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Comment Greenspan even grasps (Score 1) 496

by ephemeralspecter (#25494635) Attached to: Greenspan Tells Congress Bad Data Hurt Wall Street
I'm so surprised by this turn of events. It seems that greenspan is even now willing to take such a risk contradicting himself. It exposes his loyalties through him attempting to draw attention from the real problem of faulty "insurance" on the pieces of nothing they piled together. Desperate times, maybe they're afraid we'll take our money back.
Microsoft

Silverlight 2.0 Released 164

Posted by kdawson from the opposite-of-sun dept.
rfernand79 writes "Via Scott Guthrie's Blog for Microsoft, we find out that Silverlight 2.0 has been released. The blog post notes some interesting statistics, including the magnitude of video streamed during the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention (both using Silverlight). 'Hello Worlds' and educational links are included in the post."
Hardware Hacking

IPhone 2.0 Jailbroke 228

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
dch24 was one of many who noted that the iPhone 2.0 software has already been unlocked writes "If you were wondering how I was doing push email tests on iPhone OS 2.0 and Vodafone UK, this is the reason why. The code wizard commandos at the iPhone Dev Team have been working on this non-stop since the early days of beta testing. In fact, I had iPhone OS 2.0 running on my iPhone since last week. That was version 5A345, two below 5A347, but identical in functionality." Still no word on an iPhone 3G crack.
Privacy

Lawyers Would Rather Fly Than Download PGP 426

Posted by kdawson from the fly-once-to-exchange-keys dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The NYTimes is running a front-page story about lawyers for suspects in terrorism-related cases fearing government monitoring of privileged conversations. But instead of talking about the technological solutions, the lawyers fly halfway across the world to meet with their clients. In fact, nowhere in the article is encryption even mentioned. Is it possible that lawyers don't even know about PGP?" The New Yorker has a detailed piece centering on the Oregon terrorism case discussed by the Times.
Books

Don't Take Notes In the Bookstore 499

Posted by kdawson from the and-no-umpcs-either dept.
mikesd81 writes "The Harvard Crimson reports that the Harvard Coop asked Jarret A. Zafran to leave the store after writing down the prices of six books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial. The apparent new policy could be a response to Crimsonreading.org, an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers. The Coop claims the ISBN identification numbers in books are their intellectual property. Crimson Reading disagrees. 'We don't think the Coop owns copyright on this information that should be available to students,' said Tom D. Hadfield, co-creator of the site. The student paper reports that an unnamed intellectual property lawyer agreed with Crimson Reading's position."

Feed Engadget: DVD Forum approves 51GB HD DVD? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: HDTV

We haven't yet seen any official confirmation of the news, but it's been reported that the 51GB triple-layer single-sided HD DVD Toshiba first announced at CES has been approved by the DVD Forum. (The last we heard about this, the new format had been submitted for approval.) Of course, this might mean consumers will need new players to read 51GB HD DVDs, which could potentially damage the format more than help it; the last thing either HD DVD or Blu-ray need right now is to fork hardware compatibility with their own embattled formats, so we'll hope what we've heard about 2nd and 3rd gen HD DVD players being able to read 51GB discs via firmware upgrade is true. Also up to bat: the "twin" dual-layer DVD / HD DVD combo-disc was also approved, with one 5GB DVD layer and two 17GB HD DVD layers. We'll let you know when the DVD forum officially confirms (or denies) the news.

[Thanks, Ken]

Read - News of the new approvals
Read- AVS Forum thread

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
The Courts

Judge Strikes Down Part of Patriot Act 673

Posted by samzenpus from the but-what-about-the-terrorists dept.
Shining Celebi writes "U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero ruled in favor of the ACLU and struck down a portion of the revised USA PATRIOT Act this morning, forcing investigators to go through the courts to obtain approval before ordering ISPs to give up information on customers, instead of just sending them a National Security Letter. In the words of Judge Marrero, this use of National Security Letters 'offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.'"
Media

CSS of DVDs Ruled 'Ineffective' by Finnish Courts 222

Posted by Zonk from the rip-away-my-pretties-rip-away dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The CSS protection used in DVDs has been ruled "ineffective" by Helsinki District Court. This means that CSS is not covered by the Finnish copyright law amendment of 2005 (based on EU Copyright Directive from 2001), allowing it to be freely circumvented. Quoting the press release: ' The conclusions of the court can be applied all over Europe since the word effective comes directly from the directive ... A protection measure is no longer effective, when there is widely available end-user software implementing a circumvention method. My understanding is that this is not technology-dependent. The decision can therefore be applied to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as well in the future.'"
United States

Montana Says No to Real ID, Passes Law to Deny It 518

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the good-lines-in-the-sand dept.
SoCalChris writes "Montana's governor signed a bill yesterday in defiance of the Real ID Act. House Bill 287 [PDF] requires the Montana Motor Vehicle Division to not implement the provisions of the Real ID Act, and to report to the governor any attempts by any agent or agency of the Department of Homeland Security to attempt to implement the bill. Montana is the first state to implement such a law."
Privacy

Blizzard Seeks to Block User Rights, Privacy 639

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-haven't-downed-netherspite dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In the overlooked case between Blizzard and MDY Industries, the creator of the WoWGlider bot, Blizzard is arguing that using any programs in conjunction with the World of Warcraft constitutes copyright violation. Apparently accessing the copy of the game client in RAM using another program infringes upon their rights. Under that logic, users do not even have the right to use anti-virus software in the event that the game becomes infected. Furthermore, Blizzard's legal filings downplay the role of their Warden software, which actively scans users' RAM, CPU, and storage devices (and potentially sensitive data) and sends information back to Blizzard to be processed."
Wireless Networking

GPL Code Found In OpenBSD Wireless Driver 671

Posted by kdawson from the cross-licensing dept.
NormalVisual writes "The mailing lists were buzzing recently when Michael Buesch, one of the maintainers for the GPL'd bc43xx Broadcom wireless chip driver project, called the OpenBSD folks to task for apparently including code without permission from his project in the OpenBSD bcw project, which aims to provide functionality with Broadcom wireless chips under that OS. It seems that the problem has been resolved for now with the BSD driver author totally giving up on the project and Theo De Raadt taking the position that Buesch's posts on the subject were 'inhuman.'" More commentary from the BSD community is over at undeadly.org.
Privacy

DHS Wants Master Key for DNS 266

Posted by Zonk from the they-own-all-the-locks-and-doors dept.
An anonymous reader writes "At an ICANN meeting in Lisbon, the US Department of Homeland Security made it clear that it has requested the master key for the DNS root zone. The key will play an important role in the new DNSSec security extension, because it will make spoofing IP-addresses impossible. By forcing the IANA to hand out a copy of the master key, the US government will be the only institution that is able to spoof IP addresses and be able to break into computers connected to the Internet without much effort. There's a further complication, of course, because even 'if the IANA retains the key ... the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA. If the keys are then handed over to ICANN/IANA, there would be even less of an incentive [for the U.S.] to give up this role as a monitor. As a result, the DHS's demands will probably only heat up the debate about US dominance of the control of Internet resources.'"
Education

Science Fair Project Exposes GlaxoSmithKline Lies 253

Posted by CowboyNeal from the fact-checking-advertisements dept.
shadowspar writes "Despite claims made by GlaxoSmithKline that their Ribena soft drinks are high in Vitamin C, two New Zealand high school students found in their science fair research project that at least some formulations of the drink contained no detectable levels of the vitamin. As a result, GSK has been fined over $200,000 by the NZ Commerce Commission and ordered to run newspaper ads admitting that some of their drinks contain no Vitamin C."
Games

Valve Hoping For 360/PC Play, Scared of PS3 Online 105

Posted by Zonk from the weird-thing-to-be-scare-of dept.
Valve's movement to the console space has been slow, but this year will see the release of Half-Life 2 on both the 360 and PS3. They seem to be having mixed reactions to that move. On the one hand (according to CVG), they're very much hoping that 360/PC crossplay will be possible for their upcoming Team Fortress 2. On the other hand (according to Game Informer and 1up), their reaction to the PS3's online component is one of fear. Valve's Marketing representative Doug Lombardi: "PS3 is brand new and PS3's online is kind of scary so we're hoping that EA is going to be a strong partner for us. (laughs) It's always the scariest thing when it's not all yours. With the PC it's all ours, Steam is all ours, code's ours, game's ours. On 360 we're making it, we've made it before, we know what the Live thing is, although it's Microsoft's so we kind of know it. PS3 we're not building it, we haven't made a PS3 title before, and we don't really know what PS3 online really is. It's always the devil you don't know that you're the most scared of."

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