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Comment Just Thanks (Score 1) 1521

by matt_king (#37205428) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

/. is the site I've been visiting daily since I "discovered' the internet in college in 1997...I can't imagine the site without you, but I'm hoping all the best for you in your future endeavors.

I still remember (unless im cloudy) when http://slashdot.org added http://www.slashdot.org as an alternate DNS, and thinking I was cool because I still used the old address (stupid now I know, but it seemed cool to my teenage self at the time :-)
The Courts

Buffalo Tech Gets New Trial On Wi-Fi Patent 78

Posted by kdawson from the oh-give-me-a-home-router dept.
MrLint writes "It's been a long, nearly two years of silence since CSIRO won a patent battle against Buffalo Tech, causing an injunction preventing the Austin company from selling wireless routers. On September 19, 2008, a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that CSIRO patent claims are invalid and Buffalo is getting a new trial. With any luck, we will be able to get our grubby hands on low-cost Wi-Fi routers again!"
Privacy

Anti-Terrorist Data Mining Doesn't Work Very Well 163

Posted by kdawson from the could-have-told-you-and-did dept.
Presto Vivace and others sent us this CNet report on a just-released NRC report coming to the conclusion, which will surprise no one here, that data mining doesn't work very well. It's all those darn false positives. The submitter adds, "Any chance we could go back to probable cause?" "A report scheduled to be released on Tuesday by the National Research Council, which has been years in the making, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism 'is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.' Inevitable false positives will result in 'ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses' being incorrectly flagged as suspects. The whopping 352-page report, called 'Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,' amounts to [be] at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003."
Television

TiVo PC Could Be a Game-Changer 191

Posted by kdawson from the and-you-thought-google-had-the-goods-on-you dept.
An anonymous reader sends in an article by Andrew Keen (author of "The Cult of the Amateur") about TiVo's new TiVo PC, which he believes could seal the fate of advertising on online videos. Just as TiVo let viewers zap commercials on broadcast TV, TiVo PC — a TV tuner that can be plugged into a PC — will let Net viewers of the likes of Hulu.com and ABC.com skip commercials in the nascent medium of online video. Keen believes that TiVo's business model involves (besides selling lots of $199 boxes) mining and selling the far richer stream of user behavioral data that TiVo PC will enable.
The Internet

Two Europeans Indicted In US For 2003 DDOS Attacks 93

Posted by timothy from the how-about-some-shrimp-echouafni dept.
narramissic writes "In a continuation of the first successful U.S. investigation ever into DDOS attacks, Axel Gembe, 25, of Germany and Lee Graham Walker, 24, of England were indicted Thursday by a grand jury in Los Angeles, California, on one count of conspiracy and one count of intentionally damaging a computer system. The two men were allegedly hired by Jay R. Echouafni, owner of Orbit Communication, a Massachusetts-based company that sold home satellite systems, to carry out DDOS attacks against two of Orbit's competitors."

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