Phlegethon_River - Slashdot User

Submission + - EFF vs. AT&T: Wiretapping Lawsuit (eff.org)

Submitted by Sammy Sausage Head on Friday August 24, 2007 @07:34PM

Sammy Sausage Head writes: AT&T Must Face Justice for Illegal Spying

NSA Surveillance Comes Under Fire Today in Appeals Court Battle

San Francisco — In a packed San Francisco courtroom today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to allow AT&T customers to continue to fight against illegal spying on their telephone and Internet communications.

EFF is representing the plaintiffs in Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit brought by AT&T customers accusing the giant telco of violating their rights by illegally assisting the National Security Agency in domestic surveillance. The U.S. government is fighting to get the class-action lawsuit thrown out of court, contending that the litigation jeopardizes state secrets.

Submission + - Implementing OOXML: One Developer's Nightmare (arstdesign.com)

Submitted by

Just Some Nobody

on Friday August 24, 2007 @05:55PM

Just Some Nobody writes: "While Microsoft likes to play up just how well-documented the 6,000+ page OOXML specification is, the independent developers implementing it don't have things so easy. Stéphane Rodriguez, one of the top non-Microsoft experts on the binary Excel file format, has been documenting the difficulties in working with the new OOXML format for Excel. It seems that one of the biggest difficulties is that Excel-produced documents don't even conform to Microsoft's own OOXML standard, ECMA 376."

Submission + - Gamma Ray Anomaly Could Test String Theory (sciam.com)

Submitted by exploder on Friday August 24, 2007 @05:46PM

exploder writes: String theory is notorious for its lack of testable predictions. But if the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope team's interpretation is correct, then a delay in the arrival of higher-energy gamma rays could point to a breakdown of relativity theory. A type of "quantum lensing effect" is postulated to cause the delay, which is approximateley four minutes over a half-billion year journey.

Submission + - Freebase opens to the public (freebase.com)

Submitted by

suso

on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @09:36PM

suso writes: "A new user contributed information database website called Freebase has just given read access to the public, although they still consider this to be in a public alpha state. Freebase is similar to Wikipedia, except the data is more structured than free form. The company developed their own type of database, called a graph database. It is different from the typical relational database type that most database systems use. Another unique aspect of Freebase is that it provides an access API so that third parties can develop applications that use the data independently of the site."

Submission + - Wii caught the xbox 360

Submitted by LucidLion on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @07:15PM

LucidLion writes: As reported here and according to the vgchartz, in less than a year the Wii has overtaken the XBox 360 and has become the fasted selling console ever. From the article:

The news marks the first time that Nintendo has been the leader in both the home console and handheld markets since 1994 when the company's Super NES and Game Boy lines reigned supreme. Currently, the DS and Wii are the top two selling system's in the industry.

With the way it's selling, any drought in Wii games probably won't last long.

Submission + - Web users too trusting of search engine results

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @05:57PM

Stony Stevenson writes: An eye-tracking experiment published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication revealed that, when college student web users selected a link from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards higher ranking links. However, this bias was found to persist even if the more highly-placed content was less relevant to the search query than entries at the bottom of the list.

This has important long-term implications for search engine results, according to the researchers, as this type of use affects future rankings. "The way that college students conduct online searches promotes a 'rich-get-richer' phenomenon where popular sites get more hits regardless of relevance," they explained.

Submission + - Dateline producer admits net danger is exaggerated (blorge.com)

Submitted by

destinyland

on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @05:24PM

destinyland writes: "Dateline reported that "at any given time, 50,000 predators were on the internet prowling for children" — but that's contradicted by the very source for their statistic, according to a former Dateline producer. She was fired after criticizing Dateline's sensationalism in their predator-busting series — which included purchasing special video surveillance equipment for police officers and even re-imbursing them for their time. (The producer also describes the premise of a parallel police investigation as "a ruse.") But the leader of the show's online decoys continues hyping the dangers of the internet, recently labelling Wikipedia, YouTube, and LiveJournal "corporate sex offenders" for failing to delete enough accounts of suspected online pedophiles."

Submission + - US Home Confinement Program is Windows Only (torrentfreak.com) 2

Submitted by

Ernesto

on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @02:09PM

Ernesto writes: "Sk0t, an ex-administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker is to have his internet connection forcibly monitored by the US Government. If that wasn't bad enough, the monitoring software is Windows based — which means he is being forced to ditch Linux — or face being barred from the internet."

Submission + - Comcast Blocking Torrent Uploads (ubuntu-tutorials.com)

Submitted by

Cryophallion

on Tuesday August 21, 2007 @07:49PM

Cryophallion writes: "Comcast has begun the process of starting the tiered internet. They are now blocking all bittorrent uploads (whether they are legal or not). There is a petition in the article, and we can only hope someone at corporate headquarters is actually listening. Now that oen company has done it, are others going to be next?"

Submission + - NYTimes confirms that Paramount was paid $150m 1

Submitted by on Tuesday August 21, 2007 @04:33PM

An anonymous reader writes: NYTimes has confirmed the story that Paramount and DreamWorks Animation were paid $150 million for an exclusive HD-DVD deal that will last 18 months. "Paramount and DreamWorks Animation declined to comment. Microsoft, the most prominent technology company supporting HD DVDs, said it could not rule out payment but said it wrote no checks. "We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever," said Amir Majidimehr, the head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group."

Submission + - DMCA means you cannot delete files on your own PC (wired.com)

Submitted by

DragonHawk

on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:03PM

DragonHawk writes: "According to Wired, John Stottlemire found a way to print duplicate coupons from Coupons.com by deleting some files and registry entires on his PC. Now he's being sued for a DMCA violation. He says, "All I did was erase files or registry keys." Says a lawyer: "It may cover this. I think it does give companies a lot of leverage and a lot of power." So now the copyright cartels are saying that not only can we not copy things on our computers, but we cannot delete things on our computers. Time to buy stock in Seagate."

Submission + - Building a modern IT infrastructure for < $3,00 (playingwithwire.com)

Submitted by

mvip

on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:00PM

mvip writes: "This article talks about how to build a modern IT infrastructure from scratch with a sub-$3,000 budget. It's not the first article about saving costs using Open Source and Linux, but a slightly different approach using LTSP. The article goes through how to build an IT infrastructure from scratch with 10 clients and 1 server for $3,000 without having to settle for low performance and obsolete software."

Submission + - 2050 Sea Ice Coverage Prediction To Be Broken

Submitted by ahijado on Monday August 20, 2007 @04:44PM

ahijado writes: Quoted from a Universe Today web page. Sometimes you wish records didn't get broken. A group of Japanese science agencies announced today that the area of the Arctic Sea covered by ice is at its lowest level ever recorded. It reached this low point on August 15th, and it's going to get worse. Ice levels should continue to shrink all the way through mid-September. If reality matches predictions, the ice levels will reach IPCC predictions 40 years ahead of schedule. Here's what one official had to say about the IPCC predictions: 'The IPCC forecast cannot adequately explain what is now happening in the Arctic Sea.'

Submission + - Startup raises multicore bar with new 64-core CPU (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by ianare on Monday August 20, 2007 @03:58PM

ianare writes: A new startup emerged from stealth mode today to announce that they're shipping a 64-core processor for the embedded market. The company, called Tilera, was founded by Dr. Anat Agarwal, the MIT professor behind the famous and venerable Raw project on which Tilera's first product, the TILE64 processor, is based. The chip is composed of processor "tiles" arranged in a mesh network, where each tile houses a general purpose processor, cache, and a non-blocking router that the tile uses to communicate with the other tiles. Tilera claims a 30x performance per watt over a 3GHz Xeon and a 40x performance advantage over a TI DM648 DSP chip. It will also run existing code, "If you have an application written for any multi-core or single processor architecture that's written to work with Linux, you can take it, compile it and have it running on our chip in minutes," says Agarwal.

Submission + - Breaking into Identity-centric Services (informit.com)

Submitted by Nitsudima on Monday August 20, 2007 @03:48PM

Nitsudima writes: Identity management services such as OpenID, Microsoft's CardSpace, Sxip, YADIS, and others are here to improve the way we identify ourselves online and eliminate the necessity to register for every single service. But can we really trust them? pdp reveals the dangers of user-centric management systems.

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