The_Cheese_Stands_Al - Slashdot User

Student Arrested for Writing Essay 890

Posted by Zonk on Friday April 27, 2007 @01:10PM from the thinkofthechildren-tag-is-appropriate-here dept.

mcgrew writes "The Chicago Tribune reports that an eighteen year old straight-A High School student was arrested for writing an essay that 'disturbed' his teacher. Even though no threats were made to a specific person, 18 year-old Allen Lee's English teacher convened a panel to discuss the work. As a result of that discussion, the police were called in. 'The youth's father said his son was not suspended or expelled but was forced to attend classes elsewhere for now. Today, Cary-Grove students rallied behind the arrested teen by organizing a petition drive to let him back in their school. They posted on walls quotes from the English teacher in which she had encouraged students to express their emotions through writing.'"

Submission + - MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility

Submitted by RulerOf on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @03:23PM

RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.

Why Don't More CIOs Become CEO? 279

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @01:17PM from the because-they-know-better dept.

jcatcw writes "Thornton May is mystified by the very small number of Fortune 500 companies that led by former CIOs. "Knowing what we know about CIOs — that is, that most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds — the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age.""

North Korea's Secret Biochemical Arsenal 321

Posted by Zonk on Thursday January 04, 2007 @06:14PM from the i'd-keep-an-eye-on-that dept.

mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has an in-depth report on North Korea's biological and chemical weapons stock, which has been developed in secret and has gone largely unnoticed amidst the country's nuke threat. From the article: 'North Korea's Chemical and Bioweapons (CBW) program appears to be modeled on that of the former Soviet Union, which covertly constructed a massive biological weapons infrastructure within the shell of a civilian research organization called Biopreparat. Inside Biopreparat, the Soviets developed deadly agents that included weaponized forms of anthrax and pneumonic plague. Intelligence reports from the United States and South Korea list anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic plague, cholera and botulism toxins as leading components of North Korea's bioweapons projects.' "

Comment Re:Linux rootkits (Score 1) 142

by The_Cheese_Stands_Al on Tuesday December 19, 2006 @02:03AM (#17297168) Attached to: Detecting Rootkits In GNU/Linux

If your system is compromised, nothing is trustable. Not the kernel, not the sync utilities (which on a FreeBSD system would be the first thing to alter), not anything. I did not miss the part about syncing to master. If there's a rootkit it will either make sure your sync still has its changes, or it will simply not install files silently. It could also modify your compiler to produce backdoors in your executables (For more on this one in particular, look at this http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson, one of the original people involved with Unix. This has been done before, and can be done again.

I repeat--If your system has been compromised, you can only rely on things that are non-modifyable by the system (I.E. BIOS ROM, unconnected disks). Your filesystem driver cannot be trusted. Expect it to lie whenever it needs to. Assume that the rootkit will not do anything that will help you find it. Syncing your source tree depends on way too many things that would be compromised to rely on (filesystem, network driver, sync utilities, libc, etc). The same goes for any other software update of any kind (excluding livecds -- assuming said rootkit didn't change your BIOS).

Sneak Peak at the Sling Player for Mac OSX 75

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday October 17, 2006 @05:08PM from the sling-back-to-the-future dept.

kjh1 writes to tell us the folks over at SlingCommunity are running an interview with Brian Jaquet of Sling Media. They get the scoop on the upcoming SlingPlayer for Mac OSX. There is a text transcript as well as a video version of the interview."

Does the NSA Need More Electricity? 324

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday August 06, 2006 @09:26AM from the paranoid-much-lately dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Baltimore sun (NSA watchers can't live without it) reports that the NSA worries about overloading the Baltimore energy grid if it were to install new computing capacity at it's Fort Meade HQ. This includes two multi million dollar supercomputers. Some systems are reportedly not getting the cooling they need. The temperature in NSA buildings is raised two degrees to conserve energy, according to the article. The NSA is Baltimore Gas and Electric`s (BGE) biggest customer the sun reports. Former NSA employees fear that a power outage at Fort Meade would have worse consequences than the 2000 "information overload" related outage. The NSA does apparently not have the backup power generation capacity to power the whole facility during power outages. Some point a finger at a new mall build in the area, but a BGE spokesman says the mall is "fairly easily accommodated". Some sources say the problem was identified in the late 90`s. But "keeping the lights on" wasn't a priority. A $4 million computer upgrade to the system that allocates power was postponed for budgetary reasons. (the NSA budged is estimated at $8 Billion) The article reports that the budget documents for listening posts around the world report similar infrastructural problems, in the budgets for 07 as well as previous years. It should be noted that the huge "groundbreaker" IT infrastructure upgrade program is reportedly over budget and late, but not yet fully operational."

Patent Reform Act Proposes Sweeping Changes 336

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday August 06, 2006 @07:22AM from the patent-wars dept.

Geccie writes "CNet is reporting that Senators Patrick Leahy and Orin Hatch have proposed sweeping changes in the patent system in the form of the Patent Reform Act of 2006. Key features are the ability to challenge (postgrant opposition) with the Senate version being somewhat broader and better than the house version." From the article: "Specifically, it would shift to a 'first to file' method of awarding patents, which is already used in most foreign countries, instead of the existing 'first to invent' standard, which has been criticized as complicated to prove. Such a change has already earned backing from Jon Dudas, chief of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."

Students Skip College Music Services 246

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 06, 2006 @11:16AM from the they-know-which-end-stinks dept.

WSJdpatton writes "College students don't turn down much that's free. But when it comes to online music, even free hasn't been enough to persuade many students to use the digital download services colleges and universities are providing." I know that the Ctrax service offered by my current school — Temple University — and many others (it's "available to all college students with a '.edu' email address") has an ugly, awkward interface. Worse, the free (gratis) part is an expiring, "tethered" collection of music for those who use it; downloads to keep are fee-per-track.

FBI Password Database Compromised by Consultant 373

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 06, 2006 @10:41AM from the this-is-the-beg-forgiveness-part dept.

LackThereof writes "An IT consultant for the FBI, hired to work on their new 'Trilogy' computer system, apparently got hold of the username and password hash databases for the FBI's network. He then used a common dictionary attack to get usable passwords out of the hashes, including that of FBI director Robert Muller, making him able to access virtually any data stored electronically at the FBI, including Witness Protection program records. The consultant, Joseph Thomas Colon, claims he used the passwords to avoid bureaucratic obstacles, and that his actions were condoned by the FBI agents he was working with at the agency." (More below.)

NASA Finds 4-5" Crack in Shuttle Insulation 193

Posted by Hemos on Monday July 03, 2006 @10:57AM from the debilating-or-not dept.

PresidentKang writes "Spaceflight Now is reporting that a large crack has been found in an external tank foam of Space Shuttle Discovery on the launch pad. According to the article: "Engineers inspecting the shuttle Discovery's external tank following Sunday's launch scrub found a crack in the tank's foam insulation near a bracket holding a 17-inch oxygen feed line in place. Some engineers believe the crack must be repaired but senior managers say a variety of options are on the table, from fly as is to making repairs.""

Software to Make Blue Gene Top 200 Teraflops 171

Posted by timothy on Friday June 23, 2006 @04:33PM from the crunching-rather-than-taste dept.

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has a story about the most intensive computer program ever created. It runs on IBM's big beast, Blue Gene/L, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and carries out 207.3 teraflops (trillion cacluations per second). The program, called Qbox, performs very complex quantum calculations to simulate the behaviour of thousands of atoms in three dimensions. Wow."

Samsung Ships the First Blu-Ray Player 255

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday June 15, 2006 @07:17PM from the beat-ya-to-it dept.

DigitalDame2 writes "PCMag.com reports that beginning June 25th, consumers will be able to purchase the first Blu-Ray player: the Samsung BD-P1000. The BD-P1000 is twice the price of the HD-A1 ($999.99 list), but supports full 1080p playback, something the first generation of HD-DVD players do not. It also up-converts conventional DVDs to 1080p to improve video quality and comes with HDMI, Component, S-video, and composite outputs. The BD-P1000 will be sold at more than 200 retail locations, including Best Buy, Tweeter, and Circuit City, and 10 Blu-Ray titles will be available as well."

Intel's Conroe Resurfaces, Benchmarks Strong 152

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 10, 2006 @09:24AM from the kicking-the-tires dept.

MojoKid writes "Intel has been occasionally leaking performance results of their upcoming Core 2 Duo processor for the desktop, code named Conroe. At this years IDF select members of the press were allowed to get hands-on access to test systems for benchmarking. Now, coincident with this week's Computex show in Taiwan, Intel has seen fit to show us just what their soon to be released CPU can do, yet again. Select press members got together with Intel in New York city for another round of testing with Conroe. HotHardware has a performance showcase posted with scores from a Core 2 Duo E6700 machine and a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition X6800. The results, compared against the backdrop of an overclocked 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-60 system, look very impressive indeed for Intel."

Journal Journal: Random idea

Journal by The_Cheese_Stands_Al on Wednesday June 07, 2006 @09:08PM

Ok, so I've been mulling over a little idea, for a OSS project:

Given the current availibility of CMU Sphinx & (multiple?)TTS projects, I think it would be a good idea to combine them to form a "voice shell" of some kind--something not unlike Speakable Items on OSX, but capable of opening arbitrary applications (ala Katapult) or executing shell commands using some specific dictation syntax.

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