Slashdot Mirror

Anonymous guy who can't remember his login sent in a story from the Globe And Mail that says "During August, 67 per cent of all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux, followed by Microsoft Windows at 23.2 per cent. A total of 12,892 Linux on-line servers running e-business and information sites were successfully breached in that month, followed by 4,626 Windows servers."

Mikkeles writes "From an Associated Press story: 'It sounds like a chapter out of "Spy vs. Spy": Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have launched a project called Camera Watch that lists Internet cameras that monitor public spaces, letting Web surfers try the role of bored security guard.' The site permits searching for an available webcam in the geographical region (US) of your choice. About 600 webcams of 6000 in the pipe are now available."

maliabu writes "GlobeTechnology/CNET reports that Symantec has added an antipiracy technology to the new version of its main virus-zapping program, in the form of compulsory product activation. It is intended to protect consumers from widespread counterfeit copies of Symantec programs. The company estimates at least 3.6 million bogus copies of its programs are sold annually, causing headaches both for Symantec and unsuspecting buyers, who find out too late that the software isn't doing the job."

airrage writes "Sometimes technology is a good thing, and sometimes it ends up in a hardware device called an autotuner. Apparently, it allows real-time pitch correction. They are actually being used at concerts. I think we all realize that some singers sound different -- much different -- live than they do on CD's, but this just seems so, so, what's the word: fake?"

Jucius Maximus writes "As reported by Globetechnology, Canada's cellphone providers have agreed to create a common standard for their subscribers to connect to the Internet via public "hot-spots." The agreement became necessary because Canada's cellphone providers offer four different and incompatible connection technologies. The carriers will continue to vigorously compete with each other, both for customers and Wi-Fi hotspot locations, the CWTA said in a statement."

securitas submits this painfully well-linked piece: "eWEEK reviews the RIM BlackBerry 7230 color handheld, Research In Motion's latest combination wireless e-mail/phone/PDA, and the first BlackBerry to feature a full-color display. The tri-band GSM/GPRS J2ME device features a 240-by-160-pixel, 65,000-color display, 16 MB flash +2 MB SRAM, an Intel 386 32-bit chip, SMS, an HTML browser (missing from the preceding BlackBerry 5810), a claimed 4 hours talk/10 days standby removable/rechargeable lithium-ion battery, POP3/IMAP/Exchange/Notes wireless e-mail for up to 10 accounts with file attachment management, security via Triple DES encryption, USB sync/recharging and the usual organizer functions. RIM squeezes it all into a 4.8 oz/136g, 4.4x2.9x0.8 inch/11.3x7.4x2.0 cm package (tech specs at RIM). The BlackBerry 7230 is exclusive to T-Mobile USA until 2004 and costs about $400. With this release, RIM is moving the BlackBerry into the prosumer/consumer market to expand its customer base beyond enterprise users. The release comes amid speculation of BlackBerry doom following RIM's recent patent ruling loss and ahead of the highly anticipated Handspring Treo 600, its direct competition (which includes the MS Pocket PC Phone Edition Smartphone and the Palm Tungsten W). More at Wired News, E-Commerce Times, InfoWorld and Forbes/Reuters."

prostoalex writes "IMS Research says that by the end of the year People Republic of China might become world's biggest laptop manufacturer. The plants will be largely owned by Taiwanese manufacturers, though. Taiwan is current #1."

securitas writes "Today Yahoo announced it plans to buy search technology company Overture for $1.63 Billion. The move is seen as a way to compete with rivals like Google and MSN, especally in the paid search and advertising category. This takeover occurs following this article about Google and Overture's race to secure partners for its paid search advertising. Other reoprts at CNN Money, ZDNet/CNet, AP via the Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones via Yahoo. Press release at Overture and Yahoo."

evenprime writes "Sharman Networks tried to file an antitrust lawsuit against record labels and movie studios. They alleged that the companies forced piracy to occur by conspiring to keep authorized and copy-protected versions of their songs and movies off Kazaa. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson just dismissed Sharman's claims."

So, today's one of those days when every bit of news is dominated by Microsoft. To spare you six different stories about the Borg, we'll assimilate them all into this one. You have seen the stupid Passport hole in an earlier story; also the iLoo, although that hasn't stopped you from submitting stories about it, oh no. New news: a report paid for by Microsoft shows that Windows is a better server than Red Hat. A class-action suit has been filed charging that MSN and Best Buy combined to scam customers. The WINHEC conference is ongoing - Steve Ballmer says DRM is an opportunity, not a prison, the Xbox is going to be your home communications center, Wired talks about how hardware will be changed to imprison users, and once you're locked in to Microsoft you get to pay more each year. An article describes why user desktops are locked down. Oh, and here's another on DRM, just because.

An anonymous reader writes "Canada's National Post is reporting today that DARPA is (indirectly) funding $2-million (US) to Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. The article is available here." Update: 04/07 21:01 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this blurb should credit instead The Globe and Mail rather than the National Post.

AndroidCat writes "While the equipment used isn't new, this operation was different because one of surgeons was 400km away. Dr. Mehran Anvari in Hamilton Ontario tele-operated instruments in North Bay General Hospital, supervised by Dr. Craig McKinley on site. The link was over a high priority routed Bell Canada connection. The patient, Ms. Fortier is doing quite well. Don't try this from home with a dialup connection."

Henry V .009 writes "Salon.com is appealing to the community for help. They haven't been able to pay the rent since December. To date, they've lost about $80 million dollars. A cause of rejoicing for some. But their many readers are understandably sorry to see them in such desperate straits. Personally I hope they stick around, I think they are one of the best sources of independant journalism on the web--even if I happen to agree with less than 10% of what they have to say. I also think that it would be a shame for them to close now that they've finally created an advertising scheme that has a snowball's chance in hell of working on the web. I can actually recall some of the adverts I've seen on Salon--what other web site can you say that about? Salon says that if they get another 50,000 subscriptions (they currently have 50,000) they'll break even for the year." In the old role-playing game "Paranoia", there was a nice quote about what would happen when the player characters (who had never been outside of their enclosed city complex) made an attempt to swim in water over their heads: "delaying drowning".

pknoll writes "Though it probably won't happen soon, IBM is talking about Linux eventually replacing AIX. The article at Globe Technology states there are IBM folks working on 'chips for 2007' systems, and the viewpoint projected is described as 'multidecade,' but it's an interesting view into the future of IBM and Linux."

Slashback tonight with word on the (groan) fate of Iridium, more Speak n' Spell modding, examples of Serial ATA oozing to market, the RIAA versus mandatory DRM, and more. Read on for the updates.

In this household, we obey the laws of physics! Tuesday before last, we mentioned that two scientists had announced what they claim is the first accurate measure of the speed of gravity.

Now, Emperor_Alikar writes "In an article on Space.com, many physicists have criticized the current work on the speed of gravity, calling it 'nonsense' and 'simply incorrect.' Many of them still doubt the claims made by Fomalont and Kopeikin even before the results were even announced. Many of the physicists still hold on to the idea that gravity works instantaneously no matter what the distance, an idea that originated by Newton, but that was argued against by Einstein."

Back from the back from the back from the dead. Checkers writes "Spacedaily.com posted the following two stories about Iridium today. The first story is about the DoD committing the first of three renewal options that will use Iridium through 2005. The second story related story is about an agreement inked between Iridium and Harris Corp. that allows Iridium the right to use Harris' OS/COMET satellite command and control system for the life of the Iridium satellite network."

E.T. was also into this scene. In re: matt simpson writes "Another fantastic Speak & Spell modder is Dave Wright of the band "not breathing". You can check his work out, among other modifications to toys, at www.carrionsound.com Dave has made speak & spell/math/read for Nine Inch Nails, Meat Beat Manifesto, and many other bands. Figured you might be interested in other neat synth hackers :)"

Further evidence, never a good time to buy. SpinnerBait writes "It's seems like Serial ATA Controllers have been on the market forever but where have all the Serial ATA Hard Drives been? The wait seems to finally be over, as HotHardware shows with this review and showcase on a pair of new Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA drives. This article covers benchmarks with the product in single drive configurations, as well as RAID 0. In addition, they show performance on two different SATA controllers, from Promise and Silicon Image. And oh, those nice thin neat little SATA cables! Gotta love 'em."

We've had a few articles about Serial ATA; I hope it lives up to its reputation.

Just to add to the confusion ... probejockey writes "A current article in the Globe and Mail claims SCO will start collecting licensing fees from some Linux users, not all Linux vendors as previously reported here."

Birds of a feather, separate rooms. Finally, Declan McCullagh sent in a few interesting links yesterday regarding the RIAA and its announced opposition to mandated DRM technologies:

"First, here are the photos from today's press conference.

Second, the supposed news of today's announcement was that the RIAA would no longer pursue mandatory-DRM technologies like the Hollings bill. But it was the MPAA that was behind Hollings from the beginning (September 2001). And when Hollings finally introduced his bill in March 2002, it was the MPAA that endorsed it, while the RIAA pointedly did not."

Thanks to Declan for the links.

Wasn't smart enough to get in, either ... Finally, thanks to the several readers who alerted me by email and in comments that the school variously rendered Cal Tech, CalTech and other things even worse is in fact properly spelled "Caltech."

turing0 writes "Bell Canada yesterday announced a trial of a new public wifi hotspot service - currently free - with locations in either airports, railway stations or bus terminals in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston. Bell has adopted an interesting twist on the hotspot in that they have built a steel armored case, in which to house the AP, a DSL modem and power supply, which is the exact dimensions of a payphone -- and mounted the whole thing in place of a single phone where there are banks of them such as you see in airports and bus terminals or subways. According to this article in the Globe and Mail Bell has still not determined the pricing model." turing0 continues: "I attended the press conference at Toronto's Union Station, Track F, where I took a close look at the AP box which was mounted quite securely to a bank of payphones, and I was pretty impressed at how solid it appeared as various journalistic hacks took turns trying to pry the AP off the wall under the watch of Bell execs and a Bell phone tech. Bell is using Cisco AP1200's in the box as well as Alcatel ADSL modems with a 3Mb/Sec ADSL/ATM backhaul to the internet according to the Bell tech present. Various Bell types were wandering about with a pretty diverse collection of hardware such as Apple iBooks, Compaq PDA and IBM Thinkpads with 802.11 cards from Proxim, Cisco and Symbol as well as Dlink and SMC. Great use of a fully amortized asset (phone banks) and a very interesting spin on how to generate new revenue from a dying cost center - the payphone biz. Plus the added benefit of not having to negotiate new agreements with property management and landlords. Smooth move for Bell. Why didn't I think of that? Payphones, though declining in numbers, are still pretty much ubiquitous and are served with power as well as a good solid mounting location for the AP. In the final deployment Bell said that they would also be mounting AP's in the plenum and riser infrastructure of selected buildings should the full roll-out of the Accesszone product proceed. Is Bell Canada the first ILEC to recycle payphones?"

An anonymous reader writes "An often overlooked fact about network bandwidth utilization is that the bandwidth consumed on networks is more than the sum of the data exchanged at the highest level; it's data+overhead+upkeep. In the early 90's I worked for a large multi-national company whose software engineering department had a transatlantic x.25 circuit connection to it's European engineering headquarters. It was necessary that the connection be 'on' 24x7 due to the spanning of a large number of time zones, disparate working hours and tight contractual requirements. Very large data transfers were sometimes operationally essential. But the financial people used to scream constantly about the circuit costs (charged per packet, IIRC) of several thousand dollars/month. The sys admin realized that if he just reduced the frequency of keep-alives, he could shave something like 10% off the monthly bill. This article points out that p2p applications are greater bandwidth hogs than one might think because of the foregoing and more - they also search, accept pushed advertising and do other transactions that are transparent to most users, but add up. I doubt that developers of those free p2p applications have gave much thought to efficiency. This will be no surprise to many of you, but helps explain why ISP's rushing to put caps on transfers."

smcavoy writes " Globe Technology is carrying a article about the CBDTPA. "We haven't received one e-mail in support of the Hollings bill," said Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Mimi Devlin. "It seems like there's a groundswell of support from regular users." I wonder if the technology industry was pro CBDTPA, would we be hearing as many bad things about it, in the press?"

bflame writes: "The Canadian province of Alberta is building the infrastructure to provide highspeed internet service to 422 cities. The government of Alberta along with Cisco Networks, Microsoft and Axia will be installing highspeed fiber optic lines to link 422 cities. The contracts also required competition among ISPs to insure lower internet costs. Cisco provides a nice write up in IQ magazine. Globe Technologies is reporting that work has started on the Alberta Supernet. The government of Alberta has an article about the supernet along with this article." We've mentioned Alberta earlier - nice to see they're moving ahead with the project. And an anonymous reader sent in a link about the city of Tallahasee rolling out a public WLAN.

Tjp($)pjT writes "A Canadian company which bought Iridium for roughly a quarter of a cent on the dollar has scheduled the re-opening of the service. Rescued from a blazing death of dropping all 66 sats and their spares out of orbit to burn up on reentry, the 5 BILLION dollar system was purchased on the block for 25 million. The US Government contracted with the service for unlimited air time for 20,000 phones for two years with other options. More can be read here."

drkrypton writes: "The Globe and Mail is reporting on a new metal which has a superconducting temperature of -234 C or approx. 39 K. While this is still much colder than some ceramic superconductors (which have superconducting temperatures of around -113 C or 160 K) it still may have some ramifications in electronics. Hey, I triple dog dare you to lick it." Perhaps it will one day be routine to start a computing session by dumping in some liquid nitrogen onto a yet-higher-temperature superconducting CPU.

Anonymous Coward writes "I found this comment interesting, in light of the recent Red Hat buy-in from Intel. Would anyone care to speculate wildly what might happen to the strategies of both Intel and Microsoft if ever a rift were to develop between them? "