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MCI announced Tuesday that its board had decided to accept an updated offer from Verizon rather than Qwest, which should end a month and a half standoff between the three companies as well as shareholders. The new offer is for $7.6 billion in cash and stock - about $1 billion above Verizon's previous offer. The accepted offer is still lower than the 8.45
On March 11th a thief walked into a University of Cal at Berkeley office and walked out with a laptop. This laptop had personal information on it from about 100,000 alumni. Now if that wasn’t bad enough, they did not announce it to the public until now. University officials were hoping that police would be able to catch the thief and reclaim the computer. When that didn't happen, the school publicized the theft to comply with a state law requiring consumers be notified whenever their Social Security numbers or other sensitive information have been breached. The university has set up a hotline, 1-800-372-5110, and a Web site, to answer questions about the laptop theft.http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/security/grad/
"This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management said in a statement announcing the deal. Mountain View-based Google said it anticipates the deal will close by the end of April.
The Washington Post has an interesting story about how the Secret Service is using 4,000 of their computers in a Distributed network attack. The attack is to break passwords on encryption keys. We all know that getting software to encrypt our computers is simple and the software is powerful. Breaking into the encryption itself is not simple but the Secret Service has found that the real Achilles Heel of a suspect’s encrypted computer is their passwords. The Secret Service has found that by using all the emails and plain text documents they find on the suspect's computers, they can create a brute force word list that will normally find the password for the encryption in no time at all. Lesson learned? Create strong passwords unrelated to anything on your computer. Here is more from the article…
New Mailing List for Podcast Announcements and basic chat about shows we really want you to signup. We are going to bringing you some special offers this will be the place to get special announcements ahead of the regular notices that will be publicized on the main website. [Geek News Central Podcast Mailing List Subscribe Today!] GNC-2005-03-29.mp3 GNC-2005-03-29.wma GNC-2005-03-29.ogg GNC-2005-03-29.torrent
I have created a mailing list for the Geek News Central Podcast this a list that I will post show notes to and also a place to discuss current and older shows. A way to allow our community of listeners to grow closer associations. [Subscribe Here] Todd Geek News Central Podcast
Hosted by Corante yours truly Todd the Geek from Geek News Central will be at this event. Hotel Room is reserved and we plan on having a real good time, details are starting to come out but this is an event that is gonna be more fun than work.. [Podcast Hotel]
Sony was told to stop sales of it’s PlayStation console as a judge upheld a jury ruling in California in 2004 that Sony used Immersion’s vibrating controller technology in their PlayStations. According to a company representative, Sony will still be able to sell the game consoles while it attempts to appeal the ruling. The company will also start paying Immersion royalties as ordered.
According to Betanews, Adobe is planning to announce a major upgrade to Photoshop CS called Photoshop CS2. The announcement by Adobe was suppose to be made on Monday of next week. A press release was posted early and then taken down. According to Betanews, the new upgrade will be available in May.
Since I have instant messaging accounts with AOL, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo, I found it much easier to use a single multi-client program for my instant messaging. For my PC I use Trillian. On my Macs I use Fire. It didn’t take long for Trillian to become a victim of the dreaded PC buffer overflow which could allow hackers to control users PC’s. According to beta news..
As I mentioned here last week, the PSP debut has brought with it a relatively large group of complaints about dead pixels on the screens. They range from a single pixel to whole rows or columns of dead pixels. Anandtech has posted a response from Sony about the dead pixels. It’s a generic type response, but worth reading..
Digital Rights Management (DRM)is a tool that doesn't reflect the general preference of legal music downloaders. Before you read on, hoping that I will advocate for the free distribution of music, let me warn you: I'm a strong supporter of copyright and the protection of intellectual property; I want artists and distributors to make a decent living, but I'm frustrated by the current misuse of digital technology that attempts to thwart illegal distribution. In practice, DRM makes creates compatibility problems that make it excessively difficult, and in most cases, impossible, to listen to music that has been purchased online.
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