Cody Taylor

Microsoft says Xbox 360 owners affected by denial-of-service attacks should contact their Internet provider, although they’re threatening the malicious standard of banning any and all hackers. This is a new front in the war against talented players.

The trial of The Pirate Bay has not gone by unnoticed in Sweden’s neighbor country, Norway. The IFPI has ordered the largest ISP in the country to block the site, while on the other hand Norway’s Minister of Education is critical of the music industry, and wants to legalize (illegal) file-sharing

It doesn’t matter if you’re a new convert, an experienced user, or a potential switcher, you’ll find something in the following pages that will make you feel a micron of pride of what open source can achieve. By uncovering KDE’s hidden options you can make a real difference to the way you work.

An anonymous reader writes “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away. Microsoft, which recently laid off 1400 employees, is now claiming that some of those lucky schmoes were inadvertently overpaid on their severance package. A letter from the company, which was subsequently circulated on the internet, states: ‘We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you.’ Microsoft has confirmed the authenticity of the letter, but it’s not known what the amounts in question are, or how many of the 1400 were affected.”

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An anonymous reader writes “Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow depicts an unfortunate near-future for a handful of media industries being transformed or killed by the Internet. Predicting a large-scale transformation of the music, movie, book, and newspaper industry, Doctorow says, ‘The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.’ While the Internet has the potential to help the dying book industry, for example, Doctorow predicts the ‘imminent collapse’ of the American newspaper industry because advertisers are uninterested in spending money on the remaining offline readership, such as senior citizens, who prove less valuable.”

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Mr_Whoopass writes “I am the IT Administrator for a regional restaurant chain and as of late I am noticing more and more people sending me invitations to sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc. Mother always taught me to be a skeptic and knowing more than the average Joe about how information can be used in this digital era, I am reticent to say the least about posting such personal details such as my full name and where I work on the net for all to see. I have thus far managed to stay completely below the radar and a search on Google has nothing on my real persona. However now times are tough and I see sales dropping in the industry I work in as it is a discretionary spending market to be sure. I wonder if I should loosen up on the paranoia a bit and start networking with some of these folks in case of the all too common layoff scenario that seems to be happening lately. What do other folks here think about this? I am specifically interested in what people who work in IT think (since I know that just about every moron that has ‘Vice President’ or sits on the ‘Executive Team’ is already on LinkedIn and has no clue about why they should be trying to protect their identity).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.