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Comment Re:the Greens support the bill in principle... (Score 5, Informative) 162

by madleech (#35809142) Attached to: NZL Govt Rushes Thru Controversial Anti-Piracy Law

Fuck them! I've been saying all along that they are no better than anybody else. This only proves it.

Vent all you like, but the bill itself contains this snippet:

Green Party minority view
The Green Party applauded the introduction of this legislation, as it began to address the significant failings of its predecessor.
The Green Party has always opposed, and continues to oppose, termination (account suspension) as a remedy for infringing file sharing. We believe it is disproportionate to the problem and would not solve it. The compromise before the committee isn’t a compromise on this issue at all. It is just a delay in implementation of this ill-considered remedy.
The Green Party asserts that there is a danger in heavy-handed regulation for a problem that may only be a temporary result of new technologies upsetting traditional business models.
The use of fines rather than Internet suspension is a more appropriate sanction for file sharing, and the punishments should be proportionate to the crime.
Citizens are not denied the right to use their telephones because they happened to be used in the commission of a crime, and this legislation should not set any precedent. Access to the Internet has become a necessity in an era when more and more public and private services are only provided online.
While supporting the bill in principle, the Green Party opposes the retention of termination in the legislation.

While it would be nice if the Greens said that any and all regulation of the internet is wrong, I find their stance above very accurately sums up my own feelings on the matter. They are very plainly pointing out that this is the wrong approach, that it is heavy handed, inappropriate, and over the top. They even say, more or less, that "old media" should stop harassing the government and join the real world. Is this not everything that /. champions?

This current govt seem quite happy to anything they damn well please, including forcibly sacking the elected members of our regional council and replacing them with a body of their own choosing who are not answerable to their ratepayers.

There doesn't seem to be much we can do, but I encourage you to at the very least email the Hon Simon Power (simon.power@national.org.nz) and express your disdain for his actions over, and sponsorship of, this bill. If we don't speak out, we stand even less chance of changing a thing.
Microsoft

The Truth About Last Year's Xbox 360 Recall 255

Posted by kdawson from the value-for-the-money dept.
chrplace forwards an article in which Gartner's Brian Lewis offers his perspective on what led to last year's Xbox 360 recall. Lewis says it happened because Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor. "Microsoft designed the graphic chip on its own, cut a traditional ASIC vendor out of the process, and went straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., he explained. But in the end, by going cheap — hoping to save tens of millions of dollars in ASIC design costs, Microsoft ended up paying more than $1 billion for its Xbox 360 recall. To fix the problem, Microsoft went back to an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip, Lewis added. (Based on a previous report, the ASIC vendor is most likely the former ATI Technologies, now part of AMD.)"
Microsoft

Yahoo!/Microsoft Execs Meet For Round Two 84

Posted by Zonk from the ready-steady-fight dept.
psychosmyth writes "Microsoft's deal to Yahoo! is apparently back on the table. Yahoo execs met again with Microsoft early this past week to re-discuss the deal that fell through earlier. 'The gathering, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, gave Microsoft its first chance to sell Yahoo on the rationale for the proposed marriage since the software maker unveiled its plans six weeks ago. Since then, Yang has been exploring different ways to ward off Microsoft. The alternatives have included possible alliances with Internet search and advertising leader Google Inc., News Corp.'s MySpace.com and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.' Microsoft is apparently still keeping all of its options open; a hostile take-over is not out of the question."
Hardware

The Joy of the Flash Drive 332

Posted by Zonk from the little-quiet-different dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A post to the C|Net site covers the numerous benefits of flash drives, such as speed, temperature, and battery consumption. The perk author Michael Kanellos is most fond of? The distinct lack of noise. 'The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises. Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee. '"
The Internet

Jonathan Zittrain On the Future of the Internet 216

Posted by Soulskill from the take-back-the-tubes dept.
uctpjac writes "Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford and renowned cyberlaw scholar, gave a lecture explaining that the Internet has to be taken out of the hands of the anarchists, the libertarians, and the State, and handed back to self-policing communities of experts. If we don't do this, he believes the Internet will suffer 'self-closure' — the open system will seal itself off when the inability to put its own house in order leads to a take-over by government and business. The article summarizes Zittrain's points and notes, "Forces of organized interests that do not play by the rules, like malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers are allowing another army of interests — corporate protectionists, often — to demand centralized, authoritarian solutions. This is the future of the Net unless we stop it.'"

Comment Printers too (Score 1) 322

by madleech (#21349099) Attached to: Half a Million Database Servers 'Have no Firewall'
That's nothing; while cleaning up a hacked windows server today, I happened across the IPs for a pair of Lexmark color laser printers. A little bit of digging later, I found they were wide open, sitting in the business centers at a couple of hotels in Washington DC.

My flatmate had great fun printing 40 pages of LOLCats transcontinental!

Next phase is to code up a genuine bit bucket: you pipe the bits in, they emerge goodness-knows-where from some poor sods randomly chosen printer :-) Might encourage them to secure things a little.
Sci-Fi

Adams' Dirk Gently Serialized on BBC Radio 144

Posted by Zonk from the hard-not-to-appreciate-a-robot-that-can-believe-stuff-for-you dept.
happy monday writes "Douglas Adams' 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' is being serialised by BBC Radio, starring Harry Enfield. The first episode can be listened to on Radio 4's website now." The Times has a fairly glowing review of the program, and (for US folks like myself) some incomprehensible British-isms to boot.
Microsoft

Stephane Rodriguez Dismantles Open XML 188

Posted by kdawson from the some-kind-of-joke dept.
Elektroschock writes "Stephane Rodriguez, a reengineering specialist who became popular for his article on MS Office 2007 binary data, now comprehensively debunks Microsoft's new Open XML format. With small case studies he demonstrates the impossible challenges third-party developers will face. His conclusion: it is 'defective by design.' Next week members of the International Standard Organization are likely to approve the format as a second official ISO standard for office documents, even though most nations have submitted comments. Rodriguez claims he is 'not affiliated to any pro-MS or anti-MS party/org[anization]/ass[ociation].'"
The Almighty Buck

Charging the Unhealthy More For Insurance 1106

Posted by kdawson from the no-carrots-for-you-here's-a-stick dept.
Joe The Dragon sends us a BusinessWeek story, run on Yahoo, about Clarian Health and the new thing they are trying with health insurance coverage for their employees. They are charging unhealthy people more. The article goes into some depth about whether this is a good idea and whether the practice might spread. "In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index (BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat) is over 30. If their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels are too high, they'll be charged $5 for each standard they don't meet. Ditto if they smoke: Starting next year, they'll be charged another $5 in each check."
Mars

Massive Cave Found on Mars 310

Posted by Zonk from the anybody-home dept.
mrcgran writes "Space.com is reporting a very deep hole found on Mars: 'The geological oddity measures some 330 feet (100 meters) across and is located on an otherwise bright dusty lava plain to the northeast of Arsia Mons, one of the four giant Tharsis volcanoes on the red planet. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) used its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument to draw a bead on the apparent deep hole — a feature that may cause more scientists to ponder about potential subsurface biology on Mars. Because the spot lacks a raised rim or tossed out material called ejecta, researchers have ruled out the pit being an impact crater. No walls or other details can be seen inside the hole, and so any possible walls might be perfectly vertical and extremely dark or — more likely — overhanging.' The original image and its cutout at full resolution can be found in the HiRISE site."
United States

Best Presidential Candidate for Nerds? 1140

Posted by Zonk from the vote-quimby dept.
blast writes "Given the broad field of candidates, I was wondering who the community thinks will make the best President when it comes to representing issues Slashdot readers might care about? Eg: privacy, 'total information awareness', Internet regulation and taxation, net neutrality, copyright/patent reform, the right to read, the right to secure communications, the right to tinker. Who do you think best represents your views? "
Linux

Is Linux Out of Touch With the Average User? 1067

Posted by Zonk from the games-may-have-something-to-do-with-this dept.
MrSmith writes "Is Linux's less than impressive market share an indication that the movement is out of touch with the average computer user? ZDNet examines five reasons that could explain why people are still willing to pay for (or pirate) an operating system when free alternatives exist. One of the reasons seems to be that despite what many Linux advocates claim, Windows users aren't on the whole dissatisfied with their OS: 'Despite what you read on websites and blogs, newspapers and magazines, people on the whole aren't all that dissatisfied with Windows. There are millions of users out there who just get on and use their PCs without any real difficulty.'"

Is Speech Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'? 313

Posted by Zonk from the why-do-salty-snacks-keep-coming-up-freedom-fries dept.
jcatcw writes "Speech recognition software is fast, but it still may not be accurate enough. Clerical jobs usually ask for 40 wpm, but speech recognition software can keep up with someone speaking at 160 wpm. In Lamont Wood's demo it did very well at too/two/to and which/witch, but will it still render 'I really admire your analysis' as "I really admire urinalysis'? At 95% accuracy, people aren't jumping on the bandwagon. Wood's typing speed is about 60 wpm with 93% accuracy, so he found that using speech recognition was about twice as fast as typing. Those who type at hunt-and-peck speeds will experience results that are even more dramatic. There's really only one product on the US market: Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance Communications. The free versions from Microsoft aren't up to the task and IBM sold ViaVoice to Nuance, where it's treated as an entry-level product."
Privacy

How Far Should a Job Screening Go? 675

Posted by Cliff from the where-would-you-draw-the-lnie dept.
SlashSquatch asks: "My sister is getting screened for a programming position with a financial firm. I was alarmed to hear she'll be getting fingerprinted at the Sheriff's Office as part of the screening process. Instantly I conjure up scenes of frame-ups and corporate scandals. I want to know, should this raise a flag? Would you submit to fingerprinting, blood tests and who knows what else (financial, genetic code, and so forth) for a programming position?"

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