WinMX, according to my machine (PIII 450 - 256MB) and the reports of everyone else I've talked to that uses WinMX (1.2Ghz or more - 256 MB), WinMX slowly leeches away your RAM as time goes by. It shouldn't be a bother for the first hour or so, but it should start really slowing down your system afterward. I'd recommend only downloading in short bursts, but leaving it on for uploading purposes for the entire night if possible. That's what I do.
But personally, I think that a small sustained usability issue is a small price to pay for a good P2P service that's decently fast and isn't loaded with spyware and other crap. But then again, I'm biased toward WinMX, because it's very popular in Asia and thus has a lot of anime, J-Pop, and video game music.
The mistake you're making is thinking that this plan is actually supposed to support "copyright holders". In actuality, all of the MP3s from independant artists or labels, regardless of their size or even popular recognition, will be ignored. This plan is being pushed by the RIAA and the congressmen that have been paid by the RIAA. The Department of Justice, if they agree to follow along with it, will simply be looking for files that match a list of RIAA songs, not a massive index of all of the American music on Earth, including songs from Joe Blow's Six-Hits-A-Day Independent Music Site.
But then again, if the P2P services are blanketly taken down, then the artists that want to give their music away lose just as much control over their music as the ones that don't want to give their music way lose under this plan, because they lose the ability to give their music away. So, as in most things, there is no perfect choice. However, given the choice between enforcing the RIAA's copyrights by selectively prosecuting P2P users for trading only THEIR songs, enforcing the copyrights of all artists that want their music restricted by shutting down P2P programs, or enforcing the copyrights of all artists that want their music distributed freely, I have to tend toward the latter, because I believe that independant music has flourished more under the current, open system of P2P distribution than it did during the days when CDs were the only distribution method available. Besides, the RIAA isn't exactly suffering under the current system. Their sales kept going up in spite of Napster and only went down when the entire entertainment industry and most of the other businesses in the US saw a loss in profits because of September 11th.
If Sony had done the same thing, then they would've made the same comment about Sony, because on the one hand, it sounds like they're doing a good thing, but on the other hand, complimenting them for it is like walking up to everyone you see on the street that's bigger than you are and saying, "Thanks for not holding me down and raping me, because I know you could, but you're not!". It's just really, really sad when a situation gets to the point where you have to thank someone and point them out as a good example because they DIDN'T immorally abuse someone when they were given the opportunity to do so.
I just thought I'd point out that copyrights and patents were not designed this way, but instead corrupted into their current state. The original copyright and patent laws in most countries were originally much more sane.
The chances of anyone making money out of the wireless hotspots could be dented by the fact that many community groups and well-intentioned individuals are setting up networks anyone can use for free.
This is how just about everything works on the internet, aside from most broadband connections. Regardless of what corporations are offering, someone else is offering it for free. The record industry wants to sell you CDs, but hundreds of people are willing to just send you a copy online. Subscription news sites, especially gaming ones like IGN and GameSpot, want to sell you their news and content, but Gameforms, The Magic Box, and GameFAQS are all giving the same stuff away for free. And now wireless internet companies are trying to sell you wireless internet access when the same people that are using P2P services are willing to just give internet access away for free.
There simply isn't any way to compete with people that are giving away the same product as your company for free, at least not for a small startup industry that doesn't have the financial and political clout to legislate against the people giving it away for free or strongarm the supply side of the market.
But now, because of scale, file sharing actually is putting a serious economic dent in the music biz.
Actually, that's debatable. P2P File sharing, from the relatively sluggish viewpoint of solid economic data, has not been around very long. So far, there are only two real facts that have been gathered from the economic data on the two or three years that P2P file sharing has been around:
1) The music industry's sales rose at the time that Napster was around, in accordance with the trend of increased profits that the record industry had had going for years.
2) The music industry's sales dropped after September 11th, in accordance with every other entertainment/luxury industry in the United States.
So far, there hasn't been a time when the recording industry's data has been recorded solely in the context of P2P file sharing without some other larger issue (multi-year economic trends, terrorism, etc.) clouding the data, mostly because P2P file sharing hasn't been around that long. So whether or not P2P file sharing has been a boon or a burden to the recording industry is unknown. Then again, it might always be unknown, because the RIAA keeps pumping more and more money into anti-piracy measures, most likely because they know that they could always just blame the loss of revenue on piracy in front of a congressional committee if they fail.
If you take a DVD, rip it, encode it with DivX, then place it on a public FTP server, you've infringed on that copyright, obviously, and you've commited theft of copyright. (emphasis mine)
I have a general rule about discussions like this (discussions on semantics and definitions, that is): If the original word requires both a long explanation and a qualifier (of copyright, in this case), then the situation being talked about does not fit under the definition of that word.
What you're describing is a lot like calling censorship "murder", because it's the "murder of ideas". After a long, drawn out explanation, you might be able to convince some idiot that censorship is murder, because it "murders the idea" that's being censored by effectively making it as null and pointless as a human being is after they've been murdered. However, that doesn't mean that censorship is murder. It means that you're somewhat good with persuasive writing.
But anyway, here's a quick debunking of your ridiculous examples:
Bank accounts: When someone takes the money from my bank account, it's gone. Even though it was just data to begin with, the system is designed so that once someone has taken the money out of the account, it is no longer accessible by anyone else, even the original owner. This is not analogous to movies, books, DVDs, or any sort of ideas or creative works at all. Once someone "steals" a DVD by ripping it and saving it on their hard drive, that DVD still exists. Once someone else "steals" that DVD by downloading it from a P2P network, the file from the DVD is still on the uploader's computer. At no point in this process is anyone deprived of the goods that they own. Rather, an example copy of those goods is made and then given to the person that requested the copy. Bank accounts don't work like this at all. They work much more like physical property and thus should be governed as such.
Social Security Numbers: DVDs are put on sale in stores. They are not unique, they are not kept secret by their owners, they are not used as personal identifiers, and they are not sold to anyone, let alone to millions of people across the planet. Comparing a unique identifier for a human being to a creative work that is copied millions of times and sold worldwide by its creators is like comparing apples to automobiles.
An intelligence that is all talk and no action is not a very lofty goal.
This is true, but I think artificial intelligence works much more like an operating system than a human brain, in that it is made up of parts that are developed individually, rather than a fuzzy whole that slowly develops every single function at the same time over a period of many years. This project works on conversational skills while another project works on physical bodies and another is probably working on independant actions.
Needless to say, that doesn't make much sense, and as I tried to figure out what it was doing, ALICE just responded with statements that, while individually grammatically correct and coherent, were clearly formulated with the goal of imitating a human, and as such did not really convey anything meaningful.
If it didn't convey anything meaningful, then why am I laughing my ass off and why is your post moderated as Funny?;)
Seems a lot like A.L.I.C.E. itself to me. You ask it a question and it sort of gives you an answer, but mostly just says whatever the Hell it feels like at the time. It sort of makes me wonder what R.I.C.H.A.R.D. W.A.L.L.A.C.E. is an acronym for, or if his botmaster is just planning on giving it a retroactive acronym later on.
We consider retarded people to have only the bare minimum level of consciousness, on par with a small child or occasionally even an animal with human vocal cords, yet hardly any people or countries round them up and slaughter them. If the general population were suddenly considered to be almost as stupid as the average retarded individual, why would we decide to round them up and slaughter them?
Besides, I doubt that any of those "enlightened people" would try to round up and slaughter the rest of the human population. Every truly ingenius supervillain knows that he needs slaves, servants, and toadies to populate his One (Multiple?) World Empire.
well, you have to understand where they are coming from. they have to be repressive in schools because that's what school is all about: getting you in a building to 'learn' and basically become a better person for it.
If a kid wants to learn about technology, hacking, breast cancer, sex, or unpopular politics during the time when they're forced to be in school but aren't being instructed (from what I saw, the computers get 90% of their use during the lunch hours, with every computer in the school being taken up by students during that time), I don't see what's so wrong with that. The schools, on the other hand, want to make sure that the kids only learn what they want them to learn. That's a way to keep kids stupid and docile, not make them smarter and more worldly. It goes against every reason and principle behind education.
Some of these moderators are just insane. Redundancy is the entire POINT of a post like this. It's a backup copy of the website because the website is down. Its redundancy keeps the comments from becoming an endless flood of "Um, I can't see it" and "The site's/.ed" posts.
Redundancy is not a bad thing when you can't see the original text that the post is repeating.
A public school system in a country that values democracy and free speech filters its web access, most likely for not only pornography but also for hate speech, breast cancer information, and 2600.com, and is now desperately trying to get rid of a stealthy program that is meant to circumvent the oppression of free speech in repressive dictatorships.
From what I saw in my time in the US school system, this sad, ironic situation pretty well sums up how the school system here works.
Sounds like ACTUAL logic, to me. We were once turning a dial with our fingers to dial phone numbers. It wasn't that difficult, but it was unnecessary when we had the technology to just press buttons, which is what we do now. Now that technology is advancing again, we can just say "Call Tom Smith". It's not that dialing phone numbers the rotary phone way is difficult, but instead that just saying the person's name is even easier, takes less time, and prevents us from having to remember long, unnecessary phone numbers as many phone systems in the US move to ten digit dialing and blur the lines between local and long-distance calls.
Even the cellular phones that I've tried which contain voice-controlled speed-dial are speaker dependent.
Well then, you've tried the wrong ones, because my Mom's Sprint cellphone is speaker independant and only takes more than one try if you're standing directly adjacent to a sound that is almost as loud as your voice (air conditioner, open car window at 65mph, etc.).
I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?
The problem with this question is that no one will ever accept anything as the right answer. The current situation with the RIAA is like a gasoline fuel company trying to keep their profits up when everyone has switched to electric or hydrogen cars. The market is simply gone, and the best that the company can hope to do is sustain itself by changing to a new, smaller business model that serves the few customers that prefer their product. Like or not, it has become a solid fact that people now regularly trade music between each other and burn mix CDs for their friends. From here on, the RIAA can hope to keep themselves from dying by finding a newer, smaller business model, but they cannot get back the annual profits that they once had.
I'd propose a new business model for them, but I'm one of the people that just thinks that the RIAA is doomed and that the music "industry" is bound to join the art and book "industries" as small but popular businesses that offer a good product at a sane price. I believe that the days of musicians being huge superstars and their companies making billions of dollars are reaching their end, and that that is not as bad a thing as many people think it is.
You don't need a computer to play a VCD. All you need is a low-end DVD player, and low-end ones can be found for less than $100 each. Low-end TV sets that are still large enough to be seen by an entire class cost only a little over $100, as well.
This news is from March and Slashdot has already posted it. Chris, please take the whopping three or four seconds of your time to make sure that you aren't making a double post by using Slashdot's handy search feature next time. And while you're at it, maybe you should remove this news post. This is common knowledge among gamers and anyone who has come across a site like Slashdot or Kuro5hin in the past few months. The comments will be nothing more than flames.
The bug is really only a technical one. In practice, it's really like that "Perrun" hoax virus, in that it requires a huge amount of setup and complete access to the system in order to gain... well, to gain complete access to the system, which an attack would already need in order to use this bug maliciously. Basically, Windows Media Player can remotely open up the system if the attacker has found a way to get a malicious executable file into IE's cache and then convinces their victim to go to a maliciously constructed website that they've setup. When the victim goes to the maliciously constructed website, Windows Media Player could then give out information that could be used to get into the system through the IE cache.
The problem lies in the specific executable file that has to be placed into the cache. In order to get the executable file into the cache, the attacker would have to have full access to the machine or trick the user into accepting it and running it. But if they could get the user to do that, they would have full control of the system anyway, just like they would if the victim was running any OS other than Windows.
So really, it's just a small, stupid bug that's being blown out of proportion. It can't do anything other than redundantly take over a computer after it has already been taken over in a different way.
Yes. If there were a security bug in Linux, Mozilla, XMMS, FreeAmp, etc, that allowed your computer to be compromised, it would warrant front page news on Slashdot.
You're right. There WOULD be a news article on Slashdot about a bug if it were in a piece open source software. However, Slashdot's news articles about bugs in open source software usually include a link to the patch for the program if it has already been released. But in this case, like all the others, Slashdot refuses to even acknowledge the patch for Microsoft product, let alone provide a link to it, so that they can infer that it hasn't been patched.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that something like this had to exist. Thanks for finding it first.
Of course, if your lucky instead of drinking too much water your liver will fail and you'll need a transplant or die.
And no, it isn't caused by getting a bad version of Ecstasy, it is a known, and documented side-effect of the drug.
Yeah, it's a known, documented side-effect of alchohol, too. So?
WinMX, according to my machine (PIII 450 - 256MB) and the reports of everyone else I've talked to that uses WinMX (1.2Ghz or more - 256 MB), WinMX slowly leeches away your RAM as time goes by. It shouldn't be a bother for the first hour or so, but it should start really slowing down your system afterward. I'd recommend only downloading in short bursts, but leaving it on for uploading purposes for the entire night if possible. That's what I do.
But personally, I think that a small sustained usability issue is a small price to pay for a good P2P service that's decently fast and isn't loaded with spyware and other crap. But then again, I'm biased toward WinMX, because it's very popular in Asia and thus has a lot of anime, J-Pop, and video game music.
The mistake you're making is thinking that this plan is actually supposed to support "copyright holders". In actuality, all of the MP3s from independant artists or labels, regardless of their size or even popular recognition, will be ignored. This plan is being pushed by the RIAA and the congressmen that have been paid by the RIAA. The Department of Justice, if they agree to follow along with it, will simply be looking for files that match a list of RIAA songs, not a massive index of all of the American music on Earth, including songs from Joe Blow's Six-Hits-A-Day Independent Music Site.
But then again, if the P2P services are blanketly taken down, then the artists that want to give their music away lose just as much control over their music as the ones that don't want to give their music way lose under this plan, because they lose the ability to give their music away. So, as in most things, there is no perfect choice. However, given the choice between enforcing the RIAA's copyrights by selectively prosecuting P2P users for trading only THEIR songs, enforcing the copyrights of all artists that want their music restricted by shutting down P2P programs, or enforcing the copyrights of all artists that want their music distributed freely, I have to tend toward the latter, because I believe that independant music has flourished more under the current, open system of P2P distribution than it did during the days when CDs were the only distribution method available. Besides, the RIAA isn't exactly suffering under the current system. Their sales kept going up in spite of Napster and only went down when the entire entertainment industry and most of the other businesses in the US saw a loss in profits because of September 11th.
I guess we should expect network congestion because of users, downloading everything in their sight to beat this initiative.
Let loose the sails, mateys! Aye, we be setting course fer WinMX fer one last pillaging, arr...
If Sony had done the same thing, then they would've made the same comment about Sony, because on the one hand, it sounds like they're doing a good thing, but on the other hand, complimenting them for it is like walking up to everyone you see on the street that's bigger than you are and saying, "Thanks for not holding me down and raping me, because I know you could, but you're not!". It's just really, really sad when a situation gets to the point where you have to thank someone and point them out as a good example because they DIDN'T immorally abuse someone when they were given the opportunity to do so.
Copyright and Patents are designed for one thing
I just thought I'd point out that copyrights and patents were not designed this way, but instead corrupted into their current state. The original copyright and patent laws in most countries were originally much more sane.
The chances of anyone making money out of the wireless hotspots could be dented by the fact that many community groups and well-intentioned individuals are setting up networks anyone can use for free.
This is how just about everything works on the internet, aside from most broadband connections. Regardless of what corporations are offering, someone else is offering it for free. The record industry wants to sell you CDs, but hundreds of people are willing to just send you a copy online. Subscription news sites, especially gaming ones like IGN and GameSpot, want to sell you their news and content, but Gameforms, The Magic Box, and GameFAQS are all giving the same stuff away for free. And now wireless internet companies are trying to sell you wireless internet access when the same people that are using P2P services are willing to just give internet access away for free.
There simply isn't any way to compete with people that are giving away the same product as your company for free, at least not for a small startup industry that doesn't have the financial and political clout to legislate against the people giving it away for free or strongarm the supply side of the market.
But now, because of scale, file sharing actually is putting a serious economic dent in the music biz.
Actually, that's debatable. P2P File sharing, from the relatively sluggish viewpoint of solid economic data, has not been around very long. So far, there are only two real facts that have been gathered from the economic data on the two or three years that P2P file sharing has been around:
1) The music industry's sales rose at the time that Napster was around, in accordance with the trend of increased profits that the record industry had had going for years.
2) The music industry's sales dropped after September 11th, in accordance with every other entertainment/luxury industry in the United States.
So far, there hasn't been a time when the recording industry's data has been recorded solely in the context of P2P file sharing without some other larger issue (multi-year economic trends, terrorism, etc.) clouding the data, mostly because P2P file sharing hasn't been around that long. So whether or not P2P file sharing has been a boon or a burden to the recording industry is unknown. Then again, it might always be unknown, because the RIAA keeps pumping more and more money into anti-piracy measures, most likely because they know that they could always just blame the loss of revenue on piracy in front of a congressional committee if they fail.
If you take a DVD, rip it, encode it with DivX, then place it on a public FTP server, you've infringed on that copyright, obviously, and you've commited theft of copyright. (emphasis mine)
I have a general rule about discussions like this (discussions on semantics and definitions, that is): If the original word requires both a long explanation and a qualifier (of copyright, in this case), then the situation being talked about does not fit under the definition of that word.
What you're describing is a lot like calling censorship "murder", because it's the "murder of ideas". After a long, drawn out explanation, you might be able to convince some idiot that censorship is murder, because it "murders the idea" that's being censored by effectively making it as null and pointless as a human being is after they've been murdered. However, that doesn't mean that censorship is murder. It means that you're somewhat good with persuasive writing.
But anyway, here's a quick debunking of your ridiculous examples:
Bank accounts: When someone takes the money from my bank account, it's gone. Even though it was just data to begin with, the system is designed so that once someone has taken the money out of the account, it is no longer accessible by anyone else, even the original owner. This is not analogous to movies, books, DVDs, or any sort of ideas or creative works at all. Once someone "steals" a DVD by ripping it and saving it on their hard drive, that DVD still exists. Once someone else "steals" that DVD by downloading it from a P2P network, the file from the DVD is still on the uploader's computer. At no point in this process is anyone deprived of the goods that they own. Rather, an example copy of those goods is made and then given to the person that requested the copy. Bank accounts don't work like this at all. They work much more like physical property and thus should be governed as such.
Social Security Numbers: DVDs are put on sale in stores. They are not unique, they are not kept secret by their owners, they are not used as personal identifiers, and they are not sold to anyone, let alone to millions of people across the planet. Comparing a unique identifier for a human being to a creative work that is copied millions of times and sold worldwide by its creators is like comparing apples to automobiles.
An intelligence that is all talk and no action is not a very lofty goal.
This is true, but I think artificial intelligence works much more like an operating system than a human brain, in that it is made up of parts that are developed individually, rather than a fuzzy whole that slowly develops every single function at the same time over a period of many years. This project works on conversational skills while another project works on physical bodies and another is probably working on independant actions.
Needless to say, that doesn't make much sense, and as I tried to figure out what it was doing, ALICE just responded with statements that, while individually grammatically correct and coherent, were clearly formulated with the goal of imitating a human, and as such did not really convey anything meaningful.
;)
If it didn't convey anything meaningful, then why am I laughing my ass off and why is your post moderated as Funny?
A> I know a lot of Mike's.
M> Like who?
A> Joe.
Heh heh heh.
Seems a lot like A.L.I.C.E. itself to me. You ask it a question and it sort of gives you an answer, but mostly just says whatever the Hell it feels like at the time. It sort of makes me wonder what R.I.C.H.A.R.D. W.A.L.L.A.C.E. is an acronym for, or if his botmaster is just planning on giving it a retroactive acronym later on.
We consider retarded people to have only the bare minimum level of consciousness, on par with a small child or occasionally even an animal with human vocal cords, yet hardly any people or countries round them up and slaughter them. If the general population were suddenly considered to be almost as stupid as the average retarded individual, why would we decide to round them up and slaughter them?
Besides, I doubt that any of those "enlightened people" would try to round up and slaughter the rest of the human population. Every truly ingenius supervillain knows that he needs slaves, servants, and toadies to populate his One (Multiple?) World Empire.
Verisign started the trend and provided a similar case. Thus, including them as an example of what's going on provides a nice context for the story.
well, you have to understand where they are coming from. they have to be repressive in schools because that's what school is all about: getting you in a building to 'learn' and basically become a better person for it.
If a kid wants to learn about technology, hacking, breast cancer, sex, or unpopular politics during the time when they're forced to be in school but aren't being instructed (from what I saw, the computers get 90% of their use during the lunch hours, with every computer in the school being taken up by students during that time), I don't see what's so wrong with that. The schools, on the other hand, want to make sure that the kids only learn what they want them to learn. That's a way to keep kids stupid and docile, not make them smarter and more worldly. It goes against every reason and principle behind education.
(Score:2, Redundant)
/.ed" posts.
Some of these moderators are just insane. Redundancy is the entire POINT of a post like this. It's a backup copy of the website because the website is down. Its redundancy keeps the comments from becoming an endless flood of "Um, I can't see it" and "The site's
Redundancy is not a bad thing when you can't see the original text that the post is repeating.
A public school system in a country that values democracy and free speech filters its web access, most likely for not only pornography but also for hate speech, breast cancer information, and 2600.com, and is now desperately trying to get rid of a stealthy program that is meant to circumvent the oppression of free speech in repressive dictatorships.
From what I saw in my time in the US school system, this sad, ironic situation pretty well sums up how the school system here works.
Sounds like ACTUAL logic, to me. We were once turning a dial with our fingers to dial phone numbers. It wasn't that difficult, but it was unnecessary when we had the technology to just press buttons, which is what we do now. Now that technology is advancing again, we can just say "Call Tom Smith". It's not that dialing phone numbers the rotary phone way is difficult, but instead that just saying the person's name is even easier, takes less time, and prevents us from having to remember long, unnecessary phone numbers as many phone systems in the US move to ten digit dialing and blur the lines between local and long-distance calls.
Even the cellular phones that I've tried which contain voice-controlled speed-dial are speaker dependent.
Well then, you've tried the wrong ones, because my Mom's Sprint cellphone is speaker independant and only takes more than one try if you're standing directly adjacent to a sound that is almost as loud as your voice (air conditioner, open car window at 65mph, etc.).
I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?
The problem with this question is that no one will ever accept anything as the right answer. The current situation with the RIAA is like a gasoline fuel company trying to keep their profits up when everyone has switched to electric or hydrogen cars. The market is simply gone, and the best that the company can hope to do is sustain itself by changing to a new, smaller business model that serves the few customers that prefer their product. Like or not, it has become a solid fact that people now regularly trade music between each other and burn mix CDs for their friends. From here on, the RIAA can hope to keep themselves from dying by finding a newer, smaller business model, but they cannot get back the annual profits that they once had.
I'd propose a new business model for them, but I'm one of the people that just thinks that the RIAA is doomed and that the music "industry" is bound to join the art and book "industries" as small but popular businesses that offer a good product at a sane price. I believe that the days of musicians being huge superstars and their companies making billions of dollars are reaching their end, and that that is not as bad a thing as many people think it is.
You don't need a computer to play a VCD. All you need is a low-end DVD player, and low-end ones can be found for less than $100 each. Low-end TV sets that are still large enough to be seen by an entire class cost only a little over $100, as well.
This news is from March and Slashdot has already posted it. Chris, please take the whopping three or four seconds of your time to make sure that you aren't making a double post by using Slashdot's handy search feature next time. And while you're at it, maybe you should remove this news post. This is common knowledge among gamers and anyone who has come across a site like Slashdot or Kuro5hin in the past few months. The comments will be nothing more than flames.
Since no one else has answered:
The bug is really only a technical one. In practice, it's really like that "Perrun" hoax virus, in that it requires a huge amount of setup and complete access to the system in order to gain... well, to gain complete access to the system, which an attack would already need in order to use this bug maliciously. Basically, Windows Media Player can remotely open up the system if the attacker has found a way to get a malicious executable file into IE's cache and then convinces their victim to go to a maliciously constructed website that they've setup. When the victim goes to the maliciously constructed website, Windows Media Player could then give out information that could be used to get into the system through the IE cache.
The problem lies in the specific executable file that has to be placed into the cache. In order to get the executable file into the cache, the attacker would have to have full access to the machine or trick the user into accepting it and running it. But if they could get the user to do that, they would have full control of the system anyway, just like they would if the victim was running any OS other than Windows.
So really, it's just a small, stupid bug that's being blown out of proportion. It can't do anything other than redundantly take over a computer after it has already been taken over in a different way.
Yes. If there were a security bug in Linux, Mozilla, XMMS, FreeAmp, etc, that allowed your computer to be compromised, it would warrant front page news on Slashdot.
You're right. There WOULD be a news article on Slashdot about a bug if it were in a piece open source software. However, Slashdot's news articles about bugs in open source software usually include a link to the patch for the program if it has already been released. But in this case, like all the others, Slashdot refuses to even acknowledge the patch for Microsoft product, let alone provide a link to it, so that they can infer that it hasn't been patched.