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Earth

Submission + - Activist Disrupts Detonations to Protect Cranes

The Narrative Fallacy writes: "Nature reports that on 14 July, Ingmar Lee broke into a buried explosive charge and cut the detonation cord, later claiming responsibility and giving television interviews threatening more damage at Denny Island, an isolated Canadian island in British Columbia about 500 km north of Vancouver where a team of geophysicists is studying granite formation. The aim of the seismic studies on Denny Island is to define the formation, growth and recycling of Earth's crust in that area — events that happened in the late Cretaceous, some 65 million years ago. After Royal Canadian Mounted Police declined to provide protection to the scientists, local residents rallied to guard them so that they could complete repairs and set off a targeted charge late on the night of 16 July and over the following two days, the team were able to set off the remainder of the charges at 15 other sites in a line moving inland through a river valley. Lee, a long-time forest-protection campaigner who lives 1 km from the blast site, says that "there has been no prior community information, consultation or discussion" of the detonations and that the reason he disrupted the detonations was to protect Sandhill crane nests located within 2 km of the Denny Island blast site whose recently hatched chicks are currently in their most vulnerable pre-flight stage. "This is a very specialized wilderness area," says Lee. "I was concerned for the sandhill cranes and salmon. I consider this non-violent civil disobedience." On 17 July, police charged Lee with one count of willful mischief endangering life for disrupting the seismic studies."
Data Storage

Submission + - GlusterFS, GPL3 Clustered File System, Release 2.0 (gluster.org)

Shehjar Tikoo writes: "GlusterFS is a clustered file system that runs on commodity off-the-shelf hardware, delivering multiple times the scalability and performance of conventional storage. The architecture is modular, stackable and kernel-independent, which makes it easy to customize, install, manage and support different operating systems. Multiple storage systems can be clustered together, supporting petabytes of capacity in a single global namespace. Building a configuration of a few hundred terabytes can be accomplished in less than thirty minutes.

GlusterFS 2.0 Release:
GlusterFS v2.0 has gone through a major revamp in design and development since v1.3. Thanks to thousands of initial users who provided us great feedback and bug reports. There are a number of production deployments now. GlusterFS uses existing disk file systems (such as Ext3, XFS, ZFS..) to store your data as regular files and folders. You can restore the data, even after you uninstall GlusterFS. So, give it a try and let us know.

License: GNU GPLv3
What is in 2.0 release
Who is using GlusterFS
Download

Happy Hacking
--
GlusterFS Team"

Security

Botnet Worm Targets DSL Modems and Routers 272

CoreDuo writes "The people who bring you the DroneBL DNS Blacklist services, while investigating an ongoing DDoS incident, have discovered a botnet composed of exploited DSL modems and routers. OpenWRT/DD-WRT devices all appear to be vulnerable. What makes this worm impressive is the sophisticated nature of the bot, and the potential damage it can do not only to an unknowing end user, but to small businesses using non-commercial Internet connections, and to the unknowing public taking advantage of free Wi-Fi services. The botnet is believed to have infected 100,000 hosts." A followup to the article notes that the bot's IRC control channel now claims that it has been shut down, though the ongoing DDoS attack on DroneBL suggests otherwise.
Security

Submission + - Botnet worm that targets DSL modems and routers (dronebl.org)

CoreDuo writes: The people that bring you the DroneBL DNS Blacklist services, after investigation of a recent DDoS incident, have disocvered a botnet that is comprised of exploited DSL modems and routers. What makes this impressive is the sophisticated nature of the bot, and the potential damage it can do not only to an knowing end user, but to small businesses using non-commercial internet connections and the unknowing public that take advantage of the more popular than ever free wifi services. The botnet is believed to have an estimated 100,000 effected hosts.

Comment I am a Fairpoint Maine customer (Score 1) 249

I just got the letter today, and my interpretation is if you get any MSN or Yahoo value added services or use a Verizon email address, you now access these services through a Fairpoint URL and Fairpoint email servers. You are no longer a Verizon DSL customer, you are now a Fairpoint DSL customer.

In other words, nothing has changed, you just type in a new URL from now on to access webmail and MSN/Yahoo Verizon^WFairpoint services, and you change the POP/SMTP settings in your email client.

At no point is Fairpoint blocking the real MSN and Yahoo websites nor blocking you from using MSN and Yahoo directly for your non-bundled-service services.

Slashdot jumped the gun.

Businesses

Recourse For Poor Customer Service? 593

eleventypie writes "I am in the Army and currently stationed in Afghanistan. Recently I found myself without a laptop so I decided to build a studio 17 from Dell. I designed/customized my laptop on 2008-09-17 and placed my order, which totaled approximately $1,700. The laptop was built and apparently shipped on 2008-09-28. Given my APO address, I know mail can sometimes take a little while to get here, though 7-10 days is normal. Dell said to give my laptop 6-8 business days and occasionally, it might take as much as 4-6 weeks. So on 2008-11-12 I sent another email to Dell informing them I still had not received my laptop. One person said to give it more time, while another person responded to my message telling me to send my address again and they would send me a replacement. So I sent my address immediately and never got a response. It is now the 30th of November and I still have no laptop and Dell seems to have quit responding to my emails. This is very frustrating being out $1,700 and not having a laptop to talk to my friends and family and do school work. Phone calls aren't easy so calling them is pretty much out of the question. Any advice on what I can or should do at this point to get the computer I ordered or get my money back?"
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: Feds swear they'll meet key IPv6 deadline in June

alphadogg writes: U.S. federal government officials are confident they will meet a June 30 deadline to support IPv6 on their backbone networks, but they see challenges ahead in moving their production networks to this long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. Challenges cited by federal IPv6 leaders include the lack of IPv6-enabled security devices and software applications available in the commercial marketplace, as well as budgetary constraints and training hurdles.
Link to Original Source
Networking

Submission + - Verizon hacks DNS (adterrasperaspera.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: Ad Terras Per Aspera is reporting that Verizon is now redirecting non-existent domain requests to their DNS servers to their own internal website. As detailed,

This is considered a severe security violation and they are willfully undermining the integrety of the service they provide.


Is Verizon setting themselves up to be sued for privacy violations and be disconnected from other Tier 1 providers?

Media (Apple)

Submission + - Bug in ColorSync-enabled applications (adterrasperaspera.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Patrick McFarland, column writer for Free Software Magazine, has found an interesting bug in Apple's ColorSync software which manages colors for applications including Finder, Cover Flow, and Safari.

Any image that does not have a profile is not color managed. I mean, it is completely ignored: in my case, I profiled my Powerbook's LCD, [..] the desktop background image "Purple Frond" that comes with OSX is actually displayed bluish in color because Apple did not embed profiling data in their background images.

OS X

Submission + - Why don't mac computers work well with NAS?

rainman_104 writes: "I've recently succumbed and dumped my Fedora driven laptop in favour of a Macbook. I must say I've been loving it — a laptop with all the goodness of a Mac with the familiarity of Unix. However I'm miffed with the apps. iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Lightroom, Aperture. They all really really suck with NAS. They run slow and Apple recommends you only use those apps with attached storage. I found a small hack to get my music playing off my central server using mt-daapd, but all the other awesome apps, I just can't use from NAS. How have other people dealt with this? With all my movies, music, photos and such, I can't possibly be bothered to duplicate them all across my LAN at home. Should I bite the bullet and store all my stuff locally on my laptop too? What do others do?"
Unix

Submission + - DIY CPU Demo'd Running Minix

__aajbyc7391 writes: Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, today at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus.
Networking

Submission + - Twerq Search Engine refuses to pay up (adterrasperaspera.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Patrick McFarland, of ZSNES Linux fame, and a long time user of Twerq, a tabbed frontend for Google among other search engines, has been stiffed by them by their plan to pay users to look at ads and use the search engine; most likely, they never had the money to pay him in the first place and are stalling in hopes he goes away.
Music

Submission + - Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream (ocremix.org)

djpretzel writes: "Today OverClocked ReMix released its ninth album, Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream. The album, made by fans for fans, honors the recent 10-year anniversary of the Square Enix PlayStation video game Final Fantasy VII with 45 arrangements of composer Nobuo Uematsu's original score. Available for free download at http://ff7.ocremix.org, Voices of the Lifestream is not affiliated with or endorsed by Square Enix. More than 40 artists from the OverClocked ReMix community contributed more than three hours of music to the album, with interpretations covering a variety of genres and styles from jazz to electronica to rock to symphonic."
Music

Submission + - 4-CD Final Fantasy VII Fan Remix Album Released!

Anonymous writes: "Over forty musicians at OverClocked ReMix have collaborated to release a project 20 months in the making; Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream , a 4-CD set of remixes from the legendary game Final Fantasy VII. With a total of 45 tracks and nearly three and a half hours of music, Voices is the biggest album project to be released on OC ReMix to date. The album encompasses a wide variety of genres from trance, to film score orchestral, metal, jazz, new age, and many more.

Voices was recently reviewed and showcased at Music4Games, with reviewer Jayson Napolitano calling it "One of the most impressive and encompassing listening experiences in the world of video game music." Well-known industry composer and creator of Video Games Live Tommy Tallarico has also praised the album; "OC ReMix has done it again! I'm always impressed with the amazing talent that comes from the OCR community. This album is a further testament to that quality and passion. It's an honor for video game composers around the world to have their material be a part of the OCR community. This album rocks!" Voices of the Lifestream is available free-of-charge at http://ff7.ocremix.org/ via individual MP3 downloads or BitTorrent."

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