WizMaster - Slashdot User

Comment Cue Sony Parallels (Score 2, Insightful) 201

by WizMaster on Thursday January 03, 2008 @12:50PM (#21896124) Attached to: Sears Installs Spyware

What does SEARS need with this info? Honestly, this just smells bad. I won't call them evil just yet but this is pretty serious from a privacy POV.

Also, isn't it about time we push for a law that makes these privacy agreements shorter and in english (not legalese). One thing I like about CC is that they have a layman's terms version of all their licenses as well as the legalese ones. Not only would people be more likely to read them but it makes it hard for companies to bury important info several pages deep.

I realize that the layman's version would be long as heck but it's better then nothing (and people would STILL be more likely to read it since they can understand it without thinking to hard).

VeriSign To Offer Passwords On Bank Card 158

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @02:59PM from the third-factor dept.

Billosaur writes "Imagine the PayPal security tool embedded on a credit card. VeriSign is announcing that a deal is in the works to provide credit cards with one-time-use passwords. By placing the technology directly on the card, it becomes more convenient and provides an extra layer of security for online credit-card transactions. A cardholder would type in their information as normal and then would be prompted to enter the passcode displayed on the card. This means a user would need to have the physical card in hand in order to use it, thus thwarting identity thieves who steal credit card information but do not possess the card itself. VeriSign said it expects to announce a major bank using its cards in May."

Submission + - Music Decoded from 600 Year Old Engravings

Submitted by RulerOf on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @01:50PM

RulerOf writes: Musicians recently unlocked a 600 year old mystery that had been encoded into the walls of the Rosslyn Chapel that was featured in "The Da Vinci Code." The song was carved into the walls of the chapel not using traditional notes, but in the form of geometric shapes known as cymatics, or Chladni patterns. After the entire song was decoded, it was set to traditional lyrics and recorded, and can be heard in a video featured here, at the musicians' website. The video also gives a visual representation of how the engravings match up to the cymatic patterns.

From the article:

"The music has been frozen in time by symbolism...They are of such exquisite detail and so beautiful that we thought there must be a message here." The two men matched each of the patterns on the carved cubes to a Chladni pitch, and were able finally to unlock the melody.

Lastly, a direct link to the video.

Submission + - Long Block Data standard finalized

Submitted by

Anonymous

on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @01:47PM

Anonymous writes: "IDEMA has finally released the LBD (Long Block Data) standard. This standard increase the length of the data blocks of each sector from 512 bytes to 4,096 bytes. This is an update that has been requested for some time by the harddrive industry and the development of new harddrives will start immediately. The new standard offers many advantages where the improved reliability and higher transfer rates are the two most obvious. While the reliability is stated to increase as much as ten fold by some manufacturers, the performance improvements are a bit more elusive. Overall improvements include, besides the previous mentioned, shorter maintenance, time for format and more efficient data transfers due to less overhead per block during read and write operations."

Slashdot Top Deals