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Comment Re:Maybe try treating customers better? (Score 1) 278

by rliden (#31116626) Attached to: Warner To End Free Streaming of Its Content

Sorry to hear about that. It really sucks you got shafted like that.

This is one huge reason why I buy my music from Amazon. I am tired of buying the same stuff over and over as CDs wear out, formats change (albums, cassettes, CDs, etc), or digital files are lost. Amazon music is DRM free and I can back it up. If I do need to re-download my digital content again I can do that too. I'm not sure if that is an unlimited feature, but Amazon hasn't complained to me yet or given me warning about not being able to download the albums again.
Security

Rootkit May Be Behind Windows Blue Screen 323

Posted by kdawson from the pre-owned dept.
L3sPau1 writes "A rootkit infection may be the cause of a Windows Blue Screen of Death issue experienced by Windows XP users who applied the latest round of Microsoft patches. It appears that the affected Windows PCs had the rootkit infection prior to deploying the Microsoft patches. Researcher Patrick W. Barnes, investigating the issue, has isolated the infection to the Windows atapi.sys file, a driver used by Windows to connect hard drives and other components. Barnes identified the infection as the Tdss-rootkit, which surfaced last November and has been spreading quickly, creating zombie machines for botnet activity."
The Military

Directed Energy Weapon Downs Ballistic Missile 297

Posted by kdawson from the sharks-as-witnesses dept.
A**masher writes "In a test off the Califoria coast late last night, Boeing's Airborne Laser successfully destroyed a sub-launched ballistic missile. 'This was the first directed energy lethal intercept demonstration against a liquid-fuel boosting ballistic missile target from an airborne platform,' reported the Missile Defense Agency. It should be noted that destroying a liquid-fueled ballistic missile is generally considered easier than killing a solid-fueled equivalent due to the relative fragility of the fueling and other systems."
Movies

The People vs. George Lucas To Premiere At SXSW 149

Posted by Soulskill from the bringing-balance-to-the-nerdrage dept.
skatepark builder writes "David Prowse, the 74-year-old actor who has enjoyed a long and varied career filled with roles such as Darth Vader (Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI), is starting 2010 off with two major accomplishments. His victory over colon cancer earlier this month means he'll live to see his top billing in a film premiering next month at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The People vs. George Lucas is a documentary attempting a balanced examination of the love/hate relationship Star Wars fans have developed with the filmmaker and his work over the past three decades. Director Alexandre Philippe distances his film from the one-sided fan rage films that lambaste Lucas, even though the title would suggest otherwise. According to the trailer, The People vs.George Lucas exposes the full spectrum of opinions on Lucas, including those like Prowse, who still refers to him as a 'master.' Philippe captures these opinions through filmed interviews, but perhaps more interestingly, he crowdsourced the commentary by soliciting fan submissions over the internet. The clips seen in the trailer appear to be funny, highly inspired, and are probably more concise than the recently released 70-minute YouTube evisceration of Episode I."
Programming

An Interview With F# Creator Don Syme 267

Posted by kdawson from the same-as-g-flat-if-you're-tempered dept.
OCatenac passes along an interview with Don Syme, chief designer of F#, which is Microsoft Research's offering for functional programming on the .Net platform. Like Scala, which we discussed last fall, F# aims at being an optimal blend of functional and object-oriented languages. "[Q] What is the best program you've seen written in F#? [A] I've mentioned the samples from F# for Scientists, which are very compelling... For commercial impact then the uses of F# in the finance industry have been very convincing, but probably nothing beats the uses of F# to implement statistical machine learning algorithms as part of the Bing advertisement delivery machinery. ... We've recently really focused on ensuring that programming in F# is simple and intuitive. For example, I greatly enjoyed working with a high-school student who learned F#. After a few days she was accurately modifying a solar system simulator, despite the fact she'd never programmed before. You really learn a lot by watching a student at that stage."
Graphics

19th-Century Photographer Captured 5,000 Snowflakes 80

Posted by kdawson from the more-science-than-art dept.
tcd004 writes "Wilson Bentley began photographing snowflakes in 1885, and managed to immortalize more than 5,000 crystals before his death in 1931. Now his images are widely recognized and highly sought after. At the age of 19, 'Snowflake' Bentley jury-rigged a microscope to a bulky bellows camera and took the first-ever photograph of a snowflake. Photography then, particularly microphotography, was much closer to science than art. In a 1910 article published in the journal Technical World, he wrote, 'Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature possessing the charm of mystery, of the unknown, sure richly to reward the investigator." The video embedded at the link above touches on another long-forgotten piece of history: a sketch of the photographers who captured arial views of assemblages of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from WW-I, carefully choreographed and arranged to form a Liberty Bell, a Stature of Liberty, a US flag... as forgotten as the origin of the WW-I term razzle-dazzle.

Comment Re:DRM Support (Score 1) 219

by rliden (#31023486) Attached to: Intel Details Upcoming Gulftown Six-Core Processor

In addition, Intel has built in AES encryption instruction decode support

You can bet the sole reason for including this was to support DRM-protected content.

It may very well be useful for DRM, but I would venture that there are several reasons to include further AES instructions in hardware; one of the chief being full disk encryption performance.
The Courts

Landmark Ruling Gives Australian ISPs Safe Harbor 252

Posted by samzenpus from the pick-on-someone-your-own-size dept.
omnibit writes "Today, the Federal Court of Australia handed down its ruling in favor of the country's third largest ISP, iiNet. The case was backed by some of the largest media companies, including 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. They accused iiNet of approving piracy by ignoring thousands of infringement notices. Justice Cowdroy said that the 'mere provision of access to internet is not the means to infringement' and 'copyright infringement occurred as result of use of BitTorrent, not the Internet... iiNet has no control over BitTorrent system and [is] not responsible for BitTorrent system.' Many Internet providers had been concerned that an adverse ruling would have forced themselves to police Internet traffic and comply with the demands of copyright owners without any legislative or judicial oversight."
Mozilla

Mozilla Accepts Chinese CNNIC Root CA Certificate 256

Posted by kdawson from the who-do-you-trust dept.
Josh Triplett writes "Last October, Mozilla accepted the China Internet Network Information Center as a trusted CA root (Bugzilla entry). This affects Firefox, Thunderbird, and other products built on Mozilla technologies. The standard period for discussion passed without comment, and Mozilla accepted CNNIC based on the results of a formal audit. Commenters in the bug report and the associated discussion have presented evidence that the Chinese government controls CNNIC, and surfaced claims of malware production and distribution and previous man-in-the-middle attacks in China via their secondary CA root from Entrust. As usual, please refrain from blindly chiming into the discussion without supporting evidence. Since Mozilla has already accepted CNNIC as a trusted root CA, the burden rests with those who argue for its removal."

Comment Re:IE (on Windows) is safer than Firefox (Score 1) 342

by rliden (#30972998) Attached to: UK Gov't Says "No Evidence" IE Is Less Secure

It will work out the same, because if they can't figure out how to change their homepage or deal with trusted sites they aren't likely to have any more success configuring site scripting options in no script. Are they going to understand the XSS messages they see? Are they going to understand which domain scripts to allow and which third party scripts to deny? My guess is they aren't. I have to help just as many inexperienced or non-savvy users with NoScript as I do IE8. A better solution for the non-technical user is a robust third party security solution that monitors these things for you.
Cellphones

Firefox Mobile Reaches 1.0 198

Posted by timothy from the how's-it-handle-baroque-javascript dept.
Majix writes "Firefox Mobile, the mobile browser developed by Mozilla based on the same engine as in the recently released Firefox 3.6, has finally hit version 1.0. The first device to be officially supported is the Nokia N900. With a long list of features, Firefox Mobile looks to be the most complete mobile browser to date. Highlights include the familiar Awesome Bar, Weave Sync for sharing your browser state between your PC and mobile, and of course tabbed browsing and Firefox add-ons. With the Nokia 900 and Firefox Mobile 1.0, even Flash content including the normal YouTube site is working, showing that a mobile browser does not have to equal a compromised Internet experience."
Networking

1Gbps Optical Wireless Network Might Replace Wi-Fi 200

Posted by timothy from the line-of-sight-and-bouncy-bouncy dept.
Mark.JUK writes "Pennsylvania State University has developed a new method of indoor Optical Wireless network that does not require a line-of-sight and runs at speeds of 1Gbps+. The system uses a high-powered laser diode — a device that converts electricity into light — as the optical transmitter and an avalanche photo diode — a device that converts light to electricity — as the receiver. The light bounces off the walls and is picked up by the receiver. Traditional radio frequency systems (Wi-Fi , WiMAX etc.) do not require line of sight transmission, but can pass through some substances and so present a security problem. Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security."
Books

Amazon Pulls Book Publisher's Listings; Ebook Wars Underway? 297

Posted by Soulskill from the grab-some-popcorn dept.
As of last night, Amazon stopped listing all books from Macmillan Publishers, referring searches to other sellers instead. According to the New York Times, this is because Macmillan is one of the companies that now has an agreement to sell ebooks through Apple's new iBooks store, and asked Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks from $9.99 to $15. An industry source told the Times that the de-listing is Amazon's way of "expressing its strong disagreement" with the idea of a price hike. Gizmodo suggests this is the first volley in an Apple-Amazon ebook war. Quoting: "It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes, trying to counter the leverage Apple had because of iTunes' insane marketshare. Same situation here, really: Content provider wants more money/control over their content, fights with the overwhelmingly dominant, embedded service that's selling the content. Last time, everybody compromised and walked away mostly happy: Universal and NBC got more flexible pricing, iTunes got DRM-free music and more TV shows for its catalog to sell. ... The difference in this fight is that Macmillan is one of the publishers signed to deliver books for Apple's iBooks store. They have somewhere to run. And credibly. That wasn't really the case with record labels, who tried to fuel alternatives to dilute iTunes power, and failed."
Google

Google To Pay $500 For Bugs Found In Chromium 175

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the rewards-for-being-1337 dept.
Trailrunner7 writes to mention that a new program from Google could pay security researchers $500 for every security bug found in Chromium. Of course if you find a particularly clever bug you could be eligible for a $1337 reward. "Today, we are introducing an experimental new incentive for external researchers to participate. We will be rewarding select interesting and original vulnerabilities reported to us by the security research community. For existing contributors to Chromium security — who would likely continue to contribute regardless — this may be seen as a token of our appreciation. In addition, we are hoping that the introduction of this program will encourage new individuals to participate in Chromium security. The more people involved in scrutinizing Chromium's code and behavior, the more secure our millions of users will be. Such a concept is not new; we'd like to give serious kudos to the folks at Mozilla for their long-running and successful vulnerability reward program."

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