Internet World

An anonymous reader writes "Colossus Cipher Challenge winner Joachim Schueth talks about why he settled on Ada as his language of choice to unravel a code transmitted from the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Germany, from a Lorenz SZ42 Cipher machine (used by the German High Command to relay secret messages during the World War II). 'Ada allowed me to concisely express the algorithms I wanted to implement.'"

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Why would UMG, one of the four major RIAA members, consider an infringement award 'grossly excessive'? Naturally, because they were the ones ordered to pay it. While they had no trouble with Jammie Thomas being ordered to pay $222k, some 13,214 times the actual costs, they thought that being ordered to pay ten times the actual damages in Bridgeport v. Justin Combs was just too much. Then again, maybe that's why they didn't complain back when the increased statutory damages section was cut from the PRO-IP Act? Now if they could just cut the rest of the act."

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AntOverlords writes "Voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers. They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet."

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "NBC activated the 'broadcast flag' on a number of shows this week, ranging from American Gladiator to Medium, which prevented compliant programs like Windows Media Center from recording them. The matter is being 'looked into,' but that doesn't tell us whether it was an accident or a ploy to see how outraged viewers would be at being stripped of the time-shifting rights they've enjoyed ever since Sony v. Universal. Just in case it's the latter, it wouldn't hurt to let them know what you think."

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ErkDemon writes "For any Slashdotters who want a piece of frameable Einstein memorabilia, a letter from A.E. to Eric Gutkind goes on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions today (May 15th). The content of the letter mostly deals with Einstein's views on religion. (Einstein pronounces himself rather unimpressed by the whole idea and rejects it as "childish.") The Guardian has printed a translated excerpt from the letter."

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ErkDemon writes "For any SlashDotters who want a piece of frameable Einstein memorabilia, a letter from A.E. to Eric Gutkind goes on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions today (May 15th). The content of the letter mostly deals with Einstein's views on religion (Einstein pronounces himself rather unimpressed by the whole idea and rejects it as "childish"). The Guardian has printed a translated excerpt from the letter."

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w1z4rd writes "The BBC reports that seven Nato nations have backed a new cyber defence centre in Estonia, which last year blamed Russia for weeks of attacks on its internet structure. The US will initially send an observer to the project, which will have some 30 staff when fully operational in August."

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Stony Stevenson writes "IBM has announced an initiative to offer smaller versions of its high-performance computers to enterprise customers. The first new machine is a QS22 BladeCenter server powered by a Cell processor. Developed to power gaming systems, the Cell chip has also garnered interest from the supercomputing community owing to its ability to handle large amounts of floating point calculations. IBM hopes that the chips, which currently power climate modelling and other traditional supercomputing tasks, will also appeal to customers ranging from financial analysis firms to animation studios."

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StonyandCher writes "More and more ISPs are blocking or throttling traffic to the peer-to-peer file-sharing service, even if you are downloading copyright free content. Have you been targeted? How can you get around the restrictions? This PC World report shows you a number of tips and tools can help you determine whether you're facing a BitTorrent blockade and, if so, help you get around it."

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holy_calamity writes "The directed sound weapon made by US company ATC is being exported to the Chinese police, despite the public law banning sales of weapons to China. Turns out that such 'non-lethal' technologies are not covered by this law — an omission that may become more widely known if they are used to quell high-profile protests during the Olympics."

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NotBornYesterday writes "After spending $190,000 and 'countless hours' building a set of jet-powered wings, a Swiss man has successfully demoed this ultimate mother-of-all-toys. After jumping from a plane like a skydiver, he then lit the four jet engines and proceeded to fly around a valley in the Alps at up to 186 miles per hour. His site is here, if you want to see shots of him in action. 'I still haven't used the full potential,' he said."

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Hackajar writes "Valleywag has an interesting post detailing YouTube's new way to deal with copyrighted music videos, removing embed tags and linking it to the official content on site. What's significant here is the lack of video removal by YouTube staff. From the post, "Uploads of music videos from the band by non-official sources now carry a link reading "Contains content from [insert studio here]"". They use a Modest Mouse music video from a third party to illustrate the new change."

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An anonymous reader writes "According to BBC, the director of the Vatican Observatory stated in an article titled 'Aliens Are My Brother' that intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space. 'The search for forms of extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God. — Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God.' Mind that this is not the same director who said that evolution is more than a mere theory — that was Father Coyne. I myself agree. There might be intelligent beings created by God in outer space even if there are none here on earth."

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Falkkin writes "Luis von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon University have launched GWAP, a new web site for 'Games With A Purpose.' By playing these online games, humans help provide data for problems that are hard for computers to solve, such as computer vision and sound classification. Slashdot has previously covered other human computation projects by Dr. von Ahn, including the ESP Game and reCAPTCHA. The new web site contains a re-vamping of the ESP Game as well as four completely new games." (Falkkin also points to a AP story on GWAP and to coverage at the BBC.)

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Stony Stevenson writes "IT staff are 'overwhelmingly' happy to recommend their profession to their children, a survey has found. Three-quarters of nearly 1,000 IT professionals surveyed said that they would 'definitely recommend' a career in the business to their offspring. Around 70 percent also felt that their jobs are secure, and that they are expecting a salary increase next year. The survey also found that 86 per cent of respondents expect to move jobs voluntarily in the next three years."

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Simon Howes writes "After searching for decades, astronomers have found a supernova in our galaxy! So it wasn't little green men we were waiting for. It's located very near the center of the galaxy, about 28,000 light years away, and it's only at most about 140 years old. Quote from Bad Astronomy: 'If you're wondering what all the buzz has been about the past few days over a NASA discovery, then wait no longer. No, it's not aliens or an incoming asteroid. Instead, it's still very cool: astronomers have found the youngest supernova in the Milky Way.'" FiReaNGeL contributes a link to coverage on e! Science News; I think Wired's account of the super-hyped tele-press-conference is the funniest.

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Michael J. Ross writes "Web developers are oftentimes under pressure to build attractive sites as quickly as possible, and thus they are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), which offer most of the functionality typically needed in a site, such as user authentication, site-wide styling, and of course managing content contributed by site owners and users. Joomla is an extremely popular and heavily-used CMS, partly because it is one of the easiest to install, configure, and use as a starting point for a new site. But with all CMSs, Joomla's online documentation and forums can prove frustrating to the new developer. Books such as the recently published Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 are intended to fill that gap." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.

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ancientribe writes "Security suites and online Web scanners detect only a little more than half of all rootkits, according to new tests conducted by independent test organization AV-Test.org. Many of today's products struggle to clean up the ones they find. AV-Test.org also found that a few big name AV scanners had serious problems finding and removing active rootkits, such as Microsoft Windows Live OneCare 1.6.2111.32 and McAfee VirusScan 2008 11.2.121."

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An anonymous reader writes "We first heard about Splashtop back in October, when the instant-on Linux desktop was announced. At the time it was a really exciting concept but Asus only rolled out the technology on high-end motherboards. Splashtop just announced that Asus will be expanding the desktop to the P5Q motherboard family and later on to all Asus motherboards. That's embedded Linux shipping over over a million motherboards a month! The release also mentioned that the technology will be appearing on notebooks this year as well."

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Smivs writes "Britain's Ministry of Defence has just released files regarding investigations into UFO sightings between 1978 to 1987. Over the next three or four years, 160 files will be handed over to the National Archives. The first group of eight files, one of which is more than 450 pages long, is available today. The Guardian newspaper details many of the events in question, some interesting and many just bizarre. A similar release of UFO files by France's national space agency last year attracted more than 220,000 users on its first day, causing it to crash. To avoid such problems, the National Archives is using an external hosting company which can add extra capacity as needed to handle the web traffic."

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