A collection of stories tagged 'companies' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:25:09 EST In an effort to take on IE and make strong headway in its share of the browser market, Google is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook and working on deals with PC OEMs to include Chrome in their devices. From the article: '[Google] is likely to pursue deals with major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to put Chrome on their computers and devices. ... If Mozilla could get aggressive about this too, we could see Internet Explorer facing more serious competition than ever. ... Google, much more so than Mozilla, has enough global brand recognition, money, and savvy to make a big deal of this. ... Microsoft wooed Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Acer and many other companies into making its browser the default choice on Windows desktops. Chrome currently has just under one percent market share, according to NetApplications. That number could rise significantly through this effort. Mozilla doesn't have the kind of money required to get the significant deals in this space, but Google definitely does.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26315 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/b9GaSgCLkIc/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:05:01 EST In Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, an RIAA case pending in St. Louis, Missouri, the defendant has asserted detailed counterclaims against the RIAA for federal RICO violations, fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prima facie tort, trespass, and conspiracy. The claims focus on the RIAA's 'driftnet' tactic of suing innocent people, and of demanding extortionate settlements. The RICO 'predicate acts' alleged in the 42-page pleading (PDF) are extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud. The proposed class includes all people residing in the US 'who were falsely accused... of downloading copyrighted sound recordings owned by the counterclaim Defendants and making them available for distribution or mass distribution over a P2P network and who incurred costs and damages including legal fees in defense of such false claims' or 'whose computers used in interstate commerce and/or communication were accessed... without permission or authority'. This is the second class action of which we are aware against the RIAA and the Big 4 recording companies, the first being the Oregon class action brought by Tanya Andersen, which is presently in the discovery phase."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26308 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/EQdpHz7dX1M/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:05:02 EST Bell Canada Inc. will not have to suspend its practice of "shaping" traffic on the Internet after a group of companies that resell access to Bell's network complained their customers were also being negatively affected. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission today released a decision that denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers' request that Bell be ordered to cease its application of the practice to its wholesale customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26287 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/-B7CyE6VEwY/article.pl Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:05:01 EST Over the summer, the London travelcard ticketing system — called Oyster — fell over twice, forcing the transport authority to offer free travel to the six million Londoners using the system. After that, it cut its contract with the supplier of the system, a consortium called TranSys. But now, Transport for London has signed a new contract to replace the TranSys one — with the same two companies that made up the TranSys consortium. Sure, that should fix everything."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26267 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/R0JPshg5uJA/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:05:33 EST Today, more than 40 percent of all homes in the United States contain at least one video game console. Recognizing that all that gaming could add up to serious demand for electricity, NRDC and Ecos Consulting performed the first ever comprehensive study on the energy use of video game consoles and found that they consumed an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year — roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. Through the incorporation of more user-friendly power management features, we could save approximately 11 billion kWh of electricity per year, cut our nation's electricity bill by more than $1 billion per year, and avoid emissions of more than 7 million tons of CO2 each year. In this November 2008 issue paper, NRDC provides recommendations for users, video game console manufacturers, component suppliers and the software companies that design games for improving the efficiency of video game consoles already in homes as well as future generations of machines yet to hit the shelves." The full report is freely downloadable as a PDF.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26266 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/IYnU9QDLRIA/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:05:28 EST Over the summer, the London travelcard ticketing system — called Oyster — fell over twice, forcing the transport authority to offer free travel to the six million Londoners using the system. After that, it cut its contract with the supplier of the system, a consortium called TranSys. But now, Transport for London has signed a new contract to replace the TranSys one — with the same two companies that made up the TranSys consortium. Sure, that should fix everything."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26257 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/R0JPshg5uJA/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:05:10 EST Today, more than 40 percent of all homes in the United States contain at least one video game console. Recognizing that all that gaming could add up to serious demand for electricity, NRDC and Ecos Consulting performed the first ever comprehensive study on the energy use of video game consoles and found that they consumed an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year — roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. Through the incorporation of more user-friendly power management features, we could save approximately 11 billion kWh of electricity per year, cut our nation's electricity bill by more than $1 billion per year, and avoid emissions of more than 7 million tons of CO2 each year. In this November 2008 issue paper, NRDC provides recommendations for users, video game console manufacturers, component suppliers and the software companies that design games for improving the efficiency of video game consoles already in homes as well as future generations of machines yet to hit the shelves." The full report is freely downloadable as a PDF.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26256 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/IYnU9QDLRIA/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:05:01 EST An anonymous reader notes a posting up at a law blog with the provocative title Does Your Boss Have to Pay You While You Wait for Vista to Boot Up?. (Provocative because Vista doesn't boot more slowly than anything else, necessarily, as one commenter points out.) The National Law Journal article behind the post requires subscription. Quoting: "Lawyers are noting a new type of lawsuit, in which employees are suing over time spent booting [up] their computers. ... During the past year, several companies, including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp., have been hit with lawsuits in which employees claimed that they were not paid for the 15- to 30-minute task of booting their computers at the start of each day and logging out at the end. Add those minutes up over a week, and hourly employees are losing some serious pay, argues plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Thierman, a Las Vegas solo practitioner who has filed a handful of computer-booting lawsuits in recent years. ... [A] management-side attorney... who is defending a half-dozen employers in computer-booting lawsuits... believes that, in most cases, computer booting does not warrant being called work."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26244 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/azoBPcCylqY/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:05:01 EST An anonymous reader notes that TorrentFreak is reporting: "French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge. ... Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds." SourceForge is Slashdot's corporate parent.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26192 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hkOM0_56vRY/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:05:01 EST An anonymous reader notes that TorrentFreak is reporting: "French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge. ... Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds." SourceForge is Slashdot's corporate parent.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26190 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/DvFrvAggJfI/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 03:05:02 EST Companies in Europe have begun to roll out an advanced biometric system from Japan that identifies people from the unique patterns of veins inside their fingers. Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method. Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person's identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26134 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Yujw-Yxodc0/article.pl Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:05:08 EST LG, Sharp, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes pleaded guilty to charges of price fixing in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. They pleaded guilty to fixing the prices on LCD screens used not only in their products but also in other products such as Apple's iPods. The three companies agreed to pay $585 million in fines. Perhaps this will cause the price of our TVs to drop?" The New York Times also has a story on the outcome of this case.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26125 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hUgvCh4voJw/article.pl Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:05:06 EST This distinction goes to a future autonomous version of the 700-tons Caterpillar mining truck. In this article, Discovery News reports that Caterpillar engineers and computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up to develop this autonomous truck. Japan-based Komatsu already has already delivered autonomous mining trucks to its customers, but these are smaller than the Caterpillar ones. Both companies are transforming their trucks into 'robots' for three reasons. Improvements in safety, efficiency and productivity will reduce costs and increase availability."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26068 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/_6ZZUDl17_M/article.pl Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:05:11 EST With modern console technology making it easy to develop and distribute small games, more and more companies are taking advantage of gamers' nostalgia to re-release decades-old hits, and to create entirely new titles in older styles. Gamasutra takes a look at what the retro game fad has become, and where it can go from here. What old games or series do you think would translate well onto today's consoles? "Many gamers who bought Mega Man 9 did so because of the game's inherent nostalgia, or because they never had a chance to enjoy the older games on the Nintendo Entertainment System when they were younger. Mega Man 9 is very much a product of its context. Its gameplay is fantastic, but it too is a product of the time period in which it reigned supreme. It suggests the question: can neo-retro games stand the test of time? Will games that mimic or lampoon the 8-bit era remain relevant and interesting to the masses long after its original audience has disappeared?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26040 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/lDrQ8Jun0ww/article.pl Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:05:02 EST A year ago Didier Stevens discovered that padding IE malware with 0x00 bytes would happily slip past most of the scanners in use at VirusTotal.com. Revisiting his earlier discovery, Didier found that detection on his initial samples had improved, but not by much. For all the talk of AV companies moving away from signature based detection to heuristics, it is painfully obvious that not many of the tested engines can successfully handle such a simple and well known obfuscation method and the best of those that can detect the obfuscation can only detect it as a generic malware type. At least the scanning engines that can detect the presence of malware with the obfuscation aren't trying to claim each differential as a new variant."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26026 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/6gs3N3LKAJE/article.pl Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:05:02 EST News sites and political blogs are expecting extraordinary traffic tonight as Americans track results of the Presidential election, and are scaling their infrastructure to meet the challenge. Yahoo anticipates its Election Night traffic may be three times the volume seen in 2004, when it had 80 million page views on Election Day and 142 million more visits the following day. Hosting companies say customers have been ordering extra servers and load balancing services, while content delivery networks are also expecting a busy night. Will traffic approach record levels? Akamai's Net Usage Index, which tracks traffic to its customer news sites, is one metric to watch."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25963 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/4aFxT9yl1vI/article.pl Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:05:14 EST The NYTimes reports that pre-wired home security installations by alarm companies are on the way out. Thanks to wireless window and door sensors and motion detectors, installing and maintaining one's own security system is becoming a do-it-yourself project, with kits available from companies like InGrid and LaserShield. Time to start cranking out some new iPhone and Android apps, kids?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25937 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WF7wieWiBIw/article.pl Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:05:01 EST Cross Halo with an exercise bike, and you get Expresso Fitness' S3, which lets you blow away dragons by squeezing handlebar-mounted triggers as you pedal hard through the Chinese countryside. Portfolio notes that a new generation of Wii-like workouts is hitting gyms and homes, with companies like GameRunner incorporating treadmills into First Person Shooters and Kickstart offering mini steppers and cycles for popular game systems."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25934 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/YrXg1X724gk/article.pl Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:05:02 EST Still going strong since February 2006, the 'Sinowal' Master Boot Record infector (also called 'Torpig' and 'Mebroot' by various anti-virus companies) has compromised more than half a million financial accounts. An HTML injection engine adds fields to login pages to compromise credentials. Injection is triggered by the Web addresses — more than 2,700 bank and e-commerce sites are hard-coded into the malware. 'RSA investigators found more than 270,000 online banking account credentials, as well as roughly 240,000 credit and debit account numbers and associated personal information on Web servers the Sinowal authors were using to set up their attacks.' The majority of anti-virus and anti-malware scanners do not detect this threat."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25923 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ZgygqI8hSHI/article.pl Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:05:00 EST JagsLive points out a Reuters story which suggests that Google may walk away from its deal with Yahoo instead of accepting possible antitrust limitations from the government. The ongoing investigation of the deal by the Department of Justice has caused new concerns to be raised over whether the two companies have adequately addressed issues such as privacy and competition. From Reuters: "'Are they more serious about walking away? Yes. Have they decided? I'm not sure,' one source told Reuters on Friday. 'Yahoo wants the deal, and they're willing to have Google sign anything at the Justice Department to have them do it.' ... Part of the impetus of Google's walking away could be Yahoo's talks with Time Warner Inc about buying the content and advertising operations of its AOL unit. Google initially struck the deal with Yahoo as a way to fend off Microsoft Corp's unsolicited bid. Yahoo and AOL are conducting due diligence to see what a combined company would look like."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25912 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pYmhLJJ_fy0/article.pl Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:05:03 EDT There's an interesting new community by ASUS and Intel called WePC. It enables anyone to post their dream PC including not only function, but form as well. You can draw up your dream and describe it in words, and also fiddle with some predetermined properties. No doubt the two companies are looking for common configurations so they can implement them in future products, but according to the press release, even individual designs may get the two companies' backing."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25904 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/suS9mJBYV2U/article.pl Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:05:03 EDT Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests. Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25865 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/wcUY1Z-nlHg/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:05:02 EDT Maybe people are more desperate or maybe there's just too much opportunity to make a quick buck but whatever the excuse, attempts to illegally export technology from the US has gone through the roof. The Department of Justice this week said it has placed criminal charges or convictions against more than 255 defendants in the past two fiscal years — 145 in 2008 and 110 in 2007. That 255 number represents more than a six-fold increase from fiscal year 2005, when the DOJ said about 40 individuals or companies were convicted of over 100 criminal violations of export control laws."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25864 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MRHdcpBfmoc/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:05:00 EDT A assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is sounding a warning that companies, the government and researchers need to come up with a plan for preserving our increasingly digitized data in light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks). Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there exists about 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos. Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says. 'If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture,' McDonough said. Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25830 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/rMhJmtwAb1U/article.pl Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:05:16 EDT The Boston judge who has consolidated all of the RIAA's Massachusetts cases into a single case over which she has been presiding for the past 5 years delivered something of a rebuke to the RIAA's lawyers, we have learned. At a conference this past June, the transcript of which (PDF) has just been released, Judge Nancy Gertner said to them that they 'have an ethical obligation to fully understand that they are fighting people without lawyers... to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and it's terribly critical that you stop it ...' She also acknowledged that 'there is a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. The judge did not seem to acknowledge any responsibility on her part, however, for having created the 'imbalance,' and also stated that the law is 'overwhelmingly on the side of the record companies,' even though she seems to recognize that for the past 5 years she has been hearing only one side of the legal story."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25826 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/4T4Fmxt5zFs/article.pl Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:05:04 EDT