thegameiam - Slashdot User

Submission + - Free Music for College Students?

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @01:01PM

eldavojohn writes: "CNet has an interesting article on the big three music labels talking about free music for college students. From the article,
Last year, however, Ruckus decided to switch to a free, advertising-supported approach, though it still required universities to agree and to install a server on their campus networks. That increased participation to about 100 schools, with "several hundred thousand" active users, said Michael J. Bebel, chief executive of Ruckus. The new service, which is available now, does not require a university to participate. Rather, it will be made available to those who have an e-mail address ending in .edu, the top-level domain associated with educational institutions.

Is this a progressive or backwards way of solving the problem? Obviously someone looked at the correlation of file sharing cases and college students and must have thought that if they could provide the service, they would at least control the leaking music and enforce their rights & distribution management. Of course, the word 'free' means that it's 'free' while you're in college — the DRM would probably prevent you from using it after you lose student status."

Submission + - Microsoft sells Linux to Wal-Mart

Submitted by Rob on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @12:48PM

Rob writes: Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has become the latest big name to buy SUSE Linux vouchers from Microsoft Corp, following the software firm's landmark deal with Novell Inc last November. The retailer will take an undisclosed number of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates — the support vouchers that Microsoft has to distribute to hold its end of its bargain with Novell.

Submission + - What language would you use for a server

Submitted by shift on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @12:45PM

shift writes: We are looking at language choices to develop a network server in. We have to adhere to an existing proprietary binary protocol, and a lot of time is spent decoding/encoding the protocol. I also want to use non-blocking network I/O (ie: java.nio, epoll). I'm currently evaluating Java and C++. While I think I prefer C++ (I come from a C background doing mainly embedded and kernel work), many others are telling me to go Java and that C++ has gone the way of a niche language. With Java I'd still need to use JNI to do a few minor things, but that doesn't look like a big deal. Note that I am not interested in the compile one, run every where aspect of Java, due to other reasons the packages we build or platform/OS specific. Any suggestions?

Submission + - Google's Anti-Phishing Plug-In Leaked Passwords

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @12:33PM

eldavojohn writes: "There's a brief article on Ars Technica about how Finjan Inc. (a security provider) found a security problem with Google's anti-phishing plug-in for Mozilla Firefox and covertly contacted Google about it. From the article,
How did an anti-phishing plugin wind up exposing user names and passwords to the general public? Google's software used a public blacklist, available from Google's servers, which listed sites that were fraudulently pretending to be banking or other financial institutions. Unfortunately, some of these sites embedded usernames and passwords directly into the URL — obviously phishing sites didn't have concerns about security — and were thus viewable by anyone.
So you might be asking why this isn't bigger news. Well, Google has since fixed this problem and turned this issue into a non-issue. One must wonder whether this form of bug discovery is more sensible or 'correct' than the constant Microsoft bugs published online. Perhaps if Google continues to handle low key notices seriously, they'll never find themselves in the same position as Microsoft?"

Submission + - Blogger gets millionaire to pay up!

Submitted by

Daphne

on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @10:22AM

Daphne writes: "Gert Verhulst, a Belgian actor & writer, gradually became famous ever since he started the television series 'Samson en Gert' back in 1989. In 1991, he recorded a children's song in which he sang something like: "If I would have 10 million, I would buy gallons of lemonade and a hundred kilos of chocolate. I would throw a party, host a fair, and everyone would be invited." Bert, a 21-year old student in Communication Sciences, remembered the song and created the website Gertje.info, in which he presented the 'evidence' in order to persuade the television millionaire to keep true to his promise. Well, guess what? The 21-year old has done it. Millionaire Gert Verhulst announced he will be hosting a fair for over 1500 people on February 2nd. The power of one person and the internet keeps amazing me!"

Submission + - IE7 on Vista blocks www.mozilla.com

Submitted by gropix on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @09:52AM

gropix writes: Just try going to www.mozilla.com in Vista and it hangs. Shows the title, fetches the info but just hangs. Haven't found anyother website that is similarly blocked and changing the sub-domain gets round the problem. Interesting way of steming the tide of new firefox users, most consumers have no way of getting Firefox except via IE.

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