Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Single point of failure (Score 1) 127

Not exactly. I use clipperz.com to store my passwords, and one of the features it provides is a direct login. The way this works is that it submits the password form directly, without you having to visit the website and copy paste the password from clipperz. It's impermeable to keyloggers and clipboard sniffers because you don't copy or type the password anywhere. Now, if your system is already hosed, your could theoretically be hacked. But, at that point you're SOL anyway.

Yeah, I know the drawbacks of using a password manager, and an online one at that. But it's the best tradeoff I've seen. I have to remember only one strong password, and I can just randomly type in unique passwords for the sites I visit. Plus, their architecture is solid.

Comment Re:Elite (Score 2, Insightful) 134

And also, it's contradictory to what google did earlier this year. They released a zero day for windows and gave microsoft hardly a week to patch it. And as a bonus, they made the disclosure public on a Sunday.

I am all for more industry standard accountability, but this looks very one sided and google choosing to pick the instances where it gets a good publicity.

Comment Re:In France you get book loaned or rented (Score 1) 398

The college where I studied in India has a similar system. There is a college managed "Book Bank" which cost some two dollars per semester and allowed me to rent 5 books per semester. There was no guarantee of getting a recent edition of any book, but that was okay because the new content could be photocopied from someone in the hostel. The whole thing sort of worked, and of cousre the part I am forgetting to say is that it was funded by government aid.

I could have afforded text books since most major publishers have discounted prices, but this was easier and lesser hassle ;)

Comment Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score 1) 384

You must be joking. There's lots of apps for Android. Probably fewer than for iPhone, but not dramatically so. I was able to find an app for any task I needed.

On all major mobile platforms I've used, I've been able to get apps for all the tasks I've needed. I don't have an iphone due to all the restrictions on the device, but whenever I see brilliantly made apps like this, I really want to go out and get one.

The success on the platform is due to the fact that there is a lot of choices in apps, and only very few of them suck. It's become the marketleader, and as much as I hate it, I have better success browsing the net using the Iphone user agent on my N810. The N810 has a good browser, that can render content better than the Iphone browser, but market share is why most sites choose to cater only to the iphone while making non-wap mobile sites.

Yes, I hate to say it as the next guy out here, but iphone is the unrivalled smartphone. Google and MS has to do a lot of catchup before they'll get to an iphone level of success.

Comment Re:Both have evolved too in leaps and bounds (Score 3, Informative) 455

KDE has already done it with KDE 2.0 (which IIRC was before GNOME 2.0) which was a complete overhaul from what KDE 1.x was. Doing this in the 20th century was easy, but with the current user base and dependencies, it takes a lot of guts to shelf away backwards compatibility. I was first frustrated with what they did, but the more I look at it, this seems the better choice for them in the long run.

Comment Re:All headphones are hand-made... (Score 1) 353

One of the best sub-100$ headphones are the Grado SR80s and the SR125s. The 125s are slightly over your budget, but if you don't mind spending a little extra, they are well worth it. The SR80s might not cut it for you since they feature the 3.5mm jack.

BTW, if you are seriously looking for a good set of cans, browse headphone.org or head-fi.org rather than slashdot ;)

Microsoft

Microsoft Programming Contest Hacked and Defaced 151

davidmwilliams writes "Microsoft followed their major annual Tech-Ed event in Australia with a week-long programming contest called 'DevSta,' to find 'star developers.' While the quantity and quality of submissions suggest a poor turnout, it certainly caught the attention of at least two hackers who left their mark. Here is the low-down on the contest, what happened, by whom, and screen shots for posterity in case it's been fixed by the time you read this. And unless the volume of submissions increase dramatically within the next few hours, someone may be awarded an Xbox for doing nothing more than rewriting the Windows calculator as a .NET app."
PHP

Official Support For PHP 4 Ends 245

Da Massive writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld: "For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life. With the release of PHP 4.4.9, official support has ended and the final security patch for the platform issued. ...With eight years of legacy code out there, it is likely that there are going to be a fairly large number of systems that will not migrate to PHP 5 in the near future, and a reasonable proportion of those that will not make the migration at all. For those who are not able to migrate their systems to the new version of PHP, noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser will continue to provide third party security patching for the PHP 4 line through his Suhosin product."
Education

OLPC To Be Distributed To US Students 338

eldavojohn writes "The One Laptop Per Child Project plans to launch OLPC America in 2008 , to distribute the low-cost laptop computers originally intended for developing nations to needy students here in the United States. Nicholas Negroponte is quoted as saying, 'We are doing something patriotic, if you will, after all we are and there are poor children in America. The second thing we're doing is building a critical mass. The numbers are going to go up, people will make more software, it will steer a larger development community.'"
Security

Fake Codec is Mac OS X Trojan 473

Kenny A. writes "Multiple news organisations are reporting on an in-the-wild Mac OS X malware attack that uses porn lures to plant phishing Trojans on Mac machines. The attack site attempts to trick users into download a disk image (.dmg) file disguised as a codec that's required for viewing the video. If the Mac machine's browser is set to to open 'Safe' files after downloading, the .dmg gets mounted and the Installer is launched. The target must click through a series of screens to become infected but once the Trojan is installed, it has full control of the machine."
Security

One-Third of Employees Violate Company IT Policies 320

BaCa writes with a link indicating that a survey of white collar US workers shows that something like a third of all employees break IT policies. Of those, almost a sixth actually used P2P technologies from their work PCs. Overall, the survey indicates workers aren't overly concerned about any kind of security: "The telephone survey found that 65% of white-collar professionals are either not very concerned or not concerned at all about their privacy when using a workplace computer. A surprising 63% are not very concerned or are not concerned at all about the security of their information while at work. Additionally, most employees have the misconception that these behaviors pose little to no risk to their companies."
Google

Google News Launches Facebook Application 82

NewsCloud writes "Eight days after Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Zeitgeist conference attendees that social networks account for an 'enormous proportion [of Internet usage]...it's a very real phenomenon,' Google News has launched its own Facebook application. Says Google News: 'This experimental application enables users to create custom sections or select from a set of pre-defined topics, then browse and share stories with their friends on Facebook. We are trying a couple things differently with this application, and it is still in beta, but we think that it adds value to the Facebook experience and to users' overall news experience.' Check out Google News on Facebook (requires registration) — or view screenshots."

Slashdot Top Deals

A good supervisor can step on your toes without messing up your shine.

Working...