Comment Turntables (Score 1) 790
Turntables beginning and finishing "silence" parts sound very distinctive, especially on well used equipment and well used disc.
Xbox Modding Trial Dismissed 179
It seems the harsh words from District Court Judge Philip Gutierrez on Wednesday had their intended effect; prosecutors in Matthew Crippen's Xbox modding case have now dismissed the indictment. Quoting Wired:
"Witness No. 1, Tony Rosario, was an undercover agent with the Entertainment Software Association. He told jurors Wednesday that he paid Crippen $60 in 2008 to modify an Xbox, and secretly videotaped the operation. Rosario had responded to Crippen’s advertisement on the internet and met Crippen at his Anaheim house. All of that had been laid out in pretrial motions. But during his testimony, Rosario also said Crippen inserted a pirated video game into the console to verify that the hack worked. That was a new detail that helped the government meet an obligation imposed by the judge that very morning, when Gutierrez ruled that the government had to prove Crippen knew he was breaking the law by modding Xboxes. But nowhere in Rosario’s reports or sworn declarations was it mentioned that Crippen put a pirated game into the console. ... [Prosecutor Allen Chiu] conceded he never forwarded that information to the defense."
Comment Re:Talk about a stupid pissing contest (Score 1) 59
I am Hungarian, and I authoritatively say they did (do) work.
I have used many of them in my daily work, and while I agree that they were not perfect, and often outdated, still served their purpose rather well. Defacing them with a low quality remark, even if officially, is not very government-like behaviour. (It's like replacing the webpage of the parliament by a text "hahaha this site sucks! --regards, your new government". Childish.)
Either replace the sites with an objective explanation (which would be, by my opinion, unacceptably irresponsible behaviour) or rather create the new ones and replace them _after_ they're done. Right now it's what it was: part of the decade old ongoing pissing contest, as the commenter observed.
Comment Reality check (Score 1) 496
By the way about cuil indexing trillions of pages vs. it's being just a big lie: check your httpd access log, cos' nobody's gonna fake THAT.
I've got plenty of hits from Twiceler (cuil's bot), but only on some sites. Most were only hit on /robots.txt. Some sites - even large ones - were not indexed at all. But some were thoroughly read, so I cannot really say the number is a lie, they seem to index lots of pages. Finding the content, now, that's another. But the interface seem to be a crap: if there's too much load on servers it returns "not found" instead of "server error". Stupid.
Wikipedia Infiltrated by Intelligence Agents? 428
An anonymous reader writes "International Humanitarian Law professor Ludwig Braeckeleer thinks so. In an article published yesterday in the Korean newspaper OhMyNews, he reveals a discovery he made while researching a story on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland. It turns out that a Wikipedia administrator named SlimVirgin is actually Linda Mack, a woman who as a young graduate in the 1980s was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger of ABC News to help with the investigation. Salinger later came to believe that Mack was actually working for Britain's MI5 on a mission to investigate the bombing and to infiltrate and monitor the news agency. Shortly after her Wikipedia identity was uncovered, many of her edits to articles related to the bombing were permanently removed from the database in an attempt to conceal her identity. This discovery comes only months after another Wikipedia admin was caught lying about his credentials to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?"
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