Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Australia

Submission + - Anonymous Dumps Australian Telco Data Online (gizmodo.com.au)

Submitted by lukehopewell1
lukehopewell1 writes: After the threats, admissions and delays, hacktivists protesting a data retention scheme proposed by the Australian Government’s National Security Inquiry have begun dumping data gleaned from an Australian telco — presumably AAPT.

Anonymous is in the process of dumping government and business customer data onto Pastebin for the world to see under the guise of Operation Australia. This episode is far from over, however. We’re likely to see more data trickle out over the coming days, considering that the group has promised 40GB worth of leaks.

Submission + - OAuth 2.0 standard editor quits, takes name off spec (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by tramp
tramp writes: Eran Hammer, who helped create the OAuth 1.0 spec, has been editing the evolving 2.0 spec for the last three years. He resigned from his role in June but only went public with his reasons in a blog post on Thursday."
"At the end, I reached the conclusion that OAuth 2.0 is a bad protocol," Hammer writes. "WS-* bad. It is bad enough that I no longer want to be associated with it."
And he ends with "I think the OAuth brand is in decline," he writes. "This framework will live for a while, and given the lack of alternatives, it will gain widespread adoption. But we are also likely to see major security failures in the next couple of years and the slow but steady devaluation of the brand. It will be another hated protocol you are stuck with."

Comment old time cellphones (Score 1) 307

by slohandave (#33281852) Attached to: Old (unused) mobile phones I've got hanging around ...

I got my first car based cell phone in november of 1984 before the network was even turned on for use, if you tried to call you got a canned Cellular One message telling you to sod off. When they turned on the network in boston Jan 1, 1985 at 12:01 am it was like woo hoo I'm on, ordering pizza on my way home, tormenting the 1st wife and generally acting like a spoiled kid with a new toy. Then It was the bag phones, they called them transportables and they had full handsets and a lead/acid battery, great for emergencies, just wack'em upside the head with the phone bag and they were out for the night, people were all over walking around with bags'o'phones. Then came the Grey Whale, the first actual handheld, looked like a military walkie talkie from the korean war, but hey it worked and the first time it rang when I was in a store and I hauled it out of my inside pocket (specially made to fit the beast) people stared and another time it got me laid, what could be better. Since then I've been through freaking hundreds of phones, lost them, toileted them, dropped, stepped, run over, stolen, hell I dropped 2 Razors in webster lake on the same day, left one on the roof of my car and saw it fly into the Charles taking a corner at 45mph on Strorrow Drive, but with all that, I still only have 4 or 5 old phones, they all work except the analog motorola, but all the batteries are shot, 10 to 30 minutes max but I keep them around for nostagia. And the point of all this is, "Old Phones Never Die, they just move on to a different paradigm of existence"
Image

Company Makes Paper Out Of Wombat Poo 71

Posted by samzenpus from the my-test-smells-funny dept.
Creative Paper attracted worldwide interest for its paper made of kangaroo droppings in 2005. Well it's been four years and the best and brightest at Creative Paper haven't been sitting on their laurels. What's their great new idea? They have now launched a kind of paper made from wombat poo. Scat-obsessed Darren Simpson from Creative Paper says the paper is green or gold depending on the time of year the droppings are harvested. The wombat paper will be unveiled at an international paper conference in Burnie, Australia later this month.
Books

An Ethical Question Regarding Ebooks 715

Posted by kdawson from the cui-bono dept.
tytso writes "Suppose there is a book that you want to read on your ebook reader, but it is out of print (so even if you purchase the dead-tree version of the book used, the author won't receive any royalties) and the publisher has refused to make it available as an ebook. You can buy it from Amazon as a used book, but that isn't your preferred medium. It is available on the internet as a pirated etext, however. This blog post outlines a few possibilities, and then asks, 'What is the right thing to do? And why?' I'm also curious if the answers change depending on whether you are a Baby Boomer, or a Gen X, Gen Y, etc. — I've noticed that attitudes around copyright seem to change depending on whether someone is a college student or a recent college graduate, versus someone who can remember a time when the Internet did not exist."
Censorship

Google's Gatekeepers 150

Posted by kdawson from the can't-read-that-here-try-a-proxy dept.
theodp writes "With control of 63% of the world's Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, the NY Times reports that Google is the most powerful and protean of the Internet gatekeepers, exerting enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. Deciding what controversial material does and doesn't appear on the local search engines Google maintains in many countries — as well as on Google.com, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, and Orkut — falls on the shoulders of Nicole Wong and her colleagues, who have arguably been given more influence over online expression than anyone else on the planet. Some find Google's gatekeeper role worrisome: 'If your whole game is to increase market share,' says Lawrence Lessig, 'it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.'"
Windows

Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds 326

Posted by timothy from the says-them dept.
arcticstoat writes "Asus' budget motherboard wing, ASRock, claims that it's found a way to load a clean boot of Windows from a full shut down in just four seconds, using its new Instant Boot technology. The technology takes advantage of the S3 and S4 features of ACPI, which normally enable the Sleep/Standby and Hibernation modes in Windows respectively. However, by calling them at different times in the boot-up and shutdown process, Instant Boot enables you to boot up to your Windows desktop in three to four seconds, even after a proper shut down. Two modes are available; Fast mode, which uses S3 and boots up in around four seconds, and Regular Mode, which uses S4 and apparently takes between 20 and 22 seconds to boot. The advantage of Instant Boot when compared with normal Sleep and Hibernation modes is that you get the advantage of a clean boot of Windows, without what ASRock calls 'accumulated garbage data,' and you also get the security of knowing that you won't lose any data if there's a power cut and you lose AC power. There's also a video of it in action at the link above."
Image

How To Cut In Line and Not Get Caught 256

Posted by samzenpus from the no-cuts dept.
ewenc writes "A psychology study of hundreds of people waiting for front-row access to U2 concerts points to the best ways to cut in line and not get caught. 'Super-fans' are most irked by queue-jumpers. People were equally peeved whether someone cut in front or behind, and cutters who jumped beside a friend were less likely to attract scorn."
Image

Math Prof Uncovers Secret Chord 177

Posted by samzenpus from the with-a-little-help-from-my-mathematician dept.
chebucto writes "The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula. Dr. Brown used Fourier transforms to find the notes in the chord, and deduced that another George — George Martin, the Beatles producer — also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar."
News

Hans Reiser To Reveal Location of Wife's Body 882

Posted by CmdrTaco from the dark-days-almost-at-an-end dept.
dlgeek writes "The story of Hans Reiser is well known to all Slashdotters by now. Some still placed doubts about the conviction, stating that he might be innocent. It now seems that all doubt has been quelled, since Alameda County District Attorney Thomas Orloff has revealed that Hans Reiser will disclose the location of Nina's body for a reduced sentence. The deal is not yet finalized, though. 'There's been some overtures,' Orloff said, 'But everything is in its preliminary stage.' The deal would reduce his conviction from first degree to second degree murder. In addition, an anonymous source close to the situation said that 'the only real leverage he has is if he can provide a body. He really doesn't have any options left. Even if he won a retrial somehow, he'd likely be convicted.'"
Mars

Phoenix Digs First Mars Soil Sample To Analyze 116

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sing-the-peter-gabriel-song dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly two weeks after its historic landing, the US Mars probe Phoenix has scooped up its first sample of Martian soil and begun analyzing it for water and organic compounds. The test dig made Sunday by the Phoenix Mars Lander's 8-foot-long robotic arm uncovered bits of bright specks in the soil believed to be ice or salt. Mission controllers will send instructions to the lander to dump the sample into one of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) ovens. The TEGA ovens, which are about an inch long and the diameter of a pencil lead, will heat up the soil samples and use a mass spectrometer to detect the gases that come off the samples, which will shed light on some of the materials in the soil, specifically those formed by the process of liquid water."
Privacy

McCain Supports Warrantless Domestic Surveillance 650

Posted by timothy from the just-lookin'-just-listenin' dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "While there have been shifting reports about McCain's view on warrantless wiretapping, nothing could be clearer than the latest comment by McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, who said, 'We do not know what lies ahead in our nation's fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.' Article II, of course, is what Bush has argued gives the President virtually unlimited power during war, and McCain has already voted in favor of Telecom Immunity, though he sometimes mentions, to those asking for accountability, wanting to hold hearings about what the telecoms did."
Idle

Man Denied Boarding Because of Transformers Shirt 2

Posted by samzenpus
Brad Jayakody was told he would have to change his shirt if he wanted to catch his flight to Dusseldorf, Germany. The shirt that security at Heathrow got upset about depicts the Transformers character Optimus Prime holding a gun. Brad said, "I was flabbergasted. I thought the supervisor would come over and see sense, but he didn't. After I changed he said if I changed back I would be arrested." I would understand if the guy was wearing a Megatron shirt, after all that guy turns into a gun which could be very dangerous but Prime? There is no way a semi could fit on a passenger plane it's just silly.

Visual Communication in Digital Design 49

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
stoolpigeon writes "I remember the first time I saw a program I had written after the interface had been revamped by a designer. I had been pretty happy with what I had made. It worked very well and met the client's requirements. It was extremely functional and I thought it didn't look bad either. But when I saw the new interface, not functionally different, just so much better looking, I was really blown away. My application had gone from useful to cool. (That might be a slight exaggeration, it was still just a database app but it sure looked cool to me.) Since then I've learned to primarily leave the user interface work to the experts in that arena, and I stick to the getting the functionality in place. But sometimes I don't have the luxury of a design team at my disposal. Or when I do, I still need to be able to talk to them and discuss what is going on. I found Dr. Ji Young Park's new book "Visual Communication in Design" to be a friendly and accessible introductory primer in visual design." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

Slashdot Top Deals

Credit ... is the only enduring testimonial to man's confidence in man. -- James Blish

Close