alterimage asks: "I'm a Computer Science major at night, working by day in Accounting for a major telecom provider, with clients consisting of most the entities on Fortune's Top 20 Most Admired Companies of 2006 list. Daily, I see customer payments in excess of $50,000 come and go. Strangely enough, rather than have these payments conducted by an IVR system or over the Internet, the majority of these payments are conducted over the phone with individuals such as myself, who are instructed to write down, document all the specific banking information, and to keep them on hard-copy in an unlocked file cabinet that is accessible to anyone. Having experience with social engineering and fraud, I've already advised my boss that it's probably not a good idea for those bank routing and account numbers to be laying around unsecured, and was told that I'm over-reacting. So I ask Slashdot: At what point should the human aspect of security be considered in the business environment? Should I just smile, nod, and play along in this situation?"

QuantumCrypto writes "Errata has developed a new network sniffer, dubbed 'Ferret,' that looks for traffic using 25 protocols, including those for the popular instant message clients as well as DHCP, SNMP, DNS and HTTP. This means the sniffer will capture requests for network addresses, network management tools, Web sites queries, Web traffic and more. 'You don't realize how much you're making public, so I wrote a tool that tells you,' said Robert Graham, Errata's chief executive. Errata has released the source code to this version 1.0, 'feature-poor and buggy' tool on its site. Anyone with a wireless card will be able to run it, Graham said."

RobK writes "The GA release of MyEclipse 5.1.1 is now available for immediate download and is compatible with Eclipse 3.2.2, Windows Vista. The release also includes an enhanced and professionally supported version of Eclipse WTP 1.5.3 with many MyEclipse improvements and bug fixes, as well as Fully I18N enabled. "

JamesO writes "Commodore is a name which will bring memories flooding back to many a gamer and it's been announced that the legendary brand is to return with a new range of high specification gaming PCs. The new Commodore PCs optimized for gaming will be launched at the CeBIT show in Germany on March 15 and attendees will be offered the chance to play the latest PC games using the purpose-built PCs."

Arun Jacob points us to an article in the NYTimes about online tools that can help in salary negotiations. The article concentrates on two websites — Salary.com and Payscale.com — that use different approaches to provide information on standard compensation packages for particular positions and roles. The theory is that, armed with information that was once available only to corporate HR departments, you could have an easier time negotiating your pay using a fact-based rather than a feelings-based approach.

GREYCstoration is an open-source tool able to de-noise, inpaint, or resize 2D color images. This is a command-line program developed by the IMAGE team of the GREYC Lab in France and is available for Unix, Mac, and Windows systems under the CeCILL license. The algorithm is based on anisotropic diffusion partial differential equations. These equations are able to smooth an image while preserving its main structures. The demo page presents interesting examples of color image de-noising and reconstruction. This is a serious free alternative to commercial products like Noise Ninja or Neat Image that perform the same kinds of operations. The tool is still a little bit hard to use (command-line based), but I hope the simple C++ API will ease the integration of the algorithm in more user-friendly interfaces. Previous versions of GREYCstoration are already available in Digikam and Krita.

When it was first announced that Halo 3 Beta keys were being included in the retail release of an Xbox 360 game, I rolled my eyes. I assumed that whatever they were slapping that key onto was going to be a crappy bargain basement eyesore. It has been a great pleasure to learn that, maybe, they bundled the Halo 3 key with Crackdown so that more people would be exposed to the simple greatness this game contains. To be sure, the game has deep flaws; not much of a story, a few racial stereotypes, and somewhat unsatisfying boss fights mar the experience. At the core, though, this is a mindlessly fun game that does a lot of things right. If there's a sequel, and there's no reason not to think there won't be, it's good to know that Realtime Worlds has established an extremely solid base for future endeavors. Read on for my thoughts on this superjumping shooter.

Brietech writes "Ever felt like building your own laptop from (almost literally) scratch? This is a microcontroller-based "laptop" built from the ground up from a handful of chips and other hardware found lying around. It runs a self-hosted development environment, allowing the user to write and edit programs in "Chris++" on the machine, and then compile and run them. The carpentry looks like it could use some work, but it's a neat project!"

Croakyvoice writes "Datel has finally released the Games n Music Homebrew cart for the Nintendo DS, this mass market entry level cart features a 128mb Micro SD card and comes with a 25 game CD of the best of DS homebrew games." Games 'n' Music contains everything you need straight out of the box. It even comes bundled with a 25-game CD, offering some of the best games the DS home brew scene has to offer, as well as a video conversion program."

An anonymous reader wonders: "My University has begun a migration of student email services to Windows Live Mail. All students will be forced onto the system by the end of the semester, but it doesn't support POP or IMAP. Because of that limitation, the only freely available mail client it supports is Windows Live Desktop, which is only available on Windows and I'm worried its ads might be vulnerable to malware just like the ones in Live Messenger. I depend on my mail client and I am concerned about this, because we're not allowed to forward our mail but are responsible for information received there from the University and classes, I'm not on a Windows machine, and I don't have the time to regularly check for web-mail, during the day." What are the pros and cons of such a move for a mid-sized or large college? If you were in charge of the communications of a such a university, would you outsource [please note the vendor neutrality, here] your e-mail?

ogar572 asks: "There has been an ongoing and heated debate around the office concerning the definition of what /etc means on *nix operating systems. One side says "et cetera" per Wikipedia. Another side says it means 'extended tool chest' per this gnome mailing list entry or per this Norwegian article. Yet another side says neither, but he doesn't remember exactly what he heard in the past. All he remembers is that he was flamed when he called it 'et cetera', but that 'extended tool chest' didn't sound right either. So, what does it really mean?"

Dotnaught writes "For the past five years, Xcerion has been working on an XML-based Internet operating system (XIOS) that runs inside a Web browser and promises radically reduced development time. To provide developers with an incentive to write for the platform, Xcerion's back-end system is designed to route revenue, either from subscription fees or from ads served to users of free programs, to application authors. Think of it as Google AdSense, except for programmers rather than publishers. Is it absurd to think this poses a threat to Google and Microsoft?"

hedgemage asks: "I work at a retirement home and we have trouble with the cell phones that our nursing and maintenance staff use. The problem is that our nursing home area is built into a lower level that was originally constructed as a fallout shelter in 1960. There's a lot of solid concrete in the walls and ceiling. We have paid out tens of thousands to try and get an on-site mobile to work using NEC Dterm PSII phones, but they have proven absolutely unreliable (not just in the bomb shelter but throughout the campus) and the only solution our telecom provider has is to install several thousand dollars more in transceivers. If we could use ordinary cell phones, it would be ideal for everyone. Is there an off-the-shelf solution that could boost regular cellular signals in our bomb shelter?"

Yvan256 asks: "I've been looking for over 15 years for the Innovation SSI 2001 soundcard. It's a very old and extremely rare ISA card, based on the SID 6581 chip of the Commodore 64. Yes, I am aware of the HardSID (I've got one), but it's not hardware compatible with the SSI 2001 (different method of accessing the SID registers). The SSI 2001 is about the only card missing from my soundcards collection. I am aware of the IBM Music Feature, I have one. It's just not on the webpage yet. Please note, this collection is about the different technologies that came out at the beginning of the soundcards era, not the thousands of SoundBlaster clones that were available (including the Pro Audio Spectrum series). So, if anyone has an Innovation SSI 2001, or know where I could get one, please tell me."

Oneamp asks: "I'm interested in a '500-in-one' type electronics kit. Amazon lists a few, but I've seen some user reviews that maybe they are not all they're cracked up to be. Most of the complaints seem to be of the 'Manual sucks' variety. Nevertheless, I'm sold on the idea. Can any of you, who have had actual experience with any of these kits, recommend a good one?"