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Networking

Submission + - Virgin Media Begins DNS Hijacking 1

Submitted by Mopatop
Mopatop writes: The UK's largest cable ISP Virgin Media is following Comcast and Verizon in the recent trend of hijacking non-existent DNS requests. Instead of a traditional "not found" message, users are greeted with an advertisement-filled error page when attempting to visit a non-existent domain. Virgin have been playing by the book a lot recently, it's a shame that they've decided to hop on this worrying bandwagon.
Medicine

Submission + - You Too Can Learn Echolocation

Submitted by
The Narrative Fallacy
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "Wired reports that with just a few weeks of training, you can learn to "see" objects in the dark using echolocation the same way dolphins and bats do. Acoustic expert Juan Antonio Martinez at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain has developed a system to teach people how to use echolocation, a skill that could be particularly useful for the blind and for people who work under dark or smoky conditions, like firefighters — or cat burglars. "Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you," says Martinez. "Within another couple weeks you can tell the difference between trees and pavement." To master the art of echolocation, you can begin by making the typical "sh" sound used to make someone be quiet. Moving a pen in front of the mouth can be noticed right away similar to the phenomenon when traveling in a car with the windows down, which makes it possible to "hear" gaps in the verge of the road. The next level is to learn how to master "palate clicks," special clicks with your tongue and palate that are better than other sounds because they can be made in a uniform way, work at a lower intensity, and don't get drowned out by ambient noise. With the palate click you can learn to recognize slight changes in the way the clicks sound depending on what objects are nearby. "For all of us in general, this would be a new way of perceiving the world," says Martinez."
Networking

Submission + - Free Wi-Fi for the Residents of Venice, Italy 1

Submitted by pmontra
pmontra writes: The City of Venice, Italy, started to offer free Wi-Fi to residents (Google translation from the Italian source) on July 3 2009. Tourists and other visitors will pay 5 Euros a day for the service starting from September. The hot spots are connected to a ten thousand kilometers (6.250 miles) fiber optic LAN the City started deploying in the '90s. The first day of free Internet access has been celebrated with a digital treasure hunt in the channels of the lagoon city.
Software

Submission + - Sothink Violated the FlashGot GPL and Stole Code

Submitted by ShineTheLight
ShineTheLight writes: People at Sothink decided to violate the GPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) by stealing a piece of core code from FlashGot and use it without even the decency of covering their tracks. It is an exact copy of a previous version. This deception came to light when users reported to the FlashGot support forum that their software was not working right. Some digging led to the discovery that the older module that Sothink stole and used verbatim was overriding the more recent engine on the machines of those who had both installed and it was causing the issue. It has been reported to AMO at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499485 and the developer is aware of it at http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1654&p=6396#p6396 and the Sothink people have completed ignored and been silent on the subject. This is why most good programmers will stop contributing to the global community because there are those who will steal their work, pass it off as their own, never acknowledge or give credit and then shamefully stick their head in the sand and ignore the consequence.
Handhelds

We're Just Not That Into You, iPhone Apps 205

Posted by timothy from the 99-percent-of-everything dept.
maximus1 writes "A new report compiled by iPhone analytics firm Pinch Media finds the majority of people stop using apps the day after they download them, and only 1 percent develop a long-term relationship with any given app. Instead, most tend to lose interest after a few minutes, according to this article. Paid apps fare slightly better. 30% of the people downloading a paid app return the next day compared to 20% who download a free app. No surprises that the survey found that apps that focused on games and entertainment seem to outlast other categories when it comes to long-term love."
Idle

Submission + - Goatse Mail To Spammer Ends In Police Citation 2

Submitted by Dave
Dave writes: Locally, we have a happy hour event for Information Technology professionals to meet up and have a few drinks. Each month, it is hosted at a different location, and each month a different business sponsors the beer. As part of this event, there is an e-mail sign up for the actual happy hour mailing list to receive information about where the next event takes place and who is sponsoring it. The business where the event took place happened to take their own copy of this list and used it to start e-mailing me about their non-related promotions (Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, etc).

I replied nicely the first time with a title of 'UNSUBSCRIBE', the full original message (including the header showing which e-mail address the message was sent to), and quotes from the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 which says that there must be a clear unsubscribe mechanism (which there was not), and that requests must be honored within 10 days. This past week, I received more promotional materials and replied with an attached image of goatse.

I was contacted today by an officer in reference to "Unlawful Use Of Computerized Communication Systems". I was told that this could be prosecuted under state criminal law but that "since I had cooperated and returned the officer's phone call", I will instead be issued a municipal citation (locally adopted state law, references the same exact legal code 947.0125) for $300.

I fully plan on going to my court date to contest the citation on principle, but I thought maybe some other slashdotters might have had similar experiences or may be able to provide me with some basis on which to fight this.
Government

Submission + - Satirist Gets Three Months; the Judge, Likely More (nytimes.com)

Submitted by ponraul
ponraul writes: When Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, sentenced Hillary Transue, 17, on a harassment charge stemming from a MySpace parody of her high school's assistant principal, Hillary expected to be let off with a stern lecture; instead, the Wilkes-Barre, PA area teen got three months in a commercially operated juvenile detention center. In a reversal of fortune, Ciavarella and, his colleague, Judge Conahan, 56, find themselves trying to plea-bargain a 87 month sentence in Federal correctional facilities relating to a kick-back scheme that netted the pair $2.6 Million and PA Child Care 5000 inmates.

Comment Re:Well, that is the problem right there (Score 1) 437

by vena (#26070231) Attached to: iPhone App Pricing Limits Developers

of course the problem IS that the top apps are listed by purchases, not by ratings. there are several apps in the top apps list that have bad ratings, but finding their competitor product is often difficult. apps are categorised very simply and simply thrown into a bucket.

remember, there are no refunds on app store purchases. the cheapest of competing apps are invariably the most visible.
Censorship

Submission + - ISPs in Great Britain censoring Wikipedia (wikinews.org) 5

Submitted by
Joshua Zelinsky
Joshua Zelinsky writes: "Wikipedia is being . censored by a variety of ISPs in Great Britian. The activity was first noticed when it appeared that almost all edits from Great Britain were coming through only a handful of IP addresses. This created serious problems in preventing vandalism from Great Britain. It then emerged that this was due to the system being used by ISPs to censor Wikipedia. At present it is not known in full which pages are being censored. However, at least one page which is being censored is a page is Virgin Killer about an album from a German heavy metal band which has a naked young girl on the cover. Individuals in Great Britain attempting to access the page report that they are simply getting error messages and not even being told that the page is being censored. Some commentators have already started referring to the Great Firewall of Britain."
Censorship

Submission + - UK ISPs Censor Wikipedia (wikinews.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:

...six of the United Kingdom's main Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have implemented monitoring and filtering mechanisms that are causing major problems for UK contributors of the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation sites

Comment Re:Insensitive? Or too sensitive? (Score 1) 352

by 10sball (#25188525) Attached to: When Digital TV broadcasts kick in in earnest ...

How do you learn that you like a show enough to buy a season pass without testing the water first? On cable this is built into the cost. On legal download media occasionally a pilot or other episode will be free. But if you're going the itunes or amazon route there will probably be some small incidental costs each month while you check things out.

That is, unless you rely TOTALLY on hulu style sites, or just watch the daily show or whateer on the networks web site the next day -- neither which are still comprehensive.

[or just get everything from bittorrent]
Music

Submission + - Blogger charged with felony in leak of songs (latimes.com)

Submitted by n0nsensical
n0nsensical writes: [Blogger Kevin] Cogill posted nine leaked songs from an unreleased Guns N' Roses album, which has been in the works for more than a decade, on his music blog in June. Now he faces up to three years in prison and $250,000 in fines. On Wednesday he became the first Californian charged under a 3-year-old federal anti-piracy law that makes it a felony to distribute a copyrighted work on computer networks before its release.
Sony

Submission + - PlayStation 3 is and will be steadily at a loss (kingofgng.com) 1

Submitted by
KingofGnG
KingofGnG writes: "Sony Computer Entertainment chairman Kazuo "Kaz" Hirai would like to sell 150 millions of PlayStation 3 in ten years, but even that wouldn't be enough to recover from the astounding cost of the 3 billions of dollars spent in research&development for the console. It has been said not by a Nintendo fanboy but by the Sony Corporation Chief Executive Officer Sir Howard Stringer, who has frankly admitted with the press that PS3 is and will be a product at a loss for the coming decades yet. Story continues here."
Businesses

Submission + - Refusing ELUA against federal law! 2

Submitted by Reefrash
Reefrash writes: OK, so I purchased EA Sports Tiger Woods 09 for the xbox360 Friday night. I fired it up and was presented with an EULA from 1984 ... Total big brother.

To play the game you MUST create an account with EA (automatically done for you using your XBOX live user information). They can track you, compile data on you, do whatever they wish with said data, and will give your info to their associates to spam you as they see fit (they explicitly include Social Security numbers as potential data). They also reserve the right to compile other data on you not related to their games. To be fair they also state you can login to their website to disable spamming.

So, i was quite annoyed by the conditions ... I just wanted to play the dang video game, not give up all rights to privacy (and who knows what else, I only made it through 5 of the 20+ page EULA). So I said no, I do not accept.
I tried to return the game to Target the next morning but they will not allow a return of an opened video game. Now here is where it gets jacked ...

The first person I spoke to (and then the manager) right off each made the claim that Federal Law says its illegal to accept a return on a video game once its been opened!!!?!?! I called BS on that. They couldn't site the statute that made the action a felony, but claimed it was true.

So to all of our legalize type folks out there ... are you familiar with ANY law which prohibits open game return at the federal level? Im pretty sure the DMCA doesn't, and i doubt any else does. Makes me think that Target trains their employees to make this claim to hide their own bad policy in this regard.

Three problems I have.
1. Cannot return a game that has been opened, but unable to see the terms and conditions until the game is opened ... Leaving no room to ever refuse the terms and conditions.

2. Returning an opened game is breaking federal LAW?!!? If this is not true (i don't think it is) ... would it be illegal to train your employees to site false laws as a policy?

3. I have the numbers for EA, Microsoft, and Target. I'm gonna end up spending hours and hours on the phone to try and get my $60 back. I only have a cell phone, and these companies can only be called during the hours of the day that will take up my minutes ... costing me even more money. So my third problem is basically that I am SOL =/
Privacy

Submission + - SPAM: Secret Spying Court Stays Secret, Rejects ACLU

Submitted by
Anti-Globalism
Anti-Globalism writes: "For the third time in a year, a secret spying court rejected an ACLU request to let some sunshine pierce its dark curtains of secrecy, ruling late Thursday that national security prohibits publishing even unclassified versions of court documents or allowing non-government lawyers to argue in the court."
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