Slashdot Mirror

wiredog writes: "From ZDNET comes the news that there is apparently a serious security flaw in the Simple Network Management Protocol, used to control routers and other network devices." An anonymous reader points to the CERT advisory as well.

wiredog writes "Remember this story about the guy who spammed his resume? Well, now the Washington Post is reporting that resume spamming is a trend. Enough of a trend to have generated a backlash!" Amusing fallout from an amusing story, and hopefully a lesson for others too.

wiredog writes: "The Washington Post reports on the Future of Music conference. A gathering of musicians,labels, music publishers, unions, lawyers and others. There's also an overview of the pay sites, none of which seem worth the effort of looking at." A good recap on the conference that we mentioned earlier.

wiredog writes: "The Washington Post has an article about a company in Chantilly Virginia, most of whose programmers telecommute from Novosibirsk, Russia." Anyone out there in a similarly distant job?

wiredog writes: "The Washington Post reports on a Swedish study (PDF format) that demonstrates evidence for the existence of human pheromones." The real stuff, not the advertised-in-spam-email frauds.

wiredog writes "From Dr. Dobbs History of Computing comes the story of the IBM 604. IBMs first programmable "computer". With 16 instructions in the instruction set, 40 program steps storable in memory, a blazingly fast 1000 instructions/sec at 50 kHz and power consumption of 7.59kW (230VAC @ 33A)."

wiredog sent us a choice quote from a Washington Post story about high end audio. It compares audiophiles to drug addicts and talks about six figure stereo systems that make me cry with jealousy. Anyway, the true gold mine quote is "For that money [$140k], a local company called the Gene Donati Orchestras will send a string quartet to your home and play on your patio once a week for more than a year. Which is why audiophiles spend a lot of time defending their sanity." I dunno about you guys, but that makes my technology buying habit look like my chewing gum budget.

wiredog points to an LA Times article titled "The TV's Eye Is Set on You." The Times summarizes the story like this: "With cable technology that tracks viewers' habits, two neighbors watching the same show will see different commercials. Practice could begin next spring." The ends actually sounds pretty attractive to me (turn off those embarassing-product ads, please!), but the means (ongoing collection of data about each household) certainly don't.

wiredog writes "The suit alleges Microsoft infringed on a patent for technology that reduces the size of computer sound files that contain voice recordings. The story, from Reuters, at the Washington Post." Well, I'm posting this because apparently everyone and their brother has decided to submit it. But, well, yeah. It's a compression codec. That crap shouldn't be patentable in the first place. Of course, in the US you can patent math.

wiredog writes "The EU report on the NSA/GCHQ/et al echelon system is up at cryptome" This is a fairly lengthy piece covering a lot of stuff relating to the feasibility of intercepting transmissions, Cryptography, Privacy and more.

wiredog writes "The Daily Show's Indecision 2000 was awarded a Peabody Award for it's coverage of the 2000 election! The Peabody is one of the most prestigious awards in broadcast journalism. Comedy central beat out ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and all thew other news programs. " I watch this show pretty religiously: they are the only televised "news" I watch. Their Indecision 2000 coverage was awesome: through all the prodding, satire and joking, it was probably the best coverage during the entire election (and they made the purgatory that followed tolerable). In my eyes, they're the funniest thing coming out daily in any media. And Jon, if you ever need guests that nobody in your viewing audience has ever heard of, shoot me an email. CowboyNeal and I are more fun then a bag of cats, and you should see what he can do with a hard boiled egg and a straw.

wiredog writes "Dr. Dobbs has an article on the Apollo Guidance Computer with a jpg of a source code listing. Some specs: 70-lb box , Approximately 20 instructions, 16 bit word, ROM (rope core) 36K words; RAM (core) 2K words, Basic machine cycle: 2.048 MHz"