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Security

Submission + - It's Not Paranoia if Your Phone is Really Watching You (cio.com)

Submitted by bdcny7927
bdcny7927 writes: Malware exists that lets Bad Guys hijack webcams and microphones. The U.S. government can't even do that yet, at least not legally, but it is working on it. Remember: It's not paranoia if they're actually after you.

Submission + - GoDaddy: DMCA Overreactor Extraordinaire (plagiarismtoday.com)

Submitted by
TheNextCorner
TheNextCorner writes: "A recent Slashdot story, about a photographer threatened with lawsuits because he was sending DMCA take down notices, got more attention to the policies of GoDaddy.
GoDaddy takes down the full account of the infringing website, which could have the effect that other websites are taken down. see story here.
The lesson should be: Don't take images of the Internet which you don't have the copyright for!"
Music

Submission + - Amanda Palmer raises $1M from fans for her album (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The music industry will never be the same. Singer Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer on Twitter), has just raised over $1,000,000 directly from her fans, through Twitter and other social media, to mix, promote, and distribute her new album. Armed only with a Kickstarter page, social media accounts, and a lot of friends, she has just liberated a lot of musicians from the tyranny of having to 'sign' with a big studio. I predict music business historians will be writing about this day for years to come. The "big 4" record companies just got a lot smaller."
Software

Submission + - The Evolution of Data Management (datanami.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A condensed history of data management with some graphics, highlighting of important trends. As un-boring as something like this can be.

Submission + - The Idiot's Guide To Backing Up

Submitted by lunatic1969
lunatic1969 writes: I'm trying to get serious with my backups. Maybe I'm just used to the way of doing things in other operating systems. Maybe you can set me straight. I have several Windows 7 Home Premium edition machines and large USB network drive (Hooked to the router). I figured wow, I'll just use windows built-in backup utility. No. It won't grok saving to a network drive without using some VHD work around that I'm having mixed results with (The drive disconnects at some point for some unknown reason...). I suppose I could walk around with the USB drive to the various machines and back up every so often, but the point is I'm lazy. It has to be automatic or it won't happen. What utility or method would slashdotters use given a setup with several Windows 7 Home Premium machines and a network drive?
NASA

Submission + - Cool space shot: Venus set to cross Sun (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "You likely have been told your entire life not to stare directly at the but for an event happening next month you may want to figure out how to get a peek. NASA said on June 5th, 2012, Venus will pass in front of the sun, "producing a silhouette that no one alive today will likely see again.""
Security

Submission + - Scammers Working Harder to Fool Consumers (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The number of unique phishing reports submitted to the APWG rose substantially from early fall through the end of the year, while cybercrime gangs were apparently forced to work harder and smarter to fool increasingly fraud-savvy consumers into falling for their confidence schemes. Over the last half of 2011 there was a visible trend of phishers and scammers seeking to hide their intentions. Even fewer phishing websites are using the oh-so-obvious IP host to host their fake login pages, instead preferring to host on a compromised domain.
Government

Submission + - Florida judge rules flashing headlights is legal (orlandosentinel.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. A man who tried to warn others of a speed trap by flashing his vehicle's headlights at motorists was ticketed by police. But a Florida judge ruled this week that flashing headlights is free speech protected by the First Amendment, according to an article in the Orlando Sentinel.

Ryan Kintner was ticketed last year for warning motorists of a speed trap waiting for them down the road. The Lake Mary, Fla., resident was at home when he noticed a police officer with a radar gun near his house, and decided to help out unsuspecting motorists by parking farther up the street from the officer and flashing his lights at oncoming traffic to warn drivers. The police officer instead ticketed Kintner, citing a law that prohibits the flashing of aftermarket emergency lights.

However, Kintner fought the ticket, and brought a lawsuit against the Seminole County Sheriff's office to stop them from using this law to "silence" motorists. He argued that the officers are misapplying that law, which is intended to prevent motorists from installing aftermarket emergency lights and impersonating emergency vehicles.

A judge sort of agreed with him last year and granted a partial ruling in Kintner's favor stating that Florida law does not prohibit motorists from using their lights from communicating with other motorists, reported an earlier Orlando Sentinel article.

This latest decision that signaling with headlights is Constitutionally protected free speech should protect movie plots and road Samaritans going forward. It should also put an end to Florida police writing tickets based on the emergency-vehicle lights law. Police hiding in speed traps will either need to get stealthier or find another way to avoid being outed.
Businesses

Submission + - This Is the Way Facebook Ends (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "For the past eight years, Facebook has been the central neural network of the Internet’s link-sharing brain. But as the site has grown, so have our needs. Now that the company’s public, it’s crunch time, and the skeptics and haters are lining up to talk about how it might all end. One thing’s for certain: whether it’s a bang or a whimper, Facebook is not forever. How could it collapse? Let me count the ways."
Wikipedia

Submission + - Statisticians Investigate Political Bias on Wikipedia

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Global Economic Intersection reports on a project to statistically measure political bias on Wikipedia. The team first identified 1,000 political phrases based on the number of times these phrases appeared in the text of the 2005 Congressional Record and applied statistical methods to identify the phrases that separated Democratic representatives from Republican representatives, under the model that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct set of coded language. Then the team identified 111,000 Wikipedia articles that include “republican” or “democrat” as keywords and analyzed them to determine whether a given Wikipedia article used phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress. The results may surprise you. "The average old political article in Wikipedia leans Democratic" but gradually, Wikipedia’s articles have lost the disproportionate use of Democratic phrases and moved to nearly equivalent use of words from both parties (PDF), akin to an NPOV [neutral point of view] on average. Interestingly some articles like civil rights tend to have a Democrat slant, while others like trade tend to have a Republican slant while at the same time many seemingly controversial topics such as foreign policy, war and peace, and abortion have no net slant. "Most articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. The overall slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants, leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within specific articles.""

Comment Re:Oh really? (Score 1) 143

by robcfg (#39965395) Attached to: Xbox 360 Kinect Said To Add Internet Explorer Browsing

"We are told that the browser will let Xbox users surf all parts of the web straight from their living rooms." Does that include YouTube for example? As far as I remember you have to be a XBox Live Gold Member to use the YouTube application...

I'm not trying to be rude, but do people actually buy an Xbox and not have a Gold membership? It equates to something like $5 per month for access to demos, weekly arcade games, an indie game market, promo videos, media streaming, a stable staging environment for multiplayer gaming across games, etc. Not to burst your bubble, but you'll probably need a Gold membership to use the IE browser anyways. Hopefully they launch Skype soon. That's my only real complaint.

For me the key point is why do I have to pay for something that is free? I mean, I can watch youtube without restrictions on my Windows PC but I have to pay extra to do the same on the 360. And I don't have a gold account because I'm not into online gaming, but I'd like to watch youtube in my living room tv.
Linux

Submission + - Why Linux is a desktop flop (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: It's free, easier to use than ever, IT staffers know it and love it, and it has fewer viruses and Trojans than Windows. So, why hasn't Linux on the desktop taken off? When it comes to desktop Linux, the cost savings turn out to be problematic, there are management issues, and compatibility remains an issue. ""We get a lot more questions about switching to Macs than switching to Linux at this point, even though Macs are more expensive," one Gartner analyst says.
Hardware

Submission + - Physicist explains Moore's Law collapse in 10years (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Moore’s Law won’t be true forever, and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has explained how it will collapse. And that collapse isn’t going to happen in some distant future, it is going to happen within the next decade.

The problem is one of finding a replacement for silicon coupled with the exponential nature of Moore’s Law. Quite simply, computing power cannot go on doubling every two years indefinitely.

The other issue is we are about to reach the limits of silicon. According to Kaku, once we get done to 5nm processes for chip production, silicon is finished. Any smaller and processors will just overheat.

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