Slashdot Mirror

If you've ever wanted to pick up the phone, and leave a message for god, dutch artist Johan van der Dong has just the number for you. Johan has set up a local telephone number in the Netherlands, where he urges people to leave messages for God on his answering machine. "Like praying, leaving a voicemail message is a way to organize your thoughts," he said. "It's a perfect combination for some contemplation." If you dial 06-4424-4901 (or +316-4424-4901 if calling from outside the Netherlands) starting March 7 you will hear, "Hi, you are speaking to God. I'm not in right now so leave a message after the beep." It's strange that the almighty doesn't have a vanity number or at least one that is easier to remember.

Ryanair airline's chief executive, Michael O'Leary, has said that the airline might start charging passengers for using the toilet while flying. "One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound ($1.43) to spend a penny in future," O'Leary told BBC television. It won't be long before airlines will start charging for air. Why should they eat the entire cost of pressurizing the cabin?

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's long-running war against Patti Santangelo, her children, and even her children's schoolmates has been 'settled in principle,' with final settlement documents expected to be submitted by March 18th. Patti Santangelo is believed to be the first RIAA defendant to have made a motion to dismiss the RIAA's 'making available' complaint. The case first caught the attention of the Slashdot community back in 2005, when a transcript of Ms. Santangelo's first court appearance became available online. The case attracted national attention in December of 2005. According to the Associated Press report of the settlement, neither side was able to comment on the terms of the settlement."

Kim Sun-Ok, 54, is the proud new holder of the world record in marathon singing. After a continuous 76 hours in a karaoke bar slaughtering Elvis hits and screaming Kid Rock songs until hoarse, the brave people at Guinness were called in to end the auditory nightmare. She started singing at 11:14 am Thursday and sang a total of 1,283 tunes before ending at 3:21 pm Saturday.

An anonymous reader writes "The large print giveth, the small print taketh away. Microsoft, which recently laid off 1400 employees, is now claiming that some of those lucky schmoes were inadvertently overpaid on their severance package. A letter from the company, which was subsequently circulated on the internet, states: 'We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you.' Microsoft has confirmed the authenticity of the letter, but it's not known what the amounts in question are, or how many of the 1400 were affected." Update: 02/24 14:00 GMT by T : VinylRecords writes "Well, now Microsoft has recanted, saying that the situation has resulted in unfortunate amounts of bad press and public relations. 'This was a mistake on our part,' said a Microsoft spokesman in an e-mailed statement. 'We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner.'"

MollyB writes "According to Wired, the recent collision of satellites may put the Atlantis shuttle mission to repair Hubble in the 'unacceptable risk' status: 'The spectacular collision between two satellites on Feb. 10 could make the shuttle mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope too risky to attempt. Before the collision, space junk problems had already upped the Hubble mission's risk of a "catastrophic impact" beyond NASA's usual limits, Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reported today, and now the problem will be worse. Mark Matney, an orbital debris specialist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas told the publication that even before the collision, the risk of an impact was 1 in 185, which was "uncomfortably close to unacceptable levels" and the satellite collision "is only going to add on to that."'"

crazyeyes writes "Microsoft says it's 'optional,' but they are already planning to slip Internet Explorer 8 into all Windows Vista/XP PCs by March. MS claims that IE8 will offer better performance and security. But what about unwanted stuff like 'Monetization opportunities (for OEMs)' and 'These services will be used (by OEMs) to deliver brand exposure... to the users'?"

ketan324 points to a Register story touting an agreement among several phone makers to settle on Micro USB for their phones' charging ports, writing "It's about time for these cellphone manufacturers to wise up and design a universal phone charger. Although many manufacturers have already 'standardized' to a mini-USB interface, there are many more out there who use proprietary adapters. I wonder how Apple will feel about this? Will they finally realize that their oh-so-special adapter is nothing more than a fudged USB interface?" No legislation required.

goran72 writes "In a development which could reveal the links between modern humans and their prehistoric cousins, scientists said they have mapped a first draft of the Neanderthal genome. Researchers used DNA fragments extracted from three Croatian fossils to map out more than 60 percent of the entire Neanderthal genome by sequencing three billion bases of DNA."

DrEnter writes "According to this story on Yahoo, two communications satellites collided in orbit, resulting in two large clouds of debris. The new threat from these debris clouds hasn't been fully determined yet. From the article, 'The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. Each satellite weighed well over 1,000 pounds.' This is the fifth spacecraft/satellite collision to occur in space, but the other four were all fairly minor by comparison."

crazyeyes writes "With Windows 7 set for release in Dec. 09, Microsoft is getting ready with their free upgrade program, which allows Vista users to switch to Windows 7 when it arrives. The folks at TechARP have consistently scored accurate scoops on Microsoft software releases. They have now revealed Microsoft's upgrade plans, schedules and even screenshots of the upgrade process."

A Brazilian judge has ruled what I have known for years, TV is an "essential good" needed to watch soccer and popular reality shows. I would have changed "essential good" to "best friend" or "mentor," but I can recognize the need to be conservative in a ruling. The judge awarded $2,600 in damages to a man who sued a store for not replacing his faulty television set. "In modern life, you cannot deny that a television set, present in almost all homes, is considered an essential good," ruled the judge. "Without it, how can the owner watch the beautiful women on 'Big Brother,' the national news broadcast or a football game," the judge quipped.

A 68-year-old grandmother has taken the driving test almost every working day since 2005 in the southwestern city of Jeonju, South Korea. She failed again Monday for the 771st time. "It was a record-breaking number here. I wonder if she will try it again for a 772nd time?" Choi Yong-Cheol, a police sergeant supervising the test in the city's Deokjingu district, told AFP. The woman tells a local newspaper that she will take the test until she passes. Police estimate she has spent almost five million won (3,600 dollars) to take the written test, with each test costing 6,000 won in addition to other expenses. It appears this woman is single-handedly fueling all bad driving stereotypes.

NIckGorton writes "Research is now underway in the US to seek FDA approval for an artificial liver. The Extracorporeal Liver Assist Device (ELAD) filters blood through a cartridge containing immortalized human liver cells with fiber tubes running through that allow the patients blood to interact with them. This allows the matrix of liver cells to perform both the metabolic (cleansing the blood of toxins/waste) and synthetic (producing albumin, clotting factors, etc) functions of the patient's failing liver. A small trial in China showed a statistically and clinically significant difference in 30 day survival with ELAD."

A sewage treatment facility in Nagano prefecture has recorded a higher gold yield from sludge than can be found at some of the world's best mines. An official said the high percentage of gold found at the Suwa facility was probably due to the large number of precision equipment manufacturers in the area. The facility recently recorded finding 1,890 grammes of gold per tonne of ash from incinerated sludge. The prefecture is so far due to receive 5 million yen ($55,810) for the gold, minus expenses. I can't wait to see the game show they make out of this. I bet the physical challenges are brutal.

spirit_fingers writes "I'm the IT manager for a west coast design company that has a small branch office in Beijing with 5 employees, a few workstations and a couple of servers. Recently, it came to my attention that the Beijing office has been routinely installing and using pirated software on their computers — MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, mostly. We're very buttoned up about being legal with our software here at the home office, and I consider it unprofessional and risky for our Beijing office to be engaging in this practice. When I called the local office manager on this, he shrugged and replied, 'Well, every other shop here does it.' So I was wondering if there are any IT manager Slashdotters here in the the US who may have experienced something similar with their colleagues in APAC, and how they handle a situation like this." Click the link for more of this reader's thoughts on the subject.
Up until now, the powers that be here in the States have had a relatively laissez faire attitude about what goes on at the Beijing office and our accounting department hadn't noticed that Beijing never submitted receipts for software, until I questioned them about it.

I have no doubt that "everyone else does it" in that environment. Frankly, I could care less what those guys do with their personal computers, but when it comes to company-owned gear my attitude is to stay legal no matter what anyone else is doing. And it's not like they need to do it to save money: the Beijing branch turns a tidy profit. It just seems to be an attitude so firmly ingrained in the culture over there that no one gives it a second thought.

My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using. and see what happens. This came down today, so I'll give them a day or two to come up with something.

Jason S. writes to tell us that for those seeking to "go green" or those just wishing to try something different, RTI now offers a printer that uses coffee instead of ink. In addition to recycling your grounds, the printer also uses good old fashioned elbow grease to move the grounds cartridge back and forth, saving power. Sounds like a novelty that will die quickly as human sloth reasserts itself. "Hosted by Core77 and Inhabitat, this year's Greener Gadgets Design Competition resulted in an incredible crop of innovative consumer electronics designs, and we're excited to offer you the first scoop on some of our favorite designs! Jeon Hwan Ju's RITI printer works by replacing environmentally un-friendly inkjet cartridges with the dregs from your daily coffee. Simply place used grounds in the ink case, insert a piece of paper, and move the ink case left and right to print text."

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick spilled the news that the DJ Hero game currently being developed by FreeStyleGames will be released sometime this year. He described it as a "turntable that you actually can play competitively and spin discs and mix songs." In an interview at the World Economic Forum, Kotick also explained why the games industry is in a good position to survive the recent economic troubles, saying that the amount of time people are playing games is on the rise, in part due to their low cost-to-time ratio.

Pandanapper writes to tell us Yahoo is reporting that if you find yourself watching an ad on a video screen in a public venue, the ad may be watching you as well. "Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity -- and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens."

Shipud writes "There are ten times more bacterial cells in our body than our own cells. Most of them are located in our guts, and they affect our well-being in many ways. A group at Washington University has recently reported that although our gut microbes perform similar functions, it appears that different people have completely different compositions of gut bacteria: every man is an island, a unique microbial ecosystem composed of completely different species. One conclusion is that the whole division of bacteria into species may well be over-used in biomedicine."

Nigerian police are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery. "The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them. However one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat," said Kwara state police spokesman Tunde Mohammed. He should have turned into a car and drove away.

bk- writes with news that documents from the "Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit against Microsoft indicate the software giant could be on the hook for as much as $8.52 billion in upgrade costs. "[University of Washington economist Keith] Leffler came up with his total upgrade costs by calculating how much it would cost to upgrade each of the 19.4 million PCs with 1 GB of memory and graphics cards or onboard chipsets able to run Aero, according to Keizer. Leffler put the maximum cost of upgrading the desktops at $155, while positing that the notebooks' integrated graphics would be more tricky to replace and would cost between $245 and $590 per unit. The total price tag for Microsoft would thus range from $3.92 billion to $8.52 billion and in some cases would include complete replacements of notebooks that could not be feasibly upgraded, Leffler testified. Microsoft in its response argued that giving litigants 'a free upgrade to Premium-ready PCs would provide a windfall to millions.'"

TarrVetus writes "The Associated Press reports that a federal appeals court in Philadelphia has ruled that the Child Online Protection Act will not be revived, upholding a 2007 decision that the unimplemented 1998 law is unconstitutional. The law, which made it a crime for websites to allow children access to 'harmful' material, was declared a violation of the First Amendment because of existing elective filtering technologies and parental controls that are less restrictive to free speech than the 'ineffective' and 'overly broad' ban."

Voidsinger writes "The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums that there has yet to be a successful update of the 3500320AS models from SD15 to the new SD1A firmware. Add to that the updater updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people's backups if they were on the same type of drive. Drives are still flashable though, and Seagate has pulled the update for validation. While it would have been nice of them to validate the firmware beforehand, there is still a little hope that not everyone will lose all of their data."

crazyeyes writes "It looks like Microsoft is facing problems with Windows Vista SP2. The final Service Pack for Vista and Server 2008 (before Windows 7 comes out) has been delayed. The folks who broke the launch details and dates of previous Service Packs for XP and Vista have Microsoft's latest internal schedule. Can Microsoft get it out before Windows 7? According to the new schedule, just barely."

Pay The Piper writes "As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I've been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft's suite? Besides the obvious 'free vs. expensive' argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?" (Given that company-wide rollouts take some time to implement, this early look at the features of OO.o 3.1 may have some relevance, too.)

Peru's top court has ruled that workers cannot be fired for being drunk on the job. The ruling was criticized by the government for setting a dangerous precedent. Celso Becerra, the administrative chief of Chorrillos, a suburb of Lima, denounced the ruling. "We've fired four workers for showing up drunk, and two of them were drivers," he said. "How can we allow a drunk to work who might run somebody over?" Go with the liquor, Peru.

Police have arrested a California man for allegedly trying to sell his 14-year-old daughter into marriage in exchange for $16,000, 100 cases of beer and several cases of meat. The police became aware of this shining example of fatherhood after he went to them to complain that the buyer had failed to make payment as promised. He was arrested on suspicion of human trafficking.

PeterAitch writes "According to Reuters, Potsdam University in Germany is now teaching social skills as part of their IT courses. This is intended to 'ease entry into the world of work'. The 440 students enrolled in the master's degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection(s)." The class is taught by a superficial model, who will fall in love with the nerdiest student at the end of the semester after realizing that he is beautiful on the inside.

Jamie Price writes with a nice tutorial on putting technology to use in the service of mankind, with one of his latest projects — BaR2D2. "BaR2D2 is a radio-controlled, mobile bar that features a motorized beer elevator, motorized ice/mixer drawer, six-bottle shot dispenser, and sound activated neon lighting. The robot is driveable so you can take the party on the road! It was created in my garage using standard hand/power tools and readily available parts and materials. Here is a video of it in action. To see the full how-to with tons of pictures, check out the build.

It is estimated that a square yard of Mexico City sidewalk has 70 blobs of discarded gum, making it twice as gum filled as the bottom of an average 3rd grader's desk. To fight the problem authorities have used expensive sidewalk steam-cleaners, natural chewing gums that break down and now they are telling citizens to swallow it. "People just spit their gum out right on the sidewalk," marveled Paula Moran, a 32-year-old secretary. "It's ugly, and it's even worse when you step on it -- especially when it's still warm."

Garth Seehawer, 71, of Oconto Falls, has taken the coveted Top Lie of 2008 award given by The Burlington Liars Club. Four judges picked Seehawer's lie,"My grandson is the most persuasive liar I have ever met. By the time he was 2 years old he could dirty his diaper and make his mother believe someone else had done it," out of about 160 entries. "When you're the best in the world at something, sure, that's an honor," he said, insisting with a chuckle that his background as a lawyer gave him no advantage. "This will only hurt for a little while," came in a close second, with "I'd love to watch the Sex and the City movie with you," rounding out third.

DynaSoar writes "Lake Superior State University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ('The land of four seasons: June, July, August and Winter') has just published its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Besides such unsurprising inclusions such as 'green' corporations being 'game changing' due to concern with their 'carbon foot print,' this year's list contains an emoticon for the first time — not a smiley face or variant, but the 'heart' symbol made from the characters 'less than' and 'three.' It's perhaps a sign of the evolution of language, or at least of this volunteer linguistic watchdog group, that a symbol compounded of two characters, neither of them a letter, is considered not only a word, but a particularly egregious one."

TaeKwonDood writes "LEDs don't beat CFLs in the home yet, but it's not simply because PG&E is getting rich making people feel like they are helping the environment buying CFLs made in China that are shipped to the US using a lot more fossil fuels than they save. It's a problem of indication versus illumination. However, some new discoveries are going to change all that."

the_kanzure points out this AP story on amateur genetic engineering, excerpting: "The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself. Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories." Reader resistant has a few ideas about how to use this sort of lab: "Personally, I'd like to whip up a reasonably long-lasting and durable paint made with dye based on squid genes that glows brightly enough to allow 'guide lines' to be daubed along hallway baseboards, powered by a very low trickle of electricity. Plus, a harmless glowing yogurt would make for a cool prank."

Frosty Piss writes "Police in Finland have made an arrest for car theft based on a DNA sample taken from the blood found inside a mosquito. 'A police patrol carried out an inspection of the car and they noticed a mosquito that had sucked blood. It was sent to the laboratory for testing, which showed the blood belonged to a man who was in the police registers,' a police officer told reporters. The suspect, who has been interrogated, has insisted he did not steal the car, saying he had hitchhiked and was given a lift by a man driving the car. I'm wondering if the suspect should have denied any association with the car at all. After all, who knows where that mosquito had been?"

RockDoctor writes "A report is circulating that in the run-up to the selection of prize-winners for 2006 and 2008, some members of the Nobel jury accepted an expenses-paid trip (or trips) to China to 'explain the selection process.' That's not, in itself, an incriminating event ('Is there something that we're doing incorrectly, or not doing?' is a valid question), and if there was dishonorable intent, it doesn't seem to have worked too well (the last Chinese Nobel Laureate was in 1957). There does seem to be embarrassment about falling into an obvious conflict-of-interest mantrap." PhysOrg mentions that a corruption prosecutor is also looking into a Nobel-related sponsorship from a pharmaceutical company that was linked to one of the winners for this year's Medicine prize.

unassimilatible writes "If there was ever a sad day for nerds, it's today, as Majel Barrett-Rodenberry has passed away. The widow of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is best remembered as the gorgeous Nurse Christine Chapel from the original series, the pesky and officious Lwaxana Troi from The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and of course the ubiquitous voice of Star Trek computers in movies, TV, and animated films (who hasn't used her voice as a system sound on their PC?). Majel also attended Star Trek conventions yearly and was a producer of Andromeda. Fortunately, Majel just finished her voice over work for the computers in J.J. Abrams' latest Trek movie. I have to admit, this made me sad, just having caught up on the entire TNG and DS9 series on DVD."

quarterbuck writes "While Google is saying that personalization is the key to search, Yahoo is taking a different view of the topic. Yahoo announced plans to retain user data for no longer than 90 days and to anonymize data. Even if Yahoo is not your favorite search engine, it is a good move in the direction of online privacy if it will force others to follow suit." Reader Mike adds "Yahoo did say, however, that it will keep some data for up to six months for security and fraud reasons, as part of some 'specific and limited exceptions.'"

walterbyrd notes that new data from Gartner indicates that the successful launch of the iPhone 3G was enough to push iPhone market share over that of Windows Mobile devices — the entire range of them. And reader Spy Hunter writes: "Seadragon Mobile is Microsoft's first iPhone application. Seadragon is a technology for streaming zoomable user interfaces, and this iPhone incarnation allows viewing huge collections of gigapixel-sized images over WiFi or 3G. If you don't have an iPhone, you can also try Seadragon in your browser via Seadragon Ajax."

BeanBagKing writes "Yesterday I set out in search of a way to store my documents, videos, and pictures for a long time without worrying about them. This is stuff that I may not care about for years, I don't care where it is, or if it's immediately available, so long as when I do decide to get it, it's there. What did I come up with? Nothing. Hard Drives can fail or degrade. CD's and DVD's I've read have the same problem over long periods of time. I'd rather not pay yearly rent on a server or backup/storage solution. I could start my own server, but that goes back to the issue of hard drives failing, not to mention cost. Tape backups aren't common for personal backups, making far-future retrieval possibly difficult, not to mention the low storage capacity of tape drives. I've thought about buying a bunch of 4GB thumb drives; I've had some of those for years and even sent a few through washers and driers and had the data survive. Do you have any suggestions? My requirements are simple: It must be stable, lasting for decades if possible, and must be as inexpensive as possible. I'm not looking to start my own national archive; I have less than 500GBs and only save things important to me."

Jason Sahler writes "When the East Japan Railway Company (JR East) decided to invest in alternative energy sources, it only had to look to its users for the perfect source of energy. Recently the company decided to update their Tokyo Station with a revolutionary new piezoelectric energy generating floor. The system will harvest the kinetic energy generated by crowds to power ticket gates and display systems."

You can help your furry friends from beyond the grave thanks to a New Mexico company that is building coffins in a partnership with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The coffins range from $620-$670, which includes a $75 PETA contribution. They are earth-friendly, being made of wood with no screws, nails, hinges or animal-based glues. Michael McGraw, a PETA spokesman in New York, said, "We expect a healthy interest. It's the best way for people to continue to use their voice for animals in death." I would think that being fed to animals upon your death would be the most environmentally friendly thing to do, but what do I know?

darkwing_bmf writes "The NFL broadcast a live game to theaters in 3-D for the first time on Thursday night. The technology demonstration was mostly successful but they still have some issues to work out. 'Some scenes clearly captured the benefits of 3-D broadcasts, however, such as an interception by Chargers linebacker Stephen Cooper as players crisscrossed the field, and a long touchdown catch by San Diego's Vincent Jackson with the arc of the ball caught on camera all the way. Viewers were encouraged to text in their reaction to the viewing. One of the first comments, according to the commentators: "More cheerleaders."'"

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "We have recently learned that another law school legal aid clinic has joined the fight against the RIAA. Student attorneys from the Consumer and Commercial Law Clinic of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire, working under law school faculty supervision, are representing a lady targeted by the RIAA in UMG Recording v. Roy in New Hampshire. The case is scheduled for trial next Fall. That makes at least 4 law schools providing anti-RIAA defense services: University of Maine, University of San Francisco, Franklin Pierce, and, most recently, Harvard. Hopefully many more will follow. One commentator theorizes that this news 'will ... [encourage] professors and students at other law schools to take on hitherto defenseless people being pilloried by the corporate music industry.'"

Joe Richardson lost his blue-stoned class ring while fishing in Lake Sam Rayburn, 21 years ago. On November 28, an anonymous fisherman found it inside an 8-pound bass he had caught and tracked Joe down. Richardson said he had lost the ring only two weeks after graduation. "I have not cleaned it," he said. "I told my wife I don't want to clean it." All this time I've been using live bait and expensive lures like a sucker! This summer my tackle box will be filled with class rings.

Mark Ciarmello and his 3-year-old daughter found a 39-year-old message in a bottle while walking along the beach in Corolla, N.C. The note was in a Schaefer beer bottle and dated Aug. 17, 1969. It read: "If found notify the North Haledon Fire Co. 2." Firefighters suspect it was tossed by someone during one of the many fishing trips that they used to take years ago, but are unsure who as their fishing trips, like most, were about the beer.

It seems that thieves in Uganda have taken a novel new approach to their business. A gang of robbers have been using women with chloroform smeared on their chests to knock their victims unconscious. "They apply this chemical to their chest. We have found victims in an unconscious state. You find the person stripped totally naked and everything is taken from him, and the victim doesn't remember anything. He just remembers being in the act of romancing," Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) spokesman Fred Enanga said. Now that the thieves have this new boob technology they will be virtually unstoppable.

wiedzmin writes "In response to the recent resurrection of the Srizbi botnet, an Estonian ISP has shut down the hosting company that was housing its new control servers. Starline Web Services, based in Estonia's capital Tallinn, had become the new home for the Srizbi botnet control center after the McColo hosting company (which was taken down earlier this month) has briefly come back to life last week, allowing the botnet to hand-off control to the Estonian network. After Estonia's biggest ISP Linxtelecom demanded that Starline Web Service be taken offline, the newly acquired Srizbi control servers went down with it. However, as the rootkit is armed with an algorithm that periodically generates new domain names where the malware then looks for new instructions, it is only a matter of time before a new set of control servers is created and used to manipulate one of the biggest spam botnets in the world."

seanpark writes "Who will President Elect Obama select for the recently established post of Copyright Czar? Biden has a longstanding relationship with Big Content, and he was partly responsible for the PRO-IP Act that created the position. The short list according to the article includes a few lobbyists (who would likely be disqualified by stringent ethical guidelines) and Lawrence Lessig, who was a technology adviser to the Obama Campaign."