LasseF - Slashdot User

Submission + - US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks, Is Leaked 1

Submitted by Jake on Sunday January 09, 2011 @04:56AM

Jake writes: The US government's 11-page document on how to get various US government agencies to prevent future leaks has been leaked. It doesn't get any more ironic than that. After the various leaks made by WikiLeaks, the US government understandably wants to limit the number of potential leaks, but their strategy apparently isn't implemented yet. It's clear that the Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive steps to prevent further leaks. According to the document, these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness. The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have.

Submission + - Some Wikileaks Contributions to Public Discourse 3

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Sunday January 09, 2011 @01:20AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "EFF reports that regardless of the heated debate over the propriety of Wikileaks actions, some of the cables have contributed significantly to public and political conversations around the world. The Guardian reported on a cable describing an incident in Afghanistan in which employees of DynCorp, a US military contractor, hired a "dancing boy," an underaged boy dressed as women, who dance for gatherings of men and is then prostituted — an incident that contributed important information to the debate over the use of private military contractors. A cable released by Wikileaks showed that Pfizer allegedly sought to blackmail a Nigerian regulator to stop a lawsuit against drug trials on children. A Wikileaks revelation that the United States used bullying tactics to attempt to push Spain into adopting copyright laws even more stringent than those in the US came just in time to save Spain from the kind of misguided copyright laws that cripple innovation and facilitate online censorship. An article by the New York Times analyzed cables released which indicated the US is having difficulties in fulfilling Obama's promise to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and is now considering incentives in return for accepting detainees, including a one-on-one meeting with Obama or assistance obtaining IMF assistance. "These examples make clear that Wikileaks has brought much-needed light to government operations and private actions," writes Rainey Reitman, "which, while veiled in secrecy, profoundly affect the lives of people around the world and can play an important role in a democracy that chooses its leaders.""

Race Pits Pigeons Against Poor UK Rural Broadband 298

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 16, 2010 @09:30AM from the heard-this-before dept.

Mark.JUK writes "Rural internet access in the United Kingdom, like many other countries around the world, is slow. So slow in fact that Trefor Davies, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at business ISP Timico, has decided to pit a typical rural broadband connection against homing pigeons (with attached memory cards) to see which can get 200MB of HD video data across an 84 mile trip the fastest. Meanwhile a farmer will attempt to upload the same video file to YouTube before the pigeons can complete their journey. The comical stunt is designed to raise awareness of the often woeful broadband speed experienced by many people who live in remote and rural parts of their country. However Davies does admit that 'there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds,' yet."

Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations 548

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @06:03AM from the following-bitprints-and-scrapes-on-the-router dept.

suraj.sun passes along this excerpt from Phoronix: "Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an 'I am alive' ping to Canonical on a daily basis. When the canonical-census package is installed, the program is to be added to the daily Cron jobs to be executed so that each day it will report to Canonical over HTTP the number of times this system previously sent to Canonical (this counter is stored locally and with it running on a daily basis it's thereby indicating how many days the Ubuntu installation has been active), the Ubuntu distributor channel, the product name as acquired by the system's DMI information, and which Ubuntu release is being used. That's all that canonical-census does, at least for now. Previously there haven't been such Ubuntu tracking measures attempted by Canonical."

Key EDS Witness Bought Internet Degree 258

Posted by timothy on Monday February 01, 2010 @03:42AM from the maybe-the-dog-just-did-better dept.

An anonymous reader writes "EDS's key witness during the firm's court case against BSkyB was shown to have bought his degree online – but still managed to get a worse mark than a dog. Joe Galloway said he had a degree from Concordia College in the US Virgin Islands and gave detailed evidence on how he took plane journeys between the islands and attended a college there. But while questioning Galloway in court, Mark Howard QC managed to obtain exactly the same degree as Galloway from Concordia College for his dog 'Lulu' with one key difference – the dog got a higher mark."

Evolution of Mona Lisa Via Genetic Programming 326

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 09, 2008 @02:07AM from the but-the-target-was-given dept.

mhelander writes "In his weblog Roger Alsing describes how he used genetic programming to arrive at a remarkably good approximation of Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent polygons. His blog entry includes a set of pictures that let you see how 'Poly Lisa' evolved over roughly a million generations. Both beautiful to look at and a striking way to get a feel for the power of evolutionary algorithms."

Comment Re:Blackjack and hookers (Score 1) 529

by LasseF on Sunday April 27, 2008 @02:39AM (#23212076) Attached to: Party Ideas For Math Nerds?

In fact, screw the Blackjack!!!

... and screw the hookers too!!!

Submission + - Three flashing red lights cost Microsoft $1bn (ft.com)

Submitted by on Friday July 06, 2007 @04:04AM

An anonymous reader writes: The Financial Times reports that Microsoft will take a charge against profits of more than $1bn as it tries to limit the potential damage to its videogames business from a design flaw in the Xbox 360 games console leading to units to fail. This is the "three flashing red lights" problem.

"Mr Bach denied that the product failures showed Microsoft had launched the console before it was ready, or that they resulted from the company's relative weakness in hardware design."

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