Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Real-ID, PriceRitePhoto, RIM
iBill stolen info a framejob? An anonymous reader writes "The database of stolen credit card information recently discussed on Slashdot appears not to have come from iBill after all. From the article: 'Secure Science's Lance James backed away from his conclusion that iBill, which processes most of its transactions on behalf of adult services, was the source of the leak. He says pornography transaction databases may be considered especially desirable to spammers, and that a criminal may have deliberately mislabeled a database taken from another source.'"
First steps towards defying the Real ID act. An anonymous reader writes "With House Bill 1582, The New Hampshire House of Representatives has taken the first steps towards defying the Federal Government on the infamous Real ID act, which last year passed 100-0. This bill does not express disagreement with the Real ID act, it prohibits the state DMV from amending licensing procedures altogether, and it passed 270-84. Several impassioned testimonies were given at the House, and even those against the bill expressed displeasure with the Real ID act. It now moves on to the 24-member state Senate. The afternoon's proceedings can be viewed or listened to via the NH General Court website under the afternoon of March 8th."
Peter Quinn continues his support of Open Source. Stony Stevenson writes "Computerworld Australia reports that former Massachusetts state government CIO, Peter Quinn is fronting the battle for OpenSource. He believes the cost of government is not sustainable in its present form and any technology leader who is not supporting and implementing open standards should resign and get out of the business. From the article: 'Even though the personal toll from state government experience was huge, Quinn said he would not be silenced. "I will remain very vocal and prominent regarding open standards, open source, especially Open Document Format and all aspects of accessibility for the disabled community," he said.'"
Judge flunks lawsuit against spammers. Hawkeye writes "A federal court in California has just created a huge legal loophole for companies who hire sleazy spammers. Kennedy-Western, an unaccredited university (aka diploma mill) has been absolved for outsourcing its email advertising to 'proxy-abusing, header-forging, hash-busting spammers,' according to the story at Spam Kings. The court ruled that Kennedy-Western didn't violate the CAN-SPAM Act because the plaintiff, a small California ISP named Hypertouch, 'failed to provide any evidence that KWU had actual knowledge or consciously avoided knowledge of a current or future violation of the CAN-SPAM Act by anyone who sent the e-mails at issue.' Perhaps not surprisingly, KWU enlisted as an expert witness Jason Rines, an email marketer who once worked with the notorious Sanford Wallace and who has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List."
WinXP on a Mac, round 2. fan777 writes "Slashdot recently posted a story regarding blurry Flickr photos on what may be the first WinXP installation on a Mac. To those who claimed heavy photochopping, narf2006 has finally released a blurry video (Complete with Mirror || Torrent)."
Juniper drops message board suit. It seems that Juniper Networks has finally come to their senses and dropped the suit against several unidentified LightReading message board users. From the article: "What is still unknown is whether or not Juniper ever uncovered the identities of "Does 1-10." The company's complaint cited several messages that got the company riled up, and most those messages allege that Juniper is bribing lawyers and spying on its employees."
Vint Cerf answers TLD questions. netzer writes "CircleID is running responses they have received from Vint Cerf on the questions submitted to him from the community with regards to top level domains."
PriceRitePhoto gets relisted. Thomas Hawk has an interesting blog entry in which he details how PriceRitePhoto, the online retailer who gained so much recent infamy, has been relisted on Yahoo! shopping after only a three month penance. From the article: "What was interesting to me at the time when the PriceRitePhoto story was going on was that PriceRitePhoto had supposedly been delisted a year earlier from comparison shopping site PriceGrabber. What I never could get is how after being delisted on PriceGrabber that PriceRitePhoto ended back on there a year later to try and rip me off. Of course that first delisting didn't get the visibility that mine did, but not to worry, not only is PriceRitePhoto back in business at Yahoo! Shopping, they are back in business on PriceGrabber as well. This after being delisted there at least twice that I know of."
RIM goes on the offensive for patent reform. flanman writes to tell us it seems that RIM has decided to continue the patent reform fight even after giving up their recent court battle. RIM is running full page ads in a number of US newspapers urging lawmakers to change the way patents are issues and managed. RIM also has more details on the Blackberry site.
For a sake of all the fanboys who are about the flood this article as well, I will make the mandatory cross-platform statement:
Q - Why would you want to run Windows XP on mac?
A - Dell was fresh out of quad core computers with three PCI-express slots and the ability to add 8 GIGABYTES of ram. Shucks.
I know that everyone always says, "oh, every big company is pro-patent", &c. &c., but i have to say that it's nice to see that a company that's been burned by shaky patents (RIM) has decided to pursue / support the effort towards patent reform. I hope that they are able to do something good.
Many people are wondering if the video is real or not. The obvious problem is that it could be a video from a Windows PC running on a Mac in full-screen, but there are a few problems with that theory. For example, I think at one point the resolution of the screen changes, complete with all the visual craziness that causes. What kind of video capture software would catch a screen resolution change like that?
People also noticed that the Windows boot screen changed. Instead of being a black background with a Windows logo and a little pulsating bar at the bottom (reminds me of the Knight Rider car), it is just the Windows logo on a greyish background. Maybe a result of the EFI hacking?
The other way it could be faked is if the screen isn't actually connected to the iMac at all. There could be a PC somewhere directly connected to the screen somehow. Personally, I think that would take a lot of hacking by itself, probably more effort than the average hoaxster is willing to commit.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
For all we know it could just be a full-screen movie of a Windows XP install/boot that's running.
For all we know, it could be a broadcast by UFOs.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I know you can't be ultra-knowledgable about everything, but I would have thought that Vint Cert would know better than to talk about topics he's ignorant of.
A more serious problem has been that JAVA programmers for web pages often don't know that there are more than seven gTLDs and that many of them have more than three letters. That leads to rejection of email addresses and other entries into web forms that make reference to domain names. We need some educational outreach to fix that.
How about an educational outreach to explain that:
Wouldn't it have been quicker, easier and safer to simply say that web developers make forms that don't accept unusual email addresses instead of trying to include technical details of something you aren't familiar with?
With regards to the CAN-SPAM issue, sure, spam is bad and spammers are evil. But does anyone really want a court system where there's no requirement to prove that the defendent was aware of the illegal activities of their subcontractors? Just saying they "should have been" is emotionally rewarding, but I for one am glad that the judge here is insisting on proof.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Is OpenSource a brand name?
Although the ComputerWorld article mentions open source too, Peter Quinn's main battle is (was?) over open standards - a very different topic. Microsoft likes to confuse them so they can say that Massachusetts is excluding them. That's not true - they are free to implement the open standard (Open Document) in their closed source.
Please don't confuse the two.
Graham