strawberryshakes - Slashdot User

Submission + - Who is still using IE6? The UK government (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by

strawberryshakes

on Thursday May 17, 2012 @07:27AM

strawberryshakes writes: "The death knell for IE6 was sounded a couple of years ago, but seems like some people just can't let go. Many UK government departments are still using IE6, which is so old — 11 years old to be exact — it can't cope with social media — which the government is trying to get its staff to use more to engage with citizens"

Submission + - No Pardon For Turing (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk on Monday February 06, 2012 @09:03AM

mikejuk writes: A petition signed by over 21,000 people asked the UK Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing. That request has now been declined. A statement in the House of Lords explained the reasoning:
"A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted.
It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times".

Submission + - UK: Open Standards Must be RF, not FRAND (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by

Glyn Moody

on Monday September 12, 2011 @06:40AM

Glyn Moody writes: "There has been a big battle in the UK over whether open standards should be Restriction/Royalty-Free (RF) or Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND). That matters, because open source can't in general implement FRAND standards (there are legal hacks that can be applied in a few special circumstances.) First it seemed that RF had the upper hand [.pdf], but later comments from officials cast doubt on that. Now we have the definitive answer from the UK Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude: "The Government require that their ICT should be built on open standards, wherever possible, to improve competition and avoid lock-in to a particular technology or supplier. Fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) specifications may present some difficulties for the open source software development model in terms of patents and royalties. To deliver a level playing field for both open source and proprietary software, open standards are needed." Will UK government use of open source finally take off, or is this a hollow victory?"

Submission + - SSDs cause crisis for digital forensics (techworld.com) 5

Submitted by rifles only on Tuesday March 01, 2011 @07:30AM

rifles only writes: Firmware built into many solid state drives (SSDs) to improve their storage efficiency could be making forensic analysis at a later date by police forces and intelligence agencies almost impossible to carry out to legally safe standards, Australian researchers have discovered.

They found that SSDs start wiping themselves within minutes after a quick format (or a file delete or full format) and can even do so when disconnected from a PC and rigged up to a hardware blocker.

Submission + - Amazon: hardware, not hackers, caused outage (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder on Monday December 13, 2010 @08:27AM

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Amazon has denied reports that its European sites were brought down by a DoS attack by a hacker group sympathetic to Wikileaks cause. The retailer was a planned target for the attackers, called Anonymous. But Amazon said it was a hardware failure in its European data centre network that caused the half hour outage in Europe.

Submission + - Amazon: hardware, not hackers, caused outage (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder on Monday December 13, 2010 @08:27AM

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Amazon has denied reports that its European sites were brought down by a DoS attack by a hacker group sympathetic to Wikileaks cause. The retailer was a planned target for the attackers, called Anonymous. But Amazon said it was a hardware failure in its European data centre network that caused the half hour outage in Europe.

Submission + - I, for one, welcome our new patent overlords (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder on Friday December 10, 2010 @08:02AM

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: A significant event took place yesterday: potentially the biggest software patent troll of all has finally woken from its slumbers: Today Intellectual Ventures enforced its rights and filed patent infringement complaints in the US District Court of Delaware against companies in the software security; dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and Flash memory; and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) industries. Intellectual Ventures was founded by Microsoft, Intel and a Seattle based lawfim.

Submission + - Schneier: We need nuclear-style cyberwar hotlines (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by strawberryshakes on Friday December 03, 2010 @08:08AM

strawberryshakes writes: Cyberwar is the new nuclear war. Bruce Schneier says governments should establish hotlines and treaties outlining the dos and don'ts of a cyberwar, just as they would any other war.

Sarah Palin 'Target WikiLeaks Like Taliban' 1425

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 01, 2010 @01:45PM from the name-calling dept.

DMandPenfold writes "Sarah Palin, who is widely tipped as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012, has said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda." So that means we should spend billions of dollars and not catch him? Good plan.

Submission + - BP ignored safety modeling software to save time (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold on Friday November 26, 2010 @11:45AM

DMandPenfold writes: BP ignored the advice of safety critical software in an attempt to save time before the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to a presentation slide prepared by US investigators.

The slide in question briefly appeared on the Oil Spill Commission’s website in error, but was quickly retracted.

Advanced cement modelling software, provided by BP’s cement contractor Halliburton, had highlighted serious stability concerns with the well...

Hong Kong Team Stores 90GB of Data In 1g of Bacteria 164

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 25, 2010 @03:05PM from the feed-your-flashdrive dept.

Bananana writes "A research team out of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found a way to do data encryption and storage with bacteria. The project is called 'Bioencryption,' and their presentation (as a PDF file) is here."

The Beatles On iTunes 551

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @11:11AM from the help-i-need-some-money dept.

Yesterday Apple put a big old teaser up on their homepage for an unknown announcement to occur today. Speculation ran rampant from the delayed iOS 4.2, to iTunes Streaming to a release of the Beatles catalog on the iTunes store. Well, it was the latter. They have 13 albums on the store now, and a $150 box set. So here's hoping that we get that iPad multitasking yet this November.

Modeling Software Showed BP Cement As Unstable 160

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 12, 2010 @09:48AM from the many-points-of-failure dept.

DMandPenfold writes "Advanced modeling software analyzed the cementing conditions for BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well as unstable, days before the blast that killed 11 oil rig workers and let millions of barrels of oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. Halliburton, the company that carried out the cement job, used its own modeling software called OptiCem, to support arguments that more stability was needed for the piping and cement. ... An OptiCem test on 15 April, five days before the blast, stipulated that from Halliburton’s point of view, 21 ‘centralizers’ needed to be added to the well bore. The centralizers are used to provide space around the oil pipe casing within the well, as cement is poured around it, and are a vital part of safe drilling. BP initially adhered to the OptiCem software test and ordered 15 extra centralizers. But when technicians on the rig received the extra centralizers they mistakenly decided the new centralizers were the incorrect type. At this point BP proceeded with the drilling anyway, with the six centralizers, deciding another known technique of injecting cement in other places would work."

Submission + - Modeling software showed BP cement as unstable (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold on Friday November 12, 2010 @08:25AM

DMandPenfold writes: Advanced modelling software analysed the cementing conditions for BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well as unstable, days before the blast that killed 11 oil rig workers and let millions of barrels of oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico.

Halliburton, the company that carried out the cement job, used its own modelling software called OptiCem, to support arguments that more stability...

Massive Gamma Ray Bubbles Discovered In Milky Way 115

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @11:27AM from the that-was-me-sorry-i-ate-beans dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Two huge, mysterious gamma ray-emitting bubbles have been discovered at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, US astronomers said... The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old."

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