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Comment Re:No real opt-out (Score 1, Insightful) 130

by Ron2K (#38663638) Attached to: Facebook Adds Ads To News Feed

I'm with DCTech I only like stuff I actually like and want updates from, if you're one of those idiots who just "like's" everything then I feel no pity for you.

"One of those idiots" probably isn't applicable to most of the /. populace... but would apply to the overwhelming majority of Facebook users. ;)

Comment No real opt-out (Score 5, Informative) 130

by Ron2K (#38663542) Attached to: Facebook Adds Ads To News Feed

TFA implies that there isn't any opt-out, other than unliking pages or nuking individual ads:

Since these ads are just stories, they cannot be stopped completely (although ad blockers may find a way around this). Users do, however, have three options provided by Facebook to limit the ads: click hide to remove individual stories, limit the volume of stories you see from a specific friend to only important posts, or unfriend the person and/or unlike the Page to stop seeing certain kinds of stories altogether.

This is going to piss off more than a few people...
Sony

Submission + - Sony's president to step down (mybroadband.co.za)

Submitted by Ron2K
Ron2K writes: Howard Stringer, president of Sony, is reportedly due to step down as the company's president, while remaining CEO and chairman. The move comes as Sony is braced to report its fourth consecutive annual loss (attributed to a strong yen, public fallout from the PlayStation Network attacks and the Japanese earthquake and Thailand flooding impacting production). Japan's Jiji Press news agency reported that Stringer's decision to step down was due to the unusual concentration of power in him holding all three top positions. Kazuo Hirai, the company's executive deputy president, is widely tipped to succeed Stringer.

Submission + - Could online gamers be forced to obey the Geneva C (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by Ron2K
Ron2K writes: The Daily Mail is reporting that, with 62 billion kills in Call of Duty: Black Ops alone, a committee of the Red Cross is debating whether the International Humanitarian Law is applicable to online gamers, and if they are violating it. From the committee's site: "While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating International Humanitarian Law. Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of this law in video games." While it's questionable if gamers themselves can be prosecuted for not obeying the Geneva convention, the Red Cross committee's actions seem to be aimed more at game developers — as first person shooters become more realistic, do game developers have an obligation to include humanitarian elements?
Apple

Submission + - Apple has more cash than the US government (financialpost.com)

Submitted by Ron2K
Ron2K writes: On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department said that Washington now has a total operating balance of only US$73.768-billion. Meanwhile, Apple currently boasts a cash reserve of US$75.876-billion, as of its most recent quarterly earnings report at the end of June. This effectively means that Apple now has more cash on hand than the US government has spending room.
Space

Submission + - First Earth Trojan asteroid discovered (discovermagazine.com) 1

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Astronomers have found the very first Earth Trojan asteroid, a rock that more-or-less shares Earth's orbit around the Sun. Seen in data by NASA's WISE mission, 2010 TK7 is about 300 meters across and leads the Earth by 60 degrees around the Sun. Trojans have been seen for Jupiter, Neptune, and Mars, but this is the first for our planet."
Networking

Submission + - Most enterprises plan to be on IPv6 by 2013 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
Julie188
Julie188 writes: "More than 70% of IT departments plan to upgrade their websites to support IPv6 within the next 24 months, according to a recent survey of more than 200 IT professionals conducted by Network World. Plus, 65% say they will have IPv6 running on their internal networks by then, too. One survey respondent, John Mann, a network architect at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said his organization has been making steady IPv6 progress since 2008. "Mostly IPv6 has just worked," he said. "The biggest problem is maintaining forward progress with IPv6 while it is still possible to take the easy option and fall back to IPv4.""
The Internet

Submission + - Most IT pros say websites will support IPv6 by '13 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: More than 70% of IT departments plan to upgrade their websites to support IPv6 within the next 24 months, according to a recent survey of more than 200 IT professionals conducted by Network World. Plus, 65% say they will have IPv6 running on their internal networks by then, too. These IT professionals proclaimed strong support for IPv6 deployment in the online survey, which attracted 210 respondents. More than 90% said IPv6 is "fundamentally important to the Internet," and 74% said they would prefer their companies be "leaders, and not laggards, when it comes to IPv6 adoption." This wave of support for IPv6 comes at a time when the Internet is running out of address space with IPv4, the current version of the Internet's main communications protocol.
Security

Submission + - Australian Feds Unmask Evil (internetsecuritydb.com)

Submitted by damian2k
damian2k writes: Australian Federal Police (AFP) have taken down notorious Aussie hacker 'Evil' after a 7 month operation during which they monitored his activity and traced him to the country town of Cowra, New South Wales, 330km from Sydney. The 25 year-old hacker, whose real name is David Cecil, turned out to be self-taught in the art of hacking, with no formal knowledge of IT, and was in fact an unemployed truck driver and father of two. He operated from a network of multiple computers setup in his home.

Cecil is said to be motivated by ego to prove his network security skills after complaining he could not get work in the IT sector. Sydney web developer, Glenn Evans, originally tracked Evil back in January to a chat room on EFnet, a major worldwide IRC network. At the time, chat room operators on EFnet threatened Mr Evans with a cyber-attack for trying to contact Evil.
Security

Submission + - Security expert slams Google+ pseudonym policy (sophos.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A security expert has panned Google's "real name" policy on Google+, claiming that the hard line will damage privacy.

Sophos's Chester Wisniewski says that closing accounts where users have adopted false names erodes privacy on the social network.

"What they seemed to have missed is that the very foundation of privacy is identity. Simply knowing my postal code or birth date is meaningless without a name to associate it with. By requiring people to only use their real names, unless they just happen to be a celebrity, they have eliminated the ability for people to be private in any meaningful way."
AMD

Submission + - Intel Atom c.2015 "Faster Than AMD Phenom II X6"? (itproportal.com) 1

Submitted by siliconbits
siliconbits writes: Bill Leszinske, General Manager, Technology Planning of the Atom SoC Development Group at Intel, provided an update on the company's roadmap for Intel's Atom range, including a rather interesting slide; one which Leszinske clearly indicated, is based on real (but confidential) data. On it, Intel presents Atom's tablet CPU performance (in SPEC2000int_rate) which should rise by more than 10 times over the next four to five years. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation led us to believe that by 2015, the 14nm Airmont Atom SoC could be slightly faster than the six-core AMD Phenom X6, at least when it comes to SPEC2000int_rate numbers (81 GIPS vs 79 GIPS).
Security

Submission + - Anonymous, LulzSec go legal in PayPal war? (itpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
twoheadedboy
twoheadedboy writes: "Anonymous and LulzSec have taken a different tack in their fight against PayPal by simply encouraging people to ditch their accounts. The groups have come together again to tell people to finish with PayPal in response to FBI arrests of individuals suspected of involvement in cyber strikes on the eBay subsidiary. Anonymous claimed hundreds of accounts had already been closed, although PayPal had not confirmed this. Don't expect the groups to end their cyber attacks though. On its Twitter feed, Anonymous said this campaign had only just begun, adding: "We cannot only do more than DDoS we can do less than DDoS and both methods will cause you lots of headaches in the future. Expect us.""

Submission + - UK police use Lulzsec hacking techniques (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: UK police are using hacking techniques commonly employed by activists and hackers to gain entry into suspects' systems.

Police technical surveillance units are using remote network penetration techniques and social engineering to install Trojans on suspect machines, as well as intercepting Wi-Fi communications, according to police insiders.
Piracy

Submission + - Finally some truths about game piracy? (openarchive.cbs.dk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 12.7 million unique peers accessing 127 pirated games on BitTorrent over a 3 month period — roughly 100,000 per game. Those are the numbers reported in a new piece of research which forms an interesting addition to the massively heated debate on online piracy. The numbers make it the biggest such analysis to date, but what is really interesting about the work, done by a group of researchers from Copenhagen Business School and University of Waterloo, is that is uses an open methodology and that unlike earlier reports, the work is not done by vendors hired by branch organizations but independent university researchers. This makes the numbers pretty trustworthy, as there is no incentive to deflate or inflate the numbers — and anyone can critize the method used. This is also reflected in the report, which is more focused on the anatomy of BitTorrent file sharing rather than sensationalizing the numbers.

There are a few interesting wriggles also, e.g. a conclusion that the most pirated games are also those with the biggest Metacritic review score, and that the 10 most pirated games comprise over 40% of the 12.7 million peers logged. Somewhat surprisingly, the games that are distributed on BitTorrent are not only shooters, but 38% had an ESRB-rating of "E" or "E10+",
i.e. childrens games — and RPGs are the overall most downloaded genre — this deflates the myth of the Net being used to download only shooters and mature-rated games.

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