TheCrayon - Slashdot User

Scientists Make Quantum Encryption Breakthrough 156

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 22, 2007 @02:04AM from the completely-secure-for-at-least-a-few-days dept.

Madas writes "Scientists working in Cambridge have managed to make quantum encryption completely secure (registration required) by putting decoy pulses in the key transmission stream. According to the story this paves the way for safe, encrypted high-speed data links. Could this allow completely private transmission of data away from snooping eyes and ears? Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when traveling on the internet?"

Gaming Mice Get Benchmarked 45

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @05:36AM from the fun-toys dept.

Via Joystiq, an article at the ES Reality site where they do their level best to benchmark mice in a logical fashion. Post author Sujoy explains: "In this environment where performance is king, it's ludicrous to think that mouse performance has never been measured for reviewing the products. Imagine reviewing the latest graphics card in the same way. Without benchmarks, reviewers would have to resort to loading up their favourite game and commenting on how their frag count improved. You would have no way to compare NVIDIA and ATI cards apart from the quality of the packaging. Without benchmarking, graphics card reviews would be almost entirely useless. So why do we put up with mouse reviews that are just as useless?" They have scales based on control, speed, and DPI to determine how good, really, that mouse is.

Network Computing's 7th Annual Reader Survey 22

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday November 07, 2006 @01:35PM from the crab-fest dept.

Thomas LaSusa writes "In this year's reader survey, Network Computing Magazine editors invited IT managers to vent about the tech challenges they face every day and how they wish vendors would address these problems. Read the unvarnished truth about what your peers are thinking." From the article: "This isn't the Top 10 worst vendor list, though. The largest tech companies tend to get the blame because they're the easy targets. Individual experiences with a particular company will vary widely; for every person who blasted Dell or Symantec for poor equipment or lousy service, someone else sang their praises. Instead, we find it more worthwhile to identify key areas where technology vendors as a whole aren't living up to their own boilerplate marketing. Some of the vendors contacted for their reactions to this story explained that today's enterprise networks are bewilderingly complex and run a vast number of OSs, applications and protocols. They all defined customer support as a top priority, but recognized that problems can't be solved by first-level support. Whether you consume or sell technology products, read on for an unvarnished look at what 755 IT decision-makers want — and don't want. You might just come away with new strategies for dealing with your vendors or serving your customers."

UK Has Become a "Surveillance Society" 291

Posted by Zonk on Saturday November 04, 2006 @03:28PM from the gotta-keep-us-safe-from-the-bogeyman dept.

cultrhetor writes "In a story released by the BBC, Richard Thomas, the information commissioner for Great Britain, says that fears of the nation's 'sleep-walk into a surveillance society' have become reality. Surveillance ranges from data monitoring (credit cards, mobiles, and loyalty card information), US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic, to key stroke logging at work. From the article, the report 'predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.' The report's co-author, Dr. David Murakami-Wood, told BBC News that, compared to other Western nations, Britain was the 'most surveilled country.' He goes on to note: 'We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us.'"

Comment Re:Fire! (Score 1) 643

by TheCrayon on Thursday January 31, 2002 @02:03PM (#2931723) Attached to: AOL vs. Trillian

The TOC stuff I was talking about was a problem with IMIRC:
http://www.zevils.com/programs/imirc/
witch is why they switched to OSCAR... I suppose that it could have been limited to that client... but that just illistrates the problems with TOC ( and i suppose OSCAR aswell ) ... all the more reason to abstract the protocall so that many could work on it...maby there needs to be a lib-OSCAR or lib-TOC or some such.

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