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Security

Submission + - DDoS attack against finnish broadcasting company

Submitted by Iloinen Lohikrme
Iloinen Lohikrme writes: The Finnish broadcasting company Yle has been targeted by an DDoS attack. The matter was reported in an net article by Helsingin Sanomat. Because of the attack, Yle's net pages aren't reachable. Currently it's not known from where the attack comes and who is responsible for it. It has been speculated that this attack may be related to recent attacks against Estonian governments web services and government sites [More about attacks in Estonia]. The attacks came as a surprise to Estonia and current attack against Yle comes as more, as there hasn't been any apparent reason for any individual or group to hold grudge against Yle. It could also be that some government, be it any great power, is running the attack against Yle as an live exercise to measure it's information war power and the readiness of other governments and government agencies to respond to this kind of attack.
The Courts

Submission + - SCO goes for Groklaw. Again...

Submitted by beav007
beav007 writes: SCO has subpoenaed Pamela Jones of Groklaw again.

According to this article on TheRegister,

The attempted deposition will be seen by many as SCO's latest gambit to unmask Jones, who, it has claimed, to be in reality a group of IBM employees or an individual paid by IBM to portray SCO in an unfavorable light. Quoting press articles, SCO's action claims IBM "funneled" between $40,000 and $50,000 into Groklaw, which tracks the minutiae of SCO's cases against Novell and IBM. Also cited as proof of bias is the fact Groklaw is hosted for free on IBM servers at ibiblio.org. According to SCO, Jones has important information and has avoided its subpoenas by going on holiday.
Microsoft

Submission + - ODF Standardization Process Suspended in Malaysia

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a surprising move that has dismayed open standards supporters in Malaysia, the Malaysian Standardization National Body (SIRIM) has suspended standardization discussions on the OpenDocument Format. ODF was proposed as a voluntary Malaysian standard a year ago but discussions have languished at the technical body level with Microsoft Malaysia as the singular voice of opposition. The document format battles have gotten plenty of press in Malaysia in recent weeks with Microsoft Malaysia publicly accusing IBM of orchestrating ODF and anti-OOXML strategies in Malaysia without any proof. The SIRIM CEO agrees with Microsoft as much when he claims that "ODF supporters" are "proxies of international bodies with a business interest in promoting ODF" which led to his unilateral decision in suspending the standardization process. Microsoft employees blogging the document format battles are cheering the latest developments. This is the second setback in the last 6 months for open source and open standard initiatives in the country and there are fears that Microsoft lobbying is driving the Malaysian initiatives down the path of Massachusetts.
Google

Submission + - Google Desktop for Macs Security Risk

Submitted by
ansemond
ansemond writes: "Google Desktop on the Mac silently installs an Input Manager whose function appears to be to load bundles of code into applications targeted by Google. The Input Manager is installed in a location where it will be loaded into every application run by any user of the Mac. The fact that it loads other code on demand is worrying as it could be used for malicious purposes. Moreover, it is odd that Google installs this software without requesting the user's permission given the recent controversy on this very topic. Hopefully Google will fix the issues outlined in the article in upcoming revisions of their software."
Windows

Submission + - Better Virtual Desktops

Submitted by Joseph Fung
Joseph Fung writes: There are a number of virtual desktop applications out there that will allow you to change which applications appear to be open at any given time — however, I'm wondering whether or not there's anything out there that would allow you to create virtual desktops that include application and process/service states?

Be they called profiles, desktops, or what-not, I'm looking for a way to tell my computer to switch to "development mode" which would load up my php, mysql, and apache services, then switch to "design mode" which would terminate those processes and load up Photoshop and perhaps change my monitor's display mode. Beyond that, there are umpteen different modes that would be useful, such as "media machine" or "gaming box" that would be helpful as well.

Does anyone know if there's something like this out there?
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Can Slashdot save the world?

Submitted by
r3gx
r3gx writes: "Hypothesis: There is no problem that the collective wisdom of /. can't solve. Test case: Global Warming There has got to be a viable scientific solution to the problem of Global Warming. Is there another easily produced gas we can release into the atmosphere? Can C02 be converted into another stable state? C02 exist in the ocean as it is highly soluble, could this natural process be expedited, and what would this do to the PH of the ocean? Can we take all the excess C02, make dry ice and re-freeze Greenland? OK, so that last one is more funny than viable, but we all know the situation is no laughing matter. Yet we go on with our daily lives slashdotting about how to build a faster computer or who is suing who while we continue to emit thousands of tons of C02 and other greenhouse gasses daily. Is it possible to cut C02 and other greenhouse gas emissions significantly enough in the near future to counter global warming? I personally do not think so. There has to be another scientific solution."
Networking

Submission + - USB over IP - Beat the 5m limit.

Submitted by
Justin Chudgar
Justin Chudgar writes: "From the project's SourceForge site:


The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB requests" into IP packets and transmits them between computers. Original USB device drivers and applications can be also used for remote USB devices without any modification of them. A computer can use remote USB devices as if they were directly attached...

I've wished for something like this on and off for a few years now; and, it seems like there is real progress towards a working open-source solution. More technical info can be found here."
Microsoft

Submission + - Sharepoint: Microsoft's new operating system

Submitted by
AlexGr
AlexGr writes: "InfoWorld Matt Asay has an interesting observation: "I've been beating on the Sharepoint drum for nearly two years now, but this is the first time I've seen anyone outside the ECM industry think along the same lines. Sharepoint is very clearly the future of Microsoft. And, not coincidentally, it is the future of how Microsoft locks customers into its software (benevolently or malevolently — you choose)." http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/ 2007/03/sharepoint_micr.html"
OS X

Submission + - TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac

Submitted by
honestpuck
honestpuck writes: "About six months ago I switched to using TextMate, a text editor with a clean and well designed interface that hides a great deal of power, replacing both BBEdit and vim. I felt like a baby duck that had been ripped away from its mother, but I was determined to switch to a single editor. I have since become familiar with the power of TextMate and it's extensions. Getting a copy of "TextMate — Power Editing for the Mac" (TPEftM) made me feel like I'd gone from baby duck to Leo DiCaprio, dating a supermodel.

TextMate, like many Mac applications, seems like a simple, easy to use application but underneath the hood it has four types of additions to customize the editing experience — snippets, macros, commands and language grammars — and a method of tying them together into a mode called a bundle. Grammars control syntax colouring, indentation, text folding among other features. TextMate also seems to have been designed from day one to integrate well with Mac OS X and its Unix underpinnings. First, it includes a great command line tool, "mate", that has a couple of neat tricks like automatically creating a project when passed a list of files or a directory name, and a GUI that can easily run shell commands and scripts. TextMate can't give me a list of unique lines in a file but it is trivially easy to pass a selection to 'uniq' and have the results replace the selection, for example.

I don't want to spend half this review describing TextMate, suffice to say that it is an incredibly powerful and conformable editor. The extended features are all well covered by TPEftM.

Taken as a whole this book is a marvelous second volume to the TextMate manual. Though the first section summarizes information covered in the TextMate manual the rest of the book takes a huge leap forward and gives you details on how to get the best from one of the finest text editors it has been my pleasure to use. If you want a well written manual for the advanced and malleable parts of TextMate then this book is pretty good, the details it is missing, such as the plugin API, are covered by the manual and where the manual is thin on detail this book fleshes it out nicely.

It's broken up into three sections, "Editing" which contains three chapters (and the introduction) covering the basics of creating projects and files, moving around, selecting text and find and replace (a nice little regular expresson engine), "Automations" which contains five chapters covering the built in bundles and how to write your own snippets, macros and commands and "Languages" which covers the development of language grammars, preferences and themes.

This is a useful book. It's not a classic, it won't revolutionize your thinking about anything, nor will you learn new coding techniques. It will, however, reward any effort you make towards working through it with a much improved editing experience.

TPEftM is also a hard book, reading it can be almost a chore with the need to digest and try out some fairly complicated topics. TPEftM isn't a great learning aide, it's more a technical manual than a textbook. I wish I could blame the writing but the book is well written and edited, it just has a technical style. At times I thought a lighter touch in the writing would have been good to allay some of the density. It also seems light on examples, while the discussion of each topic is well constructed and understandable a little more attention to the number, length and content of examples would have improved the book's usability.

It is best to give TPEftM a quick read and then use it as a guide to doing some customizing of your TextMate environment. The chapter that I remember well is the one on snippets since I've used the book to guide me in writing several. In fact my first foray into 'programming' TextMate was to alter some snippets in the built-in automation.

The O'Reilly page for the book just contains a book description and some marketing information. For more useful information you can go to the Pragmatic Programmer's page for the book which has a link to download the code, an errata list, a table of contents and links to two excerpts from the book. You can also buy the PDF version or both the PDF and paper versions on the Pragmatic site.

In conclusion this is a great book if you are currently toying with using TextMate as your Mac OS X editor. It is a good book and second manual if you are already a heavy TextMate user and want to know how to get the best out of the programmability of TextMate. So all TextMate users should consider this book a must buy. This is one hunk of extra documentation for TextMate, at only 182 pages it isn't a large book but it is full of information. For your $30 (or less, almost everywhere) you'll have an immediately useful book that will take you months to digest."
Google

Submission + - Google admits its developing a phone ?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has refused to comment directly on leaks from Europe and the United States which describe a low-cost, internet-connected phone with a colour, wide-screen design. But a Google official last week acknowledged the company was "investigating" such a project. Richard Windsor, a phone analyst with brokerage Nomura in London, told clients late last week that unspecified Google representatives at a major European conference in Germany had confirmed the company is working on its own phone device.
Operating Systems

Submission + - The Ubuntu Craze: Is Linux Desktop Ready?

Submitted by
tdanylak
tdanylak writes: "Are Linux Desktop OSes ready for the general users? Does Ubuntu pave the way to the ultimate replacement of Windows in our home's computers or does it still has way to go in terms of ease of use and reliability. The author of this article discusses the above question from the perspective of someone who's comfortable with Linux and gives an example of his father testing out the Ubuntu OS. Based on the two experiences the author answers the above question. What do you think, is Ubuntu Linux ready for the masses?
The Ubuntu Craze: Is Linux Desktop Ready?"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Men focus on crotches

Submitted by JavaRob
JavaRob writes: A study by the Online Journalism Review using eye tracking to improve page layouts turned up an odd result: men tend to reliably look at crotches in photos.

"Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed. [...]This difference doesn't just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site."

Interestingly, it seems like even knowing that their eye movements were being recorded didn't affect the habit.

Side note: the main article is actually interesting, if you can manage to tear your eyes away from George Brett's groin.
The Internet

April to See Month of MySpace Bugs 165

Posted by Zonk from the next-up-a-month-of-teddy-bear-bugs dept.
An anonymous reader passed us a link to PC World's coverage of the upcoming Month of MySpace bugs. Organized by a pair of wiseacre hackers tired of the 'Month of X Bugs', they are set up to 'highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular websites.' Though it's supposed to be funny, outside security analysts have apparently been consulted on the project. "Though the project, which launches on April 1, has all the appearance of a practical joke one well-known hacker said he'd been contacted by the Month of MySpace team with legitimate security questions. 'Those guys and I have been keeping in touch,' said Robert Hansen, chief executive of Sectheory.com. 'It's funny but it's not a joke.'"
Programming

Submission + - Programming as a career?

Submitted by Jimmy
Jimmy writes: I've successfully applied for a CS-type degree starting this year. I'm pretty excited about it, and I know I'll enjoy the course. However, I have this big looming doubt about the IT industry. Some sources say that demand for graduates is outstripping supply, while others claim that both demand and supply have dropped. What's the true story? Should I turn down my offers and go build a career in auto repair? I really want to do this for a living, but is the money in it any more?

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