gschmidt - Slashdot User

Music Labels say No Deal with Qtrax 58

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @10:22AM from the so-close-and-yet-so-far dept.

mikesd81 writes "Sunday we discussed apparently great news: a company announced making a deal with the major labels to provide DRM-free, ad-supported music. There's just one problem with that. Reuters reports that the Big 4 music labels have denied having any deal with Qtrax. Contrary to Qtrax's reports, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner had publicly denied that they had agreed to back the new Qtrax service. Universal Music, the largest of the group, said it also had not signed a deal for the new Qtrax service and is still in discussions. EMI Group said that while its song publishing unit has an agreement with Qtrax, its recorded music arm, EMI Music, does not. EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner all previously had agreements with Qtrax, which was testing a paid music download service. Sources say those agreements expired in the last year and did not cover the new free, ad-supported model now being promoted by Qtrax. Qtrax did not immediately respond to further queries about its agreements with other companies."

Google Wants You to Report Malware 135

Posted by Zonk on Saturday December 01, 2007 @07:37PM from the there's-a-propaganda-poster-in-this dept.

darthcamaro writes "As part of its ongoing effort to keep a clean index Google is soliciting the help of web browsers to let them know when we find malware in the index. Celebrated Google hacker Johnny Long thinks it's a good idea, though he told the site Internet News that he doesn't think it'll stop real hackers. From the article: 'Most in search of malware for offensive use know the good stuff — it ain't distributed through public Web ... It's distributed through dark Web servers, peer-to-peer networks, IRC channels, torrents and the like. Google's efforts will not affect how skilled hackers get access to malware.'"

Miro Turns 1.0 81

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday November 13, 2007 @04:33PM from the digital-restrictions-malcontents dept.

nicholasreville writes "We have just released version 1.0 of our internet video application Miro. Miro is a free and open-source (GPL) RSS aggregator and video player with BitTorrent support and a built-in guide of video feeds. It's created by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is devoted to making online video more open and has received grants from Mozilla and Mitch Kapor, among others. In contrast to closed, proprietary delivery systems, Miro embraces open standards and DRM-free video. We build this software because we think it's absolutely crucial that internet video have an open technology foundation. We don't need more gatekeepers. Miro was featured previously on Slashdot."

Patterns in Lottery Numbers 563

Posted by Zonk on Thursday November 01, 2007 @03:12PM from the you're-still-advised-against-playing dept.

markmcb writes "Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the lottery, i.e., random numbers are selected and people guess what they will be for a cash prize. But how random are the numbers? Matt Vea has conducted a pattern analysis of the MegaMillions lottery, which recently offered a sum of $370M (USD) to the winner. Matt shows that the lottery isn't as random as it may seem and that there are 'better' choices than others to be made when selecting numbers. From the article, 'A single dollar in MegaMillions purchases a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of landing the jackpot ... a player stands a mildly better chance of winning a partial prize through the selection of weighted numbers.'" Includes some excellent charts of his analysis.

Comment Only ez-gimpy, not the new gimpy-r (Score 1) 350

by gschmidt on Monday October 20, 2003 @12:38PM (#7261241) Attached to: Baffling the Spam Bots

Check the article and the webpage; CAPTCHAs that work from a word list appear to be vulnerable to attacks that compute a confidence for each word in the wordlist -- this is how the current generation of CMU CAPTCHAs can be machine-solved 90%+ of the time -- and the new CAPTCHAs at captcha.net use random letters instead of a wordlist.

captcha.net also has "demonstration" image recognition CAPTCHAs, where the user must look at a picture of a cat and choose the radio button marked "cat". That would certainly require familiarity with English. On the other hand, it would require familiarity with English on the part of the CAPTCHA's *intended* audience as well :)

Slashdot Top Deals