njug - Slashdot User

Submission + - More Privacy Tech - digital credentials & ecas

Submitted by John Q Random on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @04:41PM

John Q Random writes: From the cypherpunks-write-code / privacy-through-advanced-crypto department, Stefan Brands company credentica.com announced their U-Prove library and SDK implementing ID tokens (also known as digital credentials or private credentials).

(Private Credentials are a cool PKI replacement and anonymous ecash tech that allows you to prove certified attributes like age, credit rating, group membership, etc without revealing who you are; to allow you to have a digital life without the digital dossier effect inherent in central databases like google's).

Following that Adam Back announced — credlib, an open source implementation of Brands credentials (and the older more basic Chaum certificates).

Relates to recent news from IBM's Zurich labs on their identity-mixer project (reported on slashdot here) that is based on the less efficient Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya credentials.

Feed Big Merger: What You Should Know (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @04:12PM

The much-anticipated merger between Sirius and XM brings up some important issues. Plus: 10 gadgets for writers. In Gadget Lab.

Journal Journal: Drug patents threatening cheap drugs

Journal by GillBates0 on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @04:05PM

This was a story I tried to submit but was rejected by Slashdot's editorial staff. Not grousing, saving my composition here for posterity, as I do with other of my rejected stories.

iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax 311

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @03:59PM from the man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-Hatto dept.

holy_calamity writes "The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB has burst open a musical fraud in the usually staid world of classical piano. Albums by the much vaunted British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, are identified by the iTunes player as belonging to other performers. A more scientific analysis by an audio remastering firm has found that none of Hatto's works appear to be hers. Her husband, who produced all her albums, says he 'cannot explain' the similarities."

Submission + - Vista's RAM sweet spot: 4GB

Submitted by jcatcw on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @03:48PM

jcatcw writes: David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Divison and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. With more RAM, there's more caching.

Longhorn Server Will Stress Virtualization 101

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @03:19PM from the bet-it-won't-run-virtual-MacOS dept.

Rob writes in with an article from CBROnline based on an interview with Microsoft's UK server director. He says the timing of the release of the next version of Microsoft's server OS, dubbed Longhorn, depends on the company getting virtualization ready to go. Microsoft has apparently decided to embed its hypervisor technology into Windows, an OS-centric approach to virtualization shared by XenSource Inc., its open-source rival and partner. This contrasts with the model of virtualizing the hardware layer being pursued by VMWare. The Microsoft spokesman is coy about a release date for Longhorn, saying it could be earlier or it could be later (but it should be in 2007).

Submission + - Scientist make quantum encryption breakthrough

Submitted by

Madas

on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @02:50PM

Madas writes: "Scientists working in Cambridge, England have managed to make quantum encryption completely secure by putting decoy pulses in the key transmission stream. According to the story this paves the way for safe, encrypted high-speed data links. Could this allow completely private transmission of data away from snooping eyes and ears? Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when travelling on the internet?"

Submission + - Remote Code Execution Hole Found in Snort

Submitted by Palljon1123 on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @02:30PM

Palljon1123 writes: A stack-based buffer overflow in the Snort IDS (intrusion detection system) could leave government and enterprise installations vulnerable to remote unauthenticated code execution attacks. The flaw, found by researchers at IBM's ISS X-Force, affects the Snort DCE/RPC preprocessor and could be used to execute code with the same privileges (usually root or SYSTEM) as the Snort binary. No user action is required.

Journal Journal: Filesharing Insurance opposed by Swedish goverment 2

Journal by Ricker500 on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @12:54PM

The filesharing Insurance at www.tankafritt.nu got world famous over night offering to pay fines for filesharing. This is totally legal in sweden where you can find it but the authorities keep working against the company with more or less legal means.

U.S. Copyright Lobby Out of Touch 293

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @12:39PM from the reach-out-and-touch dept.

Ontheright writes "The BBC is featuring a story on how the U.S. copyright lobby is increasingly out of touch with the rest of the world. The article focuses on a recent report designed to highlight the inadequacies of IP protection around the world by arguing for a global expansion of the DMCA and elimination of copyright exceptions. Michael Geist penned the article, which specifically calls out the United States for expecting the world at large to adopt its non-standard standards for copyright law."

Journal Journal: Plausible Deniability via Open WAP 1

Journal by inviolet on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @12:21PM

Now that the RIAA, MPAA, and who knows how many government agencies are sniffing internet traffic in order to find subvers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpirates, it would be nice to have an ironclad method of achieving plausible deniability.

Viacom Turns to Joost, Spurns YouTube 139

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @11:55AM from the google-has-lost-please-turn-to-page-57 dept.

Vincenzo writes "Viacom has signed a deal with Joost that will see content from MTVI, Comedy Central, and CBS distributed on the new P2P distribution service. The move comes just two weeks after demanding YouTube pull over 100,000 videos offline. 'Joost's promise to protect their copyrights was a major factor in Viacom's decision, and also a stumbling block in their discussions with YouTube/Google. At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.' It's also a 'secure' distribution medium in the eyes of many in the entertainment industry, since users can't upload content themselves.'"

Comment Re:strategy guide? hardly (Score 1) 352

by njug on Monday August 28, 2006 @05:43PM (#15996478) Attached to: How Strategy Guides Affected Gaming

To be fair, there are plenty of guides that are actual strategy guides, particularly when there is choice in character development.

In any party-based game, there is, I think, a solid role to be played by a guide that provides you with information about character strengths and weaknesses. It can be extremely tedious to go through every character stat screen, or to play with each secondary character and see how they level up.

In the KoTOR and KoTOR II Prima's guides (hey, I don't buy them...it was my roommate....), there are suggestions for how you might want to build your party depending on skill path and light/dark alignment.

In X-Men Legends, same deal. I really didn't want to have to spend several iterations figuring out the proper party balance or which skills it was worthwhile to upgrade.

For those roles, at least, the guide remains a side effect of the complexity of the game. Sometimes, too much choice shuts down options. I mean, I played through KoTOR about 6 times, and one can only sit through the same cut scenes for so long before losing interest.

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