sh0rtie - Slashdot User

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.

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.

Submission + - Restaurant Owners Use Zapper to Cook the Books

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Saturday August 30, 2008 @10:37PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times writes that thanks to a software program called a zapper, even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners are siphoning cash from computer cash registers to cheat tax officials including a 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit that used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years. Zappers — also known as automated sales suppression devices — are a new twist on an old fraud. In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat on taxes kept two sets of books but because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine's memory and changing that record. The more sophisticated zappers are easy to use: a dialog box shows the day's tally then the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till and the program calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Richard T. Ainsworth, a Boston University law professor specializing in taxes says only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States. ""Why aren't cases being identified in the United States? This is my tax money. It makes me mad.""

Submission + - Google Developing ISP Throttling Detector

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Saturday June 14, 2008 @12:38AM

MojoKid writes: "Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Recently, Richard Whitt — Senior Policy Director for Google — announced that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs. Google's stance is that if the ISPs won't disclose that information to the public, then consumers should have the tools at hand to determine for themselves what their ISPs are doing."

Journal SPAM: New US Law Mandates DNA Collection from All Newborns 12

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday May 03, 2008 @06:52PM

It sounds like the setup for the movie Gattaca, but the United States has enacted a Federal law mandating the creation of a national "DNA Warehouse", with the President's signature on April 24, 2008. Described as a "national contingency plan", justification for the new law, S. 1858, known as Th

Submission + - SPAM: FTC fines annoying online ad firm record $2.9M

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday March 17, 2008 @12:21PM

coondoggie writes: "It probably won't do away with those annoying "YOU HAVE WON" banner ads but online advertiser ValueClick, today agreed to pay a record $2.9 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that its advertising claims and e-mails were deceptive and violated federal law. Aside from being deceptive and generally annoying, the FTC also charged that ValueClick and its subsidiaries, Hi-Speed Media and E-Babylon failed to secure consumers' sensitive financial information, despite their claims to do so. The FTC alleged the companies published online privacy policies claiming they encrypted customer information, but either failed to encrypt the information at all or used a non-standard and insecure form of encryption. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

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."

Slashdot Top Deals