halftrack - Slashdot User

UK Outlines Plan For Internet Black Boxes 419

Posted by timothy on Friday November 07, 2008 @05:50AM from the but-don't-panic-they'll-say-don't-panic-on-them dept.

RobotsDinner writes "In what sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot, the Home Office has made public plans to outfit the country's Internet with upstream data recorders to log pretty much everything that passes through. 'Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.'"

Comment Re:rewritten history (Score 1) 185

by halftrack on Sunday December 16, 2007 @08:04AM (#21716068) Attached to: The Transistor's 60th Birthday

Correct, Lilienfeld had the theory down but couldn't build a working device due to poorly understood and unknown surface effects. The transistor he described was a field effect transistor (FET.) This was also the type of transistor that Bardeen, Brattain and Schockley wanted to build. However, as I understand it, the point-contact transistor (which is a bipolar junction transistor, quite different from a FET) they created in 1947 was an "accident" while trying to build a FET.

Fans Cheer as Apple's iPhone Finally Hits Europe 381

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday November 10, 2007 @10:14AM from the fall-is-apple-season dept.

An anonymous reader sent in this article which opens, "Apple fans lined up through Yesterday night in Germany and Britain to be among the first in Europe to buy an iPhone, the must-have gadget that is set to shake up the mobile industry." Over 10,000 phones were sold in Germany by Friday afternoon. In France, however, the iPhone doesn't arrive until the end of month.

A Look At Free Reviewer Swag 144

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday October 28, 2007 @10:20AM from the something-to-think-about dept.

chicl3t writes "It used to be that the lagniappes that came along with hardware for review were things like USB drives — makes sense, one 128MB drive for a 100MB presentation. But...iPod nanos? As in more than one? That's another story entirely. It's damn nice swag, of course, but at what point is it too much? A DailyTech writer talks about his experiences with swag."

Swearing at Work is Bleeping Good For You 421

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 17, 2007 @11:36AM from the now-shut-the-bleep-up-you-bleeping-bleep dept.

coondoggie writes "This is the kind of news that your HR folks don't want to hear, but researchers today said letting workers swear at will in the workplace can benefit employees and employers. The study found regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UES). Researchers said their aim was to challenge leadership styles and suggest ideas for best practice. "Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner. Swearing was as a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness, or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress, " the study stated." I'm sure the discussion and tags on this story will be completely G Rated ;)

Submission + - How can 200,000 galaxies point the same way? (arxivblog.com) 1

Submitted by

KentuckyFC

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @08:16AM

KentuckyFC writes: "Does the universe have a preferred direction — an axis of evil as some astrophyscists have called it? It certainly looks that way with the publication today of a survey of 200,000 elliptical galaxies that indicates they are all aligned in the same direction. What's more, this axis is the same as the controversial alignment found in the cosmic microwave background by the WMAP spacecraft"

Submission + - GPL Violations On Windows Go Unnoticed?

Submitted by Scott_F on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @03:36PM

Scott_F writes: I recently reviewed several commercial, closed-source slideshow authoring packages for Windows and came across an alarming trend. Several of the packages I installed included GPL and LGPL software without any mention of the GPL, much less source code. For example, DVD Photo Slideshow (www.dvd-photo-slideshow.com) included mkisofs, cdrdao, dvdauthor, spumux, id3lib, lame, mpeg2enc and mplex (all of which are GPL or LGPL). What's worse is that the company tried to hide this by wrapping them all in DLL's! There are other violations in other packages as well. It seems that use of GPL software in commercial Windows applications is on the rise based on my testing of other software. My question is how much are GPL violations in the Windows world being pursued? Does the FSF or EFF follow-up on these if the platform is not GPL? How aware is the community of this trend?

Submission + - XP on 8MHz Intel Pentium and 20MB RAM

Submitted by

swehack

on Saturday February 24, 2007 @09:31AM

swehack writes: "The germans over at Winhistory.de managed to get their Windows XP Professional to run on an Intel Pentium clocked down to 8MHz and 20MB RAM. Here is the english version of their article, with plenty of pictures. On a related note they also won the golden hourglass for 'extreme waste of time'. What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?"

Do You Tell a Job Candidate How Badly They Did? 702

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @07:45PM from the let-the-job-market-sort-it-out dept.

skelter asks: "I have been lamenting with friends in the industry about interviewing woes and the candidates that we find. Consider a hypothetical job candidate comes in after some how making it through screening. In the team technical interview they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is he (or she) not as adequate as he thinks he is, but has demonstrated that he is a danger to any code base. Do you tell them? Quietly step away, usher them out and say nothing? Play with them on the whiteboard the way your cat plays with injured mice? Should you leave them as their own warning to others? Is there any obligation to guide them to gaining real experience? Can you give them any advice or is it all liability?"

A New Vulnerability In RSA Cryptography 108

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 18, 2006 @05:45PM from the predictions-of-trouble dept.

romiz writes, "Branch Prediction Analysis is a recent attack vector against RSA public-key cryptography on personal computers that relies on timing measurements to get information on the bits in the private key. However, the method is not very practical because it requires many attempts to obtain meaningful information, and the current OpenSSL implementation now includes protections against those attacks. However, German cryptographer Jean-Pierre Seifert has announced a new method called Simple Branch Prediction Analysis that is at the same time much more efficient that the previous ones, only needs a single attempt, successfully bypasses the OpenSSL protections, and should prove harder to avoid without a very large execution penalty." From the article: "The successful extraction of almost all secret key bits by our SBPA attack against an openSSL RSA implementation proves that the often recommended blinding or so called randomization techniques to protect RSA against side-channel attacks are, in the context of SBPA attacks, totally useless." Le Monde interviewed Seifert (in French, but Babelfish works well) and claims that the details of the SBPA attack are being withheld; however, a PDF of the paper is linked from the ePrint abstract.

How Bezos Messed With Texas 87

Posted by Zonk on Saturday November 11, 2006 @03:27PM from the have-to-stay-up-there-once-he-launches dept.

theodp writes "The WSJ has the behind-the-spaceport story on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Texas land grab for his Blue Origin space tourism venture. Bezos deputized an attorney (who once handled Amazon SEC filings) to make ranchers offers they couldn't refuse (and can't talk about), acquiring property through corporate entities with monikers including 'James Cook L.P.,' 'Jolliet Holdings,' 'Coronado Ventures,' and 'Cabot Enterprises' — all named for famous explorers and all using the same address, c/o [Star Trek-monikered] Zefram LLC. BTW, FAA temporary flight restrictions are in effect for Blue Origin until Monday ('DUE TO ROCKET LAUNCH ACTIVITY'). Let's hope it's more successful than Blue Origin's maiden flight."

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