apoKalypse - Slashdot User

Moonlight 1.0 Brings Silverlight Content To Linux 346

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @11:08PM from the cue-the-brouhaha dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Novell has unveiled some of the fruits of its technical collaboration with Microsoft in the form of Moonlight 1.0, a Firefox plug-in which will allow Linux users to access Microsoft Silverlight content. Officially created by the Mono project, it is available for all Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Also included in Moonlight is the Windows Media pack, with support for Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3 files."

UK Child Abuse Investigators Resent Being Charged For ISP Data 241

Posted by timothy on Friday January 23, 2009 @05:22AM from the thinly-veiled-threat dept.

nk497 writes "In the UK, ISPs are charging a child protection agency for access to IP user details they need for their investigations into online-related abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has paid out over £170,000 since 2006 on IP data requests related to child abuse cases, and expects to pay another £100,000 this year — enough to fund another two investigators. The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'" Surely it must cost the ISPs money to comply with such requests, no matter how official the quest.

Comment Canadian Debit Card != US Debit Card (Score 1) 526

by apoKalypse on Thursday January 08, 2009 @04:07PM (#26376181) Attached to: Blu-ray Update Sent To User Via Credit Card Records

One thing I noticed while traveling to the US is the different meaning of a debit card. Up here in Canada, a debit card is a bank card used for Interac transactions. This does not exist widely in the United States. We also have credit cards, which are issued by Visa/Mastercard/etc. Down in the states, a debit card is a credit card.

Oblong's g-speak Brings "Minority Report" Interface To Life 221

Posted by timothy on Friday November 21, 2008 @01:50AM from the staged-mock-up-or-real-time-control? dept.

tracheopterix writes "Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong's founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a 'spatial operating environment' and adds that 'the SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.'" The video shown on Oblong's front page is an impressive demo.

UK's Loughborough Uni Demos Hydrogen Motorcycle 121

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @12:00PM from the drinking-tube-straight-from-exhaust dept.

rolandw writes "The Beeb have a piece about Loughborough University's hydrogen motorcycle and one of the UK's first hydrogen fuel pumps (presumably all developed by their excellent Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering department). Offering 50mph, the ENV will have a range of 100 miles on a 3-minute refill of hydrogen. By-products are warm air and 'drinkable' water. It will be interesting to compare these hydrogen powered vehicles with the hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles as pioneered by such as the Morgan prototype 'Lifecar' in the near future."

Solyndra's Thin-Film Solar Cells Draw $1.2 Billion In Orders 131

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @11:22AM from the beaming-down-upon-them dept.

SolarSells writes "Solyndra makes funky-looking cylindrical solar cells that resemble compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Their products are meant for office buildings, and are made from a thin coating of copper indium gallium diselenide on glass tubes. Although they might not be able to fill them till 2012, the company has already received $1.2 billion in orders. Their manufacturing tricks make the cells so cheap that they may be competitive with other forms of power even after solar subsidies are phased out."

Comment More detailed story (Score 1) 540

by apoKalypse on Saturday September 13, 2008 @02:23PM (#24992073) Attached to: University Brings Charges Against White Hat Hacker

You can see a story with more details at http://www.charlatan.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20410&Itemid=148 . He put a keylogger on a random e-Kiosk PC in one of the campus buildings. These PCs provide 20 minutes of web access per login so that students can check e-mails/surf the web briefly. There's nothing white-hat about this, unless it was done in a proof-of-concept manner, but he _DID_ collect user information. The login/password combos he would have keylogged let a student into the myCarleton portal (http://connect.carleton.ca), which is just a glorified front-end for their email. All student account information (awards, fees, course registration) is held on a separate server, http://central.carleton.ca./ This becomes a more serious problem, since once you enter into the "secure" myCarleton portal, you can click a tab called 'Carleton Central', which bypasses your need to use a separate login to view your student account information. They have purposely removed a level of security for convenience to the lemmings. As for the campus card data, I've never put my campus card through a card reader, but all campus card transactions are approved via a centralized server somewhere. Again, not sure what this kid was trying to prove, but if all he wanted to demonstrate was that he could sniff campus card data, again he overstepped his boundaries. He sent everything anonymously to Carleton Administration and the students whose data was compromised, but this was also where he tripped up, "his account log-in was embedded in the electronic document he sent out" from http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/09/11/ot-carleton-080911.html . If you google this persons name, he is rather involved in the Gentoo Security mailing lists.

Gouge Found on Shuttle Endeavour's Underside 151

Posted by Zonk on Friday August 10, 2007 @11:05PM from the i-hear-duct-tape-works-well dept.

SonicSpike writes " NASA has discovered a chunk missing from the underside of the space shuttle Endeavour. It was discovered after the shuttle docked with the ISS earlier today. Technicians theorize it may have been caused by ice ripping free of a fuel take during takeoff. From the article:'The gouge — about 3 inches square — was spotted in zoom-in photography taken by the space station crew shortly before Endeavour delivered teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan and her six crewmates to the orbiting outpost ... On Sunday, the astronauts will inspect the area, using Endeavour's 100-foot robot arm and extension beam. Lasers on the end of the beam will gauge the exact size and depth of the gouge, Shannon said, and then engineering analyses will determine whether the damage is severe enough to warrant repairs. Radar images show a white spray or streak coming off Endeavour 58 seconds after liftoff. Engineers theorize that if the debris was ice, it pierced the tile and then broke up, scraping the area downwind. Pictures from Friday's photo inspection show downwind scrapes."

Public Iris Scanning Device In the Works 154

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday February 07, 2007 @09:04AM from the road-you're-on-john-anderton dept.

Nonfinity writes "A public iris scanning device has been proposed in a patent application from Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey. The device is able to scan the iris of the eye without the knowledge or consent of the person being scanned. The device uses multiple cameras, captures multiple images, and then selects the best image to process."

Water Cooling Computers With A Swimming Pool 241

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday January 06, 2007 @11:27AM from the take-your-pc-for-a-dip dept.

guzugi writes "This is a project I have been working for several months and been hypothesizing for much longer. The basic idea is to shortcut the need for an air conditioner when cooling multiple computers. Swimming pool water is pumped into the house and through several waterblocks to effectively cool these hot machines. This greatly reduces noise cooling requirements."

Microsoft Issues Zero-Day Attack Alert For Word 483

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @10:51PM from the incoming dept.

0xbl00d writes "Eweek.com is reporting a new Microsoft Word zero-day attack underway. Microsoft issued a security advisory to acknowledge the unpatched flaw, which affects Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac. The Microsoft Works 2004, 2005 and 2006 suites are also affected because they include Microsoft Word. Simply opening a word document will launch the exploit. There are no pre-patch workarounds or anti-virus signatures available. Microsoft suggests that users 'not open or save Word files,' even from trusted sources."

Student Suspended Over IM Icon 652

Posted by Zonk on Friday June 30, 2006 @05:48PM from the lol-omg dept.

Chris Reimer writes "C|Net News.com is reporting that a 15-year-old student lost a lawsuit over having an instant messenger icon that represented a death threat against an English teacher on his personal computer that another student reported to school authorities. From the article: 'His parents sued, claiming that the icon was protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, that the school district failed to train staff in proper threat assessment and that the school board violated state law in not following proper procedures. [The judge] Mordue rejected the free-speech claims.'"

More Warnings Against Oversharing on MySpace 383

Posted by Zonk on Sunday June 11, 2006 @04:37AM from the internet-never-forgets dept.

Skapare writes "Your next prospective employer might be watching your MySpace page, according to a story at the New York Times. And if you think Facebook is more private, maybe not if that prospective employer has an intern from the same school checking up on you." From the article: "Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs had raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates."

The Worst Bill You've Never Heard Of 630

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday June 06, 2006 @05:38AM from the double-dipping dept.

AWhiteFlame writes "IPAction.org is reporting on a section of the Reform Act of 2006 that's very shocking and surprisingly not that publicized. From the article: 'This will be a busy week in the House -- Congress goes into summer recess Friday, but not before considering the Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (SIRA). Never heard of SIRA? That's the way Big Copyright and their lackey's want it, and it's bad news for you. Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy. Even copies of songs that are cached in your computer's memory or buffered over a network would need yet another license.'"

Death By DMCA 414

Posted by Zonk on Sunday June 04, 2006 @01:49PM from the law-to-the-head-ed-grubberman dept.

Dino writes "There's a good article in the IEEE Spectrum, titled 'Death by DMCA', which talks about how whole classes of devices were eliminated, and how others won't even see the light of day as a result of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. One example is ReplayTV's TiVo-like devices which featured sharing capabilities, along with automatic ad skipping; the company was sued to bankruptcy, and the reincarnated device supported neither sharing nor ad skipping."

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