on the way. Amidst the smattering of new surveillance methods being installed and implemented within the nation's border comes a second inquiry into the "constitutional implications" of such invasive measures. If you'll recall, the Commons' Home Affairs committee has already planned its own review, and now the UK's Constitution Committee will be "conducting an inquiry on the consequences of the collection and use of surveillance and personal data by the State." Basically, the group is trying to visualize just how damaging all these CCTV installations, car trackers, and behavior monitors are on the "relationship between individuals and institutions." Another aspect will be to scrutinize whether UK citizens need additional protection under the law from such voyeuristic tactics, and judging solely by the sheer multitude of surveying going on over there, we couldn't complain with a little extra shielding. [Warning: Word Document read link]

[Via El Reg]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/113345943/

shdowhawk writes "On March 2, 2007 the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) set in action a bill which increased Internet radio's royalty burden between 300 and 1200 percent and thereby jeopardized the industry's future. There is an online movement currently set up to help protest this bill. http://www.savenetradio.org/ was established to shed light on the situation, to help the protest to save internet radio, and to promote all the bills that have been set up to try and overturn the March 2 action bill."

sarkeizen writes "According to nature.com a team of researchers has, for the first time, hacked into a network protected by quantum encryption. . The MIT group was able to entangle a photons polarization with its momentum. Which allowed them to get up to 40% of the information by measuring the particles momentum without significantly disturbing it's polarization. The researchers agreed that this kind of attack, although interested could be rendered useless by increasing the key length."

The MP3 of my March 21 talk at the British Computer Society -- on information security trends and economic considerations -- is on the Internet....
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/schneier_talk_a.html

This week's miscellanea comic details my experiences on slashdot in flowchart form.

Mike Haningth writes "I was reading an interview published in the Free Software Magazine about Enigform. Author claims that signed http requests can stop man in the middle and phishing. So far, it looks to be a firefox extension using gnupg, and an apache module for the server-side. I think it is quite cool! (resubmitted to Index instead of Askslashdot)"