Slashdot Mirror

McDutchie writes "The law in the Netherlands says that intercepted phone calls between attorneys and their clients must be destroyed. But the Dutch government has been keeping under wraps for years that no one has the foggiest clue how to delete them (Google translation). Now, an email (PDF) from the National Police Services Agency (KLPD) has surfaced, revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret. The Dutch police are now trying to get their Israeli supplier Verint to tell them how to delete tapped calls and comply with the law. Meanwhile, attorneys in the Netherlands remain afraid to use their phones."

analogrithems writes "Recently I was asked by one of the suits in my company to come up with a method to comply with the new PCI DSS policy that requires companies to have write once, read many logs. In short the requirement is for a secure method to make sure that once a log is written it can never be deleted or changed. So far I've only been able to find commercial and hardware-based solutions. I would prefer to use an open source solution. I know this policy is already part of HIPPA and soon to be part of SOX. It seems like there ought to be a way to do this with cryptography and checksums to ensure authenticity. Has anyone seen or developed such a solution? Or how have you made compliance?"

mfago writes "A colleague of mine has written a great tutorial on how to use rsync to create automatic "snapshot-style" backups. Nothing is required except for a simple script, although it is thus not necessarily suitable for data-center applications. Please try to be gentle on his server: it is the $80 computer that he mentions in the tutorial. Perhaps try the Google cache." An excellent article answering a frequently asked question.

Slashback brings you updates and amplifications on the SSSCA, the future of RAMBUS and Intel, fragmentation of filesystems, a book reviewer who's been publishing online longer than some slashdot readers have walked erect, and more. Read on for the details.

A screenplay written by Jack Valenti? cc_pirate writes: "Apparently Sen. Fritz Hollings (D - Disney, er - SC) completed his hearings today on how the media needs to have content protection included in computers. Intel and other high tech companies resist and are chastized by Hollings."

Penguins are the new Turtles. Gerein writes "After many months of extreme lobbying, personal attacks, public petitions and surveys, the war over the future OS of the Bundestag (German parliament) is finally over (previous /. stories). As heise reports (in german, use the fish) Linux won't make it to the desktops (they're going with XP) but will take over the 150 servers. The last critical question over the directory service has finally been decided in favor to OpenLDAP instead of Active Directory. It's not the complete victory for Linux, many had hoped for, but it's a start for more Open Source in the German government."

Full disclosure seems like a nice idea. Merlynnus writes: "Yahoo! is running a story, Copy-protected CD makers lose battle, in which Music City Records, Fahrenheit Entertainment and digital rights management company Sunncomm have 'agreed' to stop collecting personal info, and to label copy-protected CDs as defective, er, play-challenged in certain devices. The agreement came as the result of court action by a Cali resident, Karen DeLise, over the Charlie Pride CD, 'Charley Pride: A Tribute to Jim Reeves.' Did that CD really need copy-protecting?"

This should have been transparent. Metrollica writes: "It turns out the transparent aluminium article at Spiegel was misunderstood. Sci-fighter published a correction. The transparent substance was not aluminium but alumina, shorthand for aluminium oxide. Slashdot reported on transparent aluminium here."

Odds are, somebody's written a thesis on it ... and here one is. Whether in response to this Ask Slashdot question or just a lucky guesser, Cine writes: "The standard filesystem benchmarking tools such as Bonnie++, Postmark , Mongo and others all test the optimum case for the block layouting algorithm. But in practice one also is interested to know how a filesystem performs when it is or was heavily used over a longer period (e.g. months and years).So Constantin Loizides has written a Master Thesis about the performance of filesystems under the influence of fragmentation."

Intel-Rambus break not as simple as portrayed. Controlio writes: "Tom's Hardware Guide has posted a clarification regarding the EBN story with the sensational headline, 'Intel to drop support of Rambus in new CPU products'. The article was also posted on Slashdot. Tom reports:

EBN had the sensational headline Intel to drop support of Rambus in new CPU products, but the story goes on to say, "Intel will continue using Direct Rambus memory with its network processors. Also, although not new products, the next iterations of its 850 and 860 chipsets, supporting a 533MHz front-side, will support RDRAM when they arrive, probably in the second half of this year." A little misleading, wouldn't you say? Hard to tell, but you read it for yourself, and make your own call.

Great. More sensational journalism. Maybe someone should submit Jack Robertson's resume to Fox News."

Finally, some congratulations are in order. danny writes (does he ever): "February 28th marks the 10th anniversary of my first book review; there are now over six hundred. I have written an account of ten years writing book reviews, which illustrates something of how online publication has changed over the years."

Quite a number of people have written, including the Webmaster of the Mars Polar Lander Site to let us know that it will be touching down at ~12:14 PST. The website will have also have a Downlink from the Lander itself which is incredibly cool. Check out their site - but also check out the technical document about the web site. Very interesting read for those of you who want to know about setting up a powerful web site. The web site is using a huge amount of Open Source software - Apache, Perl, PHP, Linux, MySQL and other software as well.