Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Idle

Submission + - Harry Potter blamed for India's disappearing owls (google.com) 2

Submitted by GillBates0
GillBates0 writes: Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blamed fans of Harry Potter for the demise of wild owls in the country as children seek to emulate the boy wizard by taking the birds as pets. Following Harry Potter, there seems to be a strange fascination even among the urban middle classes for presenting their children with owls," Ramesh said Wednesday, according to comments reported by the BBC.
Google

Submission + - Google Admits To Collecting Emails and Passwords! (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research Google, in an interesting blog post on how Google will be creating stronger privacy controls, slipped in some very interesting information at the end of his post, disclosing that after Streetview WiFi Payload data was analyzed by regulators, their investigations revealed that some incredibly private information was harvested in some cases.

Eustace noted that "It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords."
Idle

Submission + - Pirate Parties Plan to Shoot Site Into Orbit (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by palmerj3
palmerj3 writes: It is almost four years ago that The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, so they could host their site without having to bother about copyright law – an ambitious plan that turned out to be unaffordable. This week, Pirate Parties worldwide started brainstorming about a similarly ambitious plan. Instead of founding their own nation, they want to shoot a torrent site into orbit.

Submission + - NRO Warns They are on Final IPv4 Address Blocks (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: According to the Number Resources Organization, they will have issued their final twelve IPv4 blocks in a few months. Each block is 16 million addresses and represents 1/256 of the total addresses issued. We are now down to 12 blocks left in the global pool for issuing to Regional Internet Registries who will then assign the last addresses that will run out sometime later in 2011. The pool of free addresses works out to be less than half of where we were in January. The new numbers from the NRO indicate estimated global pool IP address exhaustion in a few months with the final registrations in late 2011, a year earlier than they estimated at the beginning of 2010.
Social Networks

Submission + - Facebook Implements 'Download Your Profile' Option (computerworld.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Facebook is rolling out some new changes (including groups) that are supposed to liberate user control. But something that might interest Slashdot readers even more is that they now allow you to download all your information from Facebook. That's everything, all your posts, pictures, videos, friend lists, etc. A video from David of the Open Source team at Facebook explains how it will work although I don't see that option on my profile yet (they are slowly rolling it out). There's not a lot of details it but they at least require you to click a link from an e-mail and reenter your password to get this (to avoid spambots harvesting everyone's data and careless use of public computers resulting in data leaks). Perhaps competitors like Diaspora would be interested in using this base information to germinate user seeds?

Submission + - Nations Differ on "Information Weapons" (npr.org)

Submitted by DrgnDancer
DrgnDancer writes: There's an interesting story on NPR's website about recent efforts to control so called "information weapons" on the Internet. What's interesting here is that the term "information weapon", as defined by many of the countries trying to limit them, doesn't mean what you would think. From the article:

"At a U.N. disarmament conference in 2008, Sergei Korotkov of the Russian Defense Ministry argued that anytime a government promotes ideas on the Internet with the goal of subverting another country's government — even in the name of democratic reform — it should qualify as "aggression." And that, in turn, would make it illegal under the U.N. Charter.

"Practically any information operation conducted by a state or a number of states against another state would be qualified as an interference into internal affairs," Korotkov said through an interpreter. So any good cause, like [the] promotion of democracy, cannot be used as a justification for such actions.""

The Russians, and a lot of other countries (Iran and China notable among them), apparently consider the free exchange of information to be an information technology threat. One that must be managed by treaty.
Patents

Submission + - ‘Preliminary’ finding invalidates VoIP (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: The finding by the U.S. Patent Office is only preliminary, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it “an important first step in busting a patent that stifles innovation and the use of VoIP as a free speech tool.” C2 Communications has used the patent to extract one-time payments from the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Qwest.

Submission + - Intel Threatens DMCA Using HDCP Crack

Submitted by
mikesd81
mikesd81 writes: "Intel is apparently threatening to use the DMCA against anyone using the HDCP crack under the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.

“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”

"
Idle

Submission + - YouTube videos on display at the Guggenheim (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Move over Picasso....here comes "Charlie bit me"? 125 YouTube videos are now on display at Guggenheim museums around the world. The videos, chosen from more than 23,000 submissions, are part of an exhibit called "YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video", featuring both well-known YouTube hits and barely-seen works by students. This group of videos will be narrowed down to about 20 entries, which will be featured at the Guggenheim in New York next month.

Slashdot Top Deals

Center meeting at 4pm in 2C-543.

Close