Linux fréttir
Most diverse playlists in the UK: Official
It's not exactly WFMU, the world's greatest radio station, but a new study shows how valuable BBC 6Music is to curious listeners and the music industry. By some distance, it offers the most diverse selection of pop music on UK radio.…
Not an Exadata
Oracle may not be as chatty as the formerly independent Sun Microsystems, but it sure is more keen on using benchmark tests to help make the case for the products it sells.…
scribblej writes "Many large companies use Microsoft's Dynamics GP product for accounting, and many of these companies use it to store credit card numbers for billing customers. Turns out these numbers (and anything else in GP) are encrypted only by means of a simple substitution cipher. This includes the master system password, which can be easily selected and decrypted from the GP database by any user. Quoting: '[Y]ou DON'T HAVE TO GIVE ACCESS TO THE DYNAMICS DATABASE. What that means is if you create a base user in GP, that user can log into the SQL server and run a select statement on the table containing the "encrypted" GP System password. Not good.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pulls on big briefs
The secretary of state for business, innovation and skills (BIS) outlined his department's responsibilities in the UK's newly-formed coalition government today.…
'This will be as big as going from props to jets'
The X-51A "Waverider" scramjet will fly at last next Tuesday, it has been announced. It had been expected that the radical engine - capable of Mach 6 velocities while running on fairly ordinary jet fuel - would fly last December, but budgetary and scheduling difficulties have delayed the project.… Free White Paper - IBM Sets Pace in Unix Virtualization
theodp writes "If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s, Google Storage even manages to overcomplicate the simple act of copying files. Which raises the question: Are Googlers with 'world-class programming skills' capable of producing straightforward, simple-to-use programming interfaces for ordinary humans?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Iconic telescope sees some funding loving
Jodrell Bank, home to the Lovell radio telescope, is getting £3.1m in funding to build a new visitor centre, cafe and maze.…
Freeview VoD box gets extra service
Fetch TV, the online telly-on-demand service, will today send out a firmware update to its SmartBox set-tops to allow viewers to activate Sky's Sky Player software.…
An anonymous reader notes the discovery of a 35-million-year-old impact crater in the Timor Sea, northwest of Australia, which helped to usher in a period of significant global cooling. "The new findings, announced today and published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, suggest that the impact could have contributed towards the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet... The minimum size of the dome, which 'represents elastic rebound doming of the Earth crust triggered by the impact' is 50 km across, but the full size of the crater could be significantly larger, [lead researcher Andrew Glikson] told Australian Geographic. 'It would be possibly 100 km.' From the probable diameter of the crater, Andrew estimates that the asteroid which struck the Timor Sea was between 5 and 10 km in size. This impact coincided with a time of heavy asteroid bombardment globally. Several other craters have been documented from a similar time, including one off the WA coast measuring 120 km in diameter. Another impact structure in Siberia was created by an asteroid 100 km in size."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Big bureaucrats scoff at the law
The Stop Clause 43 campaigners have sounded a warning over the British Library's newspaper digitisation initiative.…
No laughing matter
Shifty sorts have created a new worm which spread rapidly on Facebook on Friday.…
BlueBeat shrugs off injunction to stream playlists
The Californian website injuncted for selling Beatles catalogue downloads at 25 cents a pop last year has refused to let a little legal difficulty hamper its progress and has expanded its reach to the iPhone.… Free White Paper - IBM Sets Pace in Unix Virtualization
Too much power in too few hands?
The FCC has published its annual report on the competitiveness of the US wireless industry, and says there's not enough of it - despite industry howls to the contrary.…
An anonymous reader writes "Well, that didn't take long. Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG-LA, the consortium that controls the AVC/H.264 video standard, says the group is looking at creating a patent pool license for VP8 and WebM, Google's new open source, royalty-free HTML5 video format... So much for a Web video standard unencumbered by patent issues." We talked about VP8/WebM a couple of days ago when Google open sourced it. Reader Stoobalou points out another late-night email from Steve Jobs, who was asked to comment on VP8 vs. H.264. Jobs laconically sent a pointer to the technical analysis we linked before, where the poster says "VP8 copies way too much from H.264 for anyone sane to be comfortable with it, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
kevin7kal writes "The Apple iPad is the ideal automotive communications and entertainment device. It is sized perfectly to mount using the iPad Steering Wheel Mount without obscuring the driver's view. 'I don't think that I am exaggerating when I say that the iPad Steering Wheel Mount probably has saved my life...'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pac-Mac anniversary celebrated in style
Human Pac-Man descends on Swindon tomorrow. Here's a picture of the dress rehearsal.…
superapecommando sends along a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Facebook's privacy troubles may be just beginning. "Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. ... Several large advertising companies ... including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it. ... The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards. ... Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Strange bedfellows for extreme-porn fanciers, freetards
Pentagon bizarro-boffinry bureau DARPA is seeking to develop a set of tools for internet users which are nominally intended for some military purpose - but which would seem at least as useful to those determined to get around measures designed to thwart copyright violators and extreme-porn aficionados.…
bennyboy64 and other readers let us know that
IBM sent out an email to all attendees to the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) 2010 conference, warning them that some of the USB drives handed out to delegates contained malware. Fortunately it was old malware, which all anti-virus products have detected since 2008. Two years ago telecommunications company Telstra distributed malware-infected USB drives at the same conference.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
bennyboy64 and other readers let us know that
IBM sent out an email to all attendees to the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) 2010 conference, warning them that some of the USB drives handed out to delegates contained malware. Fortunately it was old malware, which all anti-virus products have detected since 2008. Two years ago telecommunications company Telstra distributed malware-infected USB drives at the same conference.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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