sh0rtie - Slashdot User

Submission + - Virgin Media to trial filesharing monitoring (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Shokaster on Thursday November 26, 2009 @08:56AM

Shokaster writes: The Register reports that Virgin Media are to begin monitoring file sharing using a deep packet inspection system, CView, provided by Deltica, a BAE subsidiary. The trial will cover about 40% of customers, although those involved will not be informed. CView's deep packet inspection is the same technology that powered Phorm's advertising system.
Initially Virgin Media's implementation will focus on music sharing and will inspect packets to determine whether the content is licensed or unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry. Virgin Media emphasised that records will not be kept on individual customers and that data on the level of copyright infringement will be aggregated and anonymised.

Submission + - SPAM: LSE trading hit by technical glitch

Submitted by viralMeme on Thursday November 26, 2009 @08:16AM

viralMeme writes: Trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been brought to a halt by technical difficulties.

The LSE said it had been affected by connectivity issues and at 1033 GMT had placed all orders for shares into an "auction call period".

This allows traders to put orders to buy or sell shares into the system but without executing them.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - 30000 UK ISP Users Face Illegal P2P Threat Letters (ispreview.co.uk)

Submitted by Mark.JUK on Thursday November 26, 2009 @05:53AM

Mark.JUK writes: Solicitors at ACS:Law have been granted approval by the Royal Courts of Justice in London to demand the private personal details of some 30,000 customers suspected of involvement with illegal file sharing from UK broadband ISPs. The customers concerned are "suspected" of illegally file sharing (P2P) approximately 291 movie titles, they now face threatening demands for money (settlement) or risk the prospect of court action. It's noted that 25,000 of the IP addresses that have been collected belong to BT users.

eBay Denies New Design Is Broken, Blames Users 362

Posted by kdawson on Saturday September 12, 2009 @10:44PM from the just-test-the-darn-thing dept.

krick-zero writes "eBay recently rolled out a new page design. Many eBay sellers are reporting issues with missing description text, resulting in lost sales. Buyers are reporting the same intermittent issue, on multiple platforms, with multiple browsers. After complaining to eBay customer service, one user got this response: 'I have reviewed several of your listings using my computer and had several of my coworkers view your listings as well and we are seeing the complete listings. Many times when buyers are not able to see the whole description or just bits and pieces it is due to browser issues they are having. A lot of times if they simply clear out their cache and cookies or change browsers (i.e. change from Internet explorer to Firefox or vice versa) they no longer have this problem.'"

Submission + - Virgin Media Begins DNS Hijacking 1

Submitted by Mopatop on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:26AM

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.

Submission + - You Too Can Learn Echolocation

Submitted by

The Narrative Fallacy

on Saturday July 04, 2009 @03:48PM

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."

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

Submitted by pmontra on Saturday July 04, 2009 @03:30PM

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.

Submission + - Sothink Violated the FlashGot GPL and Stole Code

Submitted by ShineTheLight on Saturday June 20, 2009 @08:35PM

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.

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

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 21, 2009 @06:41PM 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."

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

Submitted by Dave on Friday February 20, 2009 @08:05PM

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.

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

Submitted by ponraul on Tuesday February 17, 2009 @12:38AM

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 on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @11:41PM (#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.

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

Submitted by

Joshua Zelinsky

on Saturday December 06, 2008 @09:05PM

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."

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

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06, 2008 @05:56PM

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 on Sunday September 28, 2008 @07:57PM (#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]

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