jbskbert - Slashdot User

4D Analogue of Megaminx Puzzle 80

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @11:23AM from the pretty-puzzling dept.

roice writes "The crazy hypercubists who created the 4D and 5D Rubik's cubes (here are previous Slashdot posts on the 4-D one and the 5-D one) have now developed a free working 4-dimensional software analogue of the Megaminx puzzle. Composed of 120 dodecahedral cells, the underlying structure is arguably the most beautiful of 4D geometrical shapes, with amazing symmetries and no analogue in dimensions higher than 4. Though some have already begun working on solutions for this 'Hyperminx,' it has yet to be solved by anyone. Also, when it comes to number of positions, it dwarfs the previous puzzles by many thousands of orders of magnitude!"

CIPPIC Files Privacy Complaint Over DPI 21

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @10:54AM from the show-us-your-packets dept.

dj_yaz writes "A group of University Of Ottawa law students who deal with online privacy issues last week filed a complaint with Canada's Privacy Commissioner about Bell Canada's use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to monitor internet subscribers' online activities without their knowledge or consent."

HP Seals the Deal, Buys EDS For $14B 214

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @10:45AM from the the-same-only-different dept.

netbuzz writes "Following yesterday's spate of heated rumors, the announcement comes this morning that HP has completed a deal to buy EDS for just under $14 billion. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of both companies, according to HP. EDS CEO Ron Rittenmeyer has issued an e-mail to his employees promising that the company brand will continue and, "We are — and will remain — EDS."

China to Regulate Internet Map Publishing 279

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @10:07AM from the emblematic dept.

hackingbear writes "After text, pictures, and videos, China starts regulating Internet map publishing (here is the google translation.) The government believes that Internet maps can represent the state's sovereignty and its political and diplomatic positions in the international community — and consequently, inaccurate maps could harm national interests and dignity, produce bad political influences, reveal national secrets and harm national security, in addition to harming consumer interests. So from now on, publishing maps would require approval and (yet another) license from the state survey bureau. That means Google, Yahoo, etc., need to remove China from the map; or maybe they just pay up some officials and their agents to acquire yet another license. And our newest 80Gbps DPI monsters need to be upgraded to identify maps together with porn."

Just How Effective is System Hardening? 154

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @09:31AM from the how-large-is-your-facade dept.

SkiifGeek, pointing to our recent coverage of what the NSA went through to create SELINUX, wants to know just how effective system hardening is at preventing successful attack, and writes "When Jay Beale presented at DefCon 14, he quoted statistics (PDF link) that Bastille protected against every major threat targeting Red Hat 6, before the threats were known. With simple techniques available for the everyday user which can start them on the path towards system hardening, just how effective have you found system and network hardening to be? The NSA does have some excellent guides to help harden not only your OS but also your browser and network equipment."

Lectures On the Frontiers of Physics Online 77

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @08:14AM from the current-perimeter dept.

modernphysics writes "The Outreach Department at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics offers a wide array of online lecture playbacks examining hot topics in modern physics and beyond. Presentations include Neil Turok's 'What Banged?,' John Ellis with 'The Large Hadron Collider,' Nima Arkani-Hamed with 'Fundamental Physics in 2010,' Paul Steinhardt with 'Impossible Crystals,' Edward Witten with 'The Quest for Supersymmetry,' Seth Lloyd with 'Programming the Universe,' Anton Zeilinger with 'From Einstein to Quantum Information,' Raymond Laflamme with 'Harnessing the Quantum World,' and many other talks. The presentations feature a split-screen presentation with the guest speaker in one frame and their full-frame graphics in the other."

Brad Neuberg, Google Gears, and the Future of the Web 65

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 12, 2008 @06:41PM from the where-are-we-headed dept.

Linux.com has an interesting look at Google Gears and one of its leading evangelists, Brad Neuberg. "For Neuberg -- as for most developers -- the idea of expanding the Web's capabilities is intriguing in itself. But both inside and outside Google, his argument is that there's more at stake than just a particular piece of technology. In fact, he does not even seem particularly concerned whether Gears or some rival project takes on the role he envisions. What matters, he says, is that finding a solution to the problems of the Web is essential not only to the continued evolution of the Web, but also to its continued freedom. "

Comment Re:paper on usenet early days (Score 2) 217

by jbskbert on Sunday August 27, 2000 @09:27AM (#824984) Attached to: Usenet Archive from 1981

Aah .. Ronda Hauben :) She's done a lot for Internet research, such as publishing a book on the subject ("Netizens") with her son Michael who was also the editor of an online newsletter called the Amateur Computerist which had a 1994 edition celebrating 25 years of UNIX ( http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~rwoods/internet/amco mp61.html), among other things. The guy behind the Usenet archives, by the way, is Bruce Jones, who was one of the first Usenet ethnographers and nearly wrote his thesis on the subject, just in case you were wondering. As well as the A-news archive, he also maintains an archive on the discussion on the history of Usenet, in which most of the Usenet biggies participated (Rich Salz, Mark Horton, Gene Spafford etc.) For more on Internet history and culture, check out http://duplox.wz-berlin.de (warning: most of the articles are in German, but the most important ones have been translated).

Jillian.

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