iburrell - Slashdot User

Lord British Claims He Owns the Moon 144

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 29, 2010 @05:14PM from the enjoy-the-property-tax dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Following the recent discovery of Richard Garriott's old moon rover, the man known as Lord British has laid claim to his own lunar territory. Moon dwellers, all hail your new overlord!"

64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha 172

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:03PM from the new-and-shiny dept.

Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."

The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3 104

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @05:30PM from the people-of-earth-you're-on-your-own dept.

Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."

Comment Re:Unfortunately, applications still behind the cu (Score 4, Interesting) 467

by iburrell on Monday January 25, 2010 @12:02AM (#30885786) Attached to: IPv4 Free Pool Drops Below 10%, 1.0.0.0/8 Allocated

POSIX support is easy if you use the new generic getaddrinfo and getnameinfo. Code needs to be ported from the old way which hardcoded IPv4 addresses (AF_INET). A properly written program will support both IPv4 and IPv6 and will use the right one based on network interfaces and DNS.

Nmap 5.20 Released 36

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 23, 2010 @11:32AM from the more-and-better dept.

ruphus13 writes "Nmap has a new release out, and it's a major one. It includes a GUI front-end called Zenmap, and, according to the post, 'Network admins will no doubt be excited to learn that Nmap is now ready to identify Snow Leopard systems, Android Linux smartphones, and Chumbies, among other OSes that Nmap can now identify. This release also brings an additional 31 Nmap Scripting Engine scripts, bringing the total collection up to 80 pre-written scripts for Nmap. The scripts include X11 access checks to see if X.org on a system allows remote access, a script to retrieve and print an SSL certificate, and a script designed to see whether a host is serving malware. Nmap also comes with netcat and Ndiff. Source code and binaries are available from the Nmap site, including RPMs for x86 and x86_64 systems, and binaries for Windows and Mac OS X. '"

15-Year-Old Student Discovers New Pulsar 103

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 22, 2010 @05:37PM from the sky-isn't-the-limit dept.

For the second time in as many years, a student has made a discovery while participating in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC), a joint program between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University designed to get students and teachers involved in analyzing data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). This time it was high school sophomore Shay Bloxton, who discovered a brand new pulsar. "For Bloxton, the pulsar discovery may be only her first in a scientific career. 'Participating in the PSC has definitely encouraged me to pursue my dream of being an astrophysicist,' she said, adding that she hopes to attend West Virginia University to study astrophysics. Late last year, another West Virginia student, from South Harrison High School, Lucas Bolyard, discovered a pulsar-like object called a rotating radio transient. His discovery also came through participation in the PSC."

Italy Floats Official Permission Requirement for Web Video Uploads 131

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 16, 2010 @06:04PM from the state-v.-man dept.

An anonymous reader writes with some bad news from Italy, noting that new rules proposed there would "require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry similar to that required by television broadcasters, drastically reducing freedom to communicate over the Web." Understandably, some say such controls represent a conflict of interest for Silvio Berlusconi, "who exercises political control over the state broadcaster RAI in his role as prime minister and is also the owner of Italy's largest private broadcaster, Mediaset."

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @07:57PM from the less-math-more-social-science dept.

artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"

Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi 428

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @06:27PM from the have-you-never-wondered-why-I-drink-only-distilled-water-or-rain-water-and-only-pure-grain-alcohol dept.

Scyth3 writes "A man is suing his neighbor for not turning off his cell phone or wireless router. He claims it affects his 'electromagnetic allergies,' and has resorted to being homeless. So, why doesn't he check into a hotel? Because hotels typically have wireless internet for free. I wonder if a tinfoil hat would help his cause?"

How To Judge Legal Risk When Making a Game Clone? 270

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @05:07AM from the ask-a-lawye-oh-wait dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie game developer making a clone of a rather obscure old game. Gameplay in my clone is very similar to the old game, and my clone even has a very similar name because I want to attract fans of the original. The original game has no trademark or software patent associated with it, and my clone isn't infringing on the original's copyright in any way (all the programming and artwork is original), but nevertheless I'm still worried about the possibility of running afoul of a look and feel lawsuit or something similar. How do I make sure I'm legally in the clear without hiring an expensive lawyer that my indie developer budget can't afford?"

Comment Re:An honest answer: Its better, for tracking YOU (Score 1) 264

by iburrell on Friday January 08, 2010 @12:57PM (#30696378) Attached to: IPv4 Will Not Die In 2010

In practice, IPv6 is no different than IPv4 with NAT for tracking people. With IPv4, your machine address is hidden by NAT behind your public IP address. They can track it to your house but not your computer.

By default IPv6 uses the MAC address in composing the IPv6 address which ties it to the machine. But this is recognized as a problem and there are ways of creating unique random addresses. Also, there is enough address space that you can change your address frequently. Every day or even every destination. They can still track the prefix to your house.

Comment Re:Simple reason WHY they did it... (Score 1) 185

by iburrell on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @08:34PM (#30663372) Attached to: Kodak Wireless Picture Frames Open To Public

If they had just hashed the MAC address, it would be harder to predict and not obvious it came from the MAC address. Hashing it with a secret key (but shared key) would probably have been enough security. They would have a problem if the key was compromised but it could be model or firmware version specific.

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04, 2010 @03:11PM from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.

Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."

Reports of IE Hijacking NXDOMAINs, Routing To Bing 230

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @06:01PM from the if-I-want-bing-I-will-type-bing dept.

Jaeden Stormes writes "We just started getting word of a new browser hijack from our sales force. 'Some site called Bing?' they said. Sure enough, since the patches last night, their IE6 and IE7 installations are now routing all NXDOMAINs to Bing. Try it out — put in something like www.DoNotHijackMe.com." We've had mixed results here confirming this: one report that up-to-date IE8 behaves as described. Others tried installing all offered updates to systems running IE6 and IE7 and got no hijacking.
Update: 08/11 23:24 GMT by KD : Readers are reporting that it's not Bing that comes up for a nonexistent domain, it's the user's default search engine (noting that at least one Microsoft update in the past changed the default to Bing). There may be nothing new here.

Comment Re:Even simple steps would improve their image (Score 5, Informative) 272

by iburrell on Saturday July 25, 2009 @12:05PM (#28819217) Attached to: The Irksome Cellphone Industry

Break out the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and get them to stop. Answer the phone and get their name and address and all the info about the debt. Mail them a written request for verification of the debt. After that, all contact needs to be by mail. They are already doing things they shouldn't like calling late at night. They are supposed to have mailed you a description of the debt. Keep a log of all of the calls and violations. Send them to the FTC if they don't stop. You can even sue them and get $1000 in damages for violations.

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