Archive for April, 2008

Unexpected Slashdot Downtime

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Netcraft confirmed it... Slashdot was dying for several hours (along with SourceForge which share a corporate overlord and router). Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn't come back up quite as planned. Sorry for the inconvenience. On the upside, we're moving to a new network and hardware soon, so ...

Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade"

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We now know how the Whitehouse managed to lose about five million emails. It seems that they 'upgraded' their Lotus Notes system, which had an automatic retention and backup system, for Microsoft Exchange, which did not support the automatic system. So they changed ...

Wikipedia Overrules DOJ

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

kylehase writes "The release of Wikiscanner last year brought much attention to white washing of controversial pages on the community generated encyclopedia. Apparently Wikipedia is very serious in fighting such behavior as they've temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits."

Post-Suicide Account Cracking?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

An anonymous reader writes "A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide last week. He was a young, promising CS major who was close to being accepted into a very prestigious school. He was very into Linux as well as PHP/MySQL coding. He left absolutely nothing ...

FBI Adds Two Digital Forensic Labs

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

coondoggie sends us a story from NetworkWorld.com, as is his wont, this one on the FBI opening two new US Regional Computer Forensics Laboratories this week. In these laboratories examiners conduct a growing number of forensic examinations of digital media in support of the investigation and/or prosecution of a federal, ...

MS Beta Software To Manage Unix/Linux Systems

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Tumbleweed writes "The Cross Platform and Interop team at Microsoft today announced some new beta products for managing Unix/Linux systems from MS Operations Manager 2007, as well as connectors for HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console. Both betas are available at Microsoft Connect (search for systemcenter), according the blog."

Patent Appeals System Under Constitutional Attack

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Goobermunch sends in a law.com article going into questions about the validity of recent patent rulings (within the past eight years) by the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, due to the unconstitutionality of the method for appointing patent and trademark appeals judges. The problem arises because the patent appeals ...

MySpace Treads Carefully With "HyperTargeting"

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Ian Lamont writes "MySpace is preparing to boost its advertising systems, by launching a targeted ad platform called HyperTargeting and creating a Web-based system that lets vendors purchase ads without dealing with human sales teams. HyperTargeting will 'look at a person's interests listed on their public profile and then classify ...

NYTimes.com Hand-Codes HTML & CSS

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

eldavojohn writes "The design director of NYTimes.com, Khoi Vinh, recently answered readers' questions in the Times's occasional feature 'Ask the Times.' He was asked how the Web site looks so consistently nice and polished no matter which browser or resolution is used to access it. His answer begins: 'It's our ...

Spammers Hijacking IP Space

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Ron Guilmette writes "As reported in the Washington Post's Security Fix blog, a substantial hunk of IP address space has apparently been taken over by notorious mass e-mailing company Media Breakaway, LLC, formerly known as OptInRealBig, via means that are at best questionable. The block in question is 134.17.0.0/16, which ...