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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can any wireless tech challenge fiber to the home? 2

Submitted by danielmorrison
danielmorrison writes: In Holland, MI (birthplace of Slashdot) we're working toward fiber to the home. A handful of people have asked why not go wireless instead? I know my reasons (speed, privacy, and we have an existing fiber loop) but are any wireless technologies good enough that cities should consider them? If so, what technologies and what’s had success stories?
Businesses

Unpaid Contributors Provide Corporate Tech Support 221

Posted by kdawson from the and-when-you're-done-there's-this-fence-to-paint dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times writes about Justin McMurry of Keller, TX, who spends up to 20 unpaid hours per week helping Verizon customers with high-speed fiber optic Internet, television and telephone service. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies, and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service. Such enthusiasts are known as lead users, or super-users, and their role in contributing innovations to product development and improvement — often selflessly — has been closely researched in recent years. These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. 'You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that's where the magic happens,' says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon. The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Lyle Fong, co-founder of Lithium Technologies whose web site advertises that a vibrant community can easily save a company millions of dollars per year in deflected support calls' and whose current roster of 125 clients includes AT&T, BT, iRobot, Linksys, Best Buy, and Nintendo. Lithium's customer service sites for companies offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and kudos counts. 'That alone is addictive,' says Fong. 'They are revered by their peers.' Meanwhile McMurry, who is 68 and a retired software engineer, continues supplying answers by the bushel, all at no pay. 'People seem to like most of what I say online, and I like doing it.'"
The Courts

Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA 785

Posted by timothy from the similar-to-the-old-boss dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
Space

Illinois Declares Pluto a Planet 512

Posted by timothy from the after-ruling-out-pebble-and-mailing-tube dept.
The Bad Astronomer writes "The legislators in Illinois, always on the lookout for more places to find voters, have passed a resolution declaring Pluto is a planet. I'm not sure what else can be said here, except that — besides overstepping their jurisdiction just a wee bit — they make a couple of scientific howlers in the resolution itself."
Windows

Microsoft Windows, On a Mainframe 422

Posted by timothy from the operating-systems-plural dept.
coondoggie writes with an excerpt from Network World: "Software that for the first time lets users run native copies of the Windows operating systems on a mainframe will be introduced Friday by data center automation vendor Mantissa. The company's z/VOS software is a CMS application that runs on IBM's z/VM and creates a foundation for Intel-based operating systems. Users only need a desktop appliance running Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client, which is the same technology used to attach to Windows running on Terminal Server or Citrix-based servers. Users will be able to connect to their virtual and fully functional Windows environments without any knowledge that the operating system and the applications are executing on the mainframe and not the desktop."
Encryption

How To, When You Have To Encrypt Absolutely Everything? 468

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the first-step-is-teaching-people-how-not-to-be-stupid dept.
Dark Neuron writes "My institution has thousands of computers, and is looking at starting an IT policy to encrypt everything, all hard drives, including desktops, laptops, external hard drives, USB flash drives, etc. I am looking at an open source product for Windows, Mac, UNIX, as well as portable hard drives, but I am concerned about overhead and speed penalties. Does anyone have experience and/or advice with encrypting every single device in a similar situation?"
Microsoft

Look What's Cooking At Microsoft Labs 125

Posted by timothy from the smart-people-cool-toys dept.
stinkymountain writes "Writer John Brandon spent two days at Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond and got an inside look at some pretty interesting projects under development, including a robotic receptionist, a new type of touch screen for people with fat fingers, and an electronic table that allows multiple people to collaborate in real time. Brandon also talks about some of these research projects on this NPR podcast."

New MacBook Case Leak Rumors 243

Posted by CmdrTaco from the dear-god-i-need-a-new-machine dept.
Someone noted that there are more macbook case leaks which look to all but confirm a new MacBook and possibly a MacBook Pro expected to be announced for later this week. There seem to be fewer ports, and no leaks of a 17" aircraft carrier laptop.

Comment Re:Could you get around this... (Score 3, Informative) 287

by charleschuck (#15871765) Attached to: The Keyboard That Could Phone Home
The article says 'In applications such as telnet and remote desktop, a packet is sent every time a user presses a key' - is this the case with ssh too?

Far be it from me to question the article, but I had been under the impression that Nagle's Algorithm had been designed to concatenate small buffers—such as telnet—to prevent them from necessarily sending a packet with each keypress.

I am not a TCP stack guru (IANATCPSG?!), but it seems like, though this algorithm was designed to reduce congestion, it would upset a timing attack by having to wait for the ACK of the last packet—at least on high latency links.

SSH, at least as of 2002, according to this e-mail, turns on TCP_NODELAY, which disables the algorithm to reduce latency of keypresses in a connection when it believes an interactive session has been started. Thus, SSH does indeed send a packet with each keypress.

Comment Pardon me... (Score 2, Insightful) 1089

by turkmenistani (#11346236) Attached to: Smart Guns are Coming
From the article:

"This technology is similar to how electronic machines read an individual's signature upon completing a credit card transaction," said Sebastian.

Bullshit - I work as a cashier and half of the people "signing" their transaction either make a quick dash or scribble random lines. Hopefully these new smart guns aren't "similar", otherwise Police will have a false sense of security that their unsafe firearms can't be used against them.

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