Slashdot Mirror

To use the original Reuters link.

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=39092 73

Now I'll have to search my home every morning when I wake up, to make sure nobody's broken in and placed a rogue machine providing DHCP and LDAP services on my LAN.

Wake me when there's a real Mac OS X exploit that's as bothersome as say, Blaster.

Speaking of Windows vulnerabilities, seven more were discovered recently in Internet Explorer. Is the total number of IE security holes up to four digits yet? We must be getting close.

Your 2C has been devalued!

"I'm Michael Jackson and you're Tito "

On that note, I think I'll be Tito...or Toto for that matter.

(Full disclosure: I am a Nigerian, and it brings me grief to no end that the first thing people think of when my country is mentioned is 419 scams).

Heck, the Nigerian President can't even be sure which finance bill to sign since there are several fakes... New Finance Bill May Be a Fake

The story is also available on Reuters The Wall Street Journal story is reported on briefing.com (at 7:33am).

Justices Reject Judge's Ten Commandments Appeal

is this a great country or what!???

Carmen Electra Unveils 'Striptease' DVD

i'd love to get a download copy of the court procedings on this p2p inditement.

Hate to break it to you, but more often than not scox goes up on bad news. Remember SCOForum, when scox showed the code, and it was debunked within an hour? Scox share price went up 50%, to about $15/share, in the next trhee sessions. Then the share price went up another 50% to about $20/share in the two weeks or so.

And on September 26 when IBM announced their countersuit SCOX dropped from around $17 to $13.8 a few days later. The difference? The debunking of the code didn't show up on Reuters which investors are far more likely to read than Slashdot. The crowd driving SCOX's price are not likely to be techies and won't be hanging out here. If "news" doesn't show up on the newsfeeds they check, it may as well not have happened. Besides, the only "debunking" that really matters is the one IBM (and RHAT) will do in the courtroom.

Segway has received three such reports of riders falling off, including one person who sustained a head injury that required stitches, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the company said in a statement.

And I don't want anybody to say that we didn't warn you. We sure enough warned you.

This is not action by a court. This is not a lawsuit. This is action by a governmental regulatory body under George W. Bush. If they are acting under Bush, this must be a humongous problem.

In my opinion, proper use of a Segway will probably require at least a helmet.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The public is well and truly howling for blood on this issue -- if the only way Congress can overcome today's Denver court ruling is to pass a new bill with no loopholes, then they may just have to bite the bullet and do just that.

This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and our strategic investment to build up MSN Messenger.[my emphasis]

This would be a good opportunity to turn people on to cross-platform IM clients like GAIM. I doubt anyone in the tech communities is naive enough to take the children argument as more than a red herring to keep IM from joinging the OS/Broswer/Mediaformat/Office format anti-trust action. It does, however, provide a very good cover for pushing people into MS-Passport, despite its reputation, and for locking out non-Microsoft IM clients.

Alternately, this can be seen as just another product or service being dropped or postponed as the company sheds weight to try to stay afloat.

Lastly, regarding the link. This is being covered by everyone and his dog, even Reuters, so no need to plug poor sources..

http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=tec hnologyNews&storyID=3495415

i think intel will just release a itanium compatible desktop cpu. i think that is what microsoft is suggesting to do

A link to an article might have been nice.

So, do we have a link? A reference? How can we confirm this? Who posted this? This sort of news item sucks. Very little information and no links to reference the news item.

Well, you could bitch and moan about it, or you could just use Google News and find your own damn references

Ironically, I found this news article panning Health Canada's official dope supply for ill people. What's even funnier is that some company has a $7 million contract to supply them with it! As I read the article, I wondered how they do quality control -- just lab tests for delta-9 THC, or do they actually give samples to people to try? I'm sure its all BS lab tests and some rocket scientist is trying to mix/blend it to average out the potency.

This article in Reuters describes the Heliodisplay, a device that creates a two-dimensional image which appears to hover in mid-air and can be seen from several angles. Similar to the Fog Screen, the Heliodisplay projects the image into a cloud of "benign" particles that it sprays into the air. The developer states that he was directly influenced by the hologram communicator shown in the "Star Wars" movies. Here is a set of video clips demonstrating the device in action, and there is more detail about the design on p. 14 of Emerging Display Review (PDF).

Like these DivX-inspired zombie critters from Disney, for example.

It's only PR Newswire that keeps spreading SCOs shit around w/o rebuttals

Well.. them and Reuters

Record Labels Settle First of 261 Swap Suits

A group representing major record labels on Tuesday reached a $2,000 settlement with a New York mother of a 12-year-old girl, less than 24 hours after she and 260 other individuals were sued for illegally swapping music online.
Full Story

OK, I guess we can all go home now.

For large companies, the cost of making and deploying applications on Microsoft's .NET standard was $1.64 million over a three-year period, 28 percent less than the $2.29 million cost for running or J2EE/Linux, according to the study.

and

Forrester said that the main difference in cost was not due to price of the basic software, but rather the price of developing the software, including labor costs.

And Windows and Linux are never offtopic in the Slashdot World. So I'm reading the article, and on the sidebar I see: Study: Windows Can Be Cheaper to Use Than Linux. And I'm thinking, how come the story on IBM and privacy made it to Slashdot but not this wonderful story on Microsoft and Linux so we can all have a grand fight and yelling match. I mean really, standards around here are slipping.

I don't like e-voting any more than you do, as most of the e-voting that's around today is dangerously badly implemented, and ultimately anti-democratic. However, you argue instead that we need representative democracy because...

1. Because mob-rule (pure democracy) is a bad idea.
Mob rule is a bad idea, agreed, but please explain how is mob rule "pure democracy"? Do mobs hold votes on which person to lynch or which building to burn? Mob rule is pure feudalism, not pure democracy.

2. Because most people don't even give a shit about who's PRESIDENT, let alone every minor issue our representatives get paid (well) to address.

Most people in Zimbabwe, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela etc. care very deeply about who's president. You must be talking about "most people in the USA", right? The evidence certainly supports you there, but there is the matter of the other 6 billion people on the planet.

The original article only seemed to have a still photo of the car. For a preview of said chase, go to Reuters News and click on the link in the upper right for Reuters Television. One of their featured video clips (as of this writing) is of the car driving on the road, and into, around on, and out of a body of water (presumably the Thames).

...you pay the HP tax? Dell's got a much lower cost operation and can afford to undercut HP by a substantial amount, you might as well just buy from them, and get your copy of Windows for free (relative to the price of the equivalent computer from HP w/o Windows).

Bill's made it possible for any random high-school loser to destroy $14 billion of other people's hard work. He's soaked the world in gasoline and handed out a billion matches. That's an "achievement"?

Here's that genius's picture - Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, Minnesota teenager who officials said admitted to making a copycat variant of the devastating Blaster Internet worm.

He looks bald at age 18 !!

It's not looking that way. In fact, according to reuters he sounds like quite a moron. Nothing quite like connecting the virus that you modified to a website registered in yourname.

I'm fucking crying here. Reuters, CNN, and id's site are all talking about this explosion right now. John Carmack and Rob Spindler (a competing X prizer) were both on the pad with the brasillian engineers when this happened, and they as of yet can not find anything. They are 90% assumed everyone on the pad is now dead.

You don't need to wonder -- just read the news:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Several Internet worms that have besieged computers for over a week played havoc again on Wednesday, including one called Sobig.F whose aim was to turn PCs into spam machines and was believed to be the fastest growing virus ever, experts said.
Sobig.F drops software onto infected Windows computers that open them to be used later for distributing Internet spam -- unwanted e-mails and product promotions, experts said. It also represents a new trend in converging e-mail spamming and virus software writing, they said.

The jump is due to the analyst report, not Apple shipping G5s. You need to read the article you sited.

In other news, and possibly as a response to Apple shipping the G5, AMD skyrockets on the financial market; apparently traders know something Steve Jobs doesn't. More than 10% in a day, wheeew; looks like 1999.

I would really really love to suck you off. I hope you don't mind if I ask my brother to join us? I love him dearly.

This article from Reuters explains a little:

New York Official Says Power Grid Overloaded -CNN
Thu August 14, 2003 05:04 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A New York State official said the Niagara Mohawk power grid overloaded on Thursday, causing a massive power outage, CNN reported, and New York Major Michael Bloomberg said it was likely a natural occurrence. "It may be well into the evening before power comes back on," Bloomberg told the U.S. cable television network. He said smoke from a Consolidated Edison Inc. plant in the city was due to the plant's automatic shutdown, not to a fire, as had been reported. He said, "I can tell you 100 percent sure that there is no evidence as of this moment whatsoever of any terrorism." A massive power outage swept across swaths of the eastern United States and Canada on Thursday, leaving sections of New York, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto without electricity, witnesses said. It was not immediately clear whether the Niagara Mohawk problem caused the wider outage.

They did.

The IBM countersuit goes into quite a bit of detail on the issue. They claim that their license is irrevocable and they list a series of issues in connection with it. They have obtained a statement from Novell that states that they are in compliance with the contract and that SCO does not have termination rights.

IBM seeks a variety of inhjunctions, in particular to prevent SCO purporting to claim that the license has been terminated.

In other news SCO announced that they have appointed Bill O'Reilly as their VP of frivolous littigation/

which is still sad, especially for an os whose zealous followers claim it is derived from VMS...

VMS had a major advantage in that almost every device attached to the system was also manufactured by DEC. With Windows there are a gazillion vendors of every component you can imagine.

There is no way commodity intel boxes are going to match the reliability of the DEC hardware built to run VMS. The build quality is just not the same - apart from the junk like the Multia that DEC built when it was on its way under.

One of my pet peves about reviews of the latest video hardware is that the quality of the drivers seems to receive only scant attention. I have video cards by nvidia and ATI, the performance of the two cards is indistinguishable but I have had far more hassle with the ATI drivers.

Great, now I am gonna read this tutorial, learn Tivoli and apply for a job with Lego. If you don't know what I am talking about, check this story on eWeek.

-- Sig
TODAY'S REJECTED STORY:
This story on Reuters says that Linux is gaining ground in India and according to RedHat, about 10 percent of India's personal computers will be sold with Linux rather than Microsoft operating systems by March, 2004. Besides the plain switch of desktop operating systems to Linux, analysts say the bigger worry for Microsoft is the growing use of Linux among India's pool of an estimated 400,000 software developers, many of whom churn out code for giants such as General Motors and American Express. CNET , ZDNet and Hindustan Times are running related stories on the rapid growth of Linux in Asia.

Old Spokes-terrorist: REJECTED!
substitute with a man who can get a shave, get a suit, get a grip
New Spokes-terrorist: ACCEPTED!

Same book, different cover.

You can read lots more about this by choosing from the links in the rejected post below. Also, it's important to note that EAL2 is NOT the highest Common Criteria certification level. The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation v2.1 describes the security assurance requirements and EALs in detail. For a look at the details read about the Evaluation Assurance Levels at NIST.

IBM, SuSE Linux Get Common Criteria Security Certification

Linux has reached a new milestone: IBM and SuSE Linux have received the Common Criteria Security Certification from the U.S. government (mirror), specifically from the Defense Information Security Agency (DISA) arm of the Pentagon. 'Right now it is the only Linux distribution available that has this. This certification is used as a standard by 14 countries including the U.S. and Canada,' says the SuSE U.S. general manager. Linux Enterprise Server 8 is certified at Evaluation Assurance Level 2+ EAL2 with the companies jointly pursuing a Controlled Access Protection Profile EAL3 certification by year-end, then on to EAL4. More details at CNet, AP via Detnews/CNN and Reuters/Forbes. It looks like they beat Red Hat to the punch.

More HERE...

So I can help fund shit like this...
Step 1. Microsoft wins homeland security contract worth $100 million
Step 2. Homeland security warns of flaws in microsoft software
So, this government has spent $100 million dollars to Q&A Microsoft products. Meanwhile,at the NSA, free security enhanced linux.
Your tax dollars hard at work. I'm going to buy a box of tea and throw it in Boston harbor.

wrong

Poindexter to Quit Pentagon Post Amid Controversy
Thu July 31, 2003 01:59 PM ET

From http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews& storyID=3198102

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - John Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who spearheaded two sharply criticized Pentagon projects, intends to resign from his Defense Department post within weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.
"It's my understanding that he ... expects to, within a few weeks, offer his resignation," the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

Poindexter was involved with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's abandoned futures-trading market for predicting assassinations, terrorism and other events in the Middle East, and earlier with the so-called Total Information Awareness program that drew fire from civil rights groups.

The August issue of Wired (11.08) has a spread titled "How To Sell Your Body For $46 million" (pp46-47). Not sure if it is online yet but some of the highlights:

Fluids and Tissues: $43million
Lungs: $116,000
Heart: $57,000
Eyes: $8,000
Brain: $662,000
Kidney: $92,000
Pancreas: $46,000
Small Intestine: $72,000
Liver: $474,000

There is a more detailed breakdown, but those are the major points.

Small story from reuters: It may be illegal, immoral and certainly ill-advised, but selling every usable part of your body could fetch upward of $45 million

The first organization that learns to grow these organs individually will make a killing.

Check near the bottom of this link Sontag says that noncommercial users will not need a license. I wonder who is covered under "noncommercial" I suspect that this is to avoid a legal mess of going after thousands of individuals and groups such as universities and even government agencies. I mean the NSA has their very own distribution. Although I suspect that this noncommercial use clause does not cover code modification and redistribution.

You might like this one: Dixie Chick hearing

... courtesy of the rejected post machine. The government sector news sites are always good - and usually better - for details about contracts of this sort:

Microsoft/Dell Gets $90-$120 Million Homeland Security Contract

Microsoft has been awarded the five-year, $90 million Department of Homeland Security contract for desktop and server software. The contract will be managed by Dell and will provide the DHS with 140,000 desktops running Windows XP and Microsoft Office Professional. When consolidated with current agreements, the contract amounts to a six-year agreement covering 144,000 desktops, worth between $110 million and $120 million. This follows the $478 million, six-year deal with the Army announced last month. More at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Washington Post, InformationWeek, the Register , eWEEK, and Reuters.

In an opposing decision, microsoft won the contract to suppply server and client software to the department of homeland security here in the US.

It clearly attacks windows-based PCs. If it attacks through Mozilla or MySQL, it is the fault of the OS for exposing these things. In an OS with proper security, a bad user app such as Mozilla cannot compromise the system as badly as in Windows XP HE, for example, which runs apps as root by default, allowing for example new network services to be installed by downloaded viruses.

As far as quality of life, you need to decide what's most important for you, not what the UN tells you...if you prefer USA or Sweden or Norway or whatever, that's up to you.

For a bit more information on the UN rankings, try this article, from a little more reliable source.