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Security

Submission + - Datacenter robbed for the 4th time in 2 years (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
mariushm
mariushm writes: "The CIHost datacenter was attacked by armed intruders for the fourth times in two years.

According to a letter C I Host officials sent customers, "at least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw, [...]

During the robbery, C I Host's night manager was repeatedly tazered and struck with a blunt instrument. After violently attacking the manager, the intruders stole equipment belonging to C I Host and its customers."

To aggravate the situation, C I Host representatives needed several days to admit the most recent breach, according to several customers who said they lost equipment, all the while reporting the problems as "router failures"."
Security

Submission + - Dislike a Relative? Turn Them in as a Terrorist! 9

Submitted by Stanislav_J
Stanislav_J writes: A Swedish man who had less than fond feelings for his daughter's hubby, took advantage of the son-in-law's trip to America by reporting him to the FBI as a terrorist. The e-mail, which the father-in-law admits to sending, earned him a libel charge after his poor son-in-law was arrested on his arrival in Florida, handcuffed, interrogated, and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being released.

It's a brief article, but dovetails nicely with the recent Slashdot story about "The War on the Unexpected." That article touched on many examples of well-meaning, but misguided and paranoid citizens reporting innocent activities to the authorities. In the current climate, the potential also exists for maliciously false and far from well-meaning reports made to the Feds about people one simply doesn't care for, or those made merely as a sick prank.

While the man admitted to sending the e-mail to the FBI, he claims he thought no harm would come from it because "he did not think the US authorities would be stupid enough to believe him." To quote the great philosopher Bugs Bunny, 'Nyahh....he don't know us very well, do he?'
Supercomputing

Submission + - Argonne National Lab gets fastest supercomputer (anl.gov)

Submitted by
Derek Steinkamp
Derek Steinkamp writes: "Argonne National Laboratory announced yesterday that it had completed a contract with IBM for the installation of the Blue Gene/P system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. At 445-teraflops, Blue Gene/P will take the number one spot on the Top500 Supercomputing Sites list, surpassing current number one machine Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore by a factor of over 1.5. To put the speed of this machine in perspective, if all six billion people on Earth were participating in a science computation, each person would need to do 70,000 additions or multiplications per second to keep up with Blue Gene/P."
Enlightenment

Submission + - The Buckminster Fuller Challenge (bfi.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "If success or failure of the planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do ... How would I be? What would I do?"
— Buckminster Fuller

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge seeks submissions of design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change.

Solutions should be:

        * Comprehensive — a clear demonstration of holistic systems thinking.
        * Anticipatory — projectively tracking critical trends and needs; identifying and assessing long term consequences of proposed solutions.
        * Ecologically responsible — reflective and supportive of nature's underlying processes, patterns and principles.
        * Verifiable — able to withstand rigorous empirical testing.
        * Replicable — capable of being readily undertaken by others.
        * Achievable — likely to be implemented successfully and broadly adopted.

Can you help save the world? Go to http://challenge.bfi.org/main.php to learn about the USD $100,000 prize.
United States

Submission + - IEEE betrays American engineers (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: Dino Perrotti says that the IEEE-USA has stabbed its members in the back. It lobbied against raising the cap on H-1B visas (temporary visas) and told engineers they should support legal immigration because it's a slower process. That slow process would, supposedly, mean more American jobs for Americans. However, it turns out that's not quite the way it works. "Suddenly this slow-track green card alternative to H-1B guest visas has turned into an instant green card for every STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) graduate. When asked for a statement, the IEEE-USA lobbyist said that IEEE-USA's position is to favor legal immigration over guest workers. In fact, they want to convert all 500,000 H-1B visa holders to green card holders as soon as possible. "
Music

Submission + - Slashdot Reverses Facts about Radiohead 1

Submitted by Apro+im
Apro+im writes: The popular news aggregation website, Slashdot today reported that the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows was pirated more than it was procured via legitimate means, setting off a flurry of speculation on their online discussion board as to the implications of this "fact". Strangely overlooked in much of the discussion, however, was the fact that the article they linked contained the exact opposite information, stating:

"The file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day — adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads. That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com"
Questions about what this implies about Slashdot's editorial practices and readership remain unanswered.
Space

Submission + - Enceladus's Jets Match Hot Spots on Surface

Submitted by
CheshireCatCO
CheshireCatCO writes: "Cassini Imaging scientists have discovered that the jets coming off of the south pole of the moon Enceladus (which collectively form a plume that extends thousands of kilometers into space) are correlated with the "hot spots" found by the CIRS instrument during fly-bys of the south pole. The new analysis used images taken over two years from varying perspectives to trace the individual jets down to the surface. The resulting source locations not only match the hot spots on the surface, they also correspond closely to the fissures (sometimes called "tiger stripes") that cross the south polar region. Planetary scientists have suspected such a correlation since the plume was discovered two years ago, but demonstrating this has proven difficult. Since several competing models exist to describe the jets' origins, these findings may help scientists eliminate some models. The paper with the details of the work comes out in tomorrow's issue of Nature."
Linux Business

Submission + - RedHat: Customers Can Deploy Linux with Confidence (eweek.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "Eweek is reporting: "Red Hat is assuring its customers that they can continue to deploy its Linux operating system with confidence and without fear of legal retribution from Microsoft, despite the increasingly vocal threats emanating from the Redmond, Wash., company. In a scathing response to Ballmer's remarks, Red Hat's IP team said the reality is that the community development approach of free and open-source code represents a healthy development paradigm, which, when viewed from the perspective of pending lawsuits related to intellectual property, is at least as safe as proprietary software. "We are also aware of no patent lawsuit against Linux. Ever. Anywhere," the team said in a blog posting."
Microsoft

Submission + - Vista Explorer thinks 647MB>219GB

Submitted by pradeepsekar
pradeepsekar writes: The latest error I have noticed on my Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit is that copying a 647MB File to a partition with 219GB free gives a 'not enough disk space' error — both on using Explorer and the Move command from the prompt. Smaller files (27MB) copy fine. Thankfully, xcopy managed to copy the files without complaining. Once the file (647MB) had moved to the large drive, copying it again to another drive with 219GB free worked fine...

Interestingly, this very same error appears to have existed in XP in 2005 — http://west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/1556.aspx
Software

Submission + - Apple includes an Anti Bio-Warfare licence clause 3

Submitted by
MrNatas
MrNatas writes: "I should be doing something else right now. But this is the WTF of the year. Looking closer at Apple's products license made me drop my jaw and I temporarily went blind from a parse error.
Here is the quote, please be seated :

"You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons."
That's the most ridiculous license clause since the DRM.
First of all, you'll have to explain me how to build a missile with Safari or I-Tunes, unless you want to play the "Ride of The Valkyries" somewhere in the script.
Then, I don't really see some weird minded evil genius saying "Oooh my god, I had the perfect plan to destroy mankind with Safari , but bummer I can't do it because I'm violating the license".
And last but not least, they should be careful not to break their own terms, since I almost died laughing reading it.
It's curious though, they didn't mention acids..."
Graphics

Submission + - GIMP 2 for Photographers

Submitted by
Jon Allen
Jon Allen writes: "Gimp 2 for Photographers
Book review by Jon Allen (JJ)
Book homepage: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/1933952032/

A glance through any photography magazine will confirm that Adobe Photoshop is the accepted standard image editing software, offering almost unparalleled power and conrol over your images. However, costing more than many DSLR cameras, for non-professionals it can be a very hard purchase to justify (and of course for Linux users this is a moot point, as Photoshop is not available for their platform).

Luckily, the free software community has provided us with an alternative. The GIMP, or Gnu Image Manipulation Program, offers a huge amount of the power of Photoshop but is available at no cost. Additionally GIMP is cross-platform, available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix.

The one downside to using GIMP is that most magazines and photography books use Photoshop in their articles and tutorials, so if you do choose GIMP there's a bit more of a learning curve. Now once you're used to GIMP you'll find that many of Photoshop's features have equivalents, albeit with a different user interface, but getting that inital level of experience and familiarity with the software can be rather difficult. The GIMP does come with a manual, but it is really more of a reference guide and while very comprehensive it is not particuarly friendly for new users.

GIMP 2 for Photographers aims to rectify this.

Written clearly from a photographer's point of view (the author is a photographer who also teaches image editing), this book takes a task-oriented approach, looking at the types of editing operations that a photographer would require and then showing how to perform each task in the GIMP.

Rather helpfully, the GIMP software (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) is included on the book's accompanying CD. This means that you can follow each tutorial using the exact same version of software as the author, which really helps to build confidence that you're doing everything right.

I already have GIMP installed on OS X, so to test out the instructions in the book I performed an installation from the CD on a clean Microsoft Windows XP machine.

The exact filenames of the installation packages on the CD differ slightly from those in the accompanying README file, but the instructions in the book do list the correct files and after following this procedure the installation went without a hitch. The setup files do not ask any overly 'techy' questions, so it literally took less than 5 minutes to set up a fully working system.

As well as the GIMP application, the CD also includes all of the sample images used in the book, and for each editing tutorial the "final" image is provided so you can check your own work against the expected result.

Even more usefully, the CD contains an electronic copy of the complete book as a PDF file, so you can keep it on your laptop as a reference guide, invaluable when editing images on location (or on holiday!).

I'd have to say that this is without a doubt the most useful CD I've ever recieved with a book. Providing the applications and example files is good, giving readers instant gratification without needing to deal with downloads and websites (which may well have changed after the book went to press). But including the complete book on the CD as well is nothing short of a masterstroke, and something I'd love to see other publishers adopt.

So, the CD gets full marks but what about the book itself?

After showing how to install the software, the author takes us through basic GIMP operations — opening and saving files, cropping, resizing images, and printing. Once these basics are out of the way, the book moves on to a series of examples based on "real-life" image editing scenarios.

These examples are very well chosen, both in the fact that the vast majority of the technques shown are genuinely useful, but also in the way that they are ordered. Each example introduces a new feature of the software, building up your knowledge as you work through the book. By the end you can expect to be skilled not only in "standard" editing — adjusting colour balance, fixing red-eye, removing dust spots, and so on — but also in compositing, perspective correction, lighting and shadow effects, and building panoramic images.

Between the examples there is a good amount of more "reference" type material, with detailed descriptions of the various menus, toolbars, and dialogs you will encounter while using the software. Combined with lots of well-labelled screenshots this strikes a very good balance, ensuring that even after going through all the tutorials you'll still get value from the book as something to refer back to.

Overall the quality of the writing and general production standard is very high indeed. There are some points where it is noticable that the book was originally published in German, but this never becomes a stumbling block to the reader's understanding. Most importantly though, the author employs the "show, don't tell" philosophy throughout which is key to successful teaching.

In conclusion, I would have no hesitation in recommending GIMP 2 for Photographers to anyone with more than a passing interest in improving their photos. And even if you already use image editing software, the book is well worth a read — I have been using GIMP for several years and still learned a great deal. The accompanying CD is the icing on the cake, making GIMP 2 for Photographers a simply essential purchase."
Privacy

Submission + - Police issue Death Threats to Man with Camera 9

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cops in St. Louis have taken objection over a local man filming their abuses of power, and have responded with death threats, and stalking. The guy they're harassing installed a pretty neat video system in his car after having received a speeding ticket that he that was unfair. What he ended up catching on tape was far worse than a speeding ticket. Luckily the news has picked up on it, so he is probably out of immediate danger.

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