schon - Slashdot User

Submission + - US Internet control lead topic in Rio (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Crazy Taco on Saturday November 10, 2007 @01:43PM

Crazy Taco writes: It looks as though the next meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is about to descend into another heated debate about U.S. control of key Internet systems. Although the initial purpose of this year's summit was to cover such issues as spam, free speech and cheaper access, it appears nations such as China, Iran, and Russia, among others, would rather discuss US control of the Internet. In meetings leading to up to the second annual meeting of the IGF in Rio de Janiero on Monday, these nations won the right to hold an opening-day panel devoted to "critical Internet resources." While a number of countries wanting to internationalize Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving leaders such as China, Iran, and Russia, nations which specialize in censoring the Internet and locking down the flow of information across it.

Submission + - Rare earthquake in a cold place 1

Submitted by

DragonFire1024

on Sunday November 04, 2007 @05:55PM

DragonFire1024 writes: "Rare earthquake in a cold place A magnitude 5.8 earthquake has struck in a place where earthquakes are rare, but sometimes large. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), at 3:35 p.m (eastern time) the 5.8 quake struck in Antarctica, 105 kilometers (65 miles) south, southeast of Casey Station or 2565 kilometers (1590 miles) north of the South Pole."

Submission + - Vista not as ready for modern desktop as Linux? 1

Submitted by

Pr0xY

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @11:06PM

Pr0xY writes: "Recently I purchased my new "gaming rig." So I decided to just go for and loaded up a new Dell XPS 720 with the works. Among other things, I got 4GB of RAM. To my (and many others according to google) surprise, x86 Vista only reports 3 and change GB of RAM.
I do some systems programming, so I had a clue as to what was going on, my first reaction was "PAE must not be enabled." Here's what's going on. With traditional paging, there is 4GB of physical address space available to a 32-bit x86 processor. This includes memory mapped devices, for example, your shiny new video card with 768 Megs of RAM takes up that much space of physical RAM your system can use. The solution is to use either PAE or PSE36, both provide up to 64GB of physical memory to a 32-bit x86 system. The limit of what you can map into memory at a time is still 4GB, but this allows motherboards to relocate the RAM that got displaced by hardware above the 4GB and still be usable.
However, it turns out that first of all, Vista automatically enables PAE if you want DEP since it is necessary for the NX bit. And in addition to that, Microsoft deliberately doesn't use RAM above the 4GB mark even with PAE for "compatibility reasons." The main issue being that DMA can't touch RAM higher than 4GB on x86. Microsoft could have easily had a special pool for this "high memory" in order to make some use of it when you know it's safe. This isn't impractical as the server editions of Windows are in fact able to use upwards of 4GB on 32-bit systems as well.
Linux has no issue using all 4GB of my RAM once I build my kernel with PAE support. Microsoft also claims that they support 4GB of RAM in their documentation. All in all, I find this whole thing to be a bit deceptive on Microsoft's part. Microsoft's solution: "Get Vista x86-64""

Submission + - TechwareLabs Interviews The Devil (techwarelabs.com)

Submitted by

Godsmack74

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @10:54PM

Godsmack74 writes: "We at Techwarelabs firmly believe that there is an evil ever present inside your technology but were never able to prove it . . . until now. We had the opportunity to sit down with the Devil himself who wanted to absolve himself of technologies gone wrong blamed on him. Our interview is shocking so prepare yourselves. In our Interview with the Devil you will find out what he believes he is responsible for and what he's not."

Submission + - Mac OS X users targeted by in-the-wild porn Trojan 1

Submitted by Anonymous on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @10:21PM

Anonymous writes: The Register is reporting a sophisticated Trojan has been released into the wide that targets Mac users. The malicious Trojan, dubbed OSX.RSPlug.A, is making the rounds on several porn websites. When Mac users try to view some videos, the site feeds them a page that says QuickTime is unable to play the file unless a special codec is installed first. If the user proceeds, a form of DNSChanger is installed that hijacks some web requests sent to eBay, PayPal and some banking websites, according to security firm Intego. Is this a sign that OS X is finally a big enough to be attractive to professional attackers?

Submission + - Show Your Feelings Towards the RIAA With...Thongs? (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

Free Jammie w/purchase of equal or greater value

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @10:00PM

Free Jammie w/purchase of equal or greater value writes: "Jammie Thomas, who lost $222,000 to the RIAA thanks in part to a juror who had never used the internet, has found a new way to fight back and fund her appeal. This time, she's selling "Free Jammie" apparel including t-shirts, dog t-shirts and... thong underwear!? According to Ars, it's just one way to "show your feelings towards the RIAA.""

Submission + - Wal-Mart Sells Linux Computer

Submitted by ruffnsc on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @09:58PM

ruffnsc writes: Linux, the free operating system that's a perpetual underdog in the desktop market, is showing up in computers in Wal-Mart stores this week for the first time. Should we still call them evil?

Submission + - An Interview with CmdrTaco (web-hosting-newsletter.com)

Submitted by Ultronator on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @02:32PM

Ultronator writes: It seems that the lunar pages newsletter for this month contains an interview with Rob Malda aka Slashdot's very own CmdrTaco.

Submission + - Supreme Court Free Speech/ Pornography Case Today (acsblog.org)

Submitted by

ACSBlog

on Monday October 29, 2007 @09:38PM

ACSBlog writes: "On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear argument in U.S. v. Williams, a case that examines whether the First Amendment is violated by the PROTECT Act, which bans the pandering of real or purported child pornography. The American Constitution Society is pleased to make available two resources, one written, the other a video presentation.

First, ACS presents an analysis by Camille Gear Rich, assistant professor of law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She examines whether Congress can criminalize speech drawing attention to the picture's sexual nature, or whether Congress has committed the ultimate First Amendment sin of prohibiting the mere expression of unpopular ideas. A link to her article is available here: http://www.acsblog.org/guest-bloggers-guest-blogger-the-first-amendment-pandering-and-pornography.html

Second, ACS presents an analysis by Paul Smith, a partner with Jenner & Block LLP. A link to video of him presenting his analysis is available here: http://www.acsblog.org/bill-of-rights-paul-smith-discusses-us-v-williams.html

More information about ACS is available at www.ACSBlog.org or www.acslaw.org."

Submission + - UN report: Earth's future has major problems (wikinews.org)

Submitted by

DragonFire1024

on Thursday October 25, 2007 @10:58PM

DragonFire1024 writes: "The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has released a comprehensive report on the current state of the global environment. Climate change, food and water shortage and a decline in biodiversity threaten humanity's survival, so urgent action is necessary, the report warns."

Submission + - Life sized Red Alert Tesla tower (tesladownunder.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19, 2007 @08:56PM

An anonymous reader writes: Check this out. Some has made a life sized working model of a Red Alert Tesla tower, complete with full sized Engineers, Soviet, Tesla troops and some great photos. Is this a paint ball replacement sport of the future or have some people just got too much time on their hands? What ever the answer this is just cool for the geek factor.

Submission + - Atmospheric Cold Megawatts (coldenergy.com)

Submitted by

AJ Mexico

on Friday October 19, 2007 @08:30PM

AJ Mexico writes: "They got a patent for this? Another source of free power — this one funnier that most. This sounds like a freshman dorm discussion that somehow got taken seriously. If you run a long pipe between two areas with different barometric pressure, you can get supersonic winds to blow through the pipe allowing the generation of megawatts of electricity. I hope someone warns the builders of other long-distance pipelines about this atmospheric hazard! How about just building the pipeline to the top of a mountain, or out into space? Then the pressure difference would be even greater! But, please, don't suck the entire atmosphere out into space."

Submission + - EVE Online Has been hacked

Submitted by

jkcity

on Friday October 19, 2007 @08:27PM

jkcity writes: "on the 19/10/2007the EVE Online servers were taken down for 10 hours after it was discovered, that someone had hacked into the CCP network and managed to gain direct entry to the eve online databses and used the access to add stuff to his account in eve online. There were many rumours during the outages as they took down all websites and only form of communication was from IRC chat channels which no one knew if was actually real or not."

Submission + - Microsoft planning to buy open source companies (crn.com)

Submitted by

mjasay

on Thursday October 18, 2007 @11:40PM

mjasay writes: "At the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that Microsoft "will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," suggesting that to avoid open-source companies would "take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically." Ballmer has apparently come a long way since dubbing Linux a "cancer". The real question, however, is which open-source companies make sense within the Microsoft product portfolio, both from a technology and philosophy perspective. Novell? 37Signals? Jive? SugarCRM? And, equally importantly, which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?"

Submission + - Stop Making Us Store Credit Card Data! (communityinvestmentnetwork.org)

Submitted by GeekGrocer on Thursday October 18, 2007 @07:45AM

GeekGrocer writes: I agree with NRF CIO David Hogan. Why build an impenetrable fortress made up of millions of merchants to protect cardholder data when it shouldn't be stored in the first place? No data stored, no data to steal. Message to card issuing banks: stop making us retain customer data so we can be PCI compliant. I work for a 20-store independent with over 350mil in annual sales and I can assure you, we don't want to store this data. The problem is easily solved through segmentation: put the payment terminals on a vlan (or other lan) then let the terminal send an approval authorization code to the POS through a serial cable or other LAN/VLAN/USB/ETC. There. Problem solved: our network and systems are no longer part of the "cardholder data environment". I suppose the real reason the PCI SSC does not advocate this is because PCI compliance would then be easy. If this were the case, they wouldn't be able to impose fines and drop top-level merchants into lower tiers (translation: pay higher interchange rates), which would then force merchants worldwide to pay billions extra to... lots of banks and credit card providers, the one's who created the PCI SSC. Hmm....

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