BongoBen - Slashdot User

RIAA Targets LAN Filesharing at Universities 608

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 01, 2006 @09:56PM from the stop-sharing dept.

segphault writes "The RIAA has sent letters to 40 university presidents in 25 separate states informing them that students are engaging in filesharing on their campuses using the local network. Apparently, the RIAA wants to get universities to use filtering software on their networks to detect student filesharing. The RIAA did not disclose the methodology they used to determine that filesharing is occuring on those local networks, but it probably didn't involve asking permission. The article goes on to predict that the RIAA will eventually try to get the government to require use of anti-filesharing filtering technologies at universities."

Comment Landmine Detection a Good Thing (Score 2, Insightful) 61

by BongoBen on Sunday April 16, 2006 @12:12AM (#15136743) Attached to: The European Grand Challenge

A friend of mine, an officer who is currently serving in the US army in Iraq, came with me to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. His response to the whole event was "Hell, I don't need robots that can go 150 miles. I need robots that can go 100 yards." What he meant was that he wanted a robot capable of going a short distance that could detect/disable IUDs and mines. That's a pretty risky endeavour for a person to do.

Missing Link Fossil Discovered 864

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 06, 2006 @12:03AM from the intelligent-fossil-design dept.

choongiri writes "The Guardian is reporting the discovery of a missing link of evolution. From the article: "Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.""

New "Dark" Freenet Available for Testing 424

Posted by CowboyNeal on Tuesday April 04, 2006 @12:15AM from the if-you-dare dept.

Sanity writes "The Freenet Project has just released the first alpha version of the much anticipated Freenet 0.7 branch. This is a major departure from past approaches to peer-to-peer network design, embracing a 'scalable darknet' architecture, where security is increased by allowing users to limit which other peers their peer will communicate with directly, rather than the typical 'promiscuous' approach of classic P2P networks. This means that not only does Freenet aim to prevent others from finding out what you are doing with Freenet, it makes it extremely difficult for them to even know that you are running a Freenet node at all. This is not the first P2P application to use this approach, other examples include Waste, however those networks are limited to just a few users, while Freenet can scale up almost indefinitely. The new version also includes support for NAT hole-punching, and has an API for third-party tool development. As always, the Freenet team are asking that people support the development of the software by donating."

Another Sony Format Bites the Dust 425

Posted by CowboyNeal on Monday April 03, 2006 @10:44PM from the end-of-the-road dept.

Lam1969 writes "Reuters is reporting that Universal Media Disc, Sony's PSP-only movie format, is about to kick the bucket. While the discs' novelty factor resulted in strong sales shortly after the PSP's May 2005 launch, interest rapidly dropped and movie companies are no longer interested in producing titles. From the article: "Universal Studios Home Entertainment has completely stopped producing UMD movies, according to executives who asked not to be identified by name. Said one high-ranking exec: 'It's awful. Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb -- like Blu-ray."'"

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