geobaker - Slashdot User

Submission + - Facebook PR Firm Edited Its Own Wikipedia Page (shitplanet.org)

Submitted by metasonix on Saturday May 14, 2011 @08:40PM

metasonix writes: In the midst of all this week's flap about Facebook hiring notorious PR firm Burson-Marsteller to defame Google, I discovered something else: a Burson-Marsteller employee completely rewrote the firm's Wikipedia article to remove all the negative information. He did it openly, he violated a number of Wikipedia internal policies, another Wikipedia editor helped him, and no one was the wiser.

Submission + - Amazon Servers Used in Sony Playstation Hack (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

the simurgh

on Saturday May 14, 2011 @03:38PM

the simurgh writes: "Amazon servers may have been used to carry out the massive Playstation hack that compromised the personal information of more than 100 million Playstation Network users. According to a report from Bloomberg, sources close to the ongoing investigation say the attack was mounted from Amazon Web Service's cloud computing platform."

Submission + - Live Justice Comes to the Internet

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday May 14, 2011 @01:06PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Boston Globe reports that an experiment in live justice is coming to the Internet, uniting citizen bloggers with the public’s right to know in one of Massachusett's busiest courthouses, Quincy District Court. Dubbed Open Court, the project will operate live cameras and microphones during criminal sessions where the court’s proceedings will be streamed live over the Internet at the Open Court website to give the public an unfiltered view of court proceedings while an operating Wi-Fi network serves citizen bloggers who want to post to the Internet. “The idea is that people can live blog, but they can also tweet,’’ says John Davidow, executive editor in charge of new media at WBUR, who developed the idea for the project adding that during the next year, the goal is to move the experiment outside the first session courtroom and to stream criminal and civil trials and small claims cases as well. The project was seeking a busy court and found it in Quincy where last year the court handled more than 7,000 criminal claims and more than 15,000 civil cases, including more than 1,100 restraining orders, nearly 1,000 substance abuse and mental health cases and more than 1,200 landlord-tenant cases."

Submission + - Keeping a Cellphone system going in a war (aljazeera.net)

Submitted by dogsbreath on Saturday May 14, 2011 @01:28AM

dogsbreath writes: An Al Jazeera article provides fascinating insight about how engineers for one of the Libyan cell providers in the rebel held East have kept the system going in the middle of a civil insurrection. Administering a now free cellular system in a war zone brings new meaning to the term BOFH as the engineers deal with bandwidth hogs and prioritize international traffic.

A technical decision to keep a copy of the user database (the HLR) in Benghazi was crucial to keeping peoples phones on line. There are reasons besides earthquakes and Tsunamis to keep your data backed up in geographically diverse locations.

The report expands and corrects the WSJ article covered on slashdot before.

Submission + - Where can we find PRACTICAL technology news? (physorg.com)

Submitted by

crhylove

on Friday May 13, 2011 @09:26PM

crhylove writes: "I find myself reading physorg and slashdot nearly every day, and I love them both dearly. Frequently, I'll find an article relevant to something a fellow engineer is doing, and send them over a link. Inevitably, I get a response about how this technology is cool, that idea is neat, but we'll have to wait 10 years before we can use the tech and it's available in the market. Is there a website devoted to new technology that is freshly available and not just a concept or vapor ware?"

Submission + - Eidos Hacked: Thousands of E-Mails, Résum (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13, 2011 @07:49PM

An anonymous reader writes: Hackers might have accessed up to 25,000 e-mail addresses and 350 résumés during an attack on game developer Eidos Interactive’s websites, parent company Square Enix said Friday.

The security breach, which Square Enix said occurred Wednesday, could have given hackers access to user data for the Deus Ex: Human Revolution website, as well as résumés submitted by job applicants to Eidos.

According to a report by former Washington Post writer Brian Krebs, the official Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Eidos websites were inaccessible Thursday morning. During this period, hackers reportedly put up a banner that read “Owned by Chippy1337.”

The hackers, Krebs wrote, said they plan to distribute the stolen information on file sharing networks. His report pegs the volume of information stolen, according to the hackers, to be the personal information of more than 80,000 users and 9,000 ésumés.

A recent Ars Technica report suggests there might be discord among members of hacking collective Anonymous, centering on a 17-year-old British hacker named Ryan. According to a chat log uncovered by Krebs, the Eidos hackers attempted to frame Ryan for the attack.

Submission + - Appeals court throws out Rambus patent ruling (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Friday May 13, 2011 @07:47PM

angry tapir writes: "A U.S. appeals court has ruled on two patent lawsuits that pit Rambus against two competing DRAM makers, sending both cases back to district courts for reconsideration. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a lower court ruling requiring Hynix Semiconductor to pay Rambus damages and fees totaling US$397 million for the use of its patents in DRAM chips."

Submission + - The disgraceful interrogation of L.A. school libra (latimes.com) 1

Submitted by Devil on Friday May 13, 2011 @04:34PM

Devil writes: In a scene that even Kafka couldn't have dreamed up, school librarians in Los Angeles are being interrogated like common criminals. If they fail the interrogation, they'll be fired; if they pass, they'll cease to be librarians.

Submission + - Zediva Fights Back Against MPAA (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by MoldySpore on Friday May 13, 2011 @03:54PM

MoldySpore writes: When Zediva burst onto the streaming scene earlier this year, they managed to do something nobody else was doing. Navigating around the copyright law they found a way to stream rental movies not currently available on other services, because they were still inside the DVD sales window, and filled a role not currently part of the competitions services. The service grants a "rental" of the physical movie to the user, who is then able to stream it over the internet, usually with the option to re-rent after played. By having it be a rental service, they were able to avoid some of the legalese associated with streaming movies outside of that sales window. Needless to say the MPAA was not pleased. But instead of making nice with the MPAA, Zediva has decided to fight back in the form of expensive legal heavy-hitters from " elite San Francisco law firm, Durie Tangri", which has forced the MPAA to hire their own team of expensive legal ninjas.

Zediva argues what most technologically informed people would when looking at this service: that they are essentially a rental service who are renting physical media, and providing the DVD player and a very long cable to the renters' TV. They are able to do this while providing the same function that the traditional brick and mortar stores do during the DVD sales window: a place for people to watch rental movies that were just released on DVD. The only difference is that you don't have to physically walk into a shady video store and pick it up because they stream that DVD for you that you just rented. It is a clever interpretation of the copyright law, and will certainly have some impacts on future streaming cases.

Comment Re:Not just KPN (Score 1) 77

by geobaker on Friday May 13, 2011 @03:17PM (#36121278) Attached to: Dutch Provider KPN Under Fire Over DPI

Is it a sad commentary on the US that the general press in NL carry this as a hot/lead story, while over here it would be blip on the general press radar? Perhaps that's my age showing that I 'remember when...' this would have been a big deal in general in the US; now I think it would only be in certain interested groups.

(and I'm with MarkvW on DPI. damn i'm old... :)

Comment Re:Without PSN (Score 1) 386

by geobaker on Friday May 13, 2011 @03:53AM (#36115794) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Should Sony Compensate PSN Users?

Amen. I used to read the fine print on packaging of games and hardware to look for confirmation of compatability. Now I want to see what login/access stipulations are required.
I know I'm fighting a losing battle, but I'm just not interested in providing a company with my key personal data AND my hard-earned cash. Let me toil away in obscurity if *I* choose; I know I can expose myself (informationally speaking) at any time by clicking 2 buttons or 'answering a short survey' in exchange for a free 6-pack of coke.

Submission + - City Council Candidate Censors Debate with DMCA (gvtexas.com) 4

Submitted by claytongulick on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @10:08PM

claytongulick writes: I've become involved in a local city council election in Grapevine, Texas. Normally, these elections are pretty friendly affairs, but this one has turned nasty: one of the city council candidates has been using the DMCA to censor websites that are critical of her.

The website "comecleankathleen.com" contained information and questions critical of the candidate Kathleen Thompson. The site contained public records information about the funding sources of Kathleen's campaign and questions about her background and organizational affiliation.

In a chilling example of the censorship powers of the DMCA, this website was taken down only a week before the election. Kathleen's DMCA claims were clearly bogus (she claimed copyright on public records) but according to the DMCA, this doesn't matter — when a DMCA takedown notice is filed, the ISP removes the site, then has fourteen days to notify the owner of the website of the alleged infringment, whereupon the owner can file a counter-notice.

The problem here, is that the DMCA is clearly being abused — and by the time a counter notice could be filed, the election will be over. The owner of the site has no recourse, and in this way any information that is damaging to a candidate can be censored until after the election.

The only penalties, according to the DMCA section 512, for filing a fradulent notice are that the filer will have to pay the expense of putting the site back up (and attourney fees, if applicable). Well, in the case of a political election, the filers wouldn't even fight the counter-notice and would be happy to pay the penalty to restore the site — after the election has passed.

Clearly, this was never the intended purpose of the DMCA — but what she has done doesn't appear to be in any way illegal.

Is this the future of politics? Will political candidates be able to censor information on the web at any time using bogus copyright claims and the DMCA?

(Disclaimer: as I mentioned, I became involved with this election when I created a campaign site for a different candidate — not the one that was taken town)

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