Comment Sony says: In the year 2101 (Score 1) 437
All your firmware are belong to us!
Comment Re:Selective Protesting (Score 1) 806
I think there is a difference between voicing "fucking opposition" to a group with political views (e.g., kkk, nazis) than to a racial, religious group or social class.
I find it difficult believe, btw, that disagreement with Israel is political and not racial. I suppose that, however, is a matter for another debate
I find it difficult believe, btw, that disagreement with Israel is political and not racial. I suppose that, however, is a matter for another debate
Submission + - Lakes found under Antarctic ice using space lasers
Reverse Gear writes: "There is a new study circling the media about these newly found big lakes found underneath the antarctic ice sheets that apparently empty and fills back up quite fast (study has been working in 3 years and has detected massive movements), from the article:
NASA also has some information on the technique used to detect these lakes"The scientists allay fears that global warming has created these pockets of water. They say these lakes lie some 2,300 feet below compressed snow and ice, too deep for environmental temperature to reach. However, it is necessary to understand what causes the phenomenon as it can facilitate an understanding of the impact of climate change on the ice sheet in Antarctica
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site 344
Several readers wrote in with a CNET report that raises novel free-speech questions. MySpace asked GoDaddy to pull the plug on Seclists.org, a site run by Fyodor Vaskovich, the father of nmap. The site hosts a quarter million pages of mailing-list archives and the like. MySpace did not obtain a court order or, apparently, compose a DMCA takedown notice: it simply asked GoDaddy to remove a site that happened to archive a list of thousands of MySpace usernames and passwords, and GoDaddy complied. Fyodor says the takedown happened without prior notice. The site was unavailable for about seven hours until he found out what was happening and removed the offending posting. The CNET article concludes: "When asked if GoDaddy would remove the registration for a news site like CNET News.com, if a reader posted illegal information in a discussion forum and editors could not be immediately reached over a holiday, Jones replied: 'I don't know... It's a case-by-case basis.'"
Google Defuses Googlebombs 169
John C. Worsley writes "Google announced today a modification to their search algorithm that minimizes well-known googlebombing exploits. Searches on 'miserable failure' and their ilk no longer bring up political targets. The Google blogger writes: 'By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.'"
Why South Korea Is Shackled To Windows 252
baron writes with a blog post explaining in detail why 99.9% of S. Korea uses Windows. This amazing tale began in 1998 when Korea decided it couldn't wait for SSL to be standardized (which it was in 1999) and commissioned an ActiveX control for secure Web transactions. At first there was a secure Netscape plugin too, but we know how that story ended. Quoting: "This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users, and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions..." Now that Microsoft has made ActiveX more secure in Vista, every Web site in S. Korea is scrambling to get things working again and the government is advising citizens not to install Vista. At the end of all this work, they will still be a monoculture in thrall to Microsoft, with millions of users sitting behind some of the fattest pipes in the world.
Submission + - Scientist Develops Caffeinated Baked Goods
Zephyros writes: The AP is reporting on a scientist who has found a way to get caffeine into donuts, bagels, and other baked goods without the bitter flavor. Each piece has as much caffeine as two cups of coffee. No word on when or where they will be available, but for those of us that just don't get the same kick from the morning cuppa that we used to, this may be another tasty delivery vector to look forward to for that jump-start.
BioWare Goes Episodic With New Games 52
The word from the site Computer and Videogames is that BioWare will be offering episodic content for all of its upcoming games. This includes Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Jade Empire: Special Edition. CEO Ray Muzyka, in an interview with CVG, talks about this and many other elements of the coming year in PC gaming. From the article: "The videogame market is very cyclical and PC and console gaming have an uneasy alliance - as new console systems are released, early adopter fans move over to check those games out and as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle, a good number of those early adopter fans move back over to PC gaming. Console gaming is huge of course, especially when you add in hardware sales, but it's hard to quantify the enormous impact of online gaming on the overall PC market - retail sales just don't capture the revenues from the increasingly successful PC MMOs as well as digital distribution and episodic gaming (which are both gaining strength year after year)."
Submission + - Online Office Suites: The Winner Is Clear
jcatcw writes: Computerworld reviewed four online office suites — Ajax13, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, ThinkFree Online and Zoho Office Suite. None has all the applications and features of Microsoft Office, but if you're looking for the core office applications in an access-anywhere format, at least two were surprisingly sophisticated. The article weighs the ability to save files to a centralized server quite heavily in its ranking. The winner is ThinkFree Office because it provides the most sophisticated features and has the best Microsoft Office compatibility. Zoho's suite is the second choice.
Submission + - Startup tries watermarking instead of DRM
Loosehead Prop writes: A U.K. startup called Streamburst has a novel idea: selling downloadable video with watermarks instead of DRM. The system works by adding a 5-second intro to each download that shows the name of the person who bought the movie along with something like a watermark: 'it's not technically a watermark in the usual sense of that term, but the encoding process does strip out a unique series of bits from the file. The missing information is a minuscule portion of the overall file that does not affect video quality, according to Bjarnason, but does allow the company to discover who purchased a particular file.' The goal is to 'make people accountable for their actions without artificially restricting those actions.'
Inside MySpace.com 250
lizzyben writes "Baseline is running a long piece about the inner workings of MySpace.com. The story chronicles how the social networking site has continuously upgraded its technology infrastructure — not entirely systematically — to accommodate more than 26 million accounts. It was a rocky road and there are still hiccups, several of which writer David F. Carr details here." From the story: "MySpace.com's continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It's buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded 'Unexpected Error' screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway."
Submission + - Apple to play fairer with Fairplay?
NewbieMonster writes: According to tech.co.uk (http://tinyurl.com/yd7ac9), Apple are preparing to license Fair Play to Made for iPod accessory manufacturers.
They understand that Apple will also allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB.
From the article:
The expected announcements could signal a move on Apple's part to take some of the sting out of its Fairplay DRM which has come in for a great deal of criticism over recent months. It may also be a way of keeping Made For iPod makers onside, as the draw of the Microsoft Zune becomes stronger.
Could this signal a move to allowing other music players to access and play ITMS content?
Vendor AMD will remain in the discrete GPU business
Rick Bergman
of AMD has confirmed that the new combined AMD/ATI business will indeed remain in the discrete graphics chip business for the foreseeable future. "Many had anticipated that AMD's venture into platforms might cause the processor designer to use GPUs only for enabling its processor business via platforms, and eventually forsake the discrete graphics market. Now, it appears AMD has the R700 waiting in t
Submission + - Inside MySpace.com
lizzyben writes: Baseline is running a long piece about the inner workings of MySpace.com. The story chronicles how the social networking site has continuously upgraded its technology infrastructure — not entirely systematically — to accommodate more than 26 million accounts. It was a rocky road and there are still hiccups, several of which writer David F. Carr details here.
In many ways, the success of MySpace is counterintuitive. From the story: "MySpace.com's continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It's buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded "Unexpected Error" screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway."
In many ways, the success of MySpace is counterintuitive. From the story: "MySpace.com's continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It's buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded "Unexpected Error" screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway."
The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent 537
Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article: "The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."
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