47179247
submission
Morty writes:
Patent trolls are nothing new to tech websites. Now the more mainstream media has discovered them, too. The recent "This American Life" podcast When Patents Attack Part Two is geared towards a more general audience. This is something to point family members to.
33361381
submission
Morty writes:
George Takei's intern yesterday posted an image that some folks didn't like. Facebook took it down, instituted a temporary ban, and threatened a permanent ban. George described the incident and is asking for public support for a Facebook appeal process.
28729815
submission
Morty writes:
The NSABB (National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity) has recommended that details of two research papers involving Avian Flu not be published because of security concerns. At least one of the research groups says that their work should be logically reproducible. The NSABB's censorship recommendations do not (currently) have the force of law, but Science and Nature voluntarily delayed publication.
27991994
submission
Morty writes:
In 1961, C.S. Lewis nominated JRR Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tolkien did not receive the prize. 50 years later, the archives for that year are now available, so we know why. Tolkien's prose was viewed as low quality.
25949192
submission
Morty writes:
BIND, the popular DNS server software, has been crashing all over the Internet. The root cause is believed to be a 0-day vulnerability in BIND's resolver. The ISC has issued an alert.
22006106
submission
Morty writes:
A third Android device maker, Velocity Micro,
has signed a patent deal with Microsoft. Velocity Micro make PCs and tablets. This is the second signing this week.
12845210
submission
Morty writes:
A South Korean gamer couple neglected their real-life child in favor of a game that involved raising a virtual child. Their real child died at 3 months old. The couple has been sentenced to two years in jail, with the woman's sentence suspended.
2498085
submission
Morty writes:
John Ousterhout is retiring from the TCL core team,
John is
the original author of TCL, a popular language in its own right, and also the underlying language in Expect. He also authored the Tk toolkit.
574606
submission
Morty writes:
Thanks to Stargate: The Ark of Truth and The Daily WTF, we now know the language that Stargate's replicators are coded in. This article and its comments say that the replicators are coded in Javascript cribbed from www.rbcroyalbank.com.
245409
submission
Morty writes:
DNS rebinding attacks can be used by hostile websites to get browsers to attack behind firewalls, or to attack third parties. Browsers use "pinning" to prevent this, but a paper describes so-called multi-pin vulnerabilities that bypass the existing protections. Note that, from a DNS perspective, this is a "feature" rather than an implementation bug, although it's possible that DNS servers could be modified to prevent external sources from being able to point at internal resources. Also note that use of noscript to block javascript, java, and flash should also work around this.
168367
submission
Morty writes:
There was a previous slashdot story announcing the future availability of the Hitachi 1TB hard drive. A mere 9 months later, you can now buy the 1TB hard disk retail! Or, if you're like me, you can at least read the Anandtech review of the 1TB hard disk after you pay your mortgage. This is a milestone I will remember for a long time.
