Lots of websites ask you to invite your friends when you sign up, and for good reason; the web is more fun when you can share your experiences with other people. However, too many of these sites access your list of friends by asking for your username and password so they can sign in as you and scrape your contact lists.
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes “Summary: Amid the latest “sexting” controversy, here is a proposal for a scientifically objective method to determine whether a picture constitutes child pornography. This is a harder problem than it seems, but not for the reasons you’d think. And it raises questions about how the same scientific principles could be applied to other matters of law.” Hit the link below to read the sextiest story on Slashdot today.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Keith found a New Scientist story about fractals and quantum theory. The article says “Take the mathematics of fractals into account, says Palmer, and the long-standing puzzles of quantum theory may be much easier to understand. They might even dissolve away.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes “The Walt Disney Co and Hulu.com have restarted talks over offering shows from Disney’s ABC television network on the online video distributor owned by NBC Universal and News Corp, paidContent.org reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources.” The real question to me is when will they stop screwing around with Boxee users?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dan Kaminsky writes “We may not know what the Conficker authors have in store for us on April 1st, but I doubt many network administrators want to find out. Maybe they don’t have to: I’ve been working with the Honeynet Project’sTillmann Werner and Felix Leder, who have been digging into Conficker’s profile on the network. What we’ve found is pretty cool: Conficker actually changes what Windows looks like on the network, and this change can be detected remotely, anonymously, and very, very quickly. You can literally ask a server if it’s infected with Conficker, and it will give you an honest answer. Tillmann and Felix have their own proof of concept scanner, and with the help of Securosis’ Rich Mogull and the multivendor Conficker Working Group, enterprise-class scanners should already be out from Tenable (Nessus), McAfee/Foundstone, nmap, ncircle, and Qualys. We figured this out on Friday, and got code put together for Monday. It’s been one heck of a weekend.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
jammag writes “Setting aside the now tired debate about whether KDE or GNOME is the ‘better’ Linux desktop, Bruce Byfield compares their disparate development approaches and asks, not which desktop is subjectively better, but which developmental approach is likely to be most successful in the next few years. ‘In the short term, GNOME’s gradualism seems sensible. But, in the long-term, it could very well mean continuing to be dragged down by support for legacy sub-systems. It means being reduced to an imitator rather than innovator.’ In contrast, ‘you could say that KDE has done what’s necessary and ripped the bandage off the scab. In the short term, the result has been a lot of screaming, but, in the long term, it has done what was necessary to thrive.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
olddoc writes “In the days of 512-MB systems, I remember reading about cosmic rays causing memory errors and how errors become more frequent with more RAM. Now, home PCs are stuffed with 6GB or 8GB and no one uses ECC memory in them. Recently I had consistent BSODs with Vista64 on a PC with 4GB; I tried memtest86 and it always failed within hours. Yet when I ran 64bit Ubuntu at 100% load and using all memory, it ran fine for days. I have two questions: 1) Do people trust a memtest86 error to mean a bad memory module or motherboard or CPU? 2) When I check my email on my desktop 16-GB PC next year, should I be running ECC memory?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Texas Board of Education — as discussed here last week — has voted on the guidelines for textbooks in that state, which represents a large enough market to have influence nationwide. The good news is that the board dropped a 20-year-old requirement that both “strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories be taught; score one for the teaching of evolution. The not-so-good news is that in a “compromise,” the board also voted to require that students “in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations… including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.” Score one for the Discovery Institute. A Republican board member explained that the words “strengths and weaknesses” have become “code for creationism and [the similar theory of] intelligent design. So by being more clear in the language and using words that aren’t seen as code words, we were able to get all of the 15 board members to agree that this is how we’ll teach all sides of scientific explanation, using scientific evidence.” Reporting on the Texas vote is all over the map, as a US Today blog summarizes. Some reports claim that an amendment was passed that preserves a requirement that students study the “sufficiency or insufficiency” of common ancestry and natural selection. Other reports claim that the board also adopted language that would have students study the “different views on the existence of global warming.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ponca City, We love you writes “According to a new study, people who played fighting games on their PCs became up to a 58 percent better at perceiving fine contrast differences, an important aspect of eyesight. The breakthrough is significant because it was previously thought that the ability to notice even very small changes in shades of grey against a uniform background could not be improved. Contrast sensitivity is the primary limiting factor in how well one sees. Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks with either Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and the results were compared with another group who played The Sims 2, which is richly visual but does not require as much hand-eye coordination. The improvements lasted for months after game play stopped. The new finding suggests action video games could be used as training devices as a useful complement to eye-correction techniques, since gaming may teach the brain’s visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “According to a report I just read in Mashable, Pirate Bay is coming to Facebook. Writer Ben Parr says that The Pirate Bay site now includes links under torrents to ‘Share on Facebook.’ Once posted to a profile, the Facebook member’s friends can click the link on Facebook to begin the download right away, provided he or she already has a torrenting client installed. I just hope people do not use this feature to download copyrighted materials which are not authorized to be downloaded, or at least not materials copyrighted to litigation-happy RIAA Big 4 record labels. No doubt, if their song files were downloaded through this method, the record companies would sit back for awhile, derive profit from the promotional excitement generated for their dying industry, and then — armed with Facebook’s data — sue the pants off all the hapless Facebook users who fell for it.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
