Comment Re:The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke (Score 0) 495
I did not read past the first setence of your comment. The last Nobel Peace prize was not given to Obama.
Submission + - Palin's hacker imprisoned, against Judge's wishes (sophos.com) 1
Em Adespoton writes: "It was a computer security story that made headlines around the world, involving the private emails of a woman who could have become Vice President of the United States. And now, it's ended with a young man sent to a federal prison, hundreds of miles from his family home.
David C Kernell, the hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo email account, is reported to have been sent to jail despite a judge's recommendation that he should not be put behind bars."
David C Kernell, the hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo email account, is reported to have been sent to jail despite a judge's recommendation that he should not be put behind bars."
The Guardian's Complicated Relationship With Julian Assange 237
Sonny Yatsen writes "Vanity Fair has published an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the unlikely and tumultuous working relationship between WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and The Guardian as the Iraq War Logs were being published. The piece highlights the differences and conflicts between the Guardian's journalistic standards and WikiLeaks' transparency. Particularly interesting is the revelation that Julian Assange threatened to sue The Guardian if they publish a portion of Iraq War Logs leaked to them by a disgruntled WikiLeaks volunteer, claiming 'he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.'"
Running Your Own Ghost Investigation? 810
Quirkz writes "I am a skeptic, but have friends and family who swear by their ghost stories. I have access to a supposedly haunted house and been tempted to run a proper scientific investigation. My first question is what sorts of tools or measurements would make for sensible metrics to test during a hunt? Temperature change seems to be a common one, but the other devices you'll see ghost hunters use seem pretty random. The second question is what kinds of results would it take to be 'interesting'? Baseline readings at several presumably non-haunted locations seem to be obvious requirements for comparison. Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not? I don't have much hope of changing the minds of those who believe, but it would be satisfying to at least be scientific about it."
Man Arrested For Exploiting Error In Slot Machines 611
An anonymous reader writes "A man awaiting trial in Pennsylvania was arrested by Federal agents on Jan. 4, and accused of exploiting a software 'glitch' within slot machines in order to win payouts. The exploit may have allowed the man to obtain more than a million dollars from casinos in Pennsylvania and Nevada, and officials say they are investigating to see if he used the method elsewhere. The accused stated that 'I'm being arrested federally for winning on a slot machine. Let everybody see the surveillance tapes. I pressed buttons on the machine on the casino. That's all I did.' Apparently, slot machine software errors are fairly common. The lesson here seems to be that casinos can deny you a slot machine win any time they wish by claiming software errors, and if you find an error that you can exploit, you may find yourself facing Federal charges for doing so."
Submission + - Running your own ghost investigation? 2
Quirkz writes: I am a skeptic, but have friends and family who swear by their ghost stories. I have access to a supposedly haunted house and been tempted to run a proper scientific investigation. My first question is what sorts of tools or measurements would make for sensible metrics to test during a hunt? Temperature change seems to be a common one, but the other devices you'll see ghost hunters use seem pretty random. The second question is what kinds of results would it take to be "interesting"? Baseline readings at several presumably non-haunted locations seem to be obvious requirements for comparison. Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not? I don't have much hope of changing the minds of those who believe, but it would be satisfying to at least be scientific about it.
Hackers Find New Way To Cheat On Wall Street 271
GMGruman writes "The high-speed trading exchanges that conduct the business of buying and selling stocks and mutual funds are so fast that hackers can introduce delays of a few microseconds completely unnoticed by today's network monitoring technology — and manipulate prices in the process to reap millions of dollars to the detriment of everyone else, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. This kind of activity creates new reason to distrust Wall Street and shows how the computer networks we all rely on for conducting business and moving information are ripe for undetectable hacking."
Submission + - Facebook's Revenues Leaked (reuters.com)
eldavojohn writes: Think that Goldman Sachs spent too much on Facebook with the $450 million investment? Well, a very wealthy customer of theirs decided to leak Facebook's financials today after receiving it over lunch: 'during the first nine months of 2010, Facebook generated $1.2 billion in revenue. Net income at the firm was $355 million. The financial statements were not audited and offered little detail about how Facebook generates it revenue, said the source, who did not want to be identified because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement.' Expanding this nine month period to a year yields $1.6 billion in revenue and under half a billion in income. Given that, should Facebook be valuated at $50 billion?
Linux 2.6.37 Released 135
diegocg writes "Version 2.6.37 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a networking block device based on top of the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules, LZO compression in the hibernation image, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers for devices like the Brocade BNA 10GB ethernet, Topcliff PCH gigabit, Atheros CARL9170, Atheros AR6003 and RealTek RTL8712U. The fanotify API has also been enabled. See the full changelog for more details."
Submission + - The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn (salon.com) 2
eldavojohn writes: Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format removing two derogatory racial slurs: "injun" and "nigger." The former appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word "slave." An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter" and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today.
Comment Just like... (Score 1) 535
Even Berners-Lee is new here!
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Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian
