sh0rtie - Slashdot User

Submission + - Archive Formats Kill Antivirus Products 2

Submitted by nemiloc on Monday March 17, 2008 @10:54AM

nemiloc writes: From F-Secure website: "The Secure Programming Group at Oulu University has created a collection of malformed archive files. These archive files break and crash products from at least 40 vendors — including several antivirus vendors...including us." It is not new anymore that security producs have have security problems... What makes this special is that antivirus software is a perfect target. They are run on critical places with high privileges and autoupdates keeps versions coherent. More information: Test material by OUSPG and Joint advisory by CERT-FI and CPNI

Submission + - SPAM: Historic computer collection needs a new home

Submitted by

WirePosted

on Tuesday March 11, 2008 @08:05AM

WirePosted writes: "Wanted, a new home for some of Australia's most antiquated and historic computing devices which are in danger of being consigned to landfill or raw materials recycling unless some benefactors who care about our technology heritage can be found."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Firefox celebrates 500+ million downloads

Submitted by

WirePosted

on Sunday February 24, 2008 @06:28AM

WirePosted writes: "With Firefox 3 nearly ready for primetime, and as Netscape is formally no more, Mozilla celebrates over half a billion Firefox downloads with a program to donate free rice to the poor."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Has AT&T Lost its Corporate Mind?

Submitted by

Ponca City, We Love You

on Wednesday January 16, 2008 @06:55PM

Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for "Transitory Digital Network Communications" — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data "without selection of the material by the service provider" and "without modification of its content" but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. "As the world's largest gatekeeper," Wu writes, "AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits." ATT's new strategy "exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders," concludes Wu."

Journal SPAM: Review: Windows Vista Annoyances 2

Journal by stoolpigeon on Thursday January 10, 2008 @06:31PM

It has been well documented that the reception for Microsoft's Windows Vista has not been all that warm. Yet, visiting the web site of many PC manufacturers or visiting a retail outlet selling computers will show that most new hardware is being offered with Vista as the primary if not only option. O'Reilly's newest in their Annoyances series, "Windows Vista Annoyances", by David A. Karp, seeks to alleviate some of the pain for new Vista users. For the Vista owner who is able to put the boo

Submission + - Intel Quits One Laptop Per Child Program (physorg.com)

Submitted by

flatlyimpressed

on Friday January 04, 2008 @04:38AM

flatlyimpressed writes: "(AP) — Citing disagreements with the organization, Intel Corp. said Thursday it has abandoned the One Laptop Per Child program, dealing a big blow to the ambitious project seeking to bring millions of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries."

Submission + - Google delisted me I am powerless. (geofffox.com)

Submitted by

ctwxman

on Friday January 04, 2008 @04:35AM

ctwxman writes: "To confirm some suspicions, I did a Google search on my site. It would instantly tell me which of my pages were most popular. I was stunned. The list was long and mainly consisted of pages I hadn't entered! The pages were virtually 100% made of keywords and links. They were obviously computer generated without human intervention. I clicked on one. The address bar in my browser read www.geofffox.com/MT/archives... I went to my web server and looked for the files that made up this page. They weren't there. Though the address bar said geofffox.com, if you manually typed the web address you'd get a 404 error — page not found! Something was very fishy."

Submission + - Official DTV Converter Box Coupons for Americans (dtv2009.gov)

Submitted by

Ant

on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @09:05PM

Ant writes: "The official Digital Television/DTV Converter Box Coupon Program, for United States/U.S., is now online. Congress created it for households wishing to keep using their analog TV sets and use over the air antennae to get TV feeds. After February 17, 2009. The Program allows American households to obtain up to two coupons, each worth $40, that can be applied toward the cost of eligible converter boxes. A TV connected to cable, satellite, or other pay TV service does not require a TV converter box from this program."

Submission + - Ohio Study Confirms Voting Systems Vulnerabilities (state.oh.us)

Submitted by bratgitarre on Friday December 14, 2007 @06:41PM

bratgitarre writes: A comprehensive study of electronic voting systems (PDF) by vendors ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Premier (formerly Diebold) found that "all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election". In particular, they note all systems provide insufficiently protection against threats from election insiders, do not follow well-known security practices, and have "deeply flawed software maintenance" practices. Following up on the devastating results of the California study earlier this year, the evaluation was commissioned by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and conducted by a sizable team of academics and industry consultants. Will Secretary Brunner be forced to decertify (and recertify?) Ohio's elections equipment less than three months before the state's March 3 primary, similar to California's Debra Bowen?

Submission + - Wikipedia COO was a Convicted Felon (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by on Friday December 14, 2007 @04:52PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Register writes:

"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."

Submission + - Cross-Platform Firefox Extension for WebDAV

Submitted by on Thursday December 13, 2007 @08:12PM

An anonymous reader writes: In the past, users of Firefox who needed to access WebDAV (see RFC 4918) servers only had one choice: Julian Reschke's OpenWebFolder extension which hooks into Microsoft's WebDAV component and thus only works on Windows. Now there is a second choice: Under the guidance of Joe Feise, a team of three undergraduate students (Ayse Sabuncu, Benjamin Schuster, and Ryan McLelland) from the Department of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University has developed a new, cross-platform WebDAV extension called WebFolder. The extension, developed for their Senior Design Project course, implements the core WebDAV protocol in JavaScript and runs on any platform supported by recent versions of Firefox. The WebFolder team hopes that their work will lead to more widespread use of WebDAV as an open and user-friendly collaboration infrastructure.

Submission + - NonSilicon, 6% efficient Printable solar cell

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10, 2007 @09:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: According to nikkei.net, A dye-sensitised polymer printed solar cell from a collaboration between Toin University of Yokohama and wrapping firm Fujimori Kogyo will sample in February of next year, has three layers, and is 0.4 millimetres thin. Although energy efficiency is modest, at only six per cent, a fab will churn out 10 megawatts of dye sensitised cells a month, using more or less conventional printing techniques.

Submission + - Final Windows Vista SP1 Changelog (microsoft.com)

Submitted by

Ant

on Monday December 10, 2007 @09:34PM

Ant writes: "BetaNews shares the final Windows Vista Service Pack/SP1 changelog that shows improved startup repair tool, media throttling, etc."

Submission + - Iran builds supercomputer from banned AMD parts 2

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Monday December 10, 2007 @08:25PM

Stony Stevenson writes: Iranian scientists claim to have used 216 microprocessors made by AMD to build the country's most powerful supercomputer, despite a ban on the export of U.S. computer equipment to the Middle Eastern nation. Scientists at the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center at the country's Amirkabir University of Technology said they used a Linux-cluster architecture in building the system of Opteron processors. The supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 860 giga-flops, the posting said. The disclosure, made in an undated posting on Amirkabir's Web site, brought an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country.

Submission + - Icelandian calls White House, labelled a terrorist (go.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10, 2007 @07:47PM

An anonymous reader writes: A 16-year-old boy in Iceland called a secret government phone number, which he thought was Bush's private number, and posed as the president of Iceland. After passing some impromptu security questions, such as President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson's birth date (which he answered with Wikipedia), Bush's secretary told him to expect a call back. Instead, police surrounded his house and interrogated him on where he got the number, threatening to put him on a no-fly list if he didn't tell. He claims he can't remember where he got the number, but says "I must have gotten it from a friend when I was about 11 or 12."

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