The Little Hacker's Room

Barence writes "Speaking exclusively to PC Pro, Eugene Kaspersky has claimed Apple has repeatedly refused to deliver the software development kit necessary to design security software for the phone. "We have been in contact for two years with Apple to develop our anti-theft software, [but] still we do not have permission," said Kaspersky. Although he admits the risk of viruses infecting the iPhone is "almost zero", he claims that securing the data on the handset is critical, especially as iPhones are increasingly being used for business purposes. "I don't want to say Apple's is the wrong way of behaving, or the right way," Kaspersky added. "It's just a corporate culture mdash; it wants to control everything"."pa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/1621249/Apple-Blocking-iPhone-Security-Software?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/1621249"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F1621249%2FApple-Blocking-iPhone-Security-Software" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Apple+Blocking+iPhone+Security+Software%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9Fu0RR" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/1621249/Apple-Blocking-iPhone-Security-Software?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mtEZ88DPuiyNBFZuRywKuE_k_JI/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mtEZ88DPuiyNBFZuRywKuE_k_JI/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mtEZ88DPuiyNBFZuRywKuE_k_JI/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mtEZ88DPuiyNBFZuRywKuE_k_JI/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/W2iAbyMeADM" height="1" width="1"/

Haiti, Chile, Turkey, Chile (again). There've been a lot of earthquakes lately. But scientists say there haven't been more earthquakes lately. Tremors are, and have always been, common. On average, per year, you can expect one 8.0 or above quake, 17 quakes between 7 and 7.9, and 130-odd quakes between 6.0 and 6.9. One thing that has risen: Death tolls. But scientists say that increase has more to do with economic conditions that drive people to pack into mega-cities and live in cheaply built (and quick-to-collapse) homes.

abartels writes "It seems like there's been nothing but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle but with the Rackspace Cloud."pa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/168234/Drizzles-Future-Moving-to-Rackspace?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/168234"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F168234%2FDrizzles-Future-Moving-to-Rackspace" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Drizzle's+Future+Moving+to+Rackspace%3F%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9g2wKv" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/168234/Drizzles-Future-Moving-to-Rackspace?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1orHdrjj9btBAC7kC6jpE8msg7k/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1orHdrjj9btBAC7kC6jpE8msg7k/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1orHdrjj9btBAC7kC6jpE8msg7k/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1orHdrjj9btBAC7kC6jpE8msg7k/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/_BdJM3pNTnQ" height="1" width="1"/

Tor Books, the US/Canada publisher, has two hundred advance copies of my next young adult novel, For the Win, available for free to young (19 or younger) gamers who are interested in reviewing the book on their blog or school paper. The book is about gamer kids all over the world who use multiplayer games to organize and fight back against abusive employers: In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual "gold," jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world's poorest countries, where countless "gold farmers," bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of "General Robotwalla." In Shenzen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power--including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister's people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once--a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation If you're under 19 and want a free early look at the book for review on your blog/paper/whatever, send a note with your address to torpublicity@tor.com with "FTW" for the subject-line. Also include the name of your blog or school paper. For fun, also share a game you enjoyed recently and why.

We did this with Little Brother a couple years back, on the grounds that books for young people should be available for young reviewers to write about, rather than just adult reviewers who try to figure out whether young people will enjoy them. It was a real success and I'm happy to be repeating it.

This is being launched in honor of the American Library Association's Teen Tech Week, and is open to Canadians and Americans. I'm working on a similar offer for the UK edition, for Britons, Aussies, South Africans and Kiwis, and will post about it as soon as I have details.

tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL#174; 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware."pa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/163212/OpenGL-40-Spec-Released?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/163212"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F163212%2FOpenGL-40-Spec-Released" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=OpenGL+4.0+Spec+Released%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F93SA8X" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/163212/OpenGL-40-Spec-Released?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ofx_HEOkL2HRz6QPBHIt2uquuss/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ofx_HEOkL2HRz6QPBHIt2uquuss/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ofx_HEOkL2HRz6QPBHIt2uquuss/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ofx_HEOkL2HRz6QPBHIt2uquuss/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/5dhLGDeagik" height="1" width="1"/

Mozilla is a href=http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2010/03/10/ updating-the-mozilla-public-license/updating its license/a, and a href=http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/you can participate/a, just as you did in the GPLv3 updating process. It'll be going on for a while, until the end of 2010, in monthly stages, and each part of the schedule will only last one month, so I'm letting you know now, even though we are all riveted to Utah and the trial at the moment, so you can begin to think about it and maybe make use of intermissions in the Utah story.

What the hell, planet earth! Chile was just slammed by a 7.2 aftershock, as inaugural ceremonies for right-wing billionaire president-elect Sebastián Piñera began in Valparaiso. Chile was devastated by an 8.8-magnitude quake on Feb. 27.

Last week, the UK LibDem party was thrown into scandal when two of its Lords proposed an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill that would allow for national web-censorship, particularly aimed at "web-lockers" like Google Docs and YouSendIt. Now a leaked document from the British Phonographic Institute suggests that the amendment was basically written by the record industry lobby and entered into law on their behalf by representatives of the "party of liberty."

This weekend, LibDem members who attend the national convention in Birmingham will have the chance to vote on an emergency measure affirming the party's commitment to an open and just Internet, repudiating this disastrous measure. If you (or someone you know) is attending the convention, please support the "Save the Net" emergency measure and help rehabilitate the party's reputation on fundamental freedoms in the information society. Parliamentarians need to recognize that copyright touches everyone and every technology in the digital age. It is no longer a question of inter-business regulation and deals. Getting copyright wrong has the potential to mess up our freedom of speech, prevent us from getting the benefits of new technologies, and damage society in other very profound ways.

It is therefore deeply inappropriate for such fundamental proposals to have been introduced by both the government or the opposition parties at the behest of one side of the debate. That applies just as much to disconnection, which Mandelson introduced in the summer at the last minute under pressure again from the BPI and other rights holders. BPI drafted the Lib Dem / Conservative web blocking amendment Previously:

• LibDem rank-and-file make emergency motion for net freedom - Boing ...
• Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to ...
• Guardian column on LibDem proposal to block web-lockers
• Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to ...
• LibDem Lords seek to ban web-lockers (YouSendIt, etc) in the UK ...

Recently-exiled latenight talk show host Conan O'Brien will be headlining the comedy stage at the annual Bonnaroo festival. Wonder if he'll pick a random person out of the crowd to befriend and bestow insta-stardom? The date is part of Conan's cross-country comedy tour, also just announced today.

I feel a great disturbance in the public utility, as if millions of bladders cried out, and were suddenly silenced.

Pats Papers: What If Everybody in Canada Flushed at Once?

(Thanks, Christina!)

Dick Burger has been hailed by fandom as the greatest comic book creator since Jack Kirby. Unlike Kirby, however, Burger retained ownership of his characters and became a media tycoon, complete with a private jet furnished with a hot tub and a mansion in Los Angeles. He is also an insufferable bastard.

Leonard Bates is a North American journalist who is conducting research for a biography of Burger. When he travels to Hicksville, New Zealand to visit Burger's childhood home, he discovers that no one in the village wants to talk to him about Burger. For reasons unknown to Bates, they are downright angry at him for even mentioning his name. They are delighted, however, to give Bates access to the town library, which contains the greatest comic book collection on the face of the earth (including several copies of Action #1 which they casually pull from the shelves). It turns out that everyone in the village is connoisseur of comics and they'd all read Bates' earlier biography of Kirby. What is going in here? wonders Bates, and what's the big mystery about Burger?

That's the setup for Hicksville, an absorbing 250-page graphic novel by Dylan Horrocks, and republished Drawn & Quarterly with a new introduction. Horrocks does a fine job of weaving the medium of comics into the comic without making it obviously self-referential. I grew up reading Kirby and later was involved in the minicomics scene, and this book resonated with me. Hicksville was awarded "Book of the Year" by The Comics Journal, which described it as "a sweetly told love letter to the comics medium." It was also was nominated for two Ignatz Awards, a Harvey Award, and two Alph'Art Awards.

Buy Hicksville on Amazon.com

Boing Boing partner John Battelle was on a WiFi-enabled flight last night, and wanted to say bedtime-goodnight to his kids using videochat. Lots of parents tuck their kids into bed over video when they're far from home. What gentler, more loving example of the power of the internet could there be? Nope. A United Airlines flight attendant told John that this was prohibited because terrorists could use this to coordinate attacks. So what's a curious guy to do? To the Internet! Which is exactly what I did. Responses starting pouring in. Including one from a pal at the State Department, who echoed my basic goal: To use video chat to tuck my kids into bed isn't a crime. Or at least, shouldn't be.

The flight attendant just showed me the United policy manual which prohibits "two way devices" from communicating with the ground. However, the PLANE HAS WIFI. To combat this, not unlike China, United and other airlines have blocked Skype and other known video chat offenders. Apparently, they missed Apple iChat. Oops. An FAA guidebook says inflight video chat is to be discouraged because it can be annoying to seatmates, but that's very different than banning something because it's a terrorist weapon.

Read: Video Chat on the plane illegal? (battellemedia.com)

itwbennett writes "In a 45-minute press conference at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Sony announced its motion controller, officially named the Playstation Move. The Move, consists of the Eye Toy (a camera pointed at the player) and a wand-like controller with a lighted ball at the end and a range of buttons on the shaft, writes blogger Peter Smith. 'Alternatively games can use two of the wands, or one wand and one "sub-controller" that has an analog stick (the camera is always required),' says Smith. 'If this is sounding very much like the Wii's Remote and Nunchuk well, you aren't far off (though at least there's no cable between the two parts to smack you in the face when things get heated).' Here are Smith's thoughts on the demo: 'All in all, the demos seemed OK, but I, at least, wasn't really blown away by any of them. That said, it's always hard to tell how well these systems work without actually trying them for yourself. You need to feel the connection (or lack thereof) between what your hands are doing and what's going on on-screen in order to be sure. For example, in the boxing demo the player did a quick spin move that led to a roundhouse punch. It's hard to say if his motion triggered a pre-set action (a 'combo') or if the system was able to track the controller that accurately, and was able to 'connect the dots' from when his body briefly occluded the wand to when it reappeared.'"pa href="http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/159239/Sonys-PS3-Motion-Controller-Gets-Demoed-and-Named?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/159239"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgames.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F159239%2FSonys-PS3-Motion-Controller-Gets-Demoed-and-Named" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Sony's+PS3+Motion+Controller+Gets+Demoed+and+Named%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FblVoNx" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/159239/Sonys-PS3-Motion-Controller-Gets-Demoed-and-Named?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZGx6R3056Sv7WNgi_WGwy6mmZL0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZGx6R3056Sv7WNgi_WGwy6mmZL0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZGx6R3056Sv7WNgi_WGwy6mmZL0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZGx6R3056Sv7WNgi_WGwy6mmZL0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/wICjzNMFOE4" height="1" width="1"/

To coincide with South by Southwest, journalist Scott Kirsner is making his 2009 book Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age available free, in digital form, for the duration of the festival. You can download it here. Lots of folks you've seen at SXSW are featured in the book, including artist Natasha Wescoat, pioneering videoblogger Ze Frank, singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton, Burnie Burns of "Red vs. Blue," comedian Eugene Mirman, documentarian Curt Ellis, DJ Spooky, and plenty more. And, if you're at SXSW this year, Kirsner will be conducting a "fireside chat" with Ze Frank on Saturday. Scott Kirsner's "Fans, Friends & Followers" (PDF) mirror site if the link above is slow or cranky

Paul Taylor noted a story that I would have thought to be an april fools day joke a few weeks from now, which makes it only seem more tragic. A 3 year shot himself with a gun after mistaking it for a Wii controller.pa href="http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/142257/Accidental-Wii-Suicide?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/142257"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgames.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F142257%2FAccidental-Wii-Suicide" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Accidental+Wii+Suicide%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FcGG4q3" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/142257/Accidental-Wii-Suicide?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/jAqOtt9OgTdcN3Xh20y4QGTnT2w/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/jAqOtt9OgTdcN3Xh20y4QGTnT2w/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/jAqOtt9OgTdcN3Xh20y4QGTnT2w/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/jAqOtt9OgTdcN3Xh20y4QGTnT2w/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/HjzlZenvCQs" height="1" width="1"/

Mississippi's Itawamba County school district has cancelled a prom after Constance McMillen, an 18-year-old student, asked permission to bring her girlfriend as her date. The student planned to wear a tux. The school district's bureaucratic non-excuse for the cancellation is that it's "due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events." The district appears to be tap-dancing around the reason for the cancellation in an effort to avoid openly saying "We are scared of teh ghey," since that would open them up to legal liability. The ACLU isn't buying it. They've told the school district that they've got until Wednesday to change the policy or else. "A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it's really retaliation," McMillen told The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson. Calls to McMillen by The Associated Press late Wednesday went unanswered...

The ACLU said McMillen approached school officials shortly before the memo went out because she knew same-sex dates had been banned in the past. The ACLU said district officials told McMillen she and her girlfriend wouldn't be allowed to arrive together, that she would not be allowed to wear a tuxedo, and that she and her girlfriend might be asked to leave if their presence made any other students "uncomfortable."

McMillen said she feared she would be thrown out of the prom because "we do live in the Bible Belt." Miss. school prom off after lesbian's date request

ACLU Demands Mississippi School Allow Lesbian Student To Attend Prom With Girlfriend

(Thanks, Steve!) Previously:

• Prom dress store changes photo of dress
• Teen in skimpy dress denied prom entrance
• Lesbian prom king causes turmoil!

alphadogg writes "Riding surging prices of his various telecom holdings, including giant mobile outfit America Movil, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu has beaten out Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the wealthiest person on earth and nab the top spot on the 2010 Forbes list of the World's Billionaires." I'd still let the guy buy me dinner if he's ever in my town. He's probably still good for it even tho he's fallen on hard times.pa href="http://slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/1342233/Bill-Gates-No-Longer-Worlds-Richest-Man?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/1342233"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F1342233%2FBill-Gates-No-Longer-Worlds-Richest-Man" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Bill+Gates+No+Longer+World's+Richest+Man%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F93sNHw" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/1342233/Bill-Gates-No-Longer-Worlds-Richest-Man?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ly4DZRQbADGF6oRYib8FUSfmUZ4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ly4DZRQbADGF6oRYib8FUSfmUZ4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ly4DZRQbADGF6oRYib8FUSfmUZ4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ly4DZRQbADGF6oRYib8FUSfmUZ4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/r6DqKBNh6DU" height="1" width="1"/

Ninjakicks writes "Although they won't hit store shelves for a few more weeks, today Intel has officially unveiled the new Core i7-980X Extreme processor. The Core i7-980X Extreme is based on Intel's 32nm Gulftown core, derived from their Nehalem architecture and sports six execution cores. The chip runs at a 3.33GHz clock frequency, that can jump up to 3.6GHz in Intel's Turbo Boost mode. This processor has a max TDP of 130W, which amazingly is the same as previous generation Core i7 quad-core CPUs. Of course, it's crazy fast too. Some may say that the majority of applications can't truly take advantage of the resources afforded by a six-core chip capable of processing up to 12 threads. However, the fact remains there are plenty of multi-threaded usage models and applications where the power of a CPU like this can be put to very good use."pa href="http://slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/1320216/Intels-Core-I7-980X-Six-Core-Benchmarked?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/1320216"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F1320216%2FIntels-Core-I7-980X-Six-Core-Benchmarked" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Intel's+Core+I7-980X+Six-Core+Benchmarked%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FbeCFwf" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/1320216/Intels-Core-I7-980X-Six-Core-Benchmarked?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/cgZhn7TA2Am_C92g5x7oQpQ4yxE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/cgZhn7TA2Am_C92g5x7oQpQ4yxE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/cgZhn7TA2Am_C92g5x7oQpQ4yxE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/cgZhn7TA2Am_C92g5x7oQpQ4yxE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/i6Fnaoynba4" height="1" width="1"/

Photo: John Perivolaris / DrJohn2005 Recently out of Virginia's public school system, youngster James Stephenson writes in to say that being a kid sucks. So what's new? A gauntlet of cameras, invasive searches and authoritarian security theatrics that don't make schools feel safer—but do tempt administrators into privacy abuses such as Lower Merion's recent webcam-spying scandal. Special feature: "Seen Not Heard: How obscure security makes school suck."

CWmike writes "Two insurance organizations in upstate New York said on Wednesday that they will offer their members and employers virtual physician visits beginning this summer, making New York the fourth state to provide these types of services. BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York, BlueShield of Northeastern New York and technology services provider American Well said the Online Care service will allow members to talk with physicians in real time through a private online chat network or through a voice-over-IP phone call. The service also offers video chat and instant messages. Members can sign on to the insurer's Web sites and look for physicians who are available online in various specialty areas."pa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/0315240/NY-Health-Insurers-To-Offer-Virtual-Doc-Visits?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/11/0315240"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F11%2F0315240%2FNY-Health-Insurers-To-Offer-Virtual-Doc-Visits" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=N.Y.+Health+Insurers+To+Offer+Virtual+Doc+Visits%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9Ecfa1" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/11/0315240/NY-Health-Insurers-To-Offer-Virtual-Doc-Visits?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YJt46WEFQlIUudwX9rKCMwvNndY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YJt46WEFQlIUudwX9rKCMwvNndY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YJt46WEFQlIUudwX9rKCMwvNndY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YJt46WEFQlIUudwX9rKCMwvNndY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/ymtULgpnW28" height="1" width="1"/