catmaker - Slashdot User

Submission + - Skype Reads BIOS, Motherboard Serial no.

Submitted by pfp on Tuesday February 06, 2007 @08:58PM

pfp writes: Myria at pagetable.com, among others, noticed that Skype reads the machine's BIOS code on startup. This probably would've gone unnoticed if the operation didn't fail on 64-bit windows. From the post: "It's dumping your system BIOS, which usually includes your motherboard's serial number, and pipes it to the Skype application. I have no idea what they're using it for, or whether they send anything to their servers, but I bet whatever they're doing is no good given their track record. [...] If they hadn't been ignorant of Win64's lack of NTVDM, nobody would've noticed this happening."

Ogg Vorbis Gaining Industry Support 235

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 06, 2007 @08:51PM from the chicken-or-the-ogg dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While Ogg Vorbis format has not gained much adoption in music sales and portable players, it is not an unsupported format in the industry. Toy manufacturers (e.g. speaking dolls), voice warning systems, and reactive audio devices exploit Ogg Vorbis for its good quality at small bit-rates. As a sign of this, VLSI Solution Oy has just announced VS1000, the first 16 bits DSP device for playing Ogg Vorbis on low-power and high-volume products. Earlier Ogg Vorbis chips use 32 bits for decoding, which consumes more energy than a 16-bit device does. See the Xiph wiki page for a list of Ogg Vorbis chips."

DNS Root Servers Attacked 311

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 06, 2007 @06:46PM from the flexing-muscles dept.

liquidat and others wrote in with the news that the DNS Root Servers were attacked overnight. It looks like the F, I, and M servers felt the attack and recovered, whereas G (US Department of Defense) and L (ICANN) did less well. Some new botnet flexing its muscle perhaps? AP coverage is here.

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