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Security

Submission + - China now hosts the most malware

Submitted by BitBucket
BitBucket writes: China has bested the US for the first time in a category where it would probably prefer not to be the leader: malware. "For the first time, China tops the list of countries hosting malware-infected web sites. That honor has traditionally gone to the US, which was the leader in 2006, but China has now pulled ahead with 35.6 percent of all infected sites." Oddly enough, 17 percent of all of China's malware is designed to steal passwords from online gamers.
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Slashdot crowd shown to be lognormal

Submitted by teslar
teslar writes: Researchers at the Computational Neuroscience Group of the UPF in Barcelona have analysed a year's worth of Slashdot activity. Their results (PDF): Both the distribution of comments per post and the distribution of individual people's comments on posts can be fitted by a lognormal distribution and can thus be described by only two parameters. Daily and weekly activity cycles are also observed, revealing an American-centric usage of the site and a user who seems to almost exclusively visit Slashdot during his working hours ;)
Graphics

A Look at the Compiz and Beryl Merger 250

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the mind-melds dept.
invisibastard writes to mention that Linux Tech Daily has an editorial on the merger between Compiz and Beryl. "This state of affairs was a shame. Something that was finally getting the general public excited about Linux, the 3D desktop, was wasting time with duplication of effort and fighting. There were concerns about the long term viability of Beryl. The perception in the community overall was, Compiz = old and stale, Beryl = fresh and exciting. This despite the feeling in the Compiz community that the "real work" was being done by David Reveman and Compiz, and there were exciting things with Compiz core (like input redirection, etc...) on the horizon."
The Courts

Pirate Bay Raid Investigation Finished 234

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the casting-a-wide-net dept.
A Pirate writes "The Swedish Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) has finished the investigation of the Pirate Bay raid where close to 200 servers were confiscated. Just a fragment of these were actually Pirate Bay's and this led to both the police and prosecutor being charged with official misconduct, but the judges dropped the cases. In the report published by the JO he concludes that the judges were right, but there is also some very interesting information about how the MPA, IFPI and the American embassy tried to push the Swedish Minister of Justice and Secretary of State into influencing the police and the prosecutor to act upon The Pirate Bay."
Microsoft

Submission + - Survey Says Most Desktops Not Vista Ready

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "A majority of desktops in enterprise companies today won't be ready for a Vista upgrade, at least not without quite a bit of work. So say the results of a recent survey conducted by software-as-a-service desktop management vendor Everdream." The survey estimates that "eighty percent of machines are missing at least one of Microsoft's recommended requirements for Vista."
Movies

Submission + - MPAA names top schools for movie piracy

Submitted by Blackbeard
Blackbeard writes: Following the lead of the RIAA, the MPAA has fingered the top 2 movie piracy schools. Schools appearing on both the RIAA and MPAA's list include Ohio University (#1 RIAA/#18 MPAA), Purdue (2/5), the University of Nebraska (3/13), and 7 others. We might not see a full-bore legal assault like the RIAA's, though. 'Whether or not the MPAA will get into the trenches and follow the RIAA's pre-litigation strategy is not yet clear, and historically the MPAA has been less eager to wage a public campaign against file sharing. But like Santa, the MPAA is making a list and checking it twice... the question is, are they merely humoring Representative Berman or planning something more aggressive?'
Announcements

Submission + - E-Voting Bill That Works? Stop the Presses!

Submitted by
JeremyDuffy
JeremyDuffy writes: "So they're finally going to try and do something about the e-voting disaster.

HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available.
Holly Clap! There's not one thing in there that's wrong! If they actually implemented all those provisions, e-voting might actually work!

The proposal wasn't without its detractors, however. Several state election officials testified about the practical challenges of implementing the new requirements. Chris Nelson, South Dakota's secretary of state, warned that many of the requirements in the legislation would conflict with the states' own election procedures.
Oh BOO HOO HOO! Cry me a freaking river. "Oh it's too HARD to implement security! We need to have less restrictions so we can do this cheaper!" Idiots. The law allows flexibility in how some of the auditing is done as long as it's NIST approved and the states always have the option of keeping the optical current methods if they decide that the regulations for e-voting are too strict or too expensive to implement at this time. Of course, this almost sounds too good to be true. I'll have to read the law later, but I'm betting it has some terrible hidden catch like it legalizes eating little puppies or provides millions of pork dollars for human RFID implantations."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - Release of two quake3 engine spin-offs

Submitted by
Thilo2
Thilo2 writes: "With id software releasing Quake3 under a GPL license, finally two stand-alone games have popped up that make use of that very source code. Funny enough, both the World of Padman and Urban Terror projects have released their files at the same time on first april that can be downloaded at no cost and no, this is no delayed april fool's joke. Both games are based on the ioquake3 project, which is dedicated to cleaning up and improving the quake3 engine. World of Padman has installers for Windows, Linux and MacOSX and can be played natively on these platforms. Urban Terror's engine has not been released yet, at the time of this writing. By compiling your own engine though, you can get support for many additional platforms, like *BSD or even Solaris!"
The Internet

Submission + - Harnessing the economic power of the Internet

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "I've read slashdot for a few years, posted as an AC a few times and the discussion here is always lively and insightful. Hopefully there can be something mutually beneficial here. I'm writing a paper and I hope that this can cause some lively discussion. It'd be good for the site and be pretty much a free brainstorming session for me. How has the Internet and the environment surrounding it affected the way it is commercialized or people/firms derive profit from it? Not just the Internet itself specifically, but its creation and other things like dial-in BBS and other steps along the way. What changed? What took it from hobbyists (like Christensen from the BBS example above) to profiteers (like, say, a Mark Cuban, or a firm) for the most part? Were regulatory/legal changes a significant factor? Were IT and electronic communications just emerging technologies that were bound to be harnessed? Was it a gradual process or were there watershed moments? Essentially, what caused the Internet (and related/similar modes of communication) to shift more and more towards vehicles for profit rather than hobby?"
Music

Submission + - iTunes to Offer EMI Tracks Without DRM

Submitted by Y-Crate
Y-Crate writes: Apple and EMI have apparently inked a deal to offer "significant amounts" of EMI's catalog on iTunes without any copy protection whatsoever — a first for iTunes and something Steve Jobs claimed he would do if a label allowed him to. EMI is also considering making their content available to other online retailers under similar terms.
User Journal

Journal Journal: April Fool's Submissions Overboard and Underfunny 2

Journal by evought

I agree with some of the comments and submissions I have seen today that the yearly stupidity on Slashdot is just plain dumb. Unfortunately, these comments are drowned out. One or two good hoaxes would have made my day. ("Google Paper" was actually quite good). A score of idiotic and unbelievable posts just ruins the site and real news is buried. Having looked through the Firehose at several points today, there have been several serious submissions that have been voted up but have never made
United States

Journal Journal: Madisonian Compromise 3

Journal by pudge

I'm still hearing people talk about how Madison said in 1789 that we should impeach a President who fired a "meritorious officer," used as a defense of impeaching Bush today.
Slashdot.org

Submission + - What should I ask Slashdot?

Submitted by
TodMinuit
TodMinuit writes: "Dearest Slashdot: Recently, I've wanted to ask Slashdot something. Unable to come up with a question myself, I thought who better to ask what I should ask Slashdot than Slashdot itself? Surely the very people answering the question are quite capable of coming up with one. So, Slashdot, what should I ask Slashdot?"
Windows

Submission + - Windows Vista restricts GNU GCC apps to 32 MB

Submitted by Neil Watson
Neil Watson writes: A developer named Thomas R. Nicely claims that... Executable images created for the DOS/Wintel environment (but not employing the Win32 API), using the GNU GCC compilers and language standards, are subject to failure (or performance degradation) when executed in Microsoft Windows Vista, because Vista arbitrarily restricts the memory space for the GCC executable to 32 MB (33,554,432 bytes) Read more.

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