Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Looks like a familiar contest. (Score 5, Interesting) 138

Two relevant anecdotes from when I was in college:

1) In an artificial life course we got to propose our own semester project. One guy wanted to write a worm, but the professor was afraid that his tenure would not be enough to protect his job if the worm got out of hand.

2) One faculty member that taught a computer security course used to make the offer that anybody who could successfully access his gradebook and change their grade could have the higher grade. He stopped doing this after students switched from trying to electronically break in to just casing his house.

Comment Re:3... 2... 1... (Score 1) 186

That's a good question that I don't really have an answer for. I don't know know where the line is drawn for reverse engineering -- just dumping the entry points or actively inspecting the internals to figure out what it's doing. Or they could claim that they discovered an undocumented API when testing a random application that failed.

Comment Re:3... 2... 1... (Score 1) 186

I don't know if angry ninjas were actively involved, but I remember a few years ago they basically froze development to do a code audit. Something about making sure they were able to prove there was nothing in the code base that had been reverse engineered and that all the code was either freshly written or had been copied from publicly-available sources. http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Audit

I had the same experience with ReactOS as several other posters... I installed it on a VM, saw all of the screenshots on the site of "look what we can run!" and tried to replicate some of those, and basically had one crash after another

Comment Re:ROM Marketplace? (Score 1) 361

Ah, glad to see somebody beat me to saying this. One of my buddies in undergrad had the same "I don't want to pirate" mentality, but he wanted to play Super Metroid sometime in that period between a real SNES being readily available and the knockoffs you can buy for $30 being available. His solution, of course, was to get ZSNES and the ROM, but he also went out to a GameStop or something and bought a used copy of the cart.

Comment Re:Let the Microsoft bashing... (Score 1) 102

Let the Microsoft bashing and the Facebook bashing continue for no good reason!

FTFY

FTFY. At least, in this case. I mean, sure, bash Facebook's privacy debacles, and bash Microsoft's patent strong-arming, but there's no real reason to bash them in the context of this article.

And now I will get modded down for daring to disagree without posting as AC.

Comment Re:deja vous, anyone? (Score 1) 226

This is covered a bit in TFA. They reference a case that does remote DVR storage and make the distinction that having one copy that you send to multiple people becomes a broadcast, whereas keeping an individual copy for each person that uploads it is actually streaming the individual their own copy. So essentially, for your work case, you would have to have an individual disc, file, whatever medium stored the content you were streaming, and make sure that you were demonstrably sending a different copy of the same bits to different members. (This article What Colour are your bits seems relevant.) The implication appears to be that Google and Amazon will not be able to use any sort of duplication-based compression to save space when multiple people upload the same track, if they don't want to run afoul of broadcast licensing restrictions.

Comment Re:How Microsoft of Them (Score 1) 250

That's what happened for me with Wave. Eventually I got my wife on it and we used it to plan some travel, but none of my other friends really used it. (Of course, the bigger problem with Wave was nobody really knew what to use it for, even once it opened and they had people to use it with.)

Plus has worked out much better for my social network, though: one of my friends got an invite and the majority of our network got added in the ~12 hour period that invites were open. One of our friends remarked that we're clearly not the norm and that while most of her computer science grad student friends had gotten full networks, all of her non-computer science friends on Plus basically only had her in their circles.

Submission + - Movie industry files injunction against UK ISP (computerandvideogames.com)

daedae writes: "A group of US movie studios, under the name Motion Picture Association, have filed suit in the UK against BT, Britain's largest ISP. The studios are asking for an injunction which would force BT to block access to Newzbin, on the grounds of massive losses to Usenet piracy."

Slashdot Top Deals

System restarting, wait...

Working...