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Microsoft

Submission + - MS copies feature, then patents it

Submitted by
jbgreer
jbgreer writes: "Michael Kölling, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and one of the developers of BlueJ, an educational development environment, realized last year that Microsoft had copied one of the BlueJ features into Visual Studio. Flattery, right? Recently he was informed that Microsoft has filed a patent describing the very same feature. For more details, read Michael's blog entry."
Google

Submission + - Google Defuses Googlebombs

Submitted by
John C. Worsley
John C. Worsley writes: "Google announced today a modification to their search algorithm that minimizes well-known googlebombing exploits. Searches on "miserable failure" and their ilk apparently no longer bring up political targets. From the article:

"By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.""
Google

Submission + - Google releases "Testing on the Toilet"

Submitted by Extra Reading Material
Extra Reading Material writes: Today Google released "Testing on the Toilet", a previously internal program where testing advice is plastered to Google bathrooms in weekly episodes. From the official release: "We've decided to share this secret weapon with the rest of the world to spread our passion to other developers, and to provide a fun and easy way to educate yourself (and the rest of your company) about these important tricks and techniques." Apparently Google has also chosen to allow comments on the blog in order to start discussions about the episodes.
Music

Global Collaborative Music Experiment 80

Posted by kdawson from the mixing-it-up dept.
hephaist0s writes "Last year, 165 bands completed the RPM Challenge: to record an original album (10 songs or 35 minutes) during the 28 days of February. The idea is to get musicians to set aside the barriers that stop them from working on their music and simply devote a month to getting it done. This year, more than 300 bands from around the world — including two groups from McMurdo station in Antarctica — have already signed up at www.rpmchallenge.com, and this time the organizers of the challenge have built into the site the ability for bands to share samples with each other. If a band chooses to upload a sample into the Sample Engine, then any other participating group can use it however they like. The possibilities for global collaboration are vast!"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft PR Paying to "Correct" Wikipedia

Submitted by
Unpaid Schill
Unpaid Schill writes: "Over on the O'Reilly Network, there's an interesting piece about how Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia. Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them. Why? According to the article the article (and I am not making this up), it was apparently both to let people know that Microsoft will not "enable death squads with their UUIDs" and also to fight the growing consensus that OOXML contains a useless pile of legacy crap which is unfit for standardization. In an unrelated note, does anyone happen to know what the going rates are? I think I'm being underpaid."
Security

Submission + - Stanford & Microsoft Criticize Extended Valida

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Stanford University and Microsoft Research published a study [PDF] that evaluates Extended Validation SSL Certificates, which went live last week. The study finds that the IE7 browser's extended validation interface does not help users identify a number of common phishing attacks. In fact, when users are trained on interpreting the EV indicators, they are more likely to classify both real and fake web sites as legitimate. One problem is that IE7's interface and documentation teaches users to expect a phishing warning on all spoofed pages, and not all phishing attacks will trigger the warning. The authors will present the study next month in the Usable Security workshop, at the Financial Cryptography Conference.
The Matrix

Journal Journal: Man kicked off Quantas flight for bush-bashing Tee Shirt 13

Journal by drinkypoo
Reuters Reports that a man wearing a Tee Shirt with a picture of Dubya and subtitled "World's number 1 terrorist" was ejected from a Quantas flight from Melbourne to London simply for his dress. Quantas' statement was that "comments made verbally or on a T-shirt which had the potential to offend other tra
User Journal

Journal Journal: Finally against the Patriot Act 5

Journal by jdavidb

Liberals and libertarians have been decrying the Patriot Act for years now, and even though that time period has seen me go from "conservative" to "stark raving mad anarcho-capitalist" I still haven't really felt like there's been anything to get upset about. So far, I hadn't heard real evidence that civil liberties of non-terrorists had been curtailed in meaningful ways.
The Internet

Submission + - Comeback for internet porn domain?

Submitted by Robert
Robert writes: Computer Business Review is reporting that the controversial proposal to launch a porn-only .xxx internet domain, which many assumed dead and buried, is back. And the firm behind it is confident that this time it will be finally approved. The head of ICM Registry Inc, a Florida-based company that has been pursuing the potentially lucrative .xxx opportunity for the last seven years, said that this time he reckons .xxx will be approved.
Television

Submission + - Sling streams iTunes content to TV

Submitted by Vitamin_Boy
Vitamin_Boy writes: Sling has a new product out, the "SlingCatcher." It sends video from the PC to the TV and does it for $200. Oh, and it apparently works with iTunes. Will this undercut Apple's iTV? This Ars Technica article thinks it might: "The SlingCatcher, on the other hand, is media-agnostic. It doesn't care what codec videos are encoded with, nor whether or not they have been purchased from an approved online store. It is designed to take video output and stream it, which means that you could use the SlingCatcher with video purchased from other online services, such as the iTunes Store or CinemaNow. In this way, the SlingCatcher may turn out to be a one-size-fits-all solution in a field populated with specialty products."
Announcements

Submission + - Fortune Names 100 Best Places To Work For 2007

Submitted by
s31523
s31523 writes: "Love your job, hate your job? Find out how your company ranks according to Fortune's list of the 100 best places to work for 2007. I figured Microsoft would have made it higher than the 50 spot especially with things like, "free grocery delivery, dry-cleaning service, and valet parking". Interesting to see what perks each company has, especially to mine, which is definitely not on the list."
Privacy

Submission + - Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea

Submitted by
dheera
dheera writes: "Many of us have seen images of credit cards or statements online where information is blurred to hide sensitive information. I describe in an article why this is a bad idea and how it can be attacked in a method similar to a dictionary attack on a Unix password file."

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