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Comment Slashdot improved? (Score 1) 57

by zbyg (#49387893) Attached to: Invaders Demand Flu Shots
What happened to Slashdot? Suddenly the stories are much more interesting and, most importantly, unique. No other news site reports about these important happenings. Also, I do not see any slashvertisements for yet another crappy product/service. Has the management been changed? New editors hired? Anyway, this is great and I really hope that Slashdot can keep this high standard for years to come.

Comment Re:Link is to Flash - boooo! (Score 3, Funny) 81

by zbyg (#33261940) Attached to: Dutch Hackers Create Wi-Fi Sniffing Drone
Did you forget about the great features of Flash? If you choose Flash over HTML, you get:
  • up to 90% shorter page loading times, because Flash is compiled and HTML is not
  • increased security, because browsers are insecure, and plugins are secure by default
  • unbelievable and very powerfull accesibility features
  • a page which works and looks the same in any browser running on any computer

/sarcasm

Comment Re:ImageMagick and remove metadata (Score 1) 175

by zbyg (#33258236) Attached to: The Hidden Security Risk of Geotags
I guess that everyone who has ever used ImageMagick, has enough brain cells to not post geotaged photos of their apartment, with comments like this: "Today I brought a new computer for 2000$. Had no time to play with it, because I am leaving for a two week vacation. P.S. I like leaving the door key under the mat"

Submission + - Anti-Piracy Group Refuses Bait, DRM Breaker Goes T (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by coaxial
coaxial writes: In Denmark, it's legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about. They promised him a response, then didn't respond. So now he's reporting himself to the police. He wants a trial, so that the legality of the DRM-breaking law can be tested in court.
Medicine

Submission + - Plasma Device Kills Bacteria on Skin in Seconds

Submitted by
Ponca City, We love you
Ponca City, We love you writes: "In medicine, plasma, the fourth state of matter, is already used for the sterilization of surgical instruments as plasma works at the atomic level and is able to reach all surfaces, even the interior of hollow needle ends. Now BBC reports that researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have demonstrated a plasma device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA, by creating cold atmospheric plasma that produces a cocktail of chemicals that kills bacteria but is harmless to skin. "The plasma produces a series of over 200 chemical reactions that involve the oxygen and nitrogen in air plus water vapor — there is a whole concoction of chemical species that can be lethal to bacteria," says Gregor Morfill. "It's actually similar to what our own immune system does." The team says that an exposure to the plasma of only about 12 seconds reduces the incidence of bacteria, viruses, and fungi on hands by a factor of a million — a number that stands in sharp contrast to the several minutes hospital staff can take to wash using traditional soap and water. Morfill says that the approach can be used to kill the bacteria that lead to everything from gum disease to body odor and that the prototype is scalable to any size and can be produced in any shape. "One can treat plasmas like a medical cocktail, which contains new and established agents that can be applied at the molecular level to cells in prescribed intensities and overall doses.""
The Media

Submission + - Newspapers Face the Prisoner's Dilemma with Google

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Nicholas Carr has an interesting analysis of Rupert Murdoch's threat to de-list News Corp's stories from Google and Microsoft's eager offer to make Bing Murdoch's exclusive search engine for its content. Carr writes that newspapers are caught in a classic Prisoner's Dilemma with Google because while Google's search engine "prevents them from making decent money online — by massively fragmenting traffic, by undermining brand power, and by turning news stories into fungible commodities" if any single newspaper opts out of Google, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. There is only one way that newspapers can break out of the prison — if a critical mass of newspapers opt out of Google's search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Murdoch is signaling to other newspapers that "we'll opt out if you'll opt out" positioning himself as the would-be ringleader of a massive jailbreak, without actually risking a jailbreak himself and there are signs that Murdoch's signal is working with reports that the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are now also considering blocking Google. In the meantime, Steve Ballmer is more than happy to play along with Murdoch because although a deal with News Corps would reduce the basic profitability of Microsoft's search business, it would inflict far more damage on Google than on Microsoft. "Faced with a large-scale loss of professional news stories from its search engine, Google would likely have little choice but to begin paying sites to index their content," writes Carr. "That would be a nightmare scenario for Google — and a dream come true for newspapers and other big content producers.""

Submission + - Mininova removes all 'infringing' torrents (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Pabugs
Pabugs writes: I woke up this morning to cruise the Mininova movies category to find the torrents were removed and the line at the top stating 'From now on, only Content Distribution torrents are allowed' — Could it be that 'The Man" is gaining a foothold in the piracy battle? — I guess we'll have to wait and see, in the meantime, I'm a little less thankful on this Thanksgiving knowing that Corporate interests are now crushing my movie habits — Mininova was one of the few places I could find movies that most rental places won't carry and being forced into purchasing a crappy film for preview @ $9.99 isn't worth it to me.

Submission + - FreeBSD 8.0 Released 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights: Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5.

There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here.

You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release.
Programming

Submission + - Dumbing down programming? (zdnet.co.uk) 1

Submitted by RunRevKev
RunRevKev writes: The unveiling of Revolution 4.0 has sparked a debate on ZDNet about whether programming is being dumbed down. The new version of the software uses an English-syntax that requires 90 per cent less code than traditional languages. A descendant of Apple's Hypercard, Rev 4 is set to "...empower people who would never have attempted programming to create successful applications". ZDNet report that "One might reasonably hope that this product inspires students in the appropriate way and gets them more interested in programming."
Apple

Submission + - Apple Voids Smokers' Warranties (consumerist.com) 4

Submitted by Mr2001
Mr2001 writes: Consumerist reports that Apple is refusing to work on computers that have been used in smoking households. "The Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, that has voided the warranty and they refuse to work on the machine, due to 'health risks of second hand smoke'," wrote one customer. Another said, "When I asked for an explanation, she said [the owner of the iMac is] a smoker and it's contaminated with cigarette smoke which they consider a bio-hazard! I checked my Applecare warranty and it says nothing about not honoring warranties if the owner is a smoker."

Apple claims that honoring the warranty would be an OSHA violation. (Remember when they claimed enabling 802.11n for free would be a Sarbanes-Oxley violation?)
Linux

Submission + - Linus Torvalds suggested for Nobel Peace Prize (ridenbaugh.com) 7

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm as much of a fanboy as anyone else, but I've never thought of anything in computing as being worth a Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, there are those who take global collaboration seriously, though...
Biotech

Submission + - Scientists say Chemicals Turning Boys into Girls

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes: Denmark has unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, sunscreen lotion and moisturizing cream with a picture emerging of ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminizing male children all over the developed world. Research at Rotterdam's Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes. "The amounts that two-year-olds absorb from the [preservative] parabens propylparaben and butylparaben can constitute a risk for oestrogen-like disruptions of the endocrine system," says the report. "This contribution originates predominantly from cosmetic products such as oil-based creams, moisturizing creams, lotions and sunscreen." The contamination may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex of babies. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to be nature's way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict. But the proportion of females is rising, so much so that some 250,000 babies who statistically should have been boys have ended up as girls in Japan and the United States alone. "Both the public and wildlife are inadequately protected from harm, as regulation is based on looking at exposure to each substance in isolation, and yet it is now proven beyond doubt that hormone disrupting chemicals can act together to cause effects even when each by itself would not," says Gwynne Lyons, director of Chem Trust.

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