Submission + - Stephen Fry and DVD Jon back USB Sniffer Project (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 26, 2010 @04:52AM

An anonymous reader writes: bushing and pytey of the iPhone DevTeam and Team Twiizers have created a Kickstarter project to fund the build of an open-source/open-hardware high-speed USB protocol analyzer. The board features a high-speed USB 2.0 sniffer that will help with the reverse engineering of proprietary USB hardware, the project has gained the backing from two high-profile individuals Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon) and Actor and Comedian Stephen Fry

Comment Websense (Score 1) 504

by Pretendstocare on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @12:32PM (#29581935) Attached to: Porn Surfing Rampant at US Science Foundation

"Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
"One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer"

Rearrange the summary for all the answers

Comment Book publishers endangered, cry me a river (Score 4, Insightful) 160

by moon3 on Monday September 07, 2009 @08:49PM (#29345545) Attached to: Google Books As "Train Wreck" For Scholars

They pushed the copyright law to over hundred years (just to make sure they will make money of writers even after they are dead), now comes our big brother Google to the ring to resurrect all the OUT OF COPYRIGHT books -- meaning those dead books that publishers no longer exclusively distribute. What an offense against the poor publishers. Google is creating a real e-Library of enormous proportions of virtually free books, what a threat. I bet I am not alone who wants to see the Newton's books on physics e-published again and searchable.

Comment Re:Cross-platform code signing costs (Score 1) 158

by plsuh on Monday September 07, 2009 @08:49PM (#29345529) Attached to: How Snow Leopard Cut ObjC Launch Time In Half

I just checked and a 1-year code signing cert from Comodo is $179.95, with discounts for multi-year certs. Other vendors also seem to have pretty reasonable prices.

That's at least on the order of $100 per platform. The certificate for Windows is $179.95 per year, and the certificate for a secure web site from which to distribute copies of the software is another $99 per year. It gets even more expensive to target more than one platform: the certificate for XNA is $99 per year, the certificate for iPod Touch is $99 per year, and by the time one has ported an application to all the platforms that his audience uses, he'd be out of his hobby money.

Hold on, most code signing CA's include both the codeSigning and msCodeCom usage extensions in the same certificate so there's no need to buy multiple code signing certs. Unless you're conducting an e-commerce transaction (in which case you're no longer a hobbyist), there's no need for a website cert -- and even then I've found website certs for as little as $15/year. Mac OS X/iPhone code signing certs just require the code signing extension, so they just work. Ditto XNA. To join the iPhone developer program is $99/year, so we're up to $280/year, or about $24/month. This is well within the budget for most hobbyists. Most hobbyists won't be faced with multi-platform issues anyway. I sure as heck don't have the time to write and maintain a cross-platform app -- keeping up with Mac OS X is enough for me.

--Paul

Comment "scholarly" information (Score 2, Interesting) 160

by Aurisor on Monday September 07, 2009 @08:22PM (#29345349) Attached to: Google Books As "Train Wreck" For Scholars

As someone who majored in English Literature in college, I can tell you that academics love getting their panties in a bunch over what is Scholarly Publication and what is not. Some teachers will actually have special assignments that have to be written entirely using Scholarly sources, or in response to a Scholarly article.

Before the advent of the internet, I can see how it might have been useful to have an in-group comprised of people who had some sort of qualifications to write about something, but it seems antiquated in light of the ease with which we can independently verify claims.

Usually, if someone's going to write something that's actually useful, they'll write an actual book. Soon thereafter, a bunch of "Scholars" will come along and write a bunch of journal articles and tell us all about how the useful work was one of three things: misogynistic, code for a religious statement, or arcane, carefully-hidden innuendo.

Sorry if I sound bitter, but I spent a lot of time reading this crap, and very little of it was as insightful or interesting as even my classmates' comments.

Is Typing Ruining Your Ability To Spell? 494

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @01:10PM from the my-spellchecker-sure-thinks-so dept.

NSN A392-99-964-5927 writes "My handwriting abilities have deteriorated over the years. Putting a real pen to paper, I get frustrated over how to spell correctly, as I am so accustomed to using a keyboard and knowing where the letters are. Having spoken to a few friends, I've found that this has become apparent to them, too. I've noticed that my grammar is also affected; maybe this is because I spent too much time on IRC and lowered my standards. Hand-written words are now becoming obsolete. There is often no need to think about writing anymore, or about how something is spelled. Are other Slashdotters having the same problem? (I'm used to Telex machines, which should give you an indication of how old I am.)"

88% of Electronics Exports Reused, Not Dumped 157

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 16, 2009 @05:50PM from the well-at-first-anyhow dept.

retroworks writes "Greenercomputing.com staff covered a study which sheds more light on the controversial practice of exporting used computer equipment overseas. University of Arizona professors Ramzy Kahhat and Eric Williams newly published research, Product or Waste? Importation and End-of-Life Processing of Computers in Peru apparently confirms what WR3A.org says in the Video 'Fair Trade Recycling'. Namely, that most of the exports of used computers imported by buyers overseas (88%) are really for reuse and repair. Otherwise, people would not pay to import them. This bolsters pro-export arguments made in a scholarly article by Charles Schmidt of NIH in 2006. Perhaps what is needed to stem e-waste pollution is not a ban on exports, but for more people to export, so that buyers have more choice of (ethical) suppliers. Put another way: If used computer exports are outlawed, only outlaws will export used computers."

Why Should I Trust My Network Administrator? 730

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 13, 2009 @05:49PM from the hire-two-and-aim-them-at-each-other dept.

Andrew writes "I'm a manager at a startup, and decided recently to outsource to an outside IT firm to set up a network domain and file server. Trouble is, they (and all other IT companies we could find) insist on administering it all remotely. They now obviously have full access to all our data and PCs, and I'm concerned they could steal all our intellectual property, source code and customers. Am I being overly paranoid and resistant to change? Should we just trust our administrator because they have a reputation to uphold? Or should we lock them out and make them administer the network in person so we can stand behind and watch them?"

US Cell Phone Plans Among World's Most Expensive 827

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @01:03PM from the yes-but-we-have-cheap-gasoline dept.

Albanach writes "An OECD report published today has shown moderate cell phone users in the United States are paying some of the highest rates in the world . Average US plans cost $52.99 per month compared to an average of $10.95 in Finland. The full report is available only to subscribers, however Excel sheets of the raw data are available to download." (You'll find those Excel sheets — which open just fine in OpenOffice — on the summary page linked above.)

10 Worst Evolutionary Designs 232

Posted by samzenpus on Monday August 10, 2009 @06:35PM from the everyone-makes-mistakes dept.

JamJam writes "Besides my beer gut, which I'm sure has some purpose, Wired is running a story on the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs. Ranging from baby giraffes being dropped 5-foot during birth to Goliath bird-eating spiders that practically explode when they fall from trees."

Garbage Collection Algorithms Coming For SSDs 156

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 07, 2009 @10:11PM from the take-out-the-tash dept.

MojoKid writes "A common concern with the current crop of Solid State Drives is the performance penalty associated with block-rewriting. Flash memory is comprised of cells that usually contain 4KB pages that are arranged in blocks of 512KB. When a cell is unused, data can be written to it relatively quickly. But if a cell already contains some data, even if it fills only a single page in the block, the entire block must be re-written. This means that whatever data is already present in the block must be read, then it must be combined or replaced, and the entire block is then re-written. This process takes much longer than simply writing data straight to an empty block. This isn't a concern on fresh, new SSDs, but over time, as files are written, moved, deleted, or replaced, many blocks are a left holding what is essentially orphaned or garbage data, and their long-term performance degrades because of it. To mitigate this problem, virtually all SSD manufacturers have incorporated, or soon will incorporate, garbage collection schemes into their SSD firmware which actively seek out and remove the garbage data. OCZ, in combination with Indilinx, is poised to release new firmware for their entire line-up of Vertex Series SSDs that performs active garbage collection while the drives are idle, in order to restore performance to like-new condition, even on a severely 'dirtied' drive."

Ten Things We Still Don't Understand About Humans 397

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 07, 2009 @08:01PM from the why-do-they-like-will-ferrell-movies dept.

ParticleGirl writes "New Scientist has an article examining 10 human features (bugs?) that we still don't understand, like blushing, laughing, and nose-picking. There are some interesting, speculative evolutionary explanations listed for each. '[Psychologist Robert R. Provine] thinks laughing began in our pre-human ancestors as a physiological response to tickling. Modern apes maintain the ancestral 'pant-pant' laugh when they are tickled during play, and this evolved into the human 'ha-ha.' Then, he argues, as our brains got bigger, laughter acquired a powerful social function — to bond people. Indeed, Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has found that laughing increases levels of endorphins, our body's natural opiates, which he believes helps to strengthen social relationships.'"

Apple's Schiller Responds To iPhone Dictionary App Fiasco 200

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 07, 2009 @07:04PM from the not-so-sinister-after-all dept.

beef curtains writes "Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, responded by e-mail to a blog post discussing Apple's rejection of a dictionary app. If Schiller's e-mail is to be believed, it offers an interesting perspective on this whole issue. He said, 'The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable. ... The Ninjawords developer then decided to filter some offensive terms in the Ninjawords application and resubmit it for approval for distribution in the App Store before parental controls were implemented. Apple did not ask the developer to censor any content in Ninjawords, the developer decided to do that themselves in order to get to market faster. ... You are correct that the Ninjawords application should not have needed to be censored while also receiving a 17+ rating, but that was a result of the developers' actions, not Apple's.' PC World has an article summarizing the drama-to-date, the blog post, and Schiller's response."

Avoiding Mistakes Can Be a Huge Mistake 268

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 01, 2008 @06:20PM from the joys-of-corporate-overlordship dept.

theodp writes "No doubt many will nod knowingly as they read Paul Graham's The Other Half of 'Artists Ship', which delves into the downside of procedures developed by Big Companies to protect themselves against mistakes. Because every check you put on your programmers has a cost, Graham warns: 'And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you.' Sound familiar, anyone?"

Tsunami Invisibility Cloak 172

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday September 29, 2008 @06:11PM from the just-deflect-those-waves-to-the-poor-town-next-door dept.

BuzzSkyline writes "New Scientist is reporting on a lab-scale experiment that may lead to a tsunami invisibility cloak, which could protect islands, open-ocean platforms and even coastlines from dangerous waves by effectively making them invisible to tsunamis. The technology is based on the same sorts of negative index of refraction ideas that some physicists are exploring as they try to make an optical invisibility cloak, except that it works with water instead of light."

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