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Comment Re:Depends on what university (Score 1) 582

The flipside is that if a story were to appear on Slashdot about a large university whose network went down for several hours or days because of something accidental or malicious done by a student, people would be falling over themselves to gripe about the incompetence of the network admins.

That's because they *would* be incompetent in this case. If a student brought the network down by simply using the connection then something is wrong with the network. My university does not censor anything and there have been no major outages that I know of. They don't block outgoing traffic and on the wireless you even get a public IP address with both incoming and outgoing traffic allowed and yet the network manages to stay up somehow. Of course the network is set up competently, i.e. students' connections are isolated as much as possible, so even if a student's machine is compromised (which happens a lot I imagine) it is no worse for the others than any of the millions of compromised machines on the Internet. Also, there are some (negotiable) caps to prevent bandwidth wasting.

And even if the network is not properly set up, how is censoring open-source communities' websites such as hackaday going to help it anyway?

Comment Re:No (Score 1) 412

I believe "Intel Insider" does something like this, but I'm not sure and I wasn't really referring to anybody actually doing DRM that way currently. I just meant that in a typical hardware-assisted playback (of compressed video) the application feeds the original video to the hardware an does not usually need to touch it after that. The current hardware does still provide a channel through which the decompressed video can be read (for saving it or processing it in a way that the hardware does not support), however there is nothing stopping future versions from disabling that channel for videos that have a "protected" flag set on and I think this may be what "Intel Insider" does, although I couldn't find much information about it.

Pause/play/seek/etc. are still done by the application but they are not really relevant here since they operate on the original stream and the application still feeds the video to the hardware and so, it can still start/stop feeding it or move to another position in the original stream.

Comment Re:No (Score 1) 412

This isn't how hardware decoding (typically) works. You pass the encoded (and in this case encrypted) video to the hardware and tell it where on the display it should be rendered. It will decode it (and in this case decrypt it as well) and show it. Firefox does not get involved after passing the encoded video.

Comment Re:knowledge is power (Score 1) 385

Classified data is required to be always encrypted and any drive that has ever contained classified data is required to be physically destroyed. If you found real classified data on your hard drive you got from newegg something went very wrong and whoever was responsible should be punished accordingly. Though, I think if you found a document that says "classified" it is far more likely that somebody is just playing a silly joke on whoever gets the drive.

Comment Re:Secure boot is UEFI (Score 1) 205

The bootloader being open source does not in any way mean that it cannot implement secure booting. If it refuses to boot an unsigned OS and if it refuses to replace itself with an unsigned image (that's typical for secure bootloaders) then you are stuck looking for vulnerabilities or replacing the chip just like with a closed bootloader.
Oracle

Linux 3.0 Will Have Full Xen Support 171

GPLHost-Thomas writes "The very last components that were needed to run Xen as a dom0 have finally reached kernel.org. The Xen block backend was one major feature missing from 2.6.39 dom0 support, and it's now included. Posts on the Xen blog, at Oracle and at Citrix celebrate this achievement."
Medicine

Bionic Eye Gives Blind Man Sight 203

AmigaMMC writes "A man who lost his sight 30 years ago says he can now see flashes of light after being fitted with a bionic eye. Ron, 73, had the experimental surgery seven months ago at London's Moorfield's eye hospital. He says he can now follow white lines on the road, and even sort socks using the bionic eye, known as Argus II. I wouldn't go as far as claiming he regained his sight, but this certainly is a biotechnological breakthrough."
Biotech

Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering 83

palegray.net writes "Wired brings us a look into the world of neuroengineering, the science of hacking the brain to improve its function. Dr. Ed Boyden is the director of MIT's Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, focusing on innovative methods of physically altering neuroanatomy for various purposes. As useful as discoveries in the field may be, the work certainly raises moral and ethical questions. From the article: '"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews of The Berman Institute of Bioethics. "We place ourselves in the mind and therefore the brain. (Mood-altering surgery) feels like fundamentally modifying who a person is."'"
Java

Java EE 6 Platform Draft Published 74

synodinos writes "The public draft of the Java EE 6 Platform specification has been published and will remain open for public review and feedback until the 23rd of Feb, 2009. Perhaps the most notable part of this delayed draft is the Web Profile, which is first profile in the history of the Java EE platform. The draft is available for download and contains both the Java EE 6 Spec and the Web Profile Spec. There is a poll running at java.net regarding what the community thinks about the new spec. Although participation is yet rather small the results tend to show that the released draft did not cause any excitement."

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