Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Open Source

Submission + - Stallman crashes talk, fights 'war on sharing' (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be "free" in order to be a benefit, and not an attack.

Earlier in the conference, Stallman briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: "Don't get caught in software patent thickets". He told journalists that the Patent Office was "here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia", arguging that "there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents".
Games

Submission + - Gog.com shutting down

Submitted by snakeplissken
snakeplissken writes: It seems goodoldgames are/have shut down. I just went there and read the simple close down notice. They are going to allow folk to re-download already purchased games but in their words: "we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form."
Games

Submission + - GOG.com Shuttered? (gog.com)

Submitted by Malfeis333
Malfeis333 writes: On Saturday, the front page of Good Old Games (GOG) was replaced with an announcement informing visitors that the site was shutting down. From the announcement:
"Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we'll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,
GOG.com Team"
The Courts

WikiLeaks Founder 'Free To Leave Sweden' 410

Posted by timothy from the totally-generous dept.
An anonymous reader writes "AFP reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is free to leave Sweden, after prosecutors said there was no arrest warrant against him for an alleged case of rape. Assange said the charges against him were part of 'a clear set-up,' and that he had 'two reliable intelligence sources that state that Swedish intelligence was approached last month by the United States and told that Sweden must not be a safe haven for WikiLeaks.' The news comes just one day before the Swedish national election."
Security

Submission + - Second major hole in Linux being exploited in wild

Submitted by quartertime
quartertime writes: CVE-2010-3081, this week's second high-profile local root exploit in the Linux kernel has been quite a doozy! The bug affects all 64-bit kernels going back to 2.6.26 (and was also backported into RHEL 5's 2.6.18 kernel) and wasn't fixed until last week — shortly before "Ac1db1tch3z" published code to let any local user become root. The exploit works on most versions of Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu. Several vendors, including Ubuntu and Debian but not Red Hat, have rushed out new kernels to address this bug over the last 2 days. Red Hat's recommended workaround, it turns out, didn't actually close the hole — it just makes the published exploit not work. And Ac1db1tch3z's exploit is more malicious than your typical demo exploit: it leaves a backdoor behind for itself to exploit later even if the hole is patched. Hot-updates vendor Ksplice wrote a tool to see if your system has the backdoor installed (meaning you've been exploited) and has rushed out a "rebootless" patch to plug the hole in advance of Red Hat's own fix.

(Today's earlier article on the H-Online on CVE-2010-3301 incorrectly refers to the workaround Red Hat has recommended for CVE-2010-3081 as a workaround for CVE-2010-3301. The workaround is not effective for either vulnerability.)
Security

DDoS From 4chan Hits MPAA and Anti-Piracy Website 318

Posted by Soulskill from the wonder-how-much-piracy-went-unaddressed-while-they-were-down dept.
ACKyushu writes "Say what you like about 4chan; when they want something done, it gets done. Following a call to arms yesterday, the masses inhabiting the anonymous 4chan boards have carried out a huge assault on a pair of anti-piracy enemies. The website of Aiplex Software, the anti-piracy outfit which has been DDoSing torrent sites recently, fell victim to a DDoS itself. They were joined in the Internet wasteland by the MPAA's website, which also fell to a huge and sustained attack."

Submission + - DHS Requires Your Travel Plans 72 Hours in Advance (aa.com) 9

Submitted by
corbettw
corbettw writes: "I haven't seen this anywhere yet. I got an email from American Airlines detailing a new requirement imposed on them by the Department of Homeland Security. Starting November 1, all passengers in the US will have to submit their personal information (including full name, date of birth, and gender) to DHS, through their airline or travel agent, at least 72 hours in advance. This means you can no longer fly anywhere in the US with less than three-days notice. Did your mother have a stroke and you have to rush to be by her side? Too bad. What about that client two states over who needs some facetime or else they'll bolt to your competitor? Kiss them good-bye. Or do you just want to go to Vegas and have a wild weekend on the spur of the moment? Well, maybe next weekend, instead. Don't you feel so much safer now?"
Intel

Submission + - Intel Threatens to Sue Anyone Who Uses HDCP Crack (wired.com) 2

Submitted by Tootech
Tootech writes: Intel threatened legal action Friday against anybody who uses its proprietary crypto key — leaked on the internet — to produce hardware that defeats the so-called HDCP technology that limits home recording of digital television and Blu-ray.

“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”

Intel’s comments came as it confirmed that the internet leak of the “master key” to the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection system was authentic.

HDCP is a copy-protection technology that encrypts high-definition video traveling from Blu-ray players or set-top boxes to television monitors. The technology was approved by the Federal Communications Commission in 2004, and is a standard feature in televisions, cable boxes, satellite receivers and Blu-ray players in much of the modern world.
Television

HDCP Master Key Revealed 747

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wow-that's-a-big-one dept.
solafide writes "The HDCP Master Key has allegedly been revealed. If true, this information will allow anyone to create their own source or sink keys, essentially making HDCP useless for content protection permanently. No word yet on how it was obtained, but if true, this is a great day for content freedom around the world!"

Comment Re:huh (Score 3, Informative) 797

by Dialecticus (#33547464) Attached to: GE Closes Last US Light Bulb Factory

What I don't get is this: if China can produce CFLs at half the price (which doesn't surprise me), then why couldn't they also produce incandescents at half the price? In other words, why hadn't the plant closed long before the advent of CFLs?

My guess is that incandescent bulbs can be made cheaply both in the USA and in China because they contain no environmental pollutants, whereas CFLs, on the other hand, contain mercury, and it's probable that the environmental regulations in China are sufficiently loose to allow them to streamline the manufacturing process in ways that simply cannot be done legally in the USA.
Security

Submission + - EFF to Verizon: Should Etisalat have a CA cert? (eff.org)

Submitted by Peter Eckersley
Peter Eckersley writes: Today EFF published an open letter to Verizon (NYTimes coverage), calling for investigation of whether Etisalat is really an appropriate party to be a trusted SSL Certificate Authority. Etisalat is a majority state-owned telecom of the United Arab Emirates with operations throughout the Middle East. You may remember that last year Etisalat installed malware on its subscribers' BlackBerry phones, and was recently pivotal in the UAE's threat to disconnect BlackBerry devices altogether if Research In Motion did not provide a backdoor for BES servers' crypto.

This company, which appears to be institutionally hostile to the existence and use of secure cryptosystems, is in possession of a master certificate for HTTPS, encrypted POP and IMAP, and other SSL-based security systems. Etisalat's CA certificate is not trusted directly by Mozilla and Microsoft, but was instead delegated as an Intermediate CA by Verizon. As a result, we are asking Verzion to investigate whether it is appropriate for Etisalat to continue holding this certificate, and to consider revoking it.

Slashdot Top Deals

Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.

Close