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The Courts

Submission + - 11-Word Extracts infringe Copyright in Europe 2

Submitted by splodus
splodus writes: The European Court of Justice, which is Europe's highest court, has ruled that a service providing 11-word snippets of newspaper articles could be unlawful. Media monitoring company Infopaq International searches newspaper articles and provides clients with a keyword and the five words either side. This was challenged by the DDF, a group representing newspaper interests, as infringing their members' copyright. The court has referred the issue back to national courts to determine whether copyright laws in each country will be subject to the ruling. The full ruling is available at the European Court of Justice website.
Windows

Submission + - Amazon US refunds Windows license fee too

Submitted by rrohbeck
rrohbeck writes: Today Amazon credited my card with $65.45.

After ordering an Eee PC 1005 HA from amazon.com, I asked them for a refund for the cost of Windows XP via the "Contact us" form. At first they told me to cancel any items on my order that I wanted a refund for, but after I explained that XP was preinstalled on the machine they got it. They asked what the cost of the OS was, and I answered that I had no idea but that Amazon UK refunded GBP 40.00. Within a few hours I got a response saying "I've requested a refund of $65.45 to your Visa card."

Somehow I doubt that Amazon will charge Asus or even Microsoft, but maybe they will one day if more people do this.

Eeebuntu 3.01 doesn't have network (wired or wireless) drivers for the new generation of Eee PCs, but Karmic Alpha-3 does and looks quite good already. I love the Launcher! Now let's see how long the battery will last if I run Linux only off the SDHC card and don't spin the hard drive much. Voila, poor man's SSD.

Oh and peeling off the "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP" sticker is easy too.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Wi-Fi Allergy a PR Stunt

Submitted by ADiamond
ADiamond writes: There is no Wi-Fi allergy. The English DJ claiming a Wi-Fi sensitivity chronicled in Slashdot recently, was a PR stunt to promote his new album. It would appear that the stunt was highly successful, appearing in multiple high-profile media outlets like The Sun, The Telegraph, and Fox News. The article at Ars goes on to discuss the evidence, or lack-thereof, of electromagnetic spectrum sensitivity. Apparently, these publications don't bother to verify their sources. A cursory look into the 2% statistic would have yielded no backing data.
Security

Null Character Hack Allows SSL Spoofing 280

Posted by timothy from the cannot-anticipate-all-evil dept.
eldavojohn writes "Two researchers, Dan Kaminsky and Moxie Marlinspike, came up with exact same way to fake being a popular website with authentication from a certificate authority. Wired has the details: 'When an attacker who owns his own domain — badguy.com — requests a certificate from the CA, the CA, using contact information from Whois records, sends him an email asking to confirm his ownership of the site. But an attacker can also request a certificate for a subdomain of his site, such as Paypal.com\0.badguy.com, using the null character \0 in the URL. The CA will issue the certificate for a domain like PayPal.com\0.badguy.com because the hacker legitimately owns the root domain badguy.com. Then, due to a flaw found in the way SSL is implemented in many browsers, Firefox and others theoretically can be fooled into reading his certificate as if it were one that came from the authentic PayPal site. Basically when these vulnerable browsers check the domain name contained in the attacker's certificate, they stop reading any characters that follow the "\0 in the name.'"
The Courts

P.I.I. In the Sky 222

Posted by Soulskill from the not-about-pie-or-pi dept.
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A judge rules that IP addresses are not 'personally identifiable information' (PII) because they identify computers, not people. That's absurd, but in truth there is no standard definition of PII in the industry anyway, because you don't need one in order to write secure software. Here's a definition of 'PII' that the judge could have adopted instead, to reach the same conclusion by less specious reasoning." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts.
Security

Submission + - CCC Create a rogue CA certificate (win.tue.nl)

Submitted by
t3rmin4t0r
t3rmin4t0r writes: "Just when you were breathing easy about Kaminsky, DNS and the word hijacking, by repeating the word SSL in your head, the hackers at CCC were busy at work making a hash of SSL certificate security. Here's the scoop on how they set up their own rouge CA, by (from what I can figure) reversing the hash and engineering a collision up in MD5 space. Until now, md5 collisions have been ignored because nobody would put in that much effort to create a useful dummy file, but a CA certificate for phishing seems juicy enough to be fodder for the botnets now."
Television

David X. Cohen of Futurama Talks About the Movie 141

Posted by CmdrTaco from the things-i-want-to-see dept.
Joel Keller writes "I conducted a brief interview with David X. Cohen, EP and show-runner for Futurama, about the release of the new DVD, "Futurama: Bender's Big Score," as well as the return of his show to TV. The interview was posted to TV Squad this morning. In it, Cohen talks about how the movies will be split up into episodes, some of the inside references that they inserted for the die-hards, and a quick preview of what the second Futurama movie is going to be about."
Security

Submission + - Firefox popup blocker can allow access to local FS

Submitted by cj
cj writes: Whitedust has an interesting article where it appears that Michal Zalewski has unearthed a potentially dangerous vulnerability in the stock behaviour of Firefox's popup blocking element — when used in conjunction with another 'little trick' the vulnerability can apparently allow a malicious user to read files from an effected system and potentially gain access to sensitive information there on.
Education

Submission + - Professors want to ban Wikipedia

Submitted by
Inisheer
Inisheer writes: "History professors at Middlebury College are tired of having all their students submit the same bad information on term papers. The culprit: Wikipedia — the user-created encyclopedia that's full of great stuff, and also full of inaccuracies. Now the the entire History department has voted to ban students from using it. Other professors agree, but note that they're also enthusiastic contributors to Wikipedia. Read the full story here"
Security

Submission + - Anger over European medical data-sharing

Submitted by ukhackster
ukhackster writes: A row is brewing in Europe over plans to make medical records available across the EC. The scheme calls for interoperability between health systems in 22 different countries. Experts are predicting that security problems could expose confidential patient records, with one calling the affair "a colossal waste of money and energy". Could this be another huge IT project disaster on the horizon?
Enlightenment

Submission + - Open-unsolved Problems

Submitted by
CexpTretical
CexpTretical writes: "Their are plenty of open or unsolved problems left for this generation. Open problems exists in almost every field of study. Wikipedia maintains a small list of them and at least one international group called the Union of International Associations maintains a database of open problems. These types of resources point us to what may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet, to empower everyone to contribute or add to that body of information we call human knowledge and understanding. Not just academia or governments but anyone can join the great conversation, the ultimate forum."
Spam

Submission + - Catching spam by looking at traffic, not content

Submitted by AngryDad
AngryDad writes: HexView has proposed a method to deal with spam without scanning of message bodies. Instead, the method is based solely on traffic analysis. They call it STP (source trust prediction). An RBL-like server collects SMTP session source and destination addresses from participating MTAs and applies statistics to identify spamlike traffic patterns. A credibility score is returned to the MTA, so it can throttle down or drop possibly unwanted traffic. While I find it questionable, the method might be useful when combined with traditional keyword analysis.

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The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

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