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US Government Checking Up On Vista Users? 291

Posted by Zonk from the security-theatre-in-your-home dept.
Paris The Pirate writes "This article at Whitedust displays some very interesting logs from Vista showing connections to the DoD Information Networking Center, United Nations Development program and the Halliburton Company; for no reason other than the machine was running Vista. From the article 'After running Vista for only a few days — with a complete love for the new platform the first sign of trouble erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection — so I booted my port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I found was foundation shaking. The two images below show graphical depictions of what has and IS trying to connect to my computer even in an idle state'."
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Fedora 7 Released!

Submitted by Vertana
Vertana writes: After being developed for 6 months, the Fedora Project today has released the 7th release of Fedora (formerly Fedora Core). New in this release are Fast User Switching, the merging of the repositories (Core and Extras are now all in Core), faster package management, as well as more robust hardware detection. Read more about it here.

Feed Eben Moglen: GPLv3 not about MS and Novell (newsforge.com)

From feed by nffeed
One of the highlights of my visit to San Diego for the Red Hat Summit was the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with Professor Eben Moglen. From that interview, we have selected six segments on various topics for your viewing pleasure, and will be publishing one each day this week. First up, an explanation of all the things that GPLv3 is about other than the MS/Novell deal.
Software

Submission + - Is parallel programming just too hard?

Submitted by pcause
pcause writes: There has been a lot of talk recently about the need for programmers to shift paradigms and begin building more parallel applications and systems. The need to do this and the hardware and systems to support it have been around for a while, but we haven't seen a lot of progress. The article says that gaming systems have made progress, but MMOGs are typically years late and I'll bet part of the problem is trying to be more parallel/distributed.

Since this discussion has been going on for over a decade with little progress in terms of widespread change, one has to ask is parallel programming just too difficult for most programmers? Are the tools inadequate or perhaps is it that it is very difficult to think about parallel systems. Maybe it is a fundamental human limit. Will we really see progress in the next 10 years that matches the progress of the silicon?
Security

Submission + - Dolphin Stadium Site Compromised to Deliver Trojan

Submitted by
MrQuentin
MrQuentin writes: "ExtremeTech reports that the website of Dolphin Stadium (where the Superbowl will take place on Sunday) has been compromised. The homepage will execute malicious Javascript code that delivers a remote exploit to Microsoft Windows users, according to findings by Websense Security Labs."
Music

Submission + - Free, legal music for college students

Submitted by
theundergroundjazzman
theundergroundjazzman writes: "A former Napster executive intends to set up a new music provider in a bid to challenge iTunes: "Mike Bebel has a plan for inducing young people to pay for downloaded music: Give them all the songs they want for free while they're still in college, then start charging them a fee when they're out of school and gainfully employed...""
Games

ModDB Mod of the Year Winners Chosen 24

Posted by Zonk from the gogo-indie-gaming dept.
TheRealFritz writes "It's that time of year again and ModDB has released the winners of their annual Mod of the Year contest. Gamers who like to go beyond their initial investment have chosen their favorites for 2006: Point of Existence and Project Reality according to ModDB's Mod of the Year competition. The contest took in over 80,000 votes and narrowed the field from 4,000 mods to the Top 5 released and unreleased mods, as well as a handful of genre awards and the Editor's Choice awards. Perhaps it is ironic that the two top mods of 2006 are both for the Battlefield 2 platform, which has been abandoned by its developer and is notoriously buggy and difficult to mod. Despite these problems, both mods went on to beat out mods from the ever popular Half-Life 2 platform. The much better maintained Source engine is represented with the winners of the third through fifth places: Goldeneye: Source, The Hidden: Source and Minerva."

Slashback: SGI, Exploding Dell, Gizmo 110

Posted by Zonk from the nothing-like-a-little-slashback-in-your-teeth dept.
Slashback tonight brings some clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including: the possibility of selling OpenGL to save SGI, a denial from Dell that it knew of the overheating battery problem, an update on the Skype competitor Gizmo, and a response from the Chinese folks that reverse-engineered the Skype protocol. Read on for details.

Upstart Bloggers at Microsoft Moving On 129

Posted by Zonk from the less-talk-from-the-depths dept.
SJasperson writes "A few weeks ago Mini-Microsoft decided to stop tweaking his corporate masters, having won the astounding victory of getting free towels returned to the locker rooms in Redmond. Now uber-blogger Scoble is moving on to work with a podcasting startup, having apparently tired of his supposed role as Vista evangelist and self-appointed corporate revolutionary. The company still has 3,000 bloggers left, but Microsoft has apparently figured out how to keep them safely within the rules, blogging about the wonders of product renaming and coming features instead of anything that might challenge the party line. There's a lesson here for those starry-eyed adolescents who think the power of the blog is going to triumph over the power of the boardroom."

Homebrew on Consoles Detailed 143

Posted by CmdrTaco from the keep-em-emulated dept.
Yoshi writes "DCEmu have released an article detailing the current State of the Homebrew Scene on all consoles from the PSP to GBA and even to the Next Gen Nintendo Wii, the article explains whats needed to run emulators and games and if its worth bothering for each console."

Lower Saxony KDE Migration 119

Posted by Zonk from the upper-saxony-jealous dept.
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports on a recent German Linux migration by the tax authority in Lower Saxony which has made the decision to migrate an impressive 12,000 desktops to SuSE Linux using KDE. The project, which is now in process converting 300 desktops daily, moves systems from Solaris x86 version 8, which the organisation has been running since 2002. The migrations are reported as going well thus far. KDE's Kiosk desktop customisation, source code access and licensing costs were cited as key reasons for the decision. Congratulations to all involved, and best of luck going forward with this effort!"

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