Privacy

Secure Voice Communications While Travelling? 85

Posted by Cliff from the thwarting-eavesdroppers-everywhere dept.
captnitro asks: "My father works for the US Dept of Commerce in the Eastern Bloc. His hotel room phones are routinely bugged -- a few (former) coworkers have had their stays 'shortened' and politely asked to leave the country, when they said dumb things over the phone. A few days ago he asked me what I use for secure voice when I don't have broadband. Remembering PGPfone from a while back, I looked up the link, but apparently they're no longer supporting/distributing it. While I wouldn't recommend he say much of anything in a bugged room, it got me thinking -- what do *you* use for simple, no-nonsense (requiring modem + sound card), low-bandwidth secure voice app? Unix works, and scriptability gets geek points, but I'll take what I can get."
Graphics

Making a Fair Gfx Benchmarking Utility? 40

Posted by Cliff from the can-it-be-done dept.
Moggie68 asks: "Always when the big two release new GPU's and graphics cards that reach astounding heights with their benchmark scores, the same heated debate about unfair benchmarking utilities rises again. But what about the flipside of the coin? Would it really be that easy to construct a fair benchmarking utility for GPU's and graphics cards? What facts need to be considered? What problems solved?"
The Internet

P2P Filesharing vs. The Web 222

Posted by michael from the inculcating-values dept.
The Importance of writes "The recent RIAA lawsuits have raised many questions and issues, but the focus has been on P2P filesharing. Before there was P2P, though, there was filesharing via webservers. There doesn't seem to be much complaint about the RIAA shutting down people who upload MP3s to their homepage. Why do many people seem to treat http filesharing different than P2P filesharing? LawMeme has one answer."
The Internet

Noticed Welchie/Nachi in Your Bandwidth Bill, Yet? 94

Posted by Cliff from the those-pesky-extra-packets-you-didn't-ask-for dept.
Pinkboard Panther asks: "I have recently received my bill for Internet usage for last month and discovered it is 4 times higher than expected. Since there had been no increase in usage of the sites I run I had to search elsewhere for the exorbitant increase. Eventually I tracked it down to my firewall being bombarded with 20,000 ICMP Echo requests a minute from many different IP addresses. This adds up to $A10 per hour or $A240 a day. I still need to battle with my ISP over whether I should be paying for this. It seems that the Welchie/Nachi worm sends out pings to find what machines are out there before it moves onto deeper probes. I can't believe that I am the only site out there which is being attacked in this way. There must be lots of other sites out there who are affected this way. Maybe they just haven't received their bills, yet?"

Using an Old Satellite Dish as a WLAN Antenna 225

Posted by CowboyNeal from the rolling-your-own dept.
=m8s=Dark Underlord writes "I was browsing for wireless stuff and came across this link that shows how to use an old satellite dish as an 802.11 antenna." The directions tout the range as being 10 miles given line of sight. We've had other stories about building antennas, but I think these are cooler because of their focused nature, but a Primestar dish is a little tougher to locate than a Pringles can or a floppy disk.
Businesses

What Do You Do at Work? 154

Posted by Cliff from the reading-slashdot-doesn't-count dept.
mabhatter654 asks: "With all the talk of 'inefficent' and 'uncooperative' American workers, what do most Slashdot readers actually DO at work? Currently, I'm one of those 'IT' workers at a small manufacturer. Yes, I'm called the 'SysAdmin' but that changes monthly. I'm responsible for the companies network, AS/400, website, PC troubleshooting, phones, etc. But...I also get pushed into other things like ISO compliance, Quality issues, as well as babysitting the shop floor/nite QC on 'off' shifts on a regular basis. Of course, the 'SysAdmin' work suffers...when you spend more than half of your day on other tasks. But that does make me part of the inefficent IT problem that bosses like to talk so much about now days. I'm curious how many other Slashdot readers 'multitask' in non-IT rolls while officially still in that capacity. I'm looking for your 'title', company size, and both IT/non-IT tasks you perform. Also, Does 'multitasking' add more or less value to your position at the company. i.e. the IT tasks that don't ever happen versus helping management in another department? Oh yeah, how about those hours too! How much overtime do you put in and how much of that is due to the other work?"
Upgrades

Have Keyboards Gone Crazy? 208

Posted by Cliff from the do-you-really-need-more-than-101 dept.
Ethelthefrog asks: "My office keyboard recently failed and I am attempting to choose a replacement. Unfortunately, Logitech, who make keyboards with an action I really like, seem to have gone crazy. They have trademarked their worst features: Zero Degree Tilt(tm) means I have to reach uncomfortably far for the number keys and their horrific 'Enhanced Function Keys' means I now need to engage a shift-lock type function just to get at F1-F12. Are there any geek-friendly keyboards out there that combine decent action with just the keys I need to hack and no more?"
Operating Systems

User Space Driver for USB Storage Devices? 59

Posted by Cliff from the spreading-the-word dept.
Zarf asks: "With Linux, if you don't like something, fix it yourself. So when I couldn't get my USB pen-drive to work and none of the canned solutions were satifactory... I took it upon myself to fix Linux. I've posted my solution in my Slashdot user's journal. But it seems to me that there must be a better way to promote my solution. Where should I post my fix so it can help the most people?"
Privacy

Where is the Replacement for the JAP Anon-Proxy? 28

Posted by Cliff from the for-anonymous-cowards-everywhere dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "Now that it has been a month since the University of Dresden's Java Anonymous Proxy was back-doored via court order, what is the status of forked projects? Have any universities or individuals in countries with more respect for freedom taken the initiative to provide a truly anonymous alternative? Could a Freenet/P2P type system, with plausible deniability, be developed from the remnants of the JAP program? I would be willing to operate a mix if I could restrict the bandwidth usage and use a SOCKS proxy for my P2P apps. Could a phoenix rise from the ashes of JAP which delivered a 1-2 punch to censorship and media conglomerate entrapment?"
The Internet

When Does Website Monitoring Go Too Far? 259

Posted by Cliff from the your-right-to-monitor-ends-at-my-reset-switch dept.
jafiwam asks: "Recently, the IT department of the company I work for and a 3rd party monitoring and security firm got into a pissing match about how much monitoring is too much. They either got a hold of a customer list from a former employee or walked our IP space to find our web hosting customers. They then proceeded to sell them monitoring services for things such as server up-time, defacement detection, email up-time and DNS testing. While I welcome anything that lets our customers use the internet effectively, their set of monitoring servers filled an entire 18 gig partition full of web server logs (causing the server to crash on a weekend) and choked an email server with 40k some messages that could not be delivered, and they failed to properly brief the hosting customers about what would happen to their log analysis software when faced with 99% traffic from a small set of IPs. These things caused down-time, lost productivity and a damaged reputation. What is appropriate for monitoring a web site and email server? Who should be allowed to monitor? Where should the give and take lie in this situation? I am interested in finding out what admin-on-the-street has to say about this."
Graphics

Wireless Camera for Baby Monitoring? 47

Posted by Cliff from the when-you-can't-be-there-in-person dept.
cwinterb asks: "A friend of mine and his wife are expecting their first born. My friend is a commercial airline pilot flying all over Europe and frequently spends two or three nights away from home. He already has ADSL (256Kbps up/512 down) and 802.11b in the house, via a Draytek Vigor 2600We (draytek.co.uk). What he wants is a wireless webcam, with a built in server, so that as long as he can get web access he can see his wife and child. Streaming video would be nice but bandwidth and cost rule it out. A good quality static image that updates a few times a minute would be ideal. Audio is not required. A camera that works well in fairly low light conditions would also be a bonus."
Education

Programming for the Single-Handed 67

Posted by Cliff from the one-handed-jack-arrrr dept.
NullProg writes "Yesterday I was diagnosed with wrist-drop, and now my right arm/hand is in traction for a spell. It may or may not be related to me sitting behind a keyboard for the last twenty years. How have other programmers dealt with the loss of a hand or even multiple fingers? I moved my mouse to the left of the keyboard and can still type faster than my wife using one hand, but upper case keys are giving me problems. Has anyone experience with the smaller keyboards from Happy Hacking? Do they help one handed people? What editors did you find the most keystroke friendly. Gvim is bearable, is there a better one I can use for single key operations? What other tips do you have for someone in my situation?"
Businesses

Are You On Time To Work? 328

Posted by Cliff from the punctuality-is-for-machines dept.
gravitie asks: "I'm a developer in my local area. I'm on what is supposed to be 'flex time', so I can work the hours that my boss and I see fit for me to fullfil the number of hours I'm required to get a week. Besides this I must clock in at 7:30 AM every day I am at work. If I clock in at 7:31 I am late, no questions asked. If I am late 3 times in one quarter I get a verbal warning. Next time I get a written warning, then it just goes down hill from there (docked pay, etc..). Is this standard in todays business world? Should 1 minute late really be considered 'late'?"
Data Storage

SAN, NAS, Cost and Benefits? 44

Posted by Cliff from the testing-the-waters-before-diving-in-headfirst dept.
luetin asks: "Our company is at the point where our storage and backup infrastructure is ok, but not for much longer. We are looking into SAN, NAS, and variations thereof. We are a small IT department, with two sysadmins and two programmers. Right now we have stored/circulating about 2TB of data, and that's going to increase steadily in coming years. Does Slashdot have experience setting up SANs? Tales of costs and benefits of SANs versus a gaggle of NAS? Can SAN be implemented by reasonably seasoned IT people, or is it too dark an art?"
United States

IT Training in the Military? 344

Posted by Cliff from the sgt.-byte-and-cpl.-processor dept.
firehzd1 asks: "Yesterday's article about the new Czar of Security for the Department of Homeland Security raises a very important question, especially lately. What type of opportunities are there for IT work in the military/government. It seems every article I read is bashing the govt/military for terrible IT decisions/systems but I never hear the other side of the story. How bout we hear from those in the field that can give us a idea of what it is like behind the other side of the heavily armed gate?"

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