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Comment Re:Australian CERT (Score 1) 27

by JamesD_UK (#36138246) Attached to: Tenth Annual AusCERT Conference Kicks Off
AusCERT aren't the Australian National CERT although they have in some ways been the de-facto CERT for some time. That position is now taken up by CERT Australia who are working closely with AusCERT and taken up some of their work. If you've got problems contacting them, send me some contact details and I'll try and help you out - I know some of their staff. AusCERT have been an incredibly useful source of information on compromised systems on my customer's networks.

Comment Re:Intended Reaction? (Score 1) 724

by lortho (#34319006) Attached to: <em>Witcher 2</em> Torrents Could Net You a Fine
This theory doesn't match the evidence in this case, though. Piracy has skyrocketed over the years, but the gaming industry has shown no signs of approaching anything near a situation where it's "no longer tenable to make games and no one has a game to play." On the contrary, it's gotten bigger and bigger as well. Even in this age where thousands and thousands of both legally and illegally free games exist for all sorts of different platforms, big titles like CoD Black Ops are seeing record sales. There's very clearly something about the economics of this situation that the old theories and models are missing.
Supercomputing

Windows Cluster Hits a Petaflop, But Linux Retains Top-5 Spot 229

Posted by timothy from the heating-up-the-whole-outdoors dept.
Twice a year, Top500.org publishes a list of supercomputing benchmarks from sites around the world; the new results are in. Reader jbrodkin writes "Microsoft says a Windows-based supercomputer has broken the petaflop speed barrier, but the achievement is not being recognized by the group that tracks the world's fastest supercomputers, because the same machine was able to achieve higher speeds using Linux. The Tokyo-based Tsubame 2.0 computer, which uses both Windows and Linux, was ranked fourth in the world in the latest Top 500 supercomputers list. While the computer broke a petaflop with both operating systems, it achieved a faster score with Linux, denying Microsoft its first official petaflop ranking." Also in Top-500 news, reader symbolset writes with word that "the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin takes the top spot with 2.57 petaflops. Although the US has long held a dominant position in the list things now seem to be shifting, with two of the top spots held by China, one by Japan, and one by the US. In the Operating System Family category Linux continues to consolidate its supercomputing near-monopoly with 91.8% of the systems — up from 91%. High Performance Computing has come a long way quickly. When the list started as a top-10 list in June of 1993 the least powerful system on the list was a Cray Y-MP C916/16526 with 16 cores driving 13.7 RMAX GFLOP/s. This is roughly the performance of a single midrange laptop today."
It's funny. Laugh.

Fark Creator Slams 'the Wisdom of Crowds' 507

Posted by timothy from the respond-below-with-wit-and-vigor dept.
GovTechGuy writes with some harsh words from Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, speaking at a conference Tuesday in Washington, DC: "'The "wisdom of the crowds" is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb,' Curtis said. 'It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.' Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.' Another example Curtis pointed to is the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an 'absolute train wreck.' 'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
Power

Trash-To-Fuel Process Validated By US Military 64

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-need-to-know-who-to-ask dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After going through all kinds of grief, including being shut down by the Washington State Ecology Department, classifying them as an 'incinerator,' it looks like Green Power Inc is finally ready to shine. The Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marines, in a joint effort, validated their technology in November, and the results are now being published for the first time. For every 100 tons of municipal solid waste feedstock processed each day, the plant produces 1240 gallons of Naphtha, 3700 gallons of Kerosene, 6900 gallons of Diesel and 3000 gallons of Fuel Oil. And even the ash can be used for cement or asphalt. They generate 1 MW of electricity to sell to the grid 24/7, running three shifts per day to keep the plant going, employing approximately five people per shift. Sticker price is $25 million. ROI, 3.5 years. Maybe with this announcement, the trend of no sales in the US will change, compared to the 72 foreign contracts backed by letters of credit."
Music

Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas 57

Posted by kdawson from the music-of-the-exploding-spheres dept.
At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"

Comment Re:As a British taxpayer... (Score 1) 179

by BiggyP (#29863903) Attached to: BBC Planning To Launch Global iPlayer VoD Service

A lot doesn't equate to nearly enough, and i don't think i've ever seen it happen for radio content. PVR mode in get_iplayer is a great idea, but it still needs me to anticipate the first episode for anything that isn't in catch-up mode. Then there's the issue of older programming, which BBC worldwide have got their grubby hands on and are holding to ransom on paid-for cable/satellite channels, can't we at least have more repeats?

Comment Re:As a British taxpayer... (Score 1) 179

by BiggyP (#29861611) Attached to: BBC Planning To Launch Global iPlayer VoD Service

Not only that, Channel 4 make a large quantity of their content available on 4od(nasty flash site but still vaguely usable in linux) for 30 days, or indefinitely for stuff in their backcatalogue, such as the comic strip presents and every episode of peep show, whereas the BBC keeps recently aired content online for 7 whole days and expects you to buy the DVD if you would like to watch anything older... If i miss the first episode of a programme and realise this just after the second episode has aired i then have to go and torrent it before watching ep2 on iplayer. Now i keep an eye out for things and just rip everything remotely interesting with get_iplayer, resulting in nice mp4s that i can watch later, as in whenever i like, and without suffering the appalling performance of fullscreen flash.

Another great move by the BBC is to offer drm-free downloads of iplayer content, but guess what, you ordinarily(get_iplayer can retrieve these, thankfully) need to own an iPhone for them to extend this functionality to you, great, huh?
Linux

Submission + - Taking Free Software to The Streets

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's that time of year again, the nights are drawing in, the leaves are beginning to turn, and literally hundreds of teams of dedicated F/OSS enthusiasts, from around the world, are preparing to hit the streets in celebration of Software Freedom Day 2009. In an effort to increase awareness of free and open source software among the general public, SFD teams will be standing around town centres and shopping malls, holding talks at schools and universities, giving demonstrations and handing out Linux and FOSS collections for Windows on CD.
With money being tight and paranoia about malware and viruses at an all time high, the time is right to help consumers switch on to the myriad of quality open source applications available. If you would like to check for an SFD team in your area and consider attending, be it to help out or simply learn more about free software for yourself, there's an interactive map to help you find your way.
The Almighty Buck

$33 Million In Poker Winnings Seized By US Govt 465

Posted by samzenpus from the mine-now-I-take-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times story reports that, 'Opening a new front in the government's battle against Internet gambling, federal prosecutors have asked four American banks to freeze tens of millions of dollars in payments owed to people who play poker online. ... "It's very aggressive, and I think it's a gamble on the part of the prosecutors," Mr. Rose said. He added that it was not clear what law would cover the seizure of money belonging to poker players, as opposed to the money of the companies involved.' Many players are reporting that their cashout checks have bounced."
The Internet

The Perils of Pop Philosophy 484

Posted by kdawson from the bloggers-beware dept.
ThousandStars tips a new piece by Julian Sanchez, the guy who, in case you missed it, brought us a succinct definition of the one-way hash argument (of the type often employed in the US culture wars). This one is about the dangers of a certain kind of oversimplifying, as practiced routinely by journalists and bloggers. "This brings us around to some of my longstanding ambivalence about blogging and journalism more generally. On the one hand, while it's probably not enormously important whether most people have a handle on the mind-body problem, a democracy can't make ethics and political philosophy the exclusive province of cloistered academics. On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to find myself thinking: 'Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.' This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."

Comment Re:Maybe I'm off base here but (Score 1) 175

by JamesD_UK (#26782393) Attached to: OpenDNS To Block and Monitor Conficker Worm
One problems is that many of the domains appear to point towards servers running virtual hosts and hosting legitimate sites on the same IP address. We've been looking at data on our network and tracking down these infections based on IP address brings a lot of false positives. You really do need either proxy logs, or logs of DNS queries to find out the domain that's being contacted.
Businesses

RIM Accuses Motorola of Blocking Job Offers 353

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the if-i-can-have-you-nobody-will dept.
theodp writes "Taking a page from the insanely-jealous-husband-playbook, Motorola management has adopted an if-I-can't-have-you-nobody-can stance on its fired employees, reportedly blocking RIM from offering jobs to laid-off workers. In a complaint filed in state court, Motorola is charged with improperly trying to expand a previous agreement 'to prevent the RIM entities from hiring any Motorola employees, including the thousands of employees Motorola has already fired or will fire.' Through its Compete America membership, Motorola has repeatedly warned Congress that failing to accommodate the lobbying group members' 'principled' demand for timely access to talent would not be in the United States' economic interest and would make the US second-rate in education and basic research."

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