Education

Felony Charges For H.S. Hacking 824

Posted by Zonk from the barely-even-hacking dept.
jayrtfm writes "Last year the Kurtztown Area High School approved a program which gave every student an iBook. Now 13 students face felony charges for violating the district's usage policy." From the article: "Shrawder said the secret password '50Trexler,' was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year. It allowed between 80 and 100 students to reconfigure their laptops, he said. The more computer-savvy students began to disable the administrations' ability to spy on the students' computer use. For others, it became a game, trying to outsmart the administration and compete with fellow students who held the secret, Shrawder said."
Security

Death On Demand Drive Tech 287

Posted by Zonk from the watch-for-leaks dept.
Xanderoth writes "Engadget has an article on 'Dead on Demand' technology to destroy your disk drive should it be compromised by any number of ways. From the article: 'Configurable triggers such as removal or tampering of the drive, removal of device from a resting GPS point, cellular telephone call, or even a change in temperature will release a chemical mist into the drive (not the computer) destroying it layer by layer.' Of course the drives, due out next year, are expected to be priced between $2,500 to $9,000 each, plus a yearly fee."
Robotics

`Bionic' Arm Brings Back Sense of Touch 234

Posted by CmdrTaco from the we-can-rebuild-him dept.
bdcrazy writes "Two way communication with prosthetic devices allows man who lost both arms in an accident to feel hot and cold, to sense objects and to actually move the prosthetic device to pick things up and put them down. "
Wireless Networking

Orlando Cancels Free WiFi Project 285

Posted by samzenpus from the no-internet-for-you dept.
EvilStein writes "According to local news, the City of Orlando has cancelled the city WiFi project. The 6 month pilot program ran for 17 months instead of the planned 6, but in the end, it was costing the city too much money and very few people were using the service. Might other municipal WiFi projects go the same way?"
Technology

Sony Aibo Hacks Increase Functionality 134

Posted by samzenpus from the can-it-bring-me-a-beer dept.
Dinglenuts writes "Engadget posted a how-to article on increasing your Aibo's functionality using third party hacks. Given the increasing availability of networked home goods, I'm very interested to see what uses the Slashdot community can conceive for a household controlled through voice commands issued to a robot dog."
Supercomputing

25th TOP500 List Released 274

Posted by CmdrTaco from the winner-has-a-lottaflops dept.
Chris Vaughan writes "The 25th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today (June 22, 2005) at the 20th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2005) in Heidelberg Germany. The No. 1 position was again claimed by the previously mentioned BlueGene/L System. At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. The U.S is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 294 of the 500 systems installed there (up from 267 six months ago)."
Graphics

GeForce 7800 GTX Review 377

Posted by CmdrTaco from the everyone-likes-video-cards-right dept.
ThinSkin writes "ExtremeTech has the first review of nVidia's latest GPU architecture, the Geforce 7800 GTX. Benchmarked against nVidia's previous 6800 Ultra and ATI's latest Radeon X850 XT PE, the 7800 GTX comes out as the fastest video card to date. The unit ships today with a price tag of $599. While nVidia may enjoy this brief moment in the limelight with the fastest card, it may be short-lived once ATI comes out with their latest GPU technology, code-named R520, which is suspected to come out within the next two months."
Technology

A Working Quantum Computer in 3 Years? 292

Posted by timothy from the not-with-my-quanta-you-don't dept.
prostoalex writes "Vancouver, BC-based D-Wave Systems got $17.5 mln from Draper Fisher Jurvetson to work on a preliminary version of a quantum computer, Technology Review reports. Delivery date? Within three years: 'It won't be a fully functional quantum computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.'"
Data Storage

PetaBox: Big Storage in Small Boxes 295

Posted by timothy from the always-impressive dept.
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting that a Linux-based system comprising more than a petabyte of storage as been delivered to the Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that creates periodic snapshots of the Internet. The PetaBox products, made by Capricorn Technologies, are based on Via mini-ITX motherboards running Debian or Fedora Linux. The IA's PetaBox installation consists of about 16 racks housing 600 systems with 2,500 spinning drives, for a total capacity of roughly 1.5 petabytes, according to the article. Now to strap one of those puppies to my iPod!" The Internet Archive continues to astound.
Wireless Networking

Forget GPS, Hello WPS 286

Posted by timothy from the ded-reckoning dept.
No France writes "A company known as skyhook wireless has announced the commercial availability of its Wi-Fi Positioning System, or WPS. The company has compiled a database of every wireless access point it can find in a given city. When a mobile user running th Skyhook client is in a recorded area, their position is calculated by selecting the surrounding signals and comparing them to the reference database. Currently there are 25 US cities mapped, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Apparently this device is accurate to within 20-40 meters, though one has to wonder how well it deals with people moving their wireless access points."
Wireless Networking

Nokia And Apple Collaborate On Open Source Browser 177

Posted by Zonk from the phone-browsing dept.
Michael writes "Nokia's ambitious bid to make the mobile phone as important a client device for business and leisure as the notebook PC took another important turn last week with news that it has created a browser in collaboration with Apple, which will be managed under the open source process. This starts to address awkward web browsing, a key weakness of the phone's bid to be the 'new notebook', and it raises interesting questions about how much further Nokia and Apple could go in cooperating on the anti- Microsoft ecosystem, and how far Nokia is committing its future to Linux."
Networking

Is There a Place for a $500 Ethernet Card? 423

Posted by timothy from the yowza dept.
prostoalex writes "ComputerWorld magazine runs a story on Level 5 Networks, which emerged from the stealth startup status with its own brand of network cards and software called EtherFabric. The company claims they are reducing the load on the servers CPUs and improve the communications between the servers. And it's not vaporware: 'The EtherFabric software shipping Monday runs on the Linux kernel 2.4 and 2.6, with support for Windows and Unix coming in the first half of next year. High volume pricing is $295 for a two-port, 1GB-per-port EtherFabric network interface card and software, while low volume quantities start from $495.'"
Portables (Games)

Linux on Nintendo DS, Update 208

Posted by timothy from the make-ready-the-whine-cannon dept.
fdevliegher writes "Trying to port Linux to various portable devices is hot nowadays. One project is porting Linux to the Nintendo DS, and is making big progress lately. Right after the DSLinux guys had a working bootable 2.6 kernel, they have put lots of effort in making the sash shell work, in which they also succeeded. The latest feature added is the touchscreen keyboard. It allows users to tap in the commands, providing a much easier input method than before (when only the buttons could be used to input text). Only the basics are being worked on for now, but the future uses of Linux on the Nintendo DS are practically unlimited. In other words, it might become a cheap alternative for a PDA, an emulator, movie viewer, maybe even internet browser, who knows."
Privacy

Lost Credit Data Improperly Kept, Company Admits 272

Posted by timothy from the just-researching-your-privacy-loss-tolerance dept.
Zak3056 writes "Last week, Mastercard announced that up to 40,000,000 credit card numbers may have been compromised by one of their processing companies. Today, the New York Times (registration, along with first born child, required) is reporting that the company in question, CardSystems Solutions, should not have been retaining that data to begin with. John M. Perry, CEO of the processor in question, claims the data was merely being kept for 'research purposes.' The number of compromised Master Card accounts has been revised downward to about 68,000, with another 132,000 possibly compromised accounts belonging to Visa, American Express, and other companies."
Data Storage

Data Crunching 94

Posted by timothy from the constructive-critique dept.
Vern Ceder writes "I really expected to love Data Crunching. The Pragmatic Bookshelf has come up with some very good and, well, "pragmatic" texts in the past so I was looking for more of the same. Even better, the subject of the book was the routine data extraction, massaging and formatting that I (and a lot of other coders) spend so much time on. I was really looking forward to adding a couple more pragmatic tools to my coding toolbox. Unfortunately (as you may have guessed), I really can't say I love Data Crunching. It's a good book, but there are several minor points that keep if from being a truly great book." Read on for the rest of Ceder's review.
Mozilla

Firefox on RISC OS 7

Posted by timothy from the spreading-wealth dept.
Ian Chamberlain writes "RISC OS users have crowed for years about the intuitiveness of their operating system's GUI. But that vaunted usability is of little utility in this modern world without a modern web browser to go with it. So you'll understand the importance of the RISC OS Firefox port released today."
Technology

How to Build a Mainboard: ECS Production Tour 229

Posted by timothy from the sheep-dip-is-the-last-step dept.
Unts writes "Ever wondered how they put a mainboard together? HEXUS.net has taken a tour of ECS's production facilities, following a mainboard from PCB creation, right through to burn-in testing. From the article: 'The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem. They've got some test hardware that I'm jealous of (fast-removal memory modules, CPU heatsinks that don't need full attachment, PCI and PCI Express logic testers, etc.) and can have a mainboard fully functionally tested in a matter of minutes.'"
Data Storage

Linux Kernel Archives Struggles With Git 45

Posted by Hemos from the putting-scaling-to-work dept.
NewsFiend writes "In May, Slashdot discussed Kerneltrap's interesting feature about the Linux Kernel Archives, which had recently upgraded to multiple 4-way dual-core Opterons with 24 gigabytes of RAM and 10 terabytes of disk space. KernelTrap has now followed up with kernel.org to learn how the new hardware has been working. Evidently the new servers have been performing flawlessly, but the addition of Linus Torvalds' new source control system, git, is causing some heartache by having increased the number of files being archived sevenfold."

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