Contrary to what the paper suggests, the data has not been anonymized. Proper anonymization means that you cannot derive correlations between the behavior of the individuals, which was the whole point of the paper.
I don't know the exact legal situation in every European country. However, in EU countries this is regulated by the Directive on the protection of personal data, which requires for scientific use that safeguards have to be taken to prevent the identification of individuals. For some countries like Germany this means that the data has to be anonymized, although it is a grey area whether pseudonymization is sufficient.
More details on that matter can be found on my blog.
Wikipedia was accessible, except for certain pages. Google.com was accessible, but if you googled a certain phrases, the connection would be reset, and you couldn't access google for a few seconds. Sounds familiar. You can see the filtering in action even without having to visit China simply by using Tor.
It should be obvious to anyone with a level of intelligence higher then a chimp that Facebook shares information, it's an information sharing site! The problem is not so much the information being shared by using the site as advertized, but the unintended consequences. Why does an application developer (read: everyone interested in your personal data) need to have access to all your data?
You are probably right that when posting on Facebook one should assume that the information will be essentially available to the general public. However, Facebook claims otherwise and therefore they should be liable for this.
It seems that OpenMCU, which is part of the OpenH323 project, does exactly what you want. You can then use your favorite H.323 client to connect. Be warned though, that running a MCU consumes huge amounts of bandwidth.
Eh? From the article: "On Tuesday, a user named Hai-Nam Nguyen reported that anti-virus programs detected the Xorer Trojan inside the add-on. Firefox admins quickly confirmed the presence of the Trojan's code and removed the file the same day." Fair point. That makes it Wired sensationalism, not Slashdot sensationalism.
According to the Mozilla Security Blog the language pack did not contain any malicious code, but only manipulated HTML files:
The Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 contains inserted code to load remote content. This code is the result of a virus infection, but does not contain the virus itself.
First of all, the competition is "Jugend forscht", which is the largest science competition in Germany. It consists of three stages: first there is a regional competition with winners advancing to the state finals. The winners of the state finals then advance to the federal finals, which is the last round. Roughly speaking, in every round one winner (or winning team) is chosen by a jury in each discipline (mathematics, physics, chemistry,...).
A PR stunt it may well be, but I take exception to your characterization of his financing methods. At least according to his Wikipedia entry, he is one of the few people in Germany using the German tax laws in regards to German film fiancing on the way the German government intended it. First of all, most money for his films was spent in the US or Canada, hardly what the German legislators intended. Second, it unclear whether Boll's films were actually profitable for the investors, even when considering tax reductions. And third, the law was changed in 2005, so there will be no more Boll films financed with "stupid German money".
In many research groups it is common to go out and have a few beers once a paper has been accepted. So this should lead to a positive correlation between beer consumption and research output. However, it is likely that among Czechs these paper beers do not have a large effect on their overall consumption (they drink even more beer than Germans).
Provided a student can't pass a course without passing the exam then IMHO it doesn't really matter if the text book answers are on the net.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. If the answers are readily available the temptation to simply copy them is way too high. So in the end the students won't learn anything from the assignments and will run into trouble in the exams. However, if one gently explains the issue to the guy posting the answers chances are high that he will understand it and change his behavior.
Actually, it's a licensed fork. Songbird has licensed our technology to Qtrax and we provide support to them. It works well for everyone and we're delighted to see some little birds leave the nest.
Um, how does this work concerning the parts of Songbird PotI doesn't hold the copyright for (i.e., Firefox & VLC)?
The security model of PHP is a nightmare, therefore it is a good thing that we now have a mature and free CMS written in Perl. If it had been available some time ago, I probably wouldn't have written my own.
I can relate a similar story about licensing issues with Matlab costing me time throughout my PhD. I am currently investigating Free Software alternatives (SciPy, and now Sage) for my post-doctoral employment.
You should also take a look at Octave, which is mostly Matlab-compatible.
But I use Mathematica because it is full of functionality, fairly reliable, and has a very elegant programming paradigm. Also, as a student, it'll cost me $100-150, depending on where I live, for the lifetime of my studentship, assuming no site license; the kinds of business that run this software commercially really don't care too much about a $2500 license fee.
Free software isn't about price -- it is about freedom. One of the research groups at my university cannot use Mathematica since a few weeks because the license expired, and neither renewing the license nor contacting tech support has so far brought a solution.
Another no-go is that Mathematica 6 notebooks are not compatible with Mathematica 5 notebooks. Also, the unwillingness of Wolfram to timely fix bugs leading to wrong results is unacceptable. I could go on ranting like this, but recently I have completely switched to Maxima and have not regretted it.
This is a privilege escalation bug, meaning you need to have access to the machine in the first place. Microsoft usually doesn't care about them (the GDI bug was fixed about six months after the MoKB post) for two reasons: First, most people work with administrator rights anyway, and second, this is only relevant in true multi-user environments, which have never been the top priority for them.
The CPU power of the PS3 is indeed very impressive, however, for most real-world supercomputing tasks the 256 MB RAM per node are way too low. One Gig per core should be the minimum, meaning you would have to increase the amount of RAM in the PS3 by a factor of 24.
It is only permissible to distrubute the game data(models, maps, textures, sound, etc) as a whole, and with the intention of being used with Alien Arena. It is not permissible to distribute individual portions or items of the game data without express consent from COR Entertainment. [...] Under no circumstances ALIEN ARENA 2007 as a whole be sold or used for profit, without express consent from COR Entertainment.
If you want a free-as-in-speech shooter that rocks, try Nexuiz.
I am German and I am potentially affected by the new law as I publish exploit code from time to time. I have written a blog entry about it, including a translation of the relevant section and some thoughts about the consequences.
This is completely unrelated to the search for the Higgs boson. While the Higgs is believed to be the elementary particle responsible for giving mass to all other particles, the Xi_b mentioned here is a composite particle consisting of three previously known quarks. So while it is good to know that the particle really exists as predicted by the standard model, this is definitely not the Nobel prize physics the discovery of the Higgs would be.
AppArmor's main approach is somewhat less broad. It is more like putting certain applications into a MAC container to limit what an application can do, no matter who the user using the application is. A great example of this that most Slashdot readers should look into is putting the browser into a safety container.
Some time ago, I wrote a review of AppArmor, finding that it solves problems that don't exist. Looking at your browser example, the functionality provided by AppArmor can be implemented completely by setting up a different user and setting appropriate file ACLs.
For the real problems AppArmor provides little help. Can you confine network usage of a program, meaning your internal network cannot be accessed once your browser has been hacked? No. Can you limit the syscalls a program may use, reducing the risk of successful kernel exploits? No.
As long as it stays this way, I recommend to everyone to use SELinux, even though it is much more difficult to setup and configure.
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If you use the Debian Security Analyzer, you cannot simply supply vulnerable versions of packages as they will still be listed by debsecan.
Contrary to what the paper suggests, the data has not been anonymized. Proper anonymization means that you cannot derive correlations between the behavior of the individuals, which was the whole point of the paper.
I don't know the exact legal situation in every European country. However, in EU countries this is regulated by the Directive on the protection of personal data, which requires for scientific use that safeguards have to be taken to prevent the identification of individuals. For some countries like Germany this means that the data has to be anonymized, although it is a grey area whether pseudonymization is sufficient.
More details on that matter can be found on my blog.
Nice idea, but I like the SQL interface better.
You are probably right that when posting on Facebook one should assume that the information will be essentially available to the general public. However, Facebook claims otherwise and therefore they should be liable for this.
It seems that OpenMCU, which is part of the OpenH323 project, does exactly what you want. You can then use your favorite H.323 client to connect. Be warned though, that running a MCU consumes huge amounts of bandwidth.
By using Tor and a few hacks, you can have a look at Chinese internet censorship by yourself.
First of all, the competition is "Jugend forscht", which is the largest science competition in Germany. It consists of three stages: first there is a regional competition with winners advancing to the state finals. The winners of the state finals then advance to the federal finals, which is the last round. Roughly speaking, in every round one winner (or winning team) is chosen by a jury in each discipline (mathematics, physics, chemistry, ...).
It seems that the kid won the regional competition, but failed to advance in the state finals.
In many research groups it is common to go out and have a few beers once a paper has been accepted. So this should lead to a positive correlation between beer consumption and research output. However, it is likely that among Czechs these paper beers do not have a large effect on their overall consumption (they drink even more beer than Germans).
Provided a student can't pass a course without passing the exam then IMHO it doesn't really matter if the text book answers are on the net.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. If the answers are readily available the temptation to simply copy them is way too high. So in the end the students won't learn anything from the assignments and will run into trouble in the exams. However, if one gently explains the issue to the guy posting the answers chances are high that he will understand it and change his behavior.
Actually, it's a licensed fork. Songbird has licensed our technology to Qtrax and we provide support to them. It works well for everyone and we're delighted to see some little birds leave the nest.
Um, how does this work concerning the parts of Songbird PotI doesn't hold the copyright for (i.e., Firefox & VLC)?
The security model of PHP is a nightmare, therefore it is a good thing that we now have a mature and free CMS written in Perl. If it had been available some time ago, I probably wouldn't have written my own.
I can relate a similar story about licensing issues with Matlab costing me time throughout my PhD. I am currently investigating Free Software alternatives (SciPy, and now Sage) for my post-doctoral employment.
You should also take a look at Octave, which is mostly Matlab-compatible.
But I use Mathematica because it is full of functionality, fairly reliable, and has a very elegant programming paradigm. Also, as a student, it'll cost me $100-150, depending on where I live, for the lifetime of my studentship, assuming no site license; the kinds of business that run this software commercially really don't care too much about a $2500 license fee.
Free software isn't about price -- it is about freedom. One of the research groups at my university cannot use Mathematica since a few weeks because the license expired, and neither renewing the license nor contacting tech support has so far brought a solution.
Another no-go is that Mathematica 6 notebooks are not compatible with Mathematica 5 notebooks. Also, the unwillingness of Wolfram to timely fix bugs leading to wrong results is unacceptable. I could go on ranting like this, but recently I have completely switched to Maxima and have not regretted it.
This is a privilege escalation bug, meaning you need to have access to the machine in the first place. Microsoft usually doesn't care about them (the GDI bug was fixed about six months after the MoKB post) for two reasons: First, most people work with administrator rights anyway, and second, this is only relevant in true multi-user environments, which have never been the top priority for them.
The CPU power of the PS3 is indeed very impressive, however, for most real-world supercomputing tasks the 256 MB RAM per node are way too low. One Gig per core should be the minimum, meaning you would have to increase the amount of RAM in the PS3 by a factor of 24.
docs/license.txt:
It is only permissible to distrubute the game data(models, maps, textures, sound, etc) as a whole, and with the intention of being used with Alien Arena. It is not permissible to distribute individual portions or items of the game data without express consent from COR Entertainment. [...] Under no circumstances ALIEN ARENA 2007 as a whole be sold or used for profit, without express consent from COR Entertainment.
If you want a free-as-in-speech shooter that rocks, try Nexuiz.
By my count, there are now four announced Yes votes, with comments, two abstentions, and seven public No with comments votes for OOXML in ISO/IEC JT1.
There have been reports on far more votes. See this blog post for the current standings.
I am German and I am potentially affected by the new law as I publish exploit code from time to time. I have written a blog entry about it, including a translation of the relevant section and some thoughts about the consequences.
Last November, SFLC already said basically the same thing. Does anyone know what is really new here?
This is completely unrelated to the search for the Higgs boson. While the Higgs is believed to be the elementary particle responsible for giving mass to all other particles, the Xi_b mentioned here is a composite particle consisting of three previously known quarks. So while it is good to know that the particle really exists as predicted by the standard model, this is definitely not the Nobel prize physics the discovery of the Higgs would be.
AppArmor's main approach is somewhat less broad. It is more like putting certain applications into a MAC container to limit what an application can do, no matter who the user using the application is. A great example of this that most Slashdot readers should look into is putting the browser into a safety container.
Some time ago, I wrote a review of AppArmor, finding that it solves problems that don't exist. Looking at your browser example, the functionality provided by AppArmor can be implemented completely by setting up a different user and setting appropriate file ACLs.
For the real problems AppArmor provides little help. Can you confine network usage of a program, meaning your internal network cannot be accessed once your browser has been hacked? No. Can you limit the syscalls a program may use, reducing the risk of successful kernel exploits? No.
As long as it stays this way, I recommend to everyone to use SELinux, even though it is much more difficult to setup and configure.