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The Courts

Submission + - SPAM: FTC rules outlaw damned annoying robocalls on 9.1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Nearly a year after announcing the plan, new Federal Trade Commission rules prohibiting most robocalls are set to take effect Tuesday, Sept. 1. With the rules, prerecorded commercial telemarketing robocalls will be prohibited, unless the telemarketer has obtained permission in writing from consumers who want to receive such calls. Hopefully the rules will go a long way to helping consumers eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather or in this case prerecorded blather. The requirement is part of amendments to the agency's Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) that were announced a year ago. After September 1, sellers and telemarketers who transmit prerecorded messages to consumers who have not agreed in writing to accept such messages will face penalties of up to $16,000 per call. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Security

Free Rainbow Tables Looking For New Admin 95

Posted by kdawson from the all-the-colors dept.
lee writes "After almost three years online, the admin of Free Rainbow Tables has decided to call it a day, citing a lack of time to keep it running. (I'm sure that you all know a rainbow table is essentially a giant list of precomputed hashes.) This is a shame, as the site is a useful resource for those occasions when you really need an existing password exposed, rather than simply changing it. I'm a Windows admin, and this site has come in very handy in the past. The currently computed tables weigh in at well over half a terabyte, are available as torrents from the site, or from a couple of mirrors (and alternatives are available). When the site was active, it featured a downloadable BOINC client to put your idle cycles to work computing ever-greater tables, and a space-saving format for storing the tables. The admin is willing to hand over source code if you wish to take over, though I suspect hosting is not included!"
Security

Submission + - Free rainbow tables looking for new admin (freerainbowtables.com)

Submitted by lee
lee writes: After almost three years online, the admin of Free Rainbow Tables has decided to call it a day, citing a lack of time to keep it running (I'm sure that you all know a rainbow table is essentially a giant list of precomputed hashes). This is a shame, as the site is a useful resource for those occasions when you really need an existing password exposing rather than simply changing it; being a Windows admin, this site has come in very handy in the past! The currently computed tables weigh in at well over half a terabyte, are available as torrents from the site, or from a couple of mirrors (and alternatives are available). As well as being useful in that you can download your own copies of the tables, the site also has a downloadable client that'll put your idle cycles to work computing ever-greater tables, and a space-saving format for storing the tables. It's not all bad news though — he is willing to hand over source code if you wish to take over, though I suspect hosting is not included!
The Courts

Submission + - Australian website bans Australians

Submitted by Nazlfrag
Nazlfrag writes: Earlier this month the blog and discussion forum ZGeek was sued for $42 million AUD over a users comment. The plaintiffs are aspiring movie producers who claim to have lost a movie deal due to a 9/11 conspiracy discussion thread. Even though the initial lawsuit has been thrown out and the company complied with lawyers demands by taking down the offending posts it is believed the plaintiffs will file suit again. In addition to suing the forum, in an Australian first they have been granted an injunction to force the ISPs to disclose the IP addresses of the two posters involved. Due to the risk of incurring even greater legal costs the company is closing its doors in Australia and will ban their fellow countrymen from posting there again.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Loses Bid To Keep Revenues Secret (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA's motion to keep secret the record companies' 1999-to-date revenues for the copyrighted song files at the heart of the case has been denied, in the Boston case scheduled for trial July 27th, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The Judge had previously ordered the plaintiff record companies to produce a summary of the 1999-to-date revenues for the recordings, broken down into physical and digital sales. On the day the summary was due to be produced, instead of producing it, they produced a 'protective order motion' asking the Judge to rule that the information would have to be kept secret. The Judge rejected that motion : 'the Court does not comprehend how disclosure would impair the Plaintiffs' competitive business prospects when three of the four biggest record labels in the world — Warner Bros. Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and UMG Recording, Inc. — are participating jointly in this lawsuit and, presumably, would have joint access to this information.'"
The Courts

Submission + - US gouple gets prison time for Internet obscenity (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The husband and wife owners of a California company that distributed pornographic materials over the Internet have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison. Extreme Associates and owners Robert Zicari, also known as Rob Black, 35, and his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden, 32, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the Internet."
Networking

Submission + - Comcast intercepts and redirects port 53 traffic (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An interesting (and profane) writeup of one frustrated user's discovery that Comcast is actually intercepting DNS requests bound for non-Comcast DNS servers and redirecting them to their own servers. I had obviously heard of the DNS hijacking for nonexistent domains, but I had no idea they'd actually prevent people from directly contacting their own DNS servers.
The Internet

Internet Tax Approved By Louisiana House 305

Posted by timothy from the well-they-have-a-napoleonic-system dept.
Stinky Litter Box writes "WWL-TV in New Orleans reports that the Louisiana House voted 81-9 on Thursday to propose that a '15-cent monthly surcharge should be levied on Internet access across Louisiana to fight online criminal activity.' Can you say 'slippery slope?' The good news is that Gov. Jindal opposes such a tax. Full disclosure: I grew up in south Louisiana and worked for WWL-TV in the late '70s."
Editorial

Submission + - Could a meteor have brought down Air France 447? 1

Submitted by niktemadur
niktemadur writes: In light of an Air Comet pilot's report to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority that, during a Monday flight from Lima to Lisbon "Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds", the Cosmic Variance blog team on the Discover Magazine website muses on the question "What is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?". Taking into account total flight hours and the rate of meteoric activity with the requisite mass to impact on Earth (approximately 3,000 a day), some quick math suggests there may be one in twenty odds of a plane being brought down in the period from 1989 to 2009. Intriguingly, in the aftermath of TWA flight 800's crash in 1996, the New York Times published a letter by Columbia professors Charles Hailey (physics) and David Helfand (astronomy), in which they stated the odds of a meteor-airplane collision for aviation history up to that point: one in ten.
Television

Hulu May Begin Charging For Video Content 313

Posted by timothy from the might-even-pay-for-more-southland dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to Jonathan Miller, News Corp's CDO, Hulu may soon begin charging subscription fees for some of their online content. News Corp is the parent company of Fox, which owns a huge portion of Hulu. When Miller of Newscorp was asked if Hulu would begin charging for online content during an Interview with Daily Finance, he said that 'the answer could be yes.' He went on to say that he doesn't 'see why over time that shouldn't happen.'"
Security

Submission + - Hackers Breached U.S. Army Servers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Turkish hacking ring has broken into 2 sensitive U.S. Army servers, according to a new investigation uncovered by InformationWeek . The hackers, who go by the name "m0sted" and are based in Turkey, penetrated servers at the Army's McAlester Ammunition Plant in Oklahoma in January. Users attempting to access the site were redirected to a page featuring a climate-change protest. In Sept, 2007, the hackers breached Army Corps of Engineers servers. That hack sent users to a page containing anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric. The hackers used simple SQL Server injection techniques to gain access. That's troubling because it shows a major Army security lapse, and also the ability to bypass supposedly sophisticated Defense Department tools and procedures designed to prevent such breaches.
Security

Data Breach Exposes RAF Staff To Blackmail 153

Posted by samzenpus from the skeletons-in-the-closet dept.
Yehuda writes "Wired reports, 'Yet another breach of sensitive, unencrypted data is making news in the United Kingdom. This time the breach puts Royal Air Force staff at serious risk of being targeted for blackmail by foreign intelligence services or others. The breach involves audio recordings with high-ranking air force officers who were being interviewed in-depth for a security clearance. In the interviews, the officers disclosed information about extra-marital affairs, drug abuse, visits to prostitutes, medical conditions, criminal convictions and debt histories — information the military needed to determine their security risk. The recordings were stored on three unencrypted hard drives that disappeared last year.'"
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Understanding Addiction-Based Game Design (ign.com)

Submitted by
spidweb
spidweb writes: "Everyone knows games like World of Warcraft are addictive. But what are the exact qualities that make it so? Are there specific elements of the design that can be pulled out, distilled, and used at will to give a game druglike properties? And is it wrong to do so? A new article at IGN RPG Vault attempts to isolates the exact qualities that go into making an addiction-based design. From the article, "If a game uses rewards of any sort to entice you to experience highly repetitive content, you should see what it's trying to do and which of your buttons it's trying to press. If you don't mind, that's cool, but you should understand it."

The article is at

http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/986/986323p1.html"
Windows

Submission + - Asus slaps Linux in the face (techgeist.net) 2

Submitted by
vigmeister
vigmeister writes: "Techgeist has an article about an 'It's better with Windows' website from Asus and MS. I think the article should've been title 'Asus stabs Linux in the back'. "Linux just got a major slap in the face today from Asus. One of the highlights of Linux going mainstream was the wildly popular Asus Eee PC preinstalled with a customized Linux distro geared towards web applications. While I personally never got what the big deal was, I was still happy for all the Linux people out there waiting for this day, but it looks like the cause for celebration won't be lasting much longer. Asus and Microsoft have teamed up and have made a site called It's Better With Windows. The page touts how easy it is to get up and ready with Windows on an Asus Eee PC, while slyly stating that you won't have to deal with an "unfamiliar environment" and "major compatibility issues." While it is silly to state such a thing since Asus built the Linux distribution specifically for the Eee PC, I give Microsoft two points for snarky comments.""

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