Spitfirem1 - Slashdot User

Submission + - What do we allow search engine robots to do? (menneske.no)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @03:38AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "I run a pretty big sudoku-site, and as all content providers on the net I want to be found in the search engines. But how much do we want to be in those indexes? So far this month (10 days) Yahoo slurp has slurped about 150000 pages from my site, or 2.2GB of data. If I add all the search engine I get a number of 250000 pages downloaded in 10 days. But with the increasing amount of search engines out there, how will this number be in 2-5 years? And how high will it be if all were like Yahoo slurp?

How far do we go to allow the search engines to crawl our sites so we're searchable? How many pages each day and how many search engines do we allow? Is there a limit we should set on search engines using our bandwidth? We can of course change robots.txt to set crawl-time etc, but what are our limits? I have a 10Mb/s uplink, so I'm not very bothered by this, but what about people paying for the bandwidth used?

(I have no commersials on my site, so I will not earn a dime if all of ./ visited it.)"

Submission + - Latest revelations on FBI's data mining of America (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @03:08AM

An anonymous reader writes: You probably already knew that the FBI was data mining Americans in the "search" for potential terrorists, but did you know that they're also supposed to be looking for people in the U.S. engaged in criminal activity that is not really supposed to be the province of the federal government? Now the feds are alleged to be data mining for insurance fraudsters, identity thieves, and questionable online pharmacists. That's what they're telling us now. What else could they be looking for that they are not telling us about?

Submission + - Hybrid mesh replaces polygons to display 3D/CAD (diginfo.tv)

Submitted by

dk3nn3dy

on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @02:00AM

dk3nn3dy writes: "Japanese company Digital Process, have developed VridgeR, software which uses DVX, a special rendering technique that doesn't use polygons, and can display massive, highly complex models (for example whole cars or planes which would normally require millions of polygons to be displayed with precision) using standard hardware. 20GB of aircraft CAD data can be loaded onto less than 1GB RAM with complete mathematical precision. English video news story here."

Submission + - Are You Pro-Choice?

Submitted by

theodp

on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @12:59AM

theodp writes: "You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your work computer. Or can you? While corporate technology managers usually pick laptops, software and other technology for employees, Computerworld reports some tech managers are finding workers can do a better job when they choose and buy the equipment themselves."

Submission + - Xbox 360 Deaths are caused by.. surge protectors? (theinquirer.net)

Submitted by

Monk

on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @09:30PM

Monk writes: "Microsoft is claiming the hardware failures of Xbox 360's are not caused by heat, rain, solar flares, but they die because of electricity protection. More info here: http://lawofthegame.blogspot.com/2007/07/xbox-360- repair-saga-shoot-surge.html"

Submission + - Top 10 IT products of the past 40 years (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

Ian Lamont

on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @06:23PM

Ian Lamont writes: "Computerworld has compiled a list of the ten most important IT technologies and products of the last 40 years. Some of them are no surprise — Ethernet, Linux, the PC — but others are unexpected, such as Netscape Navigator, which was picked over Mosaic for inclusion in the list because of cookies. There are a few obscurities that many /. readers have probably never heard of — IBM System/370 and an early 90s SAP accounting package."

Submission + - 'Stealth advertising' infiltrating TV news (pressesc.com)

Submitted by

amigoro

on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @03:07PM

amigoro writes: "Over 90 per cent of newscasts in the US contained stealth advertising. Stealth advertising is showing advertisements outside regular commercial blocks cloaked as news. What's disturbing about this trend of "stealth advertising" is that viewers seldom are aware of potential slants in coverage because the connection of a story to an advertiser rarely is disclosed."

Submission + - Bugged Cell Phones Create a Scandal in Greece

Submitted by fightmaster on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @12:48PM

fightmaster writes: On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy. A version of this story was posted several months back. The July issue of IEEE Spectrum has some additional technical details.

Submission + - Warfighters Use Wikis, Military Mashups & Web (socialcomputingmagazine.com)

Submitted by jg21 on Monday July 09, 2007 @05:08PM

jg21 writes: Forget Wikipedia; according to this article the military and intelligence technology communities have now spawned Intellipedia, used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the United States intelligence community. Even more intriguingly, Web 2.0-style mashups are being used to develop integrated battlespace management and situational awareness systems and that the Defense Intelligence Agency has deployed a suite of 13 different commercial metadata extraction and tagging services in order to inject greater semantic meaning into its data. War, in other words, is going Web 3.0.

Submission + - Groklaw Explains Microsoft & The GPLv3 (groklaw.net)

Submitted by

A Groklaw Reader

on Monday July 09, 2007 @03:40PM

A Groklaw Reader writes: "After all the questions about how the GPLv3 will or won't apply to Microsoft following Microsoft's declaration that they weren't bound by it, PJ of Groklaw wrote this story about how and why the GPLv3 will apply to Microsoft. Specifically, it covers in what ways Microsoft would convey GPLv3 software under the Novell agreement, and how Microsoft's refusal to allow previously sold vouchers to be redeemed for GPLv3 software would impact that agreement. Given that Novell said that they will distribute GPLv3 software, Microsoft may have had the tables turned on them already."

Submission + - Sprint cancels PCS wireless of over 200 soldiers (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Newer Guy on Monday July 09, 2007 @02:30PM

Newer Guy writes: Sprint has cancelled the PCS service of over 200 military members for "excessive roaming". This is on the heels of last week's news about Sprint where they were cancelling PCS service for "excessive complaining" to Customer Service. Time to cancel my Sprint PCS I guess!

Submission + - Piratebay is no longer going down!

Submitted by

viking80

on Monday July 09, 2007 @12:39PM

viking80 writes: "According to the Swedish police' web page, http://www.polisen.se/inter/util%5Cnodeid=21434&pa geversion=1.jsp?articleid=9549375

they are now satisfied that all child pornography references have been removed, and are no longer planning to hijack the DNS entry."

Submission + - FTC OKs MS purchase of ad-serving company (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

athloi

on Friday July 06, 2007 @04:24PM

athloi writes: "Microsoft Corp.'s $6 billion acquisition of online advertising group aQuantive Inc. has cleared an antitrust regulatory hurdle, the companies said Friday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070706/ap_on_hi_te/mi crosoft_aquantive"

Submission + - Realtor's Actions Make it Hard to Discount Bubble

Submitted by kgolf on Friday July 06, 2007 @04:24PM

kgolf writes: While the US housing market continues to be a hot debate, the NAR (National Realtors Association) continues to make it difficult for individuals to believe that the housing bubble is a hoax. New NAR chief economic spokesman, Lawrence Yun, is being criticized for having the same rosy forecasts that forced his predecessor to resign. And it is now learned that real estate agents are even hiding DOM (days-on-market) data from buyers, saying that 'the real estate professional are in the best position to explain to your customer — buyer or seller — what the true DOM figure is and what it means.'

Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn 686

Posted by Zonk on Friday July 06, 2007 @04:22PM from the downside-of-a-hired-gun dept.

mekane8 writes "Consumer-advocate blog Consumerist ran a sting operation to catch a Best Buy Geek Squad member searching for and stealing media files from a customer's computer. The article includes the story with screen captures and a video of the technician's actions. From that piece: 'Reached for comment, Geek Squad CEO Robert Stephens expressed desire to launch an internal investigation and said, "If this is true, it's an isolated incident and grounds for termination of the Agent involved." This is not just an isolated incident, according to reports from Geek Squad insiders alleging that Geek Squad techs are stealing porn, images, and music from customer's computers in California, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere. Our sources say that some Geek Squad locations have a common computer set up where everyone dumps their plunder to share with the other technicians.' A related story from a former Geek Squad employee details the decline of the Geek Squad and Best Buy ethics in general."

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