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Comment Monitors Are Still Garbage (Score 1) 146

by prodigyx (#40615727) Attached to: A Fresh Look At Multi-Screen PC Gaming
Monitor prices continue to fall, but their quality does as well. The setup in this article is using 3x 1920x1080 monitors. What happened to all the 1920x1200 displays? Where are our 120Hz refresh rates? Multi-screen gaming is in the same place it was 5-7 years ago. How does this fluff make it to slashdot?

Comment Nothing to do with music (Score 2) 167

by prodigyx (#36120154) Attached to: LimeWire Settles For $105 Million
This money get used to push internet censorship bills like COICA and Protect IP through congress, and into Obama's pocket in exchange for appointing their lawyers into powerful government regulatory positions. The RIAA has very little to do with music. It is an evil organization and currently one of the biggest threats freedom and privacy both in the US and around the globe.
The Internet

Submission + - Westboro Baptists Stage Fake Anonymous Threat (siliconrepublic.com) 1

Submitted by
lenwood
lenwood writes: "Last week there was a story on /. reporting that the hacking group Anonymous was staging an attack against WBC (http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/02/18/2336216/Anonymous-Goes-After-GodHatesFagscom#comments). Turns out that this was a publicity stunt staged by WBC themselves. Anonymous issued a press release disassociating themselves from this."
Japan

Submission + - Piracy boost sales, says Japanese Government study (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new official study seems to confirm what a lot of the Slashdot crowd thinks, and the opposite of what the **AAs say:
"A prestigious economics think-tank of the Japanese Government has published a study which concludes that online piracy of anime shows actually increases sales of DVDs. The conclusion stands in sharp contrast with the entertainment industry’s claims that ‘illicit’ downloading is leading to billions of dollars in losses worldwide. It also puts the increased anti-piracy efforts of the anime industry in doubt."
More specifically, "(1) YouTube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny [a popular P2P program in Japan] file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales."
United States

Submission + - Patriot Act Up For Renewal, Nobody Notices

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "When the Patriot Act was first signed in 2001, it was billed as a temporary measure required because of the extreme circumstances created by the terrorist threat. The fear from its opponents was that executive power, once given, is seldom relinquished. Now the Examiner reports that on January 5th, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced a bill to add yet another year to the soon to be expiring Patriot Act extending it until February, 2012 with passage likely to happen with little debate or contention. If passed, this would be the second time the Obama administration has punted on campaign promises to roll back excessive surveillance measures allowed under the act passed in the wake of 9/11. Last years extension passed under the heading of the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. "Given the very limited number of days Congress has in session before the current deadline, and the fact that the bill’s Republican sponsor is only seeking another year, I think it's safe to read this as signaling an agreement across the aisle to put the issue off yet again," writes Julian Sanchez."
Security

Nuclear Bunker Houses World's Toughest Server Farm 152

Posted by samzenpus from the no-down-time dept.
Lanxon writes "Deep inside the Swiss Alps, a former nuclear bunker is now the ultimate hiding place for the world's most sensitive secrets — the Swiss Fort Knox. In a lengthy feature, Wired gains access to the server farm designed to survive a full-scale military attack. From the article: 'As we punch our codes at the checkpoint, the yellow door opens into what looks like a city of server towers, their green LEDs flickering as a technician in a white jumpsuit runs diagnostic checks. [Later], we are in a dimly lit tunnel next to what looks like a metal oven door carved into the side of the rock. "These are expansion rooms in case you have an atomic explosion outside," Christoph Oschwald, a retired Swiss paratrooper turned contractor, says. The thinking behind the rooms, he explains, is that if there were a nuclear explosion, the rush of high-pressure air would fill them through vents in the opposite side. Then, the vents would snap shut, trapping the air before it had a chance of damaging the fortress. "There is a lot of protection you can't see," he says. We stroll past an intricate network of insulated pipelines that carry water up from the underground glacial lake to the cooling system.'"
Google

Submission + - Users Sue Google, Facebook, Zynga Over Privacy (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A raft of class action lawsuits filed in Federal court charge the globe's biggest social networking firms with violating federal communications privacy laws, allowing advertisers to profit from personal information harvested from users.

Weeks after the Wall Street Journal blew the whistle on lax data privacy standards on Facebook, a string of class action suits attempt to hold the social networking giant, as well as game company Zynga and Google liable for what the suits contend are lax practices that allow advertisers to harvest personal information on Web users.

The suits are seeking monetary damages on behalf of potentially millions of users of Facebook, Google and game company Zynga. The suits allege that the users' personal information has been leaked to advertisers and other unauthorized individuals, in violation of the companies' privacy policies and a number of state and federal statues protecting the confidentiality of electronic communications.

Submission + - US, China Working on Intellectual Property Rights (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is visiting Beijing this week to discuss how China and the US can better coordinate efforts to stop intellectual property rights violations. 'One of the things that has happened in recent years is that counterfeiting has become a globalized industry,' said Christian Murck, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. To effectively shut down these operations, cross-country efforts at strengthening global enforcement like Holder's visit to China are crucial, he added. Coinciding with Holder's visit, China announced it will launch a new national campaign to crack down on intellectual property rights violations. The campaign will take aim at the production and distribution of pirated goods such as DVDs and software products. Violations relating to registered trademarks and patents will also be targeted. The campaign will last for half a year. The commercial value of pirated software in China, at $7.5 billion, is second only to that in the U.S., where it is $8.3 billion, according to the Business Software Alliance and IDC.

Submission + - UK to track all browsing, email, phone calls (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Sara Chan
Sara Chan writes: The UK government plans to introduce legislation that will allow the police to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages. Every communications provider will be required to store the information for at least a year. Full story in The Telegraph.
Open Source

US Elections Dominated By Closed Source. Again. 403

Posted by CmdrTaco from the pay-no-attention-to-the-bot-behind-the-curtain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Another American election is almost here, and while electronic voting is commonplace, it is still overwhelmingly run by closed source, proprietary systems. It has been shown that many of these systems can be compromised (and because they are closed, there may be holes we simply cannot know about). Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems. By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests. The opportunities for fraud, tampering and malfunction are rampant. But nonetheless, there is very little political will for open source voting, let alone simple measures like end-to-end auditable voting systems or more radical approaches like open source governance. Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?"

Comment Re:Easy to make qualifications that nobody can mee (Score 1) 450

by prodigyx (#33503026) Attached to: Tech Sector Slow To Hire
6% seems incredibly low considering the number of people in this discipline that managed to get a degree without actually being able to do anything useful or have anything to offer a company. I would love to see a 20% unemployment rate. Then the qualified employees can actually do what they are hired to do, instead of spending their first 6 months on the job cleaning up the messes that the previous 6 incompetent people mucked up. Whats the McDonalds equivalent IT job?

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