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Archive for the ‘Slashdot’ Category

The Pirate Bay On Track To Be Banned In the UK?

02.21.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

redletterdave writes with this excerpt from the International Business Times about the fate of the Pirate Bay in the UK: “Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay may soon be blocked in the UK after a London judge ruled that the site breaches copyright laws on a large scale, and that both the platform and its ...

Leaky Cellphone Nets Can Give Attackers Your Location

02.20.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

alphadogg writes “GSM cellular networks leak enough location data to give third-parties secret access to cellphone users’ whereabouts, according to new University of Minnesota research. ‘We have shown that there is enough information leaking from the lower layers of the GSM communication stack to enable an attacker to perform location tests on a victim’s device. ...

VLC 2.0 ‘Twoflower’ Released For Windows & Mac

02.19.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

Titus Andronicus writes “Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN’s media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more. From the announcement: ‘Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and ...

Canadians #TellVicEverything In Response To Bill C-30

02.18.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

First time accepted submitter beerdragoon writes “In order to protest the government’s new Internet snooping legislation, some Canadians have started a somewhat unorthodox protest. Vic Toews, the minister responsible for tabling the legislation, has had his twitter account bombarded with tweets regarding the boring, banal aspects of regular Canadians’ lives. The idea is that since ...

SSD Latency, Error Rates May Spell Bleak Future

02.16.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

Lucas123 writes “A new study by the University of California and Microsoft shows that NAND flash memory experiences significant performance degradation as die sizes shrink in size. Over the next dozen years latency will double as the circuitry size shrinks from 25 nanometers today, to 6.5nm, the research showed. Speaking at the Usenix Conference on ...

AT&T On Data Throttling: Blame Yourselves

02.15.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

zacharye writes in with a story about Senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations John Donovan’s blog post detailing why customers with unlimited smartphone plans are getting throttled. “In an effort to justify its policies surrounding data service throttling for subscribers with unlimited smartphone data plans, AT&T on Tuesday issued a brief report regarding ...

LibreOffice 3.5 Released

02.14.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

First time accepted submitter wrldwzrd89 writes “The Document Foundation, the team behind the free and open-source office suite called LibreOffice, has released their latest and greatest version. As is typical with major releases of LibreOffice, there are significant new features making their debut in this version. The component with the biggest upgrade is Calc, which ...

Best Practice: Travel Light To China

02.13.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

Hugh Pickens writes “What may once have sounded like the behavior of a raving paranoid is now considered standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies as the NY Times reports how businesses sending representatives to China give them a loaner laptop and cellphone that they wipe clean before they ...

Best Practice: Travel Light To China

02.13.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

Hugh Pickens writes “What may once have sounded like the behavior of a raving paranoid is now considered standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies as the NY Times reports how businesses sending representatives to China give them a loaner laptop and cellphone that they wipe clean before they ...

Boiling Down the Meaning of Life

02.12.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

Shipud writes “A recent article in Journal of Biomolecular structure and Dynamics proposes to define life by semantic voting [Note: open-access article]: ‘The definitions of life are more than often in conflict with one another. Undeniably, however, most of them do have a point, one or another or several, and common sense suggests that, probably, ...

Wikipedia Hasn’t Forgiven GoDaddy

02.11.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

netbuzz writes “The fact that a month and a half has gone by and Wikipedia still hasn’t followed through on Jimmy Wales public threat to remove its domain name registrations from GoDaddy over the latter’s early support of SOPA has some concerned that the online encyclopedia may have had a change of heart. After all, ...

Hacked Syrian Officials Used ’12345′ As Email Password

02.10.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

Nominei writes “The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Syrian President, aides and staffers had their email hacked by Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of emails online. Reportedly, many of the accounts used the password ’12345′ (which their IT department probably warned them to change when the accounts got set up, of course).” Read more of ...

The Science Fiction Effect

02.09.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

Harperdog writes “Laura Kahn has a lovely essay about the history of science fiction, and how science fiction can help explain concepts that are otherwise difficult for many…or perhaps, don’t hold their interest. Interesting that Frankenstein is arguably the first time that science fiction appears. From Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, authors have been writing about ...

History Repeats Itself: KDP Select Is Amazon.com’s ‘Payback For Playback’

02.08.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

New submitter brennanw writes “Anyone who was active on mp3.com during the late 90s/early 2000′s will find Amazon.com’s KDP Select awfully familiar: authors who make their works exclusive to Amazon compete for a pool of money. Any time someone ‘borrows’ one of their books, they get a cut of a monthly sum (700K in January, ...

Book Review: The Windup Girl

02.06.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

New submitter Hector’s House writes “‘Nothing is certain. Nothing is secure,’ reflects one of the characters in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl. In 23rd century Bangkok, life for many hangs by a thread. Oil has run out; rising seas threatens to engulf the city; genetically engineered diseases hover on Thailand’s borders; and the threat ...

Berkeley Scientists Develop Self-Assembling Nanorods

02.02.2012 · Posted in Slashdot

First time accepted submitter techgeek0279 writes “Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a relatively fast, easy and inexpensive technique for inducing nanorods to self-assemble into one-, two- and even three-dimensional macroscopic structures.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Slashdot ...