Slashdot Mirror

womanfiend writes "The Iowa City (Iowa) Press Citizen has been reporting the last two days about "'Operation Fastlink,' a multi-national investigation launched in April." Apparently, the investigation has netted a local college student hosting 13,000 titles worth a bundle of money both in simple value and liability for as many times as logs show the titles were downloaded. According to the P-C: "...'Operation Fastlink,' which targeted the underground community's hierarchy with [FBI] agents conducting more than 120 searches within 24 hours in 27 states and 11 foreign countries. At the time, authorities identified nearly 100 people as leaders or high-ranking members of international piracy groups." Sounds like somebody's in deep doo doo."

Brian James asks: "I am sick to death of cordless phone batteries going dead at the drop of a hat. And with frequent recharging they tend not to hold much of a charge. Replacement often equals the cost of a new phone altogether... so what's the point? Ultimately I wish cordless phone manufacturers would design a phone that used standard rechargeable batteries, preferably with 2 battery bays and a switch that allowed you to switch over to the fresh set when one set starts to go dead (of course, I don't see this happening any time soon). Is there any way to modify a cordless phone such that I can run the handset off of standard batteries? I don't care how 'cheap and dirty' it ends up, I just need to know I can pop in a fresh battery and call the guy back, without waiting 8 hours for it to charge up." A few cordless phone manufacturers do have a clue. Some phones allow you to charge an extra battery in the base while the other is being used by the phone, which works well (I have a Sony 900Mhz model that does this). It would be interesting to see if someone has done what the poster has asked, however if you'd like to recommend a cordless phone that keeps downtime to a minimum, I'm sure such would be appreciated.

Jeremy Welling asks: "I work in a corporate data center with all the major Unices present. Currently we are using a third party product to manage user logins and authentication. In our goals for 2002, we want to move off that product, and the current plan is to go to NIS. Due to the inherent security holes in NIS, I am investigating using LDAP. We would also like to tie this into the NT domain logins. My question is, how difficult is this to do, what LDAP server software would be best, and what OS platform should we look at?"