Atlantis Computing promises diskless VDI

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18 January 2012
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Virtual Desktop storage provider Altantis Computing today announced a new product that runs non-persistent virtual desktop environments using only server memory.

The company’s Atlantis ILIO diskless VDI appliance eliminates the need for Virtual Machine Disk Formats (VMDKs) on VMware. By removing disk storage, Atlantis’s ILIO reduces the cost to run a virtual desktop to $197 and delivers performance superior to a physical PC, with boot times of just 12 seconds, according to Atlantis Computing CEO Bernard Harguindeguy — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Great Martin Luther King Copyright Conundrum

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18 January 2012
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In Entertainment, History, Rights, Technology
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Believe it or not, to legally watch that famous Martin Luther King I Have a Dreamspeech — arguably one of the most hallowed moments in American history — costs $10 thanks to the twisted state of United States copyright law. In related news, happy Martin Luther King Day!

The news of how MLK’s most famous moment costs money to watch is not a new one. But given the dramatic rise of the issue of digital rights, thanks largely in part to the dramatic controversy surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the story seems unusually prescient this year. Alex Pasternack, the editor of Vice‘s tech site, Motherboard, blogged about the issue on a few months back:

If you weren’t alive to witness Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech on the Washington Mall 48 years ago this week, you might try to switch on the old YouTube and dial it up. But you won’t find it there or anywhere else; rights to its usage remain with King and his family…

At the family’s Web site, videotapes and audiotapes of the speech can be purchased for $10 a piece. The family controls the copyright of the speech for 70 years after King’s death, in 2038

— via redwolf.newsvine.com

Facebook, Google argue against Web censorship in India

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17 January 2012
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Facebook and Google told the Delhi High Court today that they cannot block offensive content that appears on their services. The two Internet giants are among 21 companies that have been asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material in India, and the Indian government has given the green light for their prosecution. Although India is democratic (in fact, it’s the world’s largest democracy), many fear the country will resort to censorship — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Copper Thieves Battled With New Anti-theft Telecom Cable

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17 January 2012
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The epidemic of telecom cable thefts has prompted a US company to develop a new design that drastically cuts down the copper content in a bid to deter metal thieves.

The GroundSmart Copper Clad Steel cable is probably the most radical solution yet devised to copper theft in that it removes almost all of the copper grounding (in the UK, earthing) metal of the sort commonly used in networks to return current to earth for safety reasons.

Unlike conventional cables made from solid copper, the GroundSmart consists of a steel core around which is bonded a copper outer casing, forming an equally effective but far less valuable cable.

The end result, according to the company, is something that exploits the corrosion-resistance of copper with the conductive properties of steel — via http://redwolf.newsvine.com/_news/2012/01/17/10172062-copper-thieves-battled-with-new-anti-theft-telecom-cable

Zappos Hacked: Internal Systems Breached in Cyber Attack

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16 January 2012
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Zappos.com, best-known for selling shoes and clothing online and its top-notch customer service and corporate culture, appears to be the latest victim of a cyber attack resulting in a data breach.

In an internal email to Zappos employees on Sunday, CEO Tony Hsieh asked employees to set aside 20 minutes of their time to read about the breach and what communications would be sent to its over 24 million customers.

While Hsieh, who said the attack occured through one of the company’s servers in Kentucky, said that credit card data was not compromised, but did say that one or more of the following pieces of personal information has been accessed by the attacker(s): customer names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of credit card numbers. User passwords were “cryptographically scrambled, he said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Twitter feed gives Swedes a new picture

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16 January 2012
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An organic sheep farmer, a priest and a Bosnian immigrant are among those who have helped double Sweden’s Twitter followers in the past month.

As part of what the country is calling the world’s most democratic Twitter experiment, a different Swede takes sole control of the nation’s official Twitter account each week, sharing their daily experiences and opinions and recommending things to do and see where they live — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Viruses stole City College of SF data for years

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15 January 2012
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Personal banking information and other data from perhaps tens of thousands of students, faculty and administrators at City College of San Francisco have been stolen in what is being called an infestation of computer viruses with origins in criminal networks in Russia, China and other countries, The Chronicle has learned.

At work for more than a decade, the viruses were detected a few days after Thanksgiving, when the college’s data security monitoring service detected an unusual pattern of computer traffic, flagging trouble — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Email after hours? It’s overtime by law for some

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13 January 2012
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The backlash against 24-hour connectivity is gathering pace around the world.

Workers who find themselves answering work emails on their smartphones after the end of their shifts in Brazil can now qualify for overtime under a new law.

The new legislation was approved by President Dilma Rousseff last month.

It says company emails to workers are equivalent to orders given directly to the employee — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The writer who made millions by self-publishing online

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13 January 2012
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When historians come to write about the digital transformation currently engulfing the book-publishing world, they will almost certainly refer to Amanda Hocking, writer of paranormal fiction who in the past 18 months has emerged from obscurity to bestselling status entirely under her own self-published steam. What the historians may omit to mention is the crucial role played in her rise by those furry wide-mouthed friends, the Muppets.

To understand the vital Muppet connection we have to go back to April 2010. We find Hocking sitting in her tiny, sparsely furnished apartment in Austin, Minnesota. She is penniless and frustrated, having spent years fruitlessly trying to interest traditional publishers in her work. To make matters worse, she has just heard that an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, is coming to Chicago later that year and she can’t afford to make the trip. As a huge Muppets fan, she is more than willing to drive eight hours but has no money for petrol, let alone a hotel for the night. What is she to do?

Then it comes to her. She can take one of the many novels she has written over the previous nine years, all of which have been rejected by umpteen book agents and publishing houses, and slap them up on Amazon and other digital ebook sites. Surely, she can sell a few copies to her family and friends? All she needs for the journey to Chicago is $300 (£195), and with six months to go before the Muppets exhibition opens, she’s bound to make it.

I’m going to sell books on Amazon, she announces to her housemate, Eric.

To which Eric replies: Yeah. Okay. I’ll believe that when it happens.

Let’s jump to October 2010. In those six months, Hocking has raised not only the $300 she needed, but an additional $20,000 selling 150,000 copies of her books. Over the past 20 months Hocking has sold 1.5m books and made $2.5m. All by her lonesome self. Not a single book agent or publishing house or sales force or marketing manager or bookshop anywhere in sight.

So let the historians take note: Amanda Hocking does get to Chicago to see the Muppets. And along the way she helps to foment a revolution in global publishing — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lawsuit Claims Symantec

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13 January 2012
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Security firms often warn users about scareware: malicious software that performs fake antivirus scans and then demands the user pay for a cleanup. Now a lawsuit claims that the world’s top antivirus firm, Symantec, is itself a scareware scammer.

James Gross, a resident of Washington State, filed what he intends to be a class action lawsuit against Symantec in a Northern District California court Tuesday. Gross claims that Symantec defrauds consumers by running fake scans on their machines, with results designed to bully users into upgrading to a paid version of the company’s software — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Leaked DHS internet watchlist mistakes

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12 January 2012
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Um. Yeah. So I’m going to be charitable here and presume that whoever compiled that internet monitoring watchlist at the Department of Homeland Security thought that Miss Thirteen, at www.msthirteen.com, was a site about the ultraviolent Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 gang, which originated in El Salvador and now operates in a number of US cities — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Virtual Sweatshops Defeat Bot-or-Not Tests

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10 January 2012
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Jobs in the hi-tech sector can be hard to find, but employers in one corner of the industry are creating hundreds of full-time positions, offering workers on-the-job training and the freedom to work from home. The catch? Employees will likely toil for cybercrooks, and their weekly paycheques may barely cover the cost of a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

The abundance of these low-skilled, low-paying jobs is coming from firms that specialize in the shadowy market of mass-solving CAPTCHAs, those blurry and squiggly words that some websites force you to retype. One big player in this industry is KolotiBablo.com, a service that appeals to spammers and exploits low cost labour in China, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

KolotiBablo, which means earn money in transliterated Russian, helps clients automate the solving of puzzles designed to prevent automated activity by bots, such as leaving spammy comments or mass-registering accounts at Webmail providers and social networking sites. The service offers an application programming interface (API) that allows clients to feed kolotibablo.com CAPTCHAs served in real time by various sites, which are then solved by KolotiBablo workers and fed back to the client’s system — via redwolf.newsvine.com

iKeepm

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9 January 2012
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If you need to inventory the total number of items you own for insurance appraisals or to simplify your life by eliminating clutter the free webapp iKeepm allows you to keep track of each item in each room. As you populate the list with each item’s make, model, serial number, and value a total household value is displayed in the corner.

Follow A Twitter User Via RSS

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9 January 2012
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If you want to follow someone on Twitter without signing up to the service yourself, getting updates via RSS can be useful. Twitter’s December redesign got rid of the visible RSS feed option that used to be there, but you can still add individual Twitter streams to your news reader of choice — via Lifehacker

US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law

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7 January 2012
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In a leaked letter sent to Spain’s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist. Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of retaliatory options but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals.

United States government interference in Spain’s intellectual property laws had long been suspected, but it was revelations from Wikileaks that finally confirmed the depth of its involvement.

More than 100 leaked cables showed that the US had helped draft new Spanish copyright legislation and had heavily influenced the decisions of both the government and opposition.

Now, another diplomatic leak has revealed how the US voiced its anger towards outgoing President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last month upon realizing that his government was unlikely to pass the US-drafted Sinde (site blocking) Law before leaving office — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Canadian Government Considers Plan To Block Public Domain

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7 January 2012
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Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. The Canadian government is now considering a plan to enter trade negotiations that would extend the term of copyright by 20 years, meaning nothing new would enter the public domain in Canada until at least 2032. The government is holding a public consultation with the chance for Canadians to speak out to save the public domain — via Slashdot

Japan tests $2.28m cyber-defence virus

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5 January 2012
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The Japanese government is testing a self-defence virus that has the objective of tracking down the source of cyber attacks and removing the threat.

The virus is the result of a quiet, $2.28 million project that Fujitsu had undertaken on behalf of the Japanese Defence Ministry’s Technical Research and Development Institute in 2008, according to reports from The Yomiuri Shimbun.

While the virus has the ability to track immediate sources of attack, it can also allegedly determine whether computers are being used as a proxy between the original source of the attack. Beyond this, it also stops its attackers and sends the information it finds back to its owners — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Spam capital India arrests six in phishing probe

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5 January 2012
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Police in India say they have arrested six foreign nationals suspected of defrauding hundreds of people using text message and email scams.

Scam victims were duped after being told they had won a lottery.

Authorities seized 14 laptops, seven memory sticks and 23 mobile phones, as well as fake documents and cash.

The arrests come after security firm Kaspersky reported that India now sent more spam than any other country in the world.

Police said the six men, all Nigerian, would be remanded in custody until 12 January — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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