Fizzlefist writes "For the past 2 weeks there has been an uproar on the Sims 2 forums concerning the inclusion of Sony's SecuROM DRM software in the latest expansion pack, Bon Voyage. It seems paid customers have been having problems since day one of release, but EA is only now, 5 weeks later, issuing an official statement on the matter. A lot of what's in the statement is outright fiction with proven reports of issues with disabling of disc burning software, optical disc drives, printers, cameras, system slowdown and even system crashes. Fan responses have been cold to say the least. Interestingly enough, the expansion pack was cracked and up on the internet less than 24 hours after its release."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes "Google claims that people are devouring capacity with photos and other attachments on its Gmail e-mail service faster than the company can add to it at its current pace. So Google said on Friday that it would increase the rate at which it is adding capacity to its web-based service. There's only one problem, Google's main competitors — Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail — far surpassed Gmail this year with their own capacity."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
thefickler writes "Dissatisfaction with Windows Vista seems to be swelling, with the Dutch Consumers' Union (Consumentenbond) asking Microsoft to supply unhappy Vista users with a free copy of Windows XP. Not surprisingly, Microsoft refused. This prompted Consumentenbond to advise consumers to ask for XP, rather than Vista, when buying a new computer."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Kaseijin writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is getting his wish. The New York Times reports the state will replace touch-screen voting machines with optical-scan models by July 1, 2008 — the most aggressive timetable of any jurisdiciton rethinking this approach to voting. The touch-screen machines most likely will be sold to other jurisdictions or stripped for parts."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
goldcd writes "A while back I wrote some pretty reasonable forum code, a PHPBB alternative. A few years down the line it's pretty stable, I've stopped tinkering with it, and it's standing up by itself. I have neither the time, inclination, nor inspiration to do anything more with it, but would very much like to give the code to the world to use and expand upon. Now I could just upload it as it is onto SourceForge, but currently it's very specific in its usage and I'd be ashamed of what 'proper' coders would think of my amateur offering — I'm afraid it would be laughed at and ignored. On the other hand, I don't want to waste hours of my own time perfecting it for people just to 'rip off' as is, and never contribute anything. My question is, what do you have to do to make your code 'OSS appealing?'"Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
The Washington Post has an article detailing what is known of the workings of the Russian Business Network, a shadowy entity based in St. Petersburg that hosts a good fraction of the world's spammers, identity thieves, bot herders, and phishers. RBN is not incorporated anywhere and may not technically even be violating Russian law. It provides "bulletproof hosting" for about $600 a month to a wide range of bad guys.The author of the Post story, Brian Krebs, supplements it with two blog posts. One provides more detail and back story including a look at one ISP's security admin who decided last summer to ban all RBN traffic from his network, with outstanding results. The other post maps some of the RBN's upstream suppliers and details the extent of the RBN's involvement in recent cyber-attacks: "Nearly every major advancement in computer viruses or worms over the past two years has emanated from or sent stolen consumer data back to servers" in the RBN.Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
coondoggie writes "Xerox today touted software it says can scan documents, understand their meaning and block access to those sensitive or secure areas so that prying eyes cannot read, copy or forward the information. Xerox and researchers from its Palo Alto Research Center debuted "Intelligent Redaction," new software that automates the process of removing confidential information from any document. The software includes a detection tool that uses content analysis and an intelligent user interface to protect sensitive information. It can encrypt only the sensitive sections or paragraphs of a document, a capability previously not available, Xerox said."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
PC World is reporting that 'California's Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer of Arizona, have been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison. Both were convicted of conspiracy, money laundering, fraud, and transportation of obscene materials, according to The East Valley Tribune, a newspaper covering the case.' Because sometimes bad things happen to bad people.Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
butterwise writes "AOL plans to cut 2,000 jobs, or 20 percent of its worldwide workforce, as the Internet division focuses on advertising sales to make up for subscriber losses. 'The latest cuts will pare AOL's staff to 8,000, down from about 18,000 employees in 2001, when the company bought New-York based Time Warner for $124 billion. The combination led to $100 billion in losses and a more than 60 percent drop in Time Warner's stock as customers dropped dial-up Web access.'"Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Bowling for cents writes "There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers. The latest variants of Storm are now using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer traffic, meaning that each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key. This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks. This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
SoyChemist writes "Forty years ago, LOGO, a derivative of LISP, was born. Several years later, it became the cornerstone of educational software that simultaneously taught geometry and how to think like a coder. With a plethora of high-end educational software packages to choose from, each with flashy multimedia and trademarked characters, parents and teachers may find the humble turtle a bit outdated. Thankfully, several LOGO programs are available for free through a variety of websites, but perhaps 3D programming environments like Alice will be the wave of the future."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
ta bu shi da yu writes "It appears that, incredibly, Vista can run out of memory while copying files. ZDNet is reporting that not only does it run out of memory after copying 16,400+ files, but that 'often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly.' Apparently a fix was scheduled for SP1 but didn't make it; there is a hotfix that you must request."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon just announced that the beta program for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service is now open to all developers. They have also added new instance types. It appears that you can now get the equivalent of an 8-core machine. Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?"Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
Hugh Pickens writes "Computer Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are developing techniques to analyze and disrupt black markets on the internet, where criminals sell viruses, stolen data, and attack services estimated to total more than $37 million for the seven-month period they studied. To stem the flow of stolen credit cards and identity data, researchers have proposed two technical approaches to reducing the number of successful market transactions. One approach to disrupting the network is a slander attack where an attacker eliminates the verified status of a buyer or seller through false defamation. Another approach undercuts the cyber-crooks' network by creating a deceptive sales environment. 'Just like you need to verify that individuals are honest on E-bay, online criminals need to verify that they are dealing with "honest" criminals,' says Jason Franklin, one of the researchers."Read more of this storyat Slashdot.
