Slashdot Mirror

gobbo writes "Project Censored has released its top 25 underreported stories for 2002-3. Everyone needs to find out about these as part of a daily anti-propaganda vitamin, but /.ers should be particularly interested in #6: "Closing Access to Information Technology," in which Arthur Stamoulis reports on how the conglomeration of control over the physical networks threatens access to content. Alternative links suggested for more info: the Center for Digital Democracy, Media Tank, and Free Press. Double plus good I say, who wants all that information anyway!"

omega_cubed asks: "'You've successfully installed FreeBSD, now your computer is going to hang at boot up!' -- That was what I just recently suffered. I've been running Mandrake on my ThinkPad X20 for almost a year. But the lack of high speed internet connection over the summer prevented me from keeping up with the various patches/updates. Many services--sendmail, apache, etc.--were shutdown one by one because of security vulnerabilities. Recently I decided that instead of trying to catch all those patches I missed in the last few months, I might just as well do a clean install of FreeBSD. I've done what I think was all the preparations necessary: I backed-up all my files, checked all the hardwares for possible conflicts (on FreeBSD.org) and supports, downloaded the ISO image. And I decided the computer should be able to take it. Unfortunately, I didn't come across the old slashdot article reporting a possible conflict between IBM ThinkPad's BIOS and FreeBSD's filesystem. So last night, after much struggling, I installed FreeBSD. It finished, rebooted, and the computer now just hangs at bootup (here's a more detailed report on what happened). It doesn't even go into BIOS. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? Is there anyway I can update the BIOS? The diskettes provided IBM were not able to boot the computer, and I am at a loss here. Thanks."

Raffi Spock writes: "OK, this isn't new or anything, but with all that stuff on transmitters for MP3 that transmit through phone lines to an expensive receiver, I just thought I'd point the dial to Cana-kit who manufacture a little kit that transmits any audio source to a distance of about 150M. Cost is about $40 Canadian. I just built one of these, so I now can listen to MP3s without carrying a very heavy PC around. Oh yeah, since it just plugs into any audio output, drivers are unnecessary making it run on any OS."

Elik writes: "I been asked by the higher up at Netwolves as to the availability of a secure messaging system that uses an encrypted protocol for messaging instead of insecure systems like AIM, MSN, Yahoo or ICQ. From what I have read, they are not secure enough that you can send any secret confidential information though the messenger system, since from the reading, they are not encrypted. Are there secure messaging client/server systems that are available for most platforms, that could be considered secure by using some of the standard encryption systems like 3DES, Blowfish or others?" It shouldn't be too hard to hack support for this into the existing IRC clients. It may not be as cute as most IM systems, but if it's security you want, you may have to sacrifice something. If you are transferring huge amounts of data, why worry about instant messaging systems? Just use PGP (or GPG) to encrypt the data and the plethora of file sharing software currently available on the Internet to get it where you want?

Dale Chesser writes "...or the PC is dying? This article is rather critical of the PC's survival, citing the evolution of the "internet appliance". " I'm not so sure. Cheap PCs are making billions, and despite years of hype, those Net Appliances still aren't catching on.