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Enlightenment

Submission + - The Wall Street Journal - subscription not require (blorge.com)

Submitted by
secretsather
secretsather writes: "The Wall Street Journal — subscription not required

I simply love to see stories on the Internet that link to the Wall Street Journal; you'll always get that "subscription required" message, usually in parenthesis, after the link. Even going to the Wall Street Journal website and clicking on the recent stories usually results in a 30 word "FREE PREVIEW" article — as if they're doing us a favor. But with everything, there are always exceptions; we've found a way to access the Journal's content without paying the annual $79 for a subscription.

You'd think the advertisements on the WSJ web page would provide enough funding to allow visitors to read for free. Even after members pay for subscription, they're still stricken with advertisements above, next to, and below the page's content.

Despite the WSJ's efforts to keep non-subscribers from accessing its content, they simply can't say no to Google. The WSJ, as the majority of the Internet, rely on Google to bring in search traffic.

Call it bad SEO, but you're average reader on the WSJ does not see what Google sees, for Google gets free access. This is most likely due to the WSJ wanting Google to index the entire page, as opposed to a few teaser words.

Take a look at a WSJ article URL when you normally navigate to a page:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948 .html?mod=home_whats_news_us

Specifically, we're looking at the "mod=home_whats_news_us" part. Now if we just happened to navigate to the same story from Google News, our URL has changed to:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948 .html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Notice the "mod=googlenews_wsj" part. However, simply changing the URL to reflect the second URL above is not enough to provide free access; the referring URL must come from news.google.com.

You can get by this one of two ways.

1. You can perform a Google News search using the article's title or first paragraph as the query.

2. You can use a developers toolbar to edit the HTML on a Google News page.

Number one is simple; you can usually just search Google News for the headline of the article you want to read, get the results, and click the link. You're done.

Although, this approach is not 100% because, strangely enough, the Wall Street Journal will sometimes feed Google a different headline than its subscribers will see. You may want to try and search for the "free preview's" first one or two lines of text.

The second method is a bit more complicated, but has never failed me to date. You just take the URL of the article you want to see — for instance:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948 .html?mod=home_whats_news_us

replace the "mod=home_whats_news_us" with "mod=googlenews_wsj" to get:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948 .html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Now comes the tricky part. You'll need to go to the Google News page and edit the href on an tag to reflect the modified URL.

I use the plug-in Firebug (for Firefox) to do this; although, any developer toolbar which allows you to edit code on the page will work just fine.

We'll just take one random link on the Google News page:

google_links

View the Source:

firebug_edit_link

Finally, Place the modified URL in-between the quotes after href=
to look like:

After modifying the HTML, you can click the link you selected and it will take you to the full version of the article. This method tricks the Wall Street Journal's system into thinking that Google is the referrer, thus showing the full article and saving you $79 per year. Enjoy."
Windows

Submission + - New $298 Wal-Mart PC with OO.org, no crapware (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by cristarol
cristarol writes: Wal-Mart has begun selling a $298 Everex IMPACT GC3502 PC. It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and OpenOffice.org 2.2, as well as a complete lack of crapware: 'Users accustomed to being bombarded with trialware offers and seeing their would-be pristine Windows desktops littered with shortcuts to AOL and other applications will likely be pleased at their absence from the GC3502. "In creating the eco-friendly GC3602, our main focus was to build a no-compromise, back-to-school PC with all the software applications a typical student would require, without resorting to bundling frivolous trial versions or increasing prices 30 percent," said Everex product manager Eugene Chang.' The hardware is nothing to write home about: a 1.5GHz Via C7 with 1GB of RAM and integrated graphics, but as Ars points out, it should be more than capable of performing basic tasks.
Security

Submission + - Army Releases Computer Security Training Slides

Submitted by SoldierOfTheYear
SoldierOfTheYear writes: The US Army has released a slide show that must be viewed by ALL Soldiers in order to educate the force on current threats to our IT assets and operational information. It is less than stellar. My favorite is slide six covering the silent cyber ninjas.

https://iatraining.us.army.mil/comsec/tia-cmsc-530 0/resources/Army%20G3%20Computer%20Security%20Trai ning.ppt
Security

Submission + - Analytical View : Hardware Based KeyLogging (hakspace.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The hardware based key logging is some what different in it working specification. This type of keylogging is independent in its context because there will be no cross linkage functioning of software based keyloggers.The fact lies in the case that this hardware keylogging is PRE dynamic in its working which means keystrokes get captured before where as the software keyloggers are POST dynamic which captures key after the system orientation.
Television

Submission + - Plasma or LCD in 12 Months

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My old dependable Sony CRT telly is clearly now in its last 12 months. The question is whehter to go with a plasma or LCD display. The trick is that I won't be buying for up to 12 months (don't know exactly when the CRT will die).
Currently Panasonic is running 'plasma — superior' types of educational ads but I'd prefer to hear from a wide audience that already owns one of these two display types. In my uninformed opinion it seems that plasma is a 5-year-old technology that is being eclipsed by LCD. Is this the case?

Both camps seem to have solved their archillies heels; burn-in for plasma and viewing angle for LCD. Is one now (and in the new future) better than the other?

p.s I've given up waiting for SED
Privacy

Submission + - do Internet users want anonymity? 5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's been quite a lot of research (academic and otherwise) on anonymous communication systems (TOR, Nyms, Crowds...). But the user population on even the most popular system, Tor, is an insignificant portion of the net user population. So I'm wondering, is anonymous communication useless, or is there just no killer app yet?

If someone implemented anonymous BitTorrent, would you sign up?
Power

Submission + - Sun 6000 blade power calculator shows AMD/Intel/Su

Submitted by
h8sg8s
h8sg8s writes: "Sun has released a power calculator for the new 6000 blade series servers. These allow you to directly compare the AMD, Intel and Sparc blades for power consumption. Very low power consumption on the Niagara blades compared to both AMD and Intel. Nice to finally have a blade chassis that allows AMD/Intel/Sparc as well as Solaris, Linux and Windows."
Security

Submission + - iPhone security compromised?

Submitted by
mrbluze
mrbluze writes: "A rather shady blog has made as yet uncorroborated claims that Russian hackers have found a vulnerability in the iPhone which causes it to send all stored data to a web server:

They reverse- engineered some functions and published this information. Results of a research shocked community. Russian hackers found a built-in function which sends all data from an iPhone to a specified web-server. Contacts from a phonebook, SMS, recent calls, history of Safari browser — all your personal information can be stolen.
Has anyone sighted the whitepaper?"
Space

Submission + - China's space science prepares for liftoff (aip.org)

Submitted by
Engineer Murad
Engineer Murad writes: "In unveiling its five-year plan for 2006-10 this past March, the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that the HXMT had won a competition for funding, beating out a proposal for the Solar Space Telescope (SST). A host of other astronomical projects are funded for various stages of R&D. Scheduled for launch in 2010, the HXMT will survey the sky in the 20-250 keV range. "In this energy band, it should be the most sensitive instrument so far for a full-sky survey," says project coleader Shuang Nan Zhang, who splits his time between Tsinghua University and the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. "It will take a year to scan the whole sky," he adds. In addition to a hard x-ray survey instrument, the mission will carry two lower-energy detectors — capable of observing from 1 keV to 30 keV — for pointed observations. Possible targets for such observations include neutron-star-black-hole binaries, active galactic nuclei, supernova remnants, soft gamma-ray burst repeaters, and galaxy clusters. "With all the detectors pointed at the same source," Zhang says, "we can look at sources with broadband spectra and rapid variability — like a high-energy version of RXTE [NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer]." China is providing the launcher, spacecraft, and hard and medium x-ray detectors, while a low-energy detector will be built jointly with scientists in the UK. Unspecified budget Zhang estimates the HXMT price tag at about $100 million. "It's pretty cheap by international standards," he says. "But in China it's a megaproject. It's the [country's] largest astronomy project ever." The country's manned space program and lunar exploration plans — an orbiter will be launched this fall to map the Moon's surface, followed by landers and rovers that will carry out experiments and bring back samples — are larger, but they are not pure astronomy programs; the manned program is not under the CNSA. The total budget for space science is unspecified, says Zhang, one of the architects of the CNSA five-year plan. "The government does not give us a budget. There is no cap. We tell them our needs. We say, 'It's been approved, please fund.' " In the past, decisions about space missions in China have been made at top government levels. This time, with peer review, the people whose missions lost out were of course disappointed. But, says Zhang, the reaction from the community about using peer review has been positive. "Everyone is a winner because we have established the correct procedure.""
Media

Submission + - BBC bans all phone in competitions

Submitted by kooky45
kooky45 writes: The BBC has been caught cheating viewers out of thousands of pounds by faking phone-in competitions across a wide variety of its programs, including flagship charity events like Children in Need. In response they have banned all phone in competitions on their TV and radio channels, and will be pulling competitions from online services very soon. This latest embarrassment follows last week when the BBC was fined £50,000 for faking another phone-in on Blue Peter, their most popular children's show. This is just the most public revelation in a scandal that is going to get bigger in TV media.
Programming

Submission + - A Conversation with Michael Stonebraker (acmqueue.com)

Submitted by ChelleChelle
ChelleChelle writes: In this interview, two generations of the database vanguard discuss SQL, startups, and stream processing. Michael Stonebraker, a man who has left an indelible mark on the database technology world over the past 30 years, and Margo Seltzer, full professor of computer science at Harvard University, meet to share their database wisdom and experience.
The Courts

Submission + - Revote likey because Diebold recount impossible

Submitted by Aidtopia
Aidtopia writes: A judge in Berkeley, California, has ordered a re-vote in a 2004 medical marijuana measure which had lost by fewer than 200 votes. A group supporting the measure requested a recount, which was meaningless since the Diebold electronic voting machines didn't produce physical ballots. The group petitioned for audit logs and other supporting documentation. The Registrar initially gave them the run-around, and, with a lawsuit pending, shipped the machines back to the manufacturer where 96% of the stored votes were erased. The ruling is tentative. The revote, if it happens, will be in the 2008 general election, using different electronic voting machines that produce a paper trail.
Announcements

Submission + - Underground Darfur lake may ease crisis

Submitted by unchiujar
unchiujar writes: A huge underground lake has been found in Sudan's Darfur region, scientists say, which they believe could help end the conflict in the arid region. Some 1,000 wells will be drilled in the region, with the agreement of Sudan's government, the Boston University researchers say.
Businesses

Submission + - WSJ's laughable Laffer curve (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
lygaret
lygaret writes: "An interesting blog post at ScienceBlogs pointing out some horrible statistics in use at the Wall Street Journal to argue big economics:

They [the Wall Street Journal] claim that this figure is an accurately derived Laffer curve describing the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues for different countries; and that the US has the highest corporate tax rates in the world...


They take a scatter plot of tax revenues as a percentage of GDP against take rates for a selection of countries, and then argue that it's an illustration of the Laffer curve. The thing is, it's more of a laughable curve than a Laffer curve. If you look at the data, what you see is a scatter that looks an awful lot like a typical noisy linear curve. It's got one extreme outlier, which the WSJ chooses as an inflection point, and then they curve fit on either side. The resulting curve is blatantly ridiculous — the tax rate smoothly increases in an almost linear way up to almost 25%; slows to crest over about 3%, and then falls into an almost perfectly vertical line over the next 4%. It's a terrible curve fit, which is just simple foolishly wrong.
"

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