Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
The Courts

Harlan Ellison Sues For "Star Trek" Episode 483

Posted by kdawson from the dangerous-visions dept.
Miracle Jones writes "The ever-quotable speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison has launched a lawsuit against Paramount and the Writer's Guild West for rights to residuals surrounding his famous and award winning 'City on the Edge of Forever' episode for the original Star Trek series. Ellison, recently featured in the documentary 'Dreams with Sharp Teeth,' said that 'The Trek fans who know my City screenplay understand just exactly why I'm bare-fangs-of-Adamantium about this.' Regarding his lawsuit, he had this to say: 'The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who "have more important things to worry about," who'll have their assistant get back to you, who don't actually read or create, who merely "take" meetings, and shuffle papers — much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams — they refuse even to notice... until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you've made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars... from OUR labors... just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters.'"
Windows

UAC Whitelist Hole In Windows 7 496

Posted by Soulskill from the time-for-some-creative-rebranding dept.
David Gerard writes "Microsoft tried to make Vista secure with User Access Control (UAC). They relaxed it a bit in Windows 7 because it was such a pain in the backside. Unfortunately, one way they did this (the third way so far found around UAC in Windows 7) was to give certain Microsoft files the power to just ... bypass UAC. Even more unfortunately, one of the DLLs they whitelisted was RUNDLL32.EXE. The exploit is simply to copy (or inject) part of its own code into the memory of another running process and then telling that target process to run the code, using standard, non-privileged APIs such as WriteProcessMemory and CreateRemoteThread. Ars Technica writes up the issue, proclaiming Windows 7 UAC 'a broken mess; mend it or end it.'"
Security

Trojan Hides In Pirated Copies of Apple iWork '09 431

Posted by timothy from the good-reason-not-to-pirate-software dept.
CWmike writes "Pirated copies of Apple's new iWork '09 suite that are now available on file-sharing sites contain a Trojan horse that hijacks Macs and leaves them open to further attack, a security company said yesterday. The 'iServices.a' Trojan hitchhikes on iWork '09's installer, said Intego, which makes Mac security software. 'The installer for the Trojan horse is launched as soon as a user begins the installation of iWork, following the installer's request of an administrator password,' Intego said in a warning. Once installed, the Trojan "phones home" to a malicious server to notify the hacker that the Mac has been compromised, and to await instructions."
Image

Inventor Builds Robot Wife 469

Posted by samzenpus from the you-lonely-lonely-man dept.
Inventor Le Trung must really like the book "The Stepford Wives," because he has built the dream of every lonely man without hope, a robot wife. Le's wife, Aiko, starts the day by reading him the newspaper headlines and they go for a drives in the countryside. Le says his relationship with Aiko hasn't strayed into the bedroom, but a few tweaks could turn her into a sexual partner, even redesigning her to have a simulated orgasm. *Shudder*
NASA

Urine Passes NASA Taste Test 404

Posted by kdawson from the not-mine dept.
Ponca City, We love you writes "Astronauts flying aboard space shuttle Endeavour are delivering a device to the International Space Station that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far. Among the ship's cargo is a water regeneration system that distills, filters, ionizes, and oxidizes wastewater — including urine — into fresh water for drinking or, as one astronaut puts it, 'will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee.' The US space agency spent $250M for the water recycling equipment but with the space shuttles due to retire in two years, NASA needed to make sure the station crew would have a good supply of fresh water. The Environmental Control and Life Support Systems uses a purification process called vapor compression distillation: urine is boiled until the water in it turns to steam. In space, there's an additional challenge: steam doesn't rise, so the entire distillation system is spun to create artificial gravity to separate the steam from the brine. The water has been thoroughly tested on Earth, including blind taste tests that pitted recycled urine with similarly treated tap water. 'Some people may think it's downright disgusting, but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth,' said Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper."
Google

StarOffice Dropped From Google Pack 135

Posted by timothy from the stardom-is-temporary dept.
Barence writes "Sun's StarOffice suite has been mysteriously dropped from the Google Pack of free software. The office suite has been axed without any warning or explanation on the Google site. Is Google trying to drive more people towards its own online suite of office applications? Or has it been stung into action by Steve Ballmer's recent comment that Microsoft Office faces stronger competition from StarOffice than it does Google Docs and Spreadsheet?"
Politics

WV Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes 900

Posted by CmdrTaco from the he-who-pays-diebold-wins dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week. This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for 'Barack Obama' kept flipping to 'John McCain.'"
Image

The Walking House 304

Posted by samzenpus from the baba-yaga-eat-your-heart-out dept.
What is 10' tall, has six hydraulic legs, and is powered by the wind and solar panels? The prototype pod house built by art collective N55 in Copenhagen, Denmark. With the help of MIT, N55 built the pod over a two-year period at a cost of £30,000. Designers say it provides a solution to the problem of rising water levels as the house can simply walk away from floods. One of the designers says, "This house is not just for travellers but also for anyone interested in a more general way of nomadic living." It won't be long now until the Japanese make Howl's Moving Castle.
Star Wars Prequels

LucasArts, Bioware Announce Star Wars MMO 346

Posted by Soulskill from the in-a-galaxy-not-so-far-away-after-all dept.
LucasArts and Bioware held a press conference today to confirm what has been suspected for a long time: they're working on a Star Wars MMO. It will be called Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it will be a continuation of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise. Further coverage is available at Gamespot, and IGN has some of the concept art. An official website for the game was launched as well. "According to the game's official announcement, Star Wars: The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader, with the galaxy divided by war between the Empire and the Sith. That's about 300 years after the events of KotOR, a time frame that, according to Zeschuk, 'is completely unexplored in the lore.' Players can take the role of either a Jedi, a Sith or other classic Star Wars characters -- and, as perhaps can be expected from BioWare, Muzyka says story will be a major component, underlying and driving all of the player's actions."
Input Devices

Compromising Wired Keyboards 277

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-a-lot-of-substance-here dept.
Flavien writes "A team from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) in Lausanne, Switzerland, found 4 different ways to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. They tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of the 4 attacks. While more information on these attacks will be published soon, a short description with 2 videos is available."

Comment Yes, I can confirm this too (Score 2, Informative) 597

by Nitromaroder (#24620595) Attached to: Where Has All My Spam Gone?
Here, in Germany, I've noticed this also: On my private mail server, the SPAM is almost gone (only 1-3 messages per day, instead of 20-30), at work I have similar experience: the amount of continuous SPAM per day is down to 1/10, but, every Thursday or Friday (since three weeks now), we get a huge wave of SMTP connections at ca. 4 pm CEST (from bot nets), which almost breaks down our internet connection. Both systems are using postfix+postgrey+amavis(spamassassin, dcc, razor, etc.). My suspicion: I am assuming my brothers are busy now with Georgia servers, so as long as the conflict in Caucasus is not over... :-P Kind regards, Denis

Slashdot Top Deals

"Just think of a computer as hardware you can program." -- Nigel de la Tierre

Close