Christopher Neufeld - Slashdot User

Obama Wants Broadband, Computers Part of Stimulus 901

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 08, 2008 @12:43PM from the that-would-stimulate-me dept.

damn_registrars writes "President-elect Barack Obama announced in his radio address that his administration's economic stimulus package will include investing in computers and broadband for education. 'To help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.' He also said it is 'unacceptable' that the US ranks 15th in broadband adoption." No doubt with free spyware and internet filtering. You know... for the kids.

Slashdot's Disagree Mail 135

Posted by samzenpus on Friday December 05, 2008 @03:25PM from the they-keep-coming dept.

This installment of Disagree Mail highlights a man's concern about illegal cloning in the Hollywood community, a guy who is sick of US imperialism and his low karma, and an example of the kind of people you don't want as roommates in college. Read below to find out just how crazy, angry and irresponsible it gets.

DARPA's IBM-Led Neural Network Project Seeks To Imitate Brain 170

Posted by timothy on Friday November 21, 2008 @05:49PM from the cats-are-smarter-than-people dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in the BBC, IBM will lead an ambitious DARPA-funded project in 'cognitive computing.' According to Dharmendra Modha, the lead scientist on the project, '[t]he key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain.' The article continues, 'IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do. The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.'"

Preview the New MythTV User Interface 229

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday November 17, 2008 @11:18AM from the it-might-be-time dept.

Tombstone-f sent in a cool update on a project that I continue to keep an eye on. MythTV has become a dominant force in the do-it-yourself media-mega-box space, so any improvements to the UI matter significantly. "One of the biggest new features of the next version of MythTV (version .22) will be its new user interface. This new interface will offer many new features to MythTV, including animation, better interactivity, and faster and easier development for themers and developers alike." I think it still has a ways to go to compete with some of the more mainstream PVR boxes in terms of minimalism and good use of whitespace, but hopefully the improvements will get more people into the door.

Submission + - Palau looking into satellite power in next decade

Submitted by davidwr on Sunday December 23, 2007 @07:55PM

davidwr writes: The island nation of Palau is looking into creating a satellite-to-ground power transmission system. The system will use low-orbit satellites to transmit power to a receiver in bursts, unlike some other plans which rely on geostationary satellites. The initial 1MW project is supposed to go online "as early as" 2012 for a cost of $0.8B. Time will tell if this is cost-effective compared to traditional solar or other sources of power.

Submission + - The pros of upgrading from Vista to XP! (dotnet.org.za) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15, 2007 @02:25AM

An anonymous reader writes: A reviewer takes on the daunting task of upgrading [sic] from Vista to XP, and gives a very nice breakdown of the Pros and Cons (yes, there are a couple...;)

Submission + - The setup behind Microsoft.com (technet.com) 1

Submitted by Toreo asesino on Thursday December 13, 2007 @06:22AM

Toreo asesino writes: Jeff Alexander gives an insight into how some of the main websites in Microsoft are run (www.microsoft.com and update.microsoft.com). Interesting details include having no firewall, having to manage 650Gb of IIS logs every day, and the use of their yet unreleased Windows Server 2008 in a production environment. http://blogs.technet.com/jeffa36/archive/2007/12/13/microsoft-com-what-s-the-story.aspx

Submission + - US Government caught manipulating Wikipedia 1

Submitted by surfi on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @02:03AM

surfi writes: As The Inquirer points out, someone with a House of Representatives IP address has been feeding propaganda into the 'invasion of Iraq' article on Wikipedia. Well, it seems they're not the only ones messing..

Submission + - KDE and KOffice rebuke OOXML; GNOME dithers 3

Submitted by Peter on Tuesday December 11, 2007 @04:21AM

Peter writes: Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman and ITWire have praised KDE and KOffice developers for taking a principled stand against OOXML, while raising serious concerns about the GNOME Foundation's decision to give credibility to Microsoft's broken format. This comes on the heels of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's depiction of OOXML as a 'superb standard', and GNOME Foundation director Quim Gil's stonewalling of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis / Theora format on behalf of Nokia. Have GNOME's leaders completely sold out their free software credentials to corporate and anti-consumer interests? And will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?

Submission + - New Encryption Standard may Contain Backdoor 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Thursday November 15, 2007 @12:31PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Bruce Schneier has a story on Wired about the new official standard for random-number generators the NIST released this year that will likely be followed by software and hardware developers around the world. There are four different approved techniques (pdf), called DRBGs, or "Deterministic Random Bit Generators" based on existing cryptographic primitives. One is based on hash functions, one on HMAC, one on block ciphers and one on elliptic curves. The generator based on elliptic curves called Dual_EC_DRBG has been has been championed by the NSA and contains a weakness that can only be described a backdoor. In a presentation at the CRYPTO 2007 conference (pdf) in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that there are constants in the standard used to define the algorithm's elliptic curve that have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG. "We don't know where the constants came from in the first place. We only know that whoever came up with them could have the key to this backdoor. And we know there's no way for NIST — or anyone else — to prove otherwise," says Schneier."

Submission + - Surgeon General describes Censorship by Pres. Bush

Submitted by UniversalVM on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @11:59AM

UniversalVM writes: The NY Times is reporting that the former Surgeon General in damaging testimony given to the senate descibes how he was repeatedly censored by by the Bush government while speaking out about topics such as global warming, Stem cell research and so on. The effort was to "water down" or weaken reports on important issues to suit Republican Agenda. He describes how he attended one meeting where Global Warming was being described as a "Liberal Agenda" and being dismissed. He tried to intervene thinking that the people there did not understand the science so he set about explaining it to them, the result? he was never invited back.
He was also told to mention Bush "three times" on every page of his speech. These guys also have it in for the Special Olympics — because of the reported connection to the Kennedy family. Is it any surprise that this is the party where three of the candidates for President proudly declare that they do not believe in evolution?

Submission + - Microsoft: Word 2007 flaws are features, not bugs

Submitted by

PetManimal

on Friday April 13, 2007 @12:31PM

PetManimal writes: "Mati Aharoni's discovery of three flaws in Word using a fuzzer (screenshots) has been discounted by Microsoft, which claims that the crashes and malformed Word documents are a feature of Word, not a bug. Microsoft's Security Response Center is also refusing to classify the flaws as security problems. According to Microsoft developer David LeBlanc, crashes aren't necessarily DoS situations:

You may rightfully say that crashing is always bad, and having a server-class app background, I agree. Crashing means you made a mistake, bad programmer, no biscuit. However, crashing may be the lesser of the evils in many places. In the event that our apps crash, we have recovery mechanisms, ways to report the crash so we know what function had the problem, and so on. I really take issue with those who would characterize a client-side crash as a denial of service. If you can crash my app so that I can't restart it, or have to reboot my system, well, OK — that's a DoS. If you blew up my app, and I just don't load that document again, big deal. On the server side, all crashes are bad — though it is still better to drop the service than to give the attacker a command prompt.
Computerworld's Frank Hayes responds to LeBlanc and questions Microsoft's logic:

So can we expect to see that approach in other products that use Windows Embedded? Like maybe...a TV that, when the cable service goes pixellated, shorts out all the circuitry in your house? ("Users can reset circuit breakers to resume normal operations.") A car CD player that, when it's fed a scratched disc, disconnects the steering and brakes and disengages the clutch? ("Users who survive can restart the car to resume normal operations.")

If your application code is in control, it can gracefully reject bad input. If your app code ISN'T in control, you crash. You're already owned. This suicide-before-capture approach isn't "by-design" behavior. It's lack-of-design behavior.
"

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