News Slashdot

2011-01-21 21:25:

Google Fires Back About Search Engine Spam

coondoggie writes "The folks at Google are taking issue over spam and the quality of Google searches, which some claim has gone down in recent months. Today on Google's official blog, Principal Engineer Matt Cutts said, 'January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.' Cutts also explained that the company has made a few significant changes to their method of indexing." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 20:43:

Foundation Drupal 7

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the better-known content management systems, Drupal is oftentimes criticized for having the steepest learning curve. Yet that would only be a valid charge as a result of Drupal's great power and flexibility — particularly in the hands of a knowledgeable Drupal developer. But how can the interested programmer begin gaining those skills, as quickly as possible? One approach is to read and work through the examples of an introductory book, such as Foundation Drupal 7, written by Robert J. Townsend (except for a chapter contributed by Stephanie Pakrul)." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 20:01:

Woman's Voice Restored After Larynx Transplant

mvar writes "A woman in the US is able to speak for the first time in 11 years after a pioneering voicebox transplant. Brenda Jensen said the operation, which took place in California, was a miracle which had restored her life. Thirteen days after the surgery she said her first words: 'Good morning, I want to go home.' It is the first time a larynx and windpipe have been transplanted at the same time (image) and only the second time a larynx has ever been transplanted. In October, surgeons at the University of California Davis Medical Center removed the larynx, thyroid gland and 6cm of the trachea from a donor body. In an 18-hour operation, this was transplanted into Ms. Jensen's throat and the team connected it to her blood supply and nerves. Thirteen days later, she was able to speak her first croaky words and is now able to talk easily for long periods of time." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 19:17:

RIAA Threatens ICANN Over Music-Themed gTLD Standards

think_nix writes "A letter to ICANN (PDF) from Victoria Sheckler, Deputy General Counsel for the RIAA, demands modifications to the future implementation of the .music gTLD, threatening to 'escalate the issue' if certain concerns about 'wide scale copyright and trademark infringement' are not addressed by ICANN in compliance with the RIAA. 'Under the current proposed standard, we fear that we will have no realistic ability to object if a pirate chooses to hijack a music themed gTLD to enable wide scale copyright infringement of our works,' Sheckler said." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 19:06:

Experiment Shows Not Washing Jeans for 15 Months is Disgusting But Safe

dbune writes "Young people who argue with their parents over wearing the same pair of smelly jeans can now cite the work of a 20-year old University of Alberta student who wore the same Jeans for 15 months straight. From the article: 'Josh Le wore the same pair of jeans to break in the raw denim, so it would wrap the contours of his body, leaving distinct wear lines. He had his textile professor test the jeans for bacteria before washing them for the first time. The results showed high counts of five different kinds of bacteria, but nothing in the range of being considered a health hazard." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 18:34:

Sony Planning Serial Keys For PS3 Games?

Stoobalou writes "Rumor has it that Sony is looking to the PC games market to help solve its growing piracy problem on the PlayStation 3 — with the introduction of serial keys to its games. According to 'a very reliable source' quoted by PS3-Sense, Sony is attempting to address the recent revelation that it failed to properly secure the private signing key for its flagship console — leading to clever tinkerers producing third-party firmware that allows unofficial software and illegitimately downloaded games to run on unmodified hardware — by looking to the PC retail market for solutions. Unlike the PS3, the PC doesn't have a hardware DRM system built in to it — despite attempts by groups like the Trusted Computing Group, formerly the Trusted Computer Platform Alliance, to introduce such a thing — relying instead on software-based DRM and a surprisingly old-fashioned guarantee of a game's uniqueness: a serial key." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 17:50:

Does Google Pin Copyright Violations On the ASF?

An anonymous reader writes "Florian Mueller claims to have produced new evidence that he believes supports Oracle's case against Google on the copyright side of the lawsuit. Oracle originally presented one example to the court, and that file was found to have been part of older Android distributions, with an Apache license header. Mueller has just published six more files of that kind and believes the Apache Software Foundation will disown those just like the first one because those were never part of the Apache Harmony code base. Furthermore, various source files from the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit were found in the Android codebase, containing a total of 38 copyright notices that mark them as proprietary and confidential, but Google apparently published their source code regardless." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 17:09:

J.J. Abrams Promises 'Fringe' Will Die Fighting

An anonymous reader writes "Fringe creator J.J. Abrams has said of the show's much-maligned move to Friday nights, 'Fringe deserves to live beyond season 3. If we're going to fail, let's go down doing the most bad ***, weirdest, interesting, sophisticated version of a series that we could possibly do.' Previous announcements about the move were more defensive, claiming that Fringe's shift to Fridays was an attempt to draw younger viewers back to the 'dead zone' of Friday nights. But season three has been confused enough in tone and approach that it's no surprise to hear yet another contradictory statement about its future..." Good episodes of Fringe have been great TV. I've really enjoyed the first half of the season and am looking forward to seeing what they do with it. A lot of mediocre SciFi has been shut down recently (Caprica? SGU?) and a lot of bad SciFi continues (V?) but Fringe flirts with greatness with regularity. I hope it makes it... even though on Friday it's not likely. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 15:54:

Duke Nukem Forever Release Date Revealed

stupid_is writes with news that Duke Nukem Forever has now gotten a firm US release date: May 3rd. It will release worldwide three days later. The game was resurrected last fall by Gearbox Software and 2K Games after 3D Realms' 12-year attempt at development came to an end in 2009 when the company closed its doors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 15:35:

Daniel Ellsberg On WikiLeaks, Google and Facebook

angry tapir writes "The Silicon Valley companies that store our personal data have a growing responsibility to protect it from government snooping, according to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Discussing the growing role of Internet companies in the public sphere, Ellsberg said companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter need to take a stand and push back on excessive requests for personal data." Ellsberg spoke as part of a panel at an event from the Churchill Club, which included Clay Shirky, Jonathan Zittrain and others discussing the WikiLeaks situation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 14:53:

Verizon Sues FCC Over Net Neutrality Rules

The Washington Post reports that Verizon has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission over the net neutrality rules they adopted last month. Quoting: "Verizon argues that the FCC does not have the legal authority to mandate how Internet service providers treat content on their networks. A legal challenge was widely expected, and the FCC has said it thinks Congress enabled the agency to pursue its rules under several interpretations of telecommunications laws. The FCC's rules are supported by consumer groups and Web giants such as Google and Facebook. Verizon filed its case in the same federal court — the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — that ruled last April that the FCC overstepped its authority in trying to sanction Comcast for blocking Web traffic. 'We are deeply concerned by the FCC's assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself,' said Michael E. Glover, Verizon's senior vice president and deputy general counsel. 'We believe this assertion of authority goes well beyond any authority provided by Congress, and creates uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 14:10:

Electronics In Flight — Danger Or Distraction?

another similar writes "IEEE Spectrum has a blog post revisiting the debate on whether electronic devices pose a risk to flight avionics spurred by a NY Post article about Arianna Huffington's refusal to power down her Blackberry during takeoff. The post points out the EU's removal of their own ban on cell phone use in 2007 and the likelihood of significant non-compliance daily in the US — and curiously, planes haven't been falling from the sky at a similar rate. While the potential exists for there to be a problem, it would appear the risk is low. Ever bent the rules? Is an app for landing commercial jets somewhere in our future?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 12:17:

PC Gaming Alliance's New President Talks DRM, System Requirements

arcticstoat writes "It's been nearly three years since the PC Gaming Alliance announced its formation at GDC 2008, promising to 'advance the PC as a worldwide gaming platform.' Since then, Activision-Blizzard has publicly left the alliance, Sony DADC – developer of the controversial SecuROM DRM software – has signed up and some people are wondering if the PCGA is really acting in the best interests of PC gamers. However, in December 2010 the alliance appointed a new president — Intel's Matt Ployhar — who's promising to make some changes. In this in-depth interview, Ployhar reveals that he wants to tempt Activision Blizzard back to the alliance, saying that 'Activision's Kotick and Blizzard's Morhaime may be more aligned with our future objectives than they may realize.' He also discusses Sony DADC's role in the alliance, and the group's stance on DRM, explaining that its research can 'really help to influence Sony DADC's and other members' awareness of key trends taking place in the PC gaming ecosystem. Given the trend of retail's diminishing presence, free-to-play, games moving towards authentication, game streaming and so on, it's really hard to divine where DRM solutions fit into this equation in the future.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 11:09:

UK ID Card Scheme Data Deleted For £400K

DaveNJ1987 writes "It will cost the British government only £400,000 to destroy the data for its failed ID card initiative. The data compiled by the National Identity Register, which was scrapped last year by the coalition government, will be disposed of for the relatively small sum — in government figures — Home Office minister Damian Green confirmed." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 09:26:

Blizzard Won't Stop World of StarCraft Mod

On Wednesday we discussed news of an impressive-looking mod for StarCraft II that transformed the game into a WoW lookalike, which quickly drew a copyright infringement warning from Activision Blizzard. The company has now released an official statement green-lighting the mod for continued development. "'It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor,' Blizzard said in a statement. 'As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we've done with our strategy games in the past.' Blizzard went on the say that it's looking forward to seeing development of the mod continue, and that it has invited Winzen to the company's campus to meet the game's development team." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 08:11:

New Red Dwarf Series Threatened By the Twitter Era

An anonymous reader writes "The announcement that the new series of Red Dwarf is likely to be shot in front of a studio audience, which hasn't happened for the show since 1998, has made one of the show's actors wary of the practicality of it. Commenting on his blog, Robert Llewellyn, who plays servile robot Kryten in the hit British SF comedy show notes: 'The fear among the producers now is that it's impossible to imagine an audience of around 400 people at the recording of a TV show like Red Dwarf, where nobody does a bit of a hint on Twitter, or sneaks a picture on Facebook or posts a bit of badly shot video on YouTube.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 06:53:

FSF Announces Support For WebM

An anonymous reader writes "The Free Software Foundation has signed up as a supporter of the WebM Project. They write, 'Last week, Google announced that it plans to remove support for the H.264 video codec from its browsers, in favor of the WebM codec that they recently made free. Since then, there's been a lot of discussion about how this change will affect the Web going forward, as HTML5 standards like the video tag mature. We applaud Google for this change; it's a positive step for free software, its users, and everyone who uses the Web.' The FSF's PlayOgg campaign will be revamped to become PlayFreedom." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 05:18:

Australian Government Denies Microsoft Bias IN OOXML Choice

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the Australian Government is not taking criticism of its decision to mandate Microsoft's Office Open XML standard lying down. 'The policy is vendor-neutral which allows its principles and standards to be used across any platform,' they said this week. Yup ... except for the fact that almost no other office suite apart from Microsoft Office supports writing to the standard. And as for Firefox? Turns out 96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer. Looks like bureaucracy is winning here." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 05:18:

Australian Government Denies Microsoft Bias In OOXML Choice

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the Australian Government is not taking criticism of its decision to mandate Microsoft's Office Open XML standard lying down. 'The policy is vendor-neutral which allows its principles and standards to be used across any platform,' they said this week. Yup ... except for the fact that almost no other office suite apart from Microsoft Office supports writing to the standard. And as for Firefox? Turns out 96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer. Looks like bureaucracy is winning here." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 02:23:

Underwater Nuclear Power Plant Proposed In France

nicomede writes "The French state-owned DCNS (French military shipyard) announced today a concept study for an underwater nuclear reactor dedicated to power coastal communities in remote places. It is derived from nuclear submarine power plants, and its generator would be able to produce between 50 MWe and 250MWe. Such a plant would be fabricated and maintained in France, and dispatched for the different customers, thus reducing the risk for proliferation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 01:35:

Espionage In Icelandic Parliament

bumburumbi writes "An unauthorised computer, apparently running encrypted software, was found hidden inside an unoccupied office in the Icelandic Parliament, Althingi, connected to the internal network. According to the Reykjavik Grapevine article, serial numbers had been removed and no fingerprints were found. The office had been used by substitute MPs from the Independence Party and The Movement, the Parliamentary group of Birgitta Jonsdottir, whose Twiiter account was recently subpoenaed by US authorities. The Icelandic daily Morgunbladid, under the editorship of Mr David Oddsson, former Prime Minister and Central Bank chief, has suggested that this might be an operation run by Wikileaks. The reporter for the Reykjavik Grapevine, Mr Paul Nikolov is a former substitute MP, having taken seat in Parliament in 2007 and 2008." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-21 00:36:

NASA Seeks Ham Operators' Help To Test NanoSail-D

SEWilco writes "Despite our older headline, NanoSail-D was not 'ost in space'. It was stuck in its canister. The solar sail nano satellite finally ejected on Wednesday. The three-day countdown to sail deployment began then, so we'll have to see what happens next." And clm1970 adds "In another conventional use for an arguably unconventional hobby given the technology of 2011, NASA is requesting the help of Amateur Radio or 'ham operators' to help listen to a beacon signal of the nano-satellite. Many say the hobby is dying but for every 'death knell,' it seems another application brings it back to life to prove its usefulness." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 23:45:

Eric Schmidt Out, Larry Page In As Google CEO

jfruhlinger writes "Google surprised just about everybody at its earnings call by announcing that Eric Schmidt, who had served as company CEO for more than a decade, would be stepping down and that cofounder Larry Page would take over. Schmidt will stay on as chairman and provide 'technology thought leadership,' whatever that is. When Schmidt, an old Sun hand, joined Google in 2001, it was seen as a move to turn the scrappy upstart into a mature company; now on his Twitter feed Schmidt proclaims that his 'adult supervision' is no longer needed." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 22:47:

How Do You Store Your Personal Photos?

mxhf writes "I just came back from a four-week vacation to Mexico. This is the country for Aztecs and Maya Ruins and we visited plenty of them. Needless to say we took thousands of pictures with two cameras. Having arrived back home I realize that my hard-disk does not have enough space left to hold the additional 16GB that I collected on the other side of the globe. Now, my hard disk already is 250GB. I work exclusively on a laptop and do not want to change this. I know that there larger disks today. But I figured that the time has come to finally move my image collection from my laptop to somewhere else. But where should I go? So, how do you store your photo collections? And how do you keep backups?. These are obviously images that I want to keep for my life. So the need to survive fires, burglaries, etc. I think the amount of data I have rules online storage out. Should I just get two USB disks and leave one at a reasonably save location? I think this must be a common problem today? And yes — before you ask — I do know that the first thing to do is to go through your collection and dump what is not worthwhile keeping." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 21:58:

Facebook Images To Get Expiration Date

Pickens writes "BBC reports that researchers have created software that gives images an expiration date by tagging them with an encrypted key so that once this date has passed the key stops the images being viewed and copied. Professor Michael Backes, who led development of the X-Pire system, says development work began about 18 months ago as potentially risky patterns of activity on social networks, such as Facebook, showed a pressing need for such a system. 'More and more people are publishing private data to the internet and it's clear that some things can go wrong if it stays there too long,' says Backes. The X-Pire software creates encrypted copies of images and asks those uploading them to give each one an expiration date. Viewing these images requires the free X-Pire browser add-on. When the viewer encounters an encrypted image it sends off a request for a key to unlock it. This key will only be sent, and the image become viewable, if the expiration date has not been passed." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 21:11:

No More Version Numbers For HTML

An anonymous reader writes "HTML5 will be the last version of HTML that carries a version number. Ian Hickson, a Google engineer and editor of the HTML5 standard announced that the language will be transitioned to a 'living standard' without version numbers. A bit like like Chrome, if you will." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 20:20:

Michigan Governor Wants 'Open Source' Economic Model

An anonymous reader writes "Incoming Michigan governor Rick Synder spoke in Kalamazoo, MI today and says he wants to use an 'open-source economic development model' to help repair the battered down state. Perhaps during his time as president of Gateway he saw a benefit to the open source model, but can it really be successfully applied as an economic model?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 19:41:

"Farming" Amoebas Discovered

Researchers from Rice University have found a type of amoeba that practices a sort of "primitive farming behavior." When their bacteria food become scarce, the Dictyostelium discoideum will group together and form a "fruiting body" that will disperse bacteria spores to a new area. From the article: "The behavior falls short of the kind of 'farming' that more advanced animals do; ants, for example, nurture a single fungus species that no longer exists in the wild. But the idea that an amoeba that spends much of its life as a single-celled organism could hold short of consuming a food supply before decamping is an astonishing one. More than just a snack for the journey of dispersal, the idea is that the bacteria that travel with the spores can 'seed' a new bacterial colony, and thus a food source in case the new locale should be lacking in bacteria." It's good to know that even a single celled creature is not immune to the pull of Farmville. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 19:36:

Carbon Trading Halted After EU Exchange Is Hacked

chicksdaddy writes "The European Commission (EC) suspended trading in carbon credits on Wednesday after unknown hackers compromised the accounts of Czech traders and siphoned off around $38 million, Threatpost reports. EU countries including Estonia, Austria, The Czech Republic, Poland and France began closing their carbon trading registries yesterday after learning that carbon allowances had been siphoned from the account of the Czech based register. A notice posted on the Web site of the Czech based registry said that it was 'not accessible for technical reasons' on Thursday and the EC issued an order to cease spot trading until January 26 so that it can sort out what appears to be chronic security lapses within the system." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 18:57:

Exoplanet Candidates Revealed

An anonymous reader writes "Last summer, NASA announced that the Kepler space telescope had identified more than 700 exoplanet 'candidates' from the first few months of observations in 2009. Only 312 of the candidates were initially made public, while 400 others (click the green search button) were sequestered until February 2011. The team is soon expected to announce that a large number of these candidates have been confirmed as exoplanets. A non-profit organization in Boulder, Colorado supports scientific research on the Kepler data through $10 adopt-a-star donations. The price is $100 for confirmed exoplanets, so hurry while these 700+ stars are still 'candidates'!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 17:35:

Polynomial Time Code For 3-SAT Released, P==NP

An anonymous reader writes "Vladimir Romanov has released what he claims is a polynomial-time algorithm for solving 3-SAT. Because 3-SAT is NP-complete, this would imply that P==NP. While there's still good reason to be skeptical that this is, in fact, true, he's made source code available and appears decidedly more serious than most of the people attempting to prove that P==NP or P!=NP. Even though this is probably wrong, just based on the sheer number of prior failures, it seems more likely to lead to new discoveries than most. Note that there are already algorithms to solve 3-SAT, including one that runs in time (4/3)^n and succeeds with high probability. Incidentally, this wouldn't necessarily imply that encryption is worthless: it may still be too slow to be practical." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 16:54:

Soundminder Android Trojan Hears Credit Cards

Blacklaw writes "A team of security researchers has created a proof-of-concept Trojan for Android handsets that is capable of listening out for credit card numbers — typed or spoken — and relaying them back to the application's creator.Once installed, Soundminder sits in the background and waits for a call to be placed — hence the access to the 'Phone calls' category. When triggered by a call, the application listens out for the user entering credit card information or a PIN and silently records the information, performing the necessary analysis to turn it from a sound recording into a number." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 16:11:

Cybercriminals Shifting Focus To Non-Windows OSes

Orome1 writes "In a major cybercrime turning point, scammers have begun shifting their focus away from Windows-based PCs to other operating systems and platforms, including smart phones, tablet computers, and mobile platforms in general, according to the a new Cisco report. The report also finds that 2010 was the first year in the history of the Internet that spam volume decreased, that cybercriminals are investing heavily in "money muling," and that users continue to fall prey to myriad forms of trust exploitation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 15:30:

Are Google's Patents Too Weak To Protect Android?

An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian published an opinion piece written by former-NoSoftwarePatents-activist-turned-controversial-patent-blogger Florian Mueller. He lists 12 patent lawsuits instigated against Android last year, says there are many more to come, and believes that Google's portfolio of only 576 U.S. patents is dwarved by those of Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and others. So Google can't retaliate against aggressors such as Oracle. Consequently — he argues — Android makers will have to remove functionality or pay high license fees, and the operating system will become unprofitable for handset makers. Even the app ecosystem could suffer, he says. Since Google received only 282 new U.S. patents in 2010, the gap between Google's portfolio and those of its competitors is widening further: Apple produces about twice as many, and Microsoft gets more than 3,000 new ones a year. Let's discuss this: is Android really in for so much trouble? Can't Google find other ways (than owning many patents) to defend it than countersuing? How about its vast financial resources?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 14:48:

Microsoft Explains Windows Phone 7 'Phantom Data'

Fuzzy Eric writes "Microsoft has confirmed that some handsets running its Windows Phone 7 software are sending and receiving "phantom data". The problem surfaced in early January with some owners of phones running Windows Phone 7, claiming that their phone was sending "between 30 and 50MB of data" every day; an amount that would eat into a 1GB allowance in 20 days. Microsoft said its investigation found that most problems were caused by a unnamed "third party" service. It said that the problem seemed to only affect "a small (low single-digit) percentage of Windows Phone customers"." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 14:05:

Starbucks Gets Mobile Payment System

Ron writes "Starbucks has started accepting mobile payments. Customers can now use the Starbucks Card Mobile app on their iPhone, iPod touch, or BlackBerry at nearly 6,800 company-operated Starbucks stores in the US plus more than 1,000 outlets inside Target stores. To pay with their phone, app users simply select 'touch to pay' and hold up the barcode on the screen to the 2D scanner at the register. The app also lets users manage Starbucks accounts and find nearby stores. To start using your device as tender, you can download the app now for iOS and BlackBerry. An Android application is also said to be in the works, but the company has not yet given a release date, and there's no word yet on plans for a Windows Phone version." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 12:47:

Wikipedia and the History of Gaming

Wired is running a story about Wikipedia's tremendous contribution to documenting the history of video games, and why it shouldn't necessarily be relied upon. Quoting: "Wikipedia requires reliable, third-party sources for content to stick, and most of the sites that covered MUDs throughout the ’80s were user-generated, heavily specialized or buried deep within forums, user groups and newsletters. Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd. ... while cataloging gaming history is a vitally important move for this culture or art form, and Wikipedia makes a very valiant contribution, the site can’t be held accountable as the singular destination for gaming archeology. But as it’s often treated as one, due care must be paid to the site to ensure that its recollection doesn’t become clouded or irresponsible, and to ensure its coalition of editors and administrators are not using its stringent rule set to sweep anything as vitally relevant as MUDS under the rug of history." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 11:35:

Road Train Completes First Trials In Sweden

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports technology that links vehicles into 'road trains' that can travel as a semi-autonomous convoy has undergone its first real world tests with trials held on Volvo's test track in Sweden. Researchers believe platoons of cars could be traveling on Europe's roads within a decade cutting fuel use, boosting safety and may even reducing congestion. SARTRE researchers say that around 80% of accidents on the road are due to human error so using professional lead drivers to take the strain on long journeys could, they say, see road accidents fall. They also predict fuel efficiency could improve by as much as 20% if 'vehicle platooning' takes off, with obvious benefits for the environment. 'An automated system is likely to make it safer as it takes away driver error but it would have to be 100% reliable,' says John Franklin 'This kind of system would also require a complete change in motoring culture for drivers to hand over control.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 09:17:

Catholic Bishops Support Net Neutrality

An anonymous reader writes "This week, in their annual 'State of the Union' address, the President of the US Catholic Bishops Conference spoke on a number of issues, in particular a surprisingly strong statement in favor on Net Neutrality. 'As the Internet continues to grow in its influence and prominence in Americans' lives, we support legislation and federal regulations that ensure equal access to the Internet for all, including religious and non-profit agencies, as well as those in more sparsely populated or economically distressed areas. True net neutrality is necessary for people to flourish in a democratic society,' said Archbishop Timothy Dolan. It's always interesting to see the Catholic Church joining in a crusade that means so much to so many Slashdotters!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 07:54:

Nintendo 3DS Launching On March 27 For $250

Sam writes "Nintendo executive Reggie Fil-Amie today revealed US availability and pricing for the Nintendo 3DS at an event in the Nintendo World store in New York City. The 3DS will launch on March 27, 2011 with a retail price of $250 and will be available in two flavors: Aqua Blue and Cosmo Black. There will be roughly 30 games released between the launch day and E3 2011 (June 7 to June 9). These include Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, Madden NFL Football, The Sims 3, Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 3D, and LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars. The device will have the same form-factor as the DSi and will be backwards compatible with both DS and DSi games. Users will also be able to download games via an online store, called the eShop. In Europe, the 3DS will launch on March 25, 2011. While Europeans will get the device two days early, pricing is not good news. Nintendo held a second event in Amsterdam today and said that pricing would be left up to retailers. Retailers in the UK are reportedly planning a £229.99 ($367.64) price tag, while other European retailers are going with €249 ($336.00)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 06:47:

Hackers Respond To Help Wanted Ads With Malware

itwbennett writes "The FBI issued a warning Wednesday about a new twist on a long-running computer fraud technique, known as Automated Clearing House fraud. With ACH fraud, criminals install malware on a small business' computer and use it to log into the company's online bank account. In this latest twist on the scam, the criminals are apparently looking for companies that are hiring online and then sending malicious software programs that are doctored to look like job applications. One unnamed company recently lost $150,000 in this way, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. 'The malware was embedded in an e-mail response to a job posting the business placed on an employment website,' the FBI said in a press release. The malware, a variant of the Bredolab Trojan, 'allowed the attacker to obtain the online banking credentials of the person who was authorized to conduct financial transactions within the company.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 04:30:

The Companies Who Support Censoring the Internet

RichiH writes "From Techdirt: 'A group of companies sent a letter to to Attorney General Eric Holder and ICE boss John Morton (with cc's to VP Joe Biden, Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano, IP Czar Victoria Espinel, Rep. Lamar Smith, Rep. John Conyers, Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Charles Grassley), supporting the continued seizure of domain names they don't like, as well as the new COICA censorship bill, despite the serious Constitutional questions raised about how such seizures violate due process and free speech principles.' A full list of companies who you might want to avoid buying from is included, as well." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 02:37:

Motorola Sticks To Guns On Locking Down Android

jeffmeden writes "'These aren't the droids you're looking for' proclaims Motorola, maker of the popular Android smartphones such as the Droid 2 and Droid X. At least, not if you have any intention of loading a customized operating system. According to Motorola's own YouTube channel, 'If you want to do custom roms, then buy elsewhere, we'll continue with our strategy that is working thanks.' The strategy they are referring to is a feature Motorola pioneered called 'e-fuse', the ability for the phone's CPU to stop working if it detects unauthorized software running." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 01:18:

California Spam Law Upheld By Appeals Court

www.sorehands.com writes "In the first California appeals court ruling (pdf), in Hypertouch v. Valueclick, it is ruled that the I-CAN-SPAM Act does not preempt California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5 prohibits the use of falsified headers and subject lines that are likely to mislead recipients. Spammers have been claiming, and some courts have been ruling, that to survive preemption, a Plaintiff has to show all the elements of fraud (false representation, knowledge, reliance, and damage from the reliance.) The reliance and damage from the reliance is difficult as it would essentially require the recipient to buy the penis enlargement pills and show that they don't work, or to send the money to the Nigerian prince. An ISP could never show reliance and harm, as they are not the recipient and would not be responding to e-mails traversing their systems. The ruling also made it clear that the advertiser is responsible for the acts of their agents, even if their agents promise not to spam." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-20 00:39:

DSL Installation Fail

An anonymous reader writes "Here's an example of fine Qwest workmanship. In our business park, they just installed a DSL connection for our neighbors, for which we share an exterior utility space. They left: a DSL modem stuffed in a cardboard box, wrapped in a Wal-Mart bag, sitting outside in what will be below-zero (F) temps, on top of a bank of ten natural gas meters in some of the driest air of the year. They also left it plugged into an exposed exterior power outlet above a snowbank, with network cables running around the building, through snowbanks, coupled and protected by zip-lock baggies, and into our neighbors office. Not to mention the hack-job of patching the phone cable directly into the demarcation box. And if you're wondering — I was told upon calling them that this is not their problem, and I need to contact my primary phone service provider." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 23:54:

Canadian Firm Plans 78-Satellite Net Service

matty619 writes "A CNET article is reporting on another try at low earth orbit satellites for internet access, reminiscent of Teledesic, an ill fated $9Billion Bill Gates/Paul Alen et al venture originally consisting of 840 low earth orbit satellites (LEO-SAT). From the article: 'MSCI, which stands for Microsat Systems Canada Inc., is trying to be a bit of a maverick with its project, called CommStellation. The company said today that its approach of using small, inexpensive satellites in low orbit--about 620 miles above the Earth--means better coverage of the world's population, quicker launch, and better network capacity.' Each MSCI satellite has a data-transfer capacity of 12 gigabits per second. The expected lifespan of each is 10 years, and they can be sent back into the atmosphere at the end of their lives to avoid more orbital clutter." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 23:10:

Amazon, Rackspace Add New Cloud Capabilities

miller60 writes "Amazon Web Services has rolled out Elastic Beanstalk, a free feature which automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. AWS execs tell GigaOm that Beanstalk represents a move up to Platform-as-a-Service and is designed 'to address the idea of vendor lock-in and inflexibility that commonly afflicts other platforms for application development.' Meanwhile, Amazon rival Rackspace Hosting has extended its cloud platform to its European data centers, opening the service to customers bound by data protection regulations, and says it now has more than 100,000 cloud customers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 22:26:

US Supreme Court Says NASA Background Checks OK

coondoggie writes "In a long-running dispute about privacy and security, the US Supreme Court today sided with NASA saying its background checks were not invasive and that the information required for not only NASA but most government positions was a reasonable security precaution and that sufficient privacy safeguards existed to prevent any improper disclosures. You may recall that in this case, 28 scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory filed suit against the US government and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2007 saying that NASA's invasive background investigations as required by government regulations." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 21:42:

World of StarCraft Mod Gets C&D From Blizzard

eldavojohn writes "If you've been following the team who created World of StarCraft (an amazing mod of StarCraft II to be more like World of Warcraft), their YouTube video of what they've done so far has already resulted in a cease and desist from Activision/Blizzard. Evidently when you are given tools to make custom mods to games you should be careful about making something too good. The author of the mod is hopeful that it's just a trademark problem with the name of his mod, but few reasons for the C&D were given." In other StarCraft news, reader glwtta recommends an article about how a Berkeley team won the world's first StarCraft AI competition with code that can beat even pro-level human players. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 20:55:

Pro Silverlight 4 In VB

jddp writes "MacDonald is a programmer's programmer, and Pro Silverlight 4 in VB is a model of what a programmer's guide should be. He explains a mass of technical information in considerable detail without losing the big-picture. His clear and concise exposition of concepts and functionality is never confusing or needlessly repetitive. The book's organization is logical, yet the chapters can be read in isolation, as the need or interest arises." Keep reading for the rest of jddp's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 20:12:

Mail Service Costs Netflix 20x More Than Streaming

Jake writes "Netflix currently pays up to $1 per DVD mailed round trip, and the company mails about 2 million DVDs per day. By comparison, the company pays 5 cents to stream the same movie. In other words, the company pays 20 times more in postage per movie than it does in bandwidth. Doing some simple math, Netflix is spending some $700 million per year in physical disk postage. Rising content prices are offset by declining postage fees for the company, as more and more users choose the streaming-only option. Furthermore, subscriber revenues will continue to increase as Netflix increases the size of its streaming library." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 19:33:

The iPad Will Get Playboy In March

Stoobalou writes "Playboy boss Hugh Hefner has confirmed that — despite Steve Jobs' protestations that Apple is pure and Android is for porn — an app for browsing uncensored back issues of Playboy is to launch later this year on the iPad. The news, which is likely to generate significantly more buzz for Apple's popular tablet as a publishing device than Rupert Murdoch's delayed digital newspaper The Daily, comes courtesy of Hefner's Twitter stream, in which he proclaimed: 'Big news! Playboy — both old & new — will be available on [the] iPad beginning in March.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 18:51:

New Sunlight Reactor Produces Fuel

eldavojohn writes "A new reactor developed by CalTech shows promise for producing renewable fuel from sunlight. The reactor hinges on a metal oxide named Ceria that has very interesting properties at very high temperatures. It exhales oxygen at very high temperatures and inhales oxygen at very low temperatures. From the article, 'Specifically, the inhaled oxygen is stripped off of carbon dioxide (CO2) and/or water (H2O) gas molecules that are pumped into the reactor, producing carbon monoxide (CO) and/or hydrogen gas (H2). H2 can be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells; CO, combined with H2, can be used to create synthetic gas, or "syngas," which is the precursor to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Adding other catalysts to the gas mixture, meanwhile, produces methane. And once the ceria is oxygenated to full capacity, it can be heated back up again, and the cycle can begin anew.' The only other piece of the puzzle is a large sunlight concentrator to raise the temperature to the necessary 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The team is working on modifying and refining the reactor to require a lower temperature to achieve the two-step thermochemical cycle. Another issue is the heat loss which the team claims could be reduced to improve efficiency to 15% or higher. Since CO2 is an input, the possibility exists for coal and power plants to collect CO2 emissions to be used in this process which would effectively allow us to "use the carbon twice." Another idea listed is that a "zero CO2 emissions" is developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.' The team's work was published last month in Science." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 18:11:

Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users

alphadogg writes "Yahoo is forging ahead with a move to IPv6 on its main Web site by year-end despite worries that up to 1 million Internet users may be unable to access it initially. Yahoo's massive engineering effort to support IPv6 — the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol — could at first shut out potential www.yahoo.com users due to what the company and others call "IPv6 brokenness.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 17:32:

Open Source More Expensive Says MS Report

doperative writes "Much conventional wisdom about programs written by volunteers is wrong. The authors took money for research from Microsoft, long the arch- enemy of the open-source movement— although they assure readers that the funds came with no strings attached) Free programs are not always cheaper. To be sure, the upfront cost of proprietary software is higher (although open-source programs are not always free). But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 16:48:

PC Virus Turns 25

Batblue writes "Happy anniversary Basit and Amjad! Twenty-five years ago this month (CT: Warning, intrusive interstitial ad), the Alvi brothers of Lahore, Pakistan, gave the world the Brain Virus, the first bit of malware capable of infecting a DOS-based PC. Back in those relatively innocent times, the brothers actually embedded their real names and business address in the code and later told Time magazine they had written the virus to protect their medical software from piracy. Who knows what they were really thinking, but by all accounts the Brain Virus was relatively harmless. Twenty-five years later, most malware is anything but benign and cyber criminals pull off exploits the Alvi brothers never envisioned." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 16:05:

Criminal Charges Filed Against AT&T iPad Attacker

Batblue writes "The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will file criminal charges against the alleged attackers who copied personal information from the AT&T network of approximately 120,000 iPad users, the U.S. Attorney's Office, District of New Jersey announced Monday. Daniel Spitler will be charged in U.S. District Court in New Jersey with one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization and one count of fraud. Andrew Auernheimer will be charged with the same counts at the U.S. Western District Court of Arkansas, which is in Fayetteville. Auernheimer made headlines last June when he discovered that AT&T's website was disclosing the e-mail addresses and the unique ICC-ID numbers of multiple iPad owners. Claiming that he wanted to help AT&T improve its security, he wrote a computer script to extract the data from AT&T and then went public with the information. AT&T said that nobody from Auernheimer's hacking group contacted them about the flaw." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 15:20:

Google Releases Software To Iran

eldavojohn writes "After working closely with US officials following the lifting of export restrictions, Google has announced that their Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome are now available for download in Iran. US sanctions once prevented this but now Google has created versions of its popular software that block all Iranian government IP addresses from utilizing them — thus satisfying the new restrictions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 14:40:

Firefox 4, A Huge Pile of Bugs

surveyork writes "Firefox 4.0 beta 9 (AKA "a huge pile of awesome") was released on January 14, 2011. Firefox 4's release schedule includes a beta 10 and a release candidate before the final launch in late February. However, one wonders if this schedule won't slip again, since there are still more than 100 "hardblocker" bugs, more than 60 bugs affecting Panorama alone and 10 bugs affecting the just-introduced Tabs-on-Titlebar. Some long-standing bugs wont' be fixed in time for Firefox 4 final either (example, example). Many startup bugs are currently pending, although Firefox 4 starts much faster than Firefox 3.6. As a side note, it's unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test, despite this being a very popular demand amongst Firefox enthusiasts. Perhaps we'll have to wait until Firefox 4.1 to have this "huge pile of bugs" (mostly) fixed." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 14:03:

Sony, Universal Hope To Beat Piracy With 'Instant Pop'

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that Britain's two biggest record labels, Sony and Universal, plan to beat music piracy by making new singles available for sale on the day they first hit the airwaves hoping the effort will encourage young people to buy songs they can listen to immediately rather than copying from radio broadcasts online. Songs used to receive up to six weeks radio airplay before they were released for sale, a practice known as 'setting up' a record. 'What we were finding under the old system was the searches for songs on Google or iTunes were peaking two weeks before they actually became available to buy, meaning that the public was bored of — or had already pirated — new singles,' says David Joseph. Sony, which will start the 'on air, on sale' policy simultaneously with Universal next month, agreed that the old approach was no longer relevant in an age where, according to a spokesman for the music major, 'people want instant gratification.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 12:23:

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Announced

An anonymous reader writes "Square-Enix has announced Final Fantasy XIII-2 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. According to Gamespot, 'The newly christened Final Fantasy XIII-2 continues the adventures of Lightning and her team of RPG vagabonds in a brand new adventure, utilizing the long-in-development engine (and, probably, some of the art assets) that powered the original game. And because Square doesn't have to spend all of that extra time developing the engine, players won’t have to wait nearly as long to get their hands on this newest iteration of the game. According to Square Enix, Final Fantasy XIII-2 (which, in case you haven't guessed, is a game title that is just as terrible to type out as it is to say with your mouth) is on track for release in Japan this year. [The game] should be available in English-speaking territories by "next winter."'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 11:06:

UK To Offer PCs For £98, Subsidized Internet Connections

Sam writes "The UK government wants to offer low-cost computers as part of a 12-month trial during Race Online 2012. The scheme, which aims to reach out to the 9.2 million adults that are not yet online, 4 million of whom are considered socially and economically disadvantaged, aims to 'make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web.' Prices will start at £98 ($156.01) for a refurbished PC, with subsidized Internet connections available for as little as £9 ($14.33) a month or £18 ($28.65) for three months. The cheap computers will run open-source software (think Linux) and will include a flat-screen monitor, keyboard, mouse, dedicated telephone helpline, delivery, and even a warranty. The cheap Internet packages will use a mobile dongle to help people access the web." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 08:03:

Sharks Seen Swimming Down Australian Streets

As if the flood waters weren't bad enough for the people of Queensland, it now appears that there are sharks swimming in the streets. Two bull sharks were spotted swimming past a McDonald’s in the city of Goodna, Butcher Steve Bateman saw another making its way past his shop on Williams street. Ipswich councillor for the Goodna region Paul Tully said: "It would have swam several kilometres in from the river, across Evan Marginson Park and the motorway. It’s definitely a first for Goodna, to have a shark in the main street." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 08:00:

Global Observer's First Hydrogen-Powered Flight

cylonlover writes "Following on from a successful maiden flight under battery power in 2010, AeroVironment's high altitude, long endurance (HALE) Global Observer unmanned aircraft has now taken to the skies using hydrogen-fueled propulsion. The aircraft reached an altitude of 5,000 feet during the four hour flight on January 11 at Edwards Air Force Base (EAFB) in California. Both the endurance and the altitude of the system will be expanded in further test flights in order to achieve the planned operational altitude of 55,000 to 65,000 feet." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 05:11:

Australia Mandates Microsoft's Office Open XML

littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 02:20:

Encrypt Your Smartphone — Or Else

pin0chet writes "Modern smartphones contain ever-increasing volumes of our private personal data — from text messages to images to emails — yet many smartphone security features can easily be circumvented by thieves or police officers equipped with off-the-shelf forensics equipment. Worse, thanks to a recent California Supreme Court ruling, police officers may be able to search your smartphone for hours without a warrant if you're arrested for any reason. Ars Technica has an article exploring the legal issues surrounding cell phone searches and explaining how you can safeguard your smartphone from the prying eyes of law enforcement officers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 01:34:

Comcast-NBC Merger Approved By FCC

AndyAndyAndyAndy writes "It seems that the FCC has approved the proposed merger between Comcast and NBC, effectively kicking apart hopes for protection against 'pipes and their water' frameworks. Pres. Obama's 2008 goal also goes ignored: 'I strongly favor diversity of ownership of outlets and protection against the excessive concentration of power in the hands of any one corporation, interest or small group.' The Dept. of Justice is also onboard, leaving little hope that this will be stopped." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 00:45:

Stuxnet Authors Made Key Errors

Trailrunner7 writes "There is a growing sentiment among security researchers that the programmers behind the Stuxnet attack may not have been the super-elite cadre of developers that they've been mythologized to be in the media. In fact, some experts say that Stuxnet could well have been far more effective and difficult to detect had the attackers not made a few elementary mistakes." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-19 00:03:

IT Management Always Blames the Worker Bees

An anonymous reader writes "A refreshing dose of sanity, It Management Fail: Always Blame the Worker Bees counters Security fail: When trusted IT people go bad, which advocates the usual reactive and punitive Big Brother measures for keeping those icky, untrustworthy IT staffers in line. Management really needs to look in the mirror when IT screws up." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 23:19:

Auto Incorrect

theodp writes "Combine smartphone auto correction and fat-fingered virtual keyboard typing, writes Rob Walker, and the results can be hilarious and even shocking. The website Damn You, Autocorrect collects the awesomely embarrassing text messages that you never meant to send. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to masturbate some chicken for bisexuals night!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 23:12:

World's First Full HDR Video System Unveiled

Zothecula writes "Anyone who regularly uses a video camera will know that the devices do not see the world the way we do. The human visual system can perceive a scene that contains both bright highlights and dark shadows, yet is able to process that information in such a way that it can simultaneously expose for both lighting extremes – up to a point, at least. Video cameras, however, have just one f-stop to work with at any one time, and so must make compromises. Now, however, researchers from the UK's University of Warwick claim to have the solution to such problems, in the form of the world's first full High Dynamic Range (HDR) video system." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 22:32:

Should Younger Developers Be Paid More?

jammag writes "A project manager describes facing an upset senior developer who learned that a new hire — a fresh college grad — would be making 30 percent more than him. The reason: the new grad knew a hot emerging technology that a client wanted. Yes, the senior coder was majorly pissed off. But with the constant upheaval in new technology, this situation is almost unavoidable — or is it? And at any rate, is it fair?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 21:37:

30% More Patents Issued in 2010

An anonymous reader writes "The numbers are in, and the US Patent Office granted 219,614 patents last year, which is 31% higher than in 2009 and 27% higher than any year in history. This wasn't just a marginal increase in patents being approved, but a major leap. US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and USPTO director David Kappos have both stated that one of their goals is to reduce the backlog in patent approvals, and it appears that the way they're doing so is by approving more patents, more quickly with less scrutiny — with a large percentage of them being software patents. This may decrease the backlog at the Patent Office, but seems likely to increase the backlog in the court system as lawsuits are filed over a bunch of these new patents." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 20:48:

Unsecured IP Cameras Accessible To Everyone

Orome1 writes "In the last couple of decades, we have become so accustomed to the idea that the public portion of our everyday life is watched and recorded — in stores, on the street, in institutions — that we often don't even notice the cameras anymore. Analog surveillance systems were difficult to hack into by people who lacked the adequate knowledge, but IP cameras — having their own IPs — can be quite easily physically located and their stream watched in real-time by anyone who has a modicum of computer knowledge and knows what to search for on Google." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 20:01:

Music Really Is Intoxicating, After All

jamie writes "Our reaction to the music that we love stimulates the flow of dopamine into certain sections of the brain, concludes a new study out of McGill University. The findings 'help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies,' the scientists note." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 19:15:

Bad Science Writer Talks About the Placebo Effect *NSFW*

The Guardian newspaper's Bad Science columnist Dr. Ben Goldacre does a stand-up routine about medicine, the placebo effect, and the mysteries of the human body at Nerdstock. From a scientific standpoint, I can't accurately say how funny it is because I was told it was great before I saw it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 18:31:

How Facebook Ships Code

Hugh Pickens writes "The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week "Boot Camp" training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. "All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to," writes yeegay. "It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in." What is interesting for a compnay this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 17:43:

Cosmological Constant Not Fine Tuned For Life

eldavojohn writes "A common argument one might encounter in intelligent design or the arduous process of resolving science with religion is that the physical constants of our world are fine tuned for life by some creator or designer. A University of Alberta theoretical physicist claims quite the opposite when it comes to the cosmological constant. His paper says that our ever expanding universe has a positive cosmological constant and he explains that the optimum cosmological constant for maximizing the chances of life in the universe would be slightly negative: 'any positive value of the constant would tend to decrease the fraction of matter that forms into galaxies, reducing the amount available for life. Therefore the measured value of the cosmological constant, which is positive, is evidence against the idea that the constants have been fine-tuned for life.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 16:54:

Fake Steve Jobs Says 'Leave the Real One Alone'

Stoobalou writes "Dan Lyons, who has been lampooning Apple's Steve Jobs for many years, has posted his last item as Fake Steve Jobs and signed off. Lyons, who has been impersonating the messianic Apple supremo in the notorious tech blog since 2006 and even managed to maintain his anonymity for quite some time, despite being a well-known tech hack, has parked his vitriolic pen for the last time." Most people expect FSJ to return if RSJ does. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 16:11:

Attack Toolkits Dominating the Threat Landscape

wiredmikey writes "The ease-of-use and ability to amass great profits through the use of easily accessible 'attack toolkits' are driving faster proliferation of cyber attacks and expanding the pool of attackers, opening the doors to more criminals who would likely otherwise lack the required technical expertise to success in the cybercrime underground. The relative simplicity and effectiveness of attack kits has contributed to their increased use in cybercrime — these kits are now being used in the majority of malicious Internet attacks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 15:33:

Facebook Suspends Personal Data-sharing Feature &#

Suki I writes "Facebook has 'temporarily disabled' a controversial feature that allowed developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users. The social network suspended the feature, introduced on Friday, after only three days. The decision follows feedback from users that the sharing of data process wasn't clearly explained and criticism from security firms that the feature was ripe for abuse." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 15:33:

Facebook Suspends Personal Data-Sharing Feature

Suki I writes "Facebook has 'temporarily disabled' a controversial feature that allowed developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users. The social network suspended the feature, introduced on Friday, after only three days. The decision follows feedback from users that the sharing of data process wasn't clearly explained and criticism from security firms that the feature was ripe for abuse." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 14:50:

Bill Gates Is More Admired Than the Pope

walterbyrd writes "Americans admire Bill Gates more than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and even Glenn Beck. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist was named the fifth most admired man of 2010, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 14:12:

The Fall of Wintel and the Rise of Armdroid

hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running a very interesting article on how this year's CES marked the end of the Wintel platform's dominance. Their argument is that tablets are going to disrupt the PC, and these tablets are predominantly going to be running on Google's Android powered by ARM processors — 'Armdroid.' Quoting: 'Both Microsoft and Intel have suffered from the same problem that most successful companies face when dealing with disruption. They cannot find a way to profitably invest in low-end offerings. Think about it from Microsoft's point of view: now that Windows 7 has been developed, to sell another copy, they don't have to do a single thing. Because of this, it becomes very hard for any executive to advocate the complete development of a low cost OS that will run on tablets: not only would it cost Microsoft a lot to develop, but it would result in cannibalization of its core product sales. Intel has the exact same issue. Why focus on Atom, or an even lower-end chip, when there is so much more margin to be made by focusing on its multi-core desktop processors?'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 11:08:

How Long Before Apps Overtake Physical Video Game Content Sales?

jamie writes "Horace Dediu crunches some numbers and comes to a startling conclusion: 'If you look at the red line above and its slope, it would indicate that, given time, the App store will overtake the entire physical media gaming industry. The time when that happens will depend a lot on the growth or decline of the physical game media business, but another four years seems a safe bet.' This follows on the heels of some earlier analysis of apps per iOS device and what that steady upward growth means." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 08:14:

How Europe Will Lower Emissions — Self Driving Cars

thecarchik writes "Scientists in Europe are working closely with industry and government as part of a new initiative called SARTRE (SAfe Road TRains for the Environment), which hopes to develop self-driving technology that will allow vehicles to drive autonomously in long road trains on the highway. The team behind SARTRE has now conducted its first real world test, using a sole Volvo S60 sedan that followed a lead truck around the automaker's test facility near Gothenburg, Sweden. In the video, the driver is free to take his eyes off the road and his hands off the wheel. In fact, he uses neither his hands nor feet during the test. Subsequent phases of the work will be carried out in 2011, and early 2012 will see the concept demonstrated on a five-vehicle road train with strategies handling interaction with other road users." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 06:06:

Righthaven Adds Forum Posters To Copyright Suit

eldavojohn writes "The last time we discussed the Las Vegas Review-Journal and their litigating attorneys at Righthaven LLC, they were suing all the websites that had violated their news copyrights. Well, they've now added seven individual message board posters that they've managed to identify, bringing the number of DMCA-related lawsuits they have launched since March to 203. In one case, LVRJ is upset that a Google Groups user named Jim_Higgins posted a column that cited the columnist but failed to cite the original LVRJ article. But Google Groups is protected from these suits, as the article explains: 'Both the madjacksports and Google sites are somewhat protected from copyright lawsuits because they have posted "DMCA" notices as required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These notices, which must be registered with the US Copyright Office, inform copyright holders who to contact if they would like infringing material removed.' The first decision of this cluster of lawsuits was against Righthaven, yet the onslaught continues. Righthaven has publicly dismissed fair use as well." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 04:03:

GE Venture Will Share Jet Technology With China

vbraga writes "This week, during the visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao to the United States, GE plans to sign a joint-venture agreement in commercial aviation that shows the tricky risk-and-reward calculations American corporations must increasingly make in their pursuit of lucrative markets in China. GE, in partnership with a state-owned Chinese company, will be sharing its most sophisticated airplane electronics (NYT reg. required, reg.-free alternative here), including some of the same technology used in Boeing's new state-of-the-art 787 Dreamliner." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 02:02:

Goldman Sachs Says No Facebook Shares For US Investors

theodp writes "In 2009, Robert Cringely speculated that the day might be coming when Goldman Sachs decides the United States isn't worth dealing with anymore. Crazy, eh? Maybe not. Blaming 'intense media attention,' Goldman Sachs has decided to exclude US investors from a $1.5 billion Facebook offering. In a nicely-timed all-investors-are-not-created-equal MLK Day statement, the US taxpayer bailout beneficiary said, 'Goldman Sachs decided to proceed only with the offer to investors outside the US....We regret the consequences of this decision, but Goldman Sachs believes this is the most prudent path to take.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 01:10:

The Prospects For Lunar Mining

MarkWhittington writes "With the discovery of vast amounts of water on the Moon, some frozen in the shadows of craters at the Lunar poles and some chemically bonded with the regolith, interest in lunar mining has arisen among commercial space entrepreneurs. Paul Spudis, a lunar geologist, has suggested a plan to return to the Moon, which features, among other things, robotic resource extraction and the deployment of space-based fuel depots using lunar water even before the first human explorers return to the lunar surface. But Mike Wall, writing in Space.com, suggests that there are a number of legal as well as technical issues involved in setting up lunar mining operations." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-18 00:19:

Crunch Time For WebOS, BlackBerry

GMGruman writes "Hewlett-Packard is planning to unveil its Palm WebOS strategy in a few weeks, while RIM is allegedly working up a new version of its popular Curve that uses the new BlackBerry OS 6 and its touch interface. WebOS has largely faded from view since HP bought it nine months ago, and RIM's been largely silent since its summer release of the BlackBerry Torch, its first successful modern BlackBerry, and the fall announcement of its PlayBook tablet. Meanwhile, it's been an Apple iOS and Google Android show at CES 2011, in the popular press, and in customers' hands. (Microsoft and Nokia essentially ceased to matter by Christmas 2010.) Is it too late for WebOS and BlackBerry? They're running out of time, and the public signs of their plans are not so positive. Still, the two 'also-ran' mobile OSes have a couple opportunities to resurrect themselves." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 23:25:

Angry Birds and Parabolic Instinct In Humans

Frankie70 writes "Matt Ridley writes about Angry Birds, an iPhone game (later ported to other platforms) which has sold more than 12 million copies. The spectacular trajectory of the game, from obscure Finnish iPhone app to global ubiquity — there are board games, maybe even movies in the works — is probably inexplicable. Ridley wonders if there is an evolutionary aspect to its allure. There is something much more satisfactory about an object tracing a parabolic ballistic trajectory through space towards its target than either following a straight line or propelling itself." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 22:36:

ARM Powered OLPC XO-1.75 Laptop Is Faster Than X86

Charbax writes "Not only is power consumption halved to less than two Watts and price of the motherboard reduced, the performance of the next generation OLPC Laptop is actually better for running full Fedora Linux compared to x86. Here's a video interviewing OLPC's CTO, Edward J. McNierney, where he explains how and why OLPC's world class engineers are making this change of CPU architecture. If OLPC XO-1 threatened Intel enough to start the netbook market and has reached two million poor kids in third-world countries thus far, XO-1.75 may help start the ARM-powered Linux laptop market. Do you think Fedora/Sugar will do, or should OLPC attract Chrome OS and Android solutions for education to get faster help from the big boys of Silicon Valley in bringing Linux software successfully to the next billion PC/laptop users?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 21:44:

Canada Explores New Frontiers In Astroinformatics

An anonymous reader writes "The number of scientific instruments available to astronomy researchers for gathering data has grown significantly in recent years, leading to unprecedented amounts of information that requires vast storage and processing capabilities. Canadian researchers are finding a way around this problem (PDF) with a new solution that combines the best of grid and cloud computing, allowing them to more efficiently reach their research goals." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 20:56:

Threat of Cyberwar Is Over-Hyped

nk497 writes "A new OECD report suggests the cyberwar threat is over-hyped. A pair of British researchers have said states are only likely to use cyberattacks against other states when already involved in military action against them, and that sub-state actors such as terrorists and individual hackers can't really do much damage. Dr. Ian Brown said, 'We think that describing things like online fraud and hacktivism as cyberwar is very misleading.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 20:06:

DoE Develops Flexible Glass Stronger Than Steel

An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Energy Office of Science recently collaborated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology to develop a resilient yet malleable new type of glass that is stronger than steel. The material can also be molded, and it bends when subjected to stress instead of shattering. The glass is actually a microalloy and features metallic elements such as palladium. This metal has a high 'bulk-to-shear' stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials. The team that developed the material believes that by changing various ratios, they could make it even stronger." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 19:19:

Milky Way May Have Dark Matter Satellite Galaxies

rubycodez writes "Berkeley astronomer Sukanya Chakrabarti has detected perturbations in the gases surrounding our Milky Way and concludes there is a satellite 'Galaxy X' 250,000 light years away that is mostly dark matter, but that may contain dwarf stars visible in infrared. She expects many more such dark matter satellites to the Milky Way to be discovered using her technique." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 18:37:

The Ambiguity of "Open" and VP8 Vs. H.264

An anonymous reader writes "With all the talk about WebM and H.264, how the move might be a step backwards for openness, and Google's intention to add "plugins" for IE9 and Safari to support WebM, this article attempts to clear misconceptions about the VP8 and H.264 codecs and how browsers render video. Firefox, Opera and Google rely on their own media frameworks to decode video, whereas IE9 and Safari will hand over video processing to the operating system (Windows Media Player or QuickTime), the need for the web to establish a baseline codec for encoding videos, and how the Flash player is proprietary, but implementation and usage remain royalty free." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 17:47:

Apple iPhone 5 To Flaunt New A8 Processor

An anonymous reader writes "The release of iOS 4.3 beta for developers has revealed updates to gesture-based navigation, AirPlay and Personal Hot Spot in the next edition of iPad and iPhone. However, not all changes are UI-related; it is reported that Apple is due to add an ARM Cortex A8 processor to its iPhone 5. Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based newspaper, reported that Apple's iPhone 5 will be powered by a dual core processor with SGX543 graphics. It is reported that Apple is in contact with a Taiwanese component maker for the A8 SoC. Currently Apple uses a custom made A4 SoC in its iPad and iPhone 4 and uses SGX535 graphics and video support." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 17:03:

Wikileaks To Name Swiss Bank Tax Evaders

eldavojohn writes "The old cliche that the rich and corrupt hold all their money in Swiss bank accounts (to avoid taxation) may finally have a bit of transparency as the news today is that Wikileaks has been handed a list of account holders tendered by Rudolf Elmer, former banker of Julius Baer. Julian Assange promises a 'full revelation' while Elmer cited his motivation as being 'I want to let society know how this system works. It's damaging society.' This appears to be real as Mr. Elmer is soon to appear before a Zurich regional court on charges of coercion as well as violations of Switzerland's strict banking secrecy laws. The public may soon find out that their favorite celebrity, politician or employer doesn't feel responsible to contribute financially to the commonwealth at the expense of privacy." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 16:22:

Man Tunnels Into GameStop, Steals Games

An anonymous reader writes "Life imitates Minecraft: Computer game piracy is big business, but there are still those who prefer to get their games the old-fashioned way: by digging a tunnel into their local games shop and making off with as much stock as they can carry. At least, that's the slightly bizarre approach taken by a man from Greeneville, Tennessee, who was arrested late last week after being caught tunneling into his local GameStop store from an empty adjoining building." Note that the link is thin, and the sources are behind logins and subscription links, so please post better URLs if you can find them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 15:42:

Steve Jobs Taking Medical Leave of Absence

Uttini writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has just announced that he is taking a medical leave of absence according to a release issued by the company today. While it's unclear what the reason is for the medical leave, Jobs' previous medical history includes Pancreatic cancer as well as a liver transplant. While Jobs is out, Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple's day to day operations" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 14:55:

New Study Links Video Games and Mental Problems

eldavojohn writes "A new study published today in Pediatrics Journal conducted in Singapore on three thousand children in grades third, fourth, seventh and eighth claims that one in ten are video game addicts and almost all of those suffer mental health problems. This comes conveniently after the suspect in the Tucson shooting has widely been reported as an online gamer. Among the accusations from the study are that playing video games leads to lower school performance and fewer social skills while exacerbating existing depression, anxiety and social phobias. Gamasutra reports that the Entertainment Software Alliance is already criticizing this study saying 'Its definition of 'pathological gaming' is neither scientifically nor medically accepted and the type of measure used has been criticized by other scholars. Other outcomes are also measured using dubious instruments when well-validated tools are readily available. In addition, because the effect sizes of the outcomes are mainly trivial, it leaves open the possibility the author is simply interpreting things as negatively as possible.' It seems that the doctors are still disagreeing on whether or not gaming causes problems." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 14:02:

EC Tests Show Windows Vista Is Above Average — At Blocking Content

littlekorea writes "Microsoft's much-maligned Vista operating system has been named in the top three of 26 tools tested by the European Commission to filter out web content deemed inappropriate for children. The EC tests found that none of the 26 products enjoyed a 100 percent success rate, failing to block over one in five adult sites. It also found that few tools could overcome the workarounds available through cache or translation sites." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 08:07:

Dating Site Creates Profiles From Public Records

schliz writes "Online dating company Gotham Dating Partners has announced plans to create profiles for non-registered individuals based on publicly available information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites. Although the Australian Privacy Commissioner has warned that the automatic creation of identifiable profiles of individuals without their knowledge is 'not good privacy practice,' Gotham Dating Partners does not expect to face any privacy issues from the move, which is expected to boost its membership from 6.5 million to 340 million worldwide." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 05:02:

Xfce 4.8 Released

PerlDudeXL writes "Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6. [..] Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 02:51:

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36

conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 01:58:

Cassandra 0.7 Can Pack 2 Billion Columns Into a Row

angry tapir writes "The cadre of volunteer developers behind the Cassandra distributed database have released the latest version of their open source software, able to hold up to 2 billion columns per row. The newly installed Large Row Support feature of Cassandra version 0.7 allows the database to hold up to 2 billion columns per row. Previous versions had no set upper limit, though the maximum amount of material that could be held in a single row was approximately 2GB. This upper limit has been eliminated." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 01:02:

Cell Phone Industry's Six Biggest Failed Schemes

adeelarshad82 writes "The tech world is for dreamers, schemers, and sometimes, scammers. Which is why it's no surprise that the cell phone industry isn't any different. In wake of the recent news about the Israeli mobile-phone firm Modu shutting its doors, mobile analyst Sascha Segan revisits six major failures in the cell phone industry, from using phones to create a peer-to-peer that would eliminate the need for wireless carriers to a company with a $225,000 phone." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-17 00:02:

Remote Control Worms With Laser Light, Using FOSS

Kramer747 writes "to share a new tool I've developed for neuroscience that uses optogenetics to remotely control the neurons of a worm as it swims or crawls. Its called CoLBeRT, Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time. With the instrument I can induce the worm to stop, accelerate, lay eggs or experience the illusion of touch. All source code to run the instrument is GPLd and available. Science News and Scientific American both have stories. The project homepage is at colbert.physics.harvard.edu." I hope that name also constitutes a successful bid to get on the actual Colbert show! Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 23:06:

Facebook Opens Up Home Addresses and Phone Numbers

An anonymous reader writes "Do you really want third-party app developers on Facebook to be able to access your mobile phone number and home address? Facebook has announced that developers of Facebook apps can now gather the personal contact information from their users. Security firm Sophos describes it as 'a move that could herald a new level of danger for Facebook users' and advises users to remove their home address and phone numbers from the network immediately." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 22:02:

Office Robots of the Near Future, Gearing Up

Reader jsrodrigues points out Businessweek's article on the predicted coming wave of office robots. These include offerings from Willow Garage, Anybots, and Smart Robots, all designed to automate certain bits of office-building meatspace gruntwork, like ferrying mail and making coffee, but more intelligently and smoothly than previous generations of such tools. Smart Robots has posted a scenario describing the benefits of office life with robots; a test run of robots from that company is set for early 2012 at "a major office building in Manhattan." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 21:00:

Breaching an AUP a Crime In Western Australia

An anonymous reader writes "A recent court case highlights that breaching an acceptable use policy at work could land you in court in Western Australia: a police officer doing a search of the police database for a friend was fined — not for disclosing confidential police information, but for unlawful use of a 'restricted-access computer system' — cracking. More worryingly for West Australians, this legal blog points out that breaching any Acceptable Use Policy would seem to be enough to land you in jail for cracking — for example, using your internet connection to break copyright." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 19:54:

Advice On Teaching Linux To CS Freshmen?

copb.phoenix writes "I'm a sophomore Computer Science student teaching computing labs to a freshman class, getting ready to go over the major ins and outs of the Linux terminal and GUI. While I have my own ideas and the professor over this class to lean on, I've found it difficult to get the few students that I've tried to teach in the past to connect the dots and understand how it relates to what they already know about computers. Does anybody out there have any advice on how to engage and inspire our upcoming class? (Perhaps important: Our machines are running Ubuntu Hardy.)" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 18:50:

Today, the IETF Turns 25

FranckMartin writes "Little known to the general public, the Internet Engineering Task Force , celebrates its 25th birthday on the 16th of January. DNSSEC, IDN, SIP, IPv6, HTTP, MPLS ... all acronyms that were codified at the IETF. But little known, one can argue the IETF does not exist; it just happens that people meet 3 times a year in some hotel around the world and are on mailing lists in between. The openness of the IETF and its structure has inspired the way ICANN is run, as well as the way the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been open to the civil society." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 17:41:

ClamAV For Windows Open Beta Begins

An anonymous reader writes "The public beta for ClamAV for Windows 3.0, which includes full integration of the ClamAV engine into the Immunet Protect product, is now open. If you are interested in playing with ClamAV for Windows 3.0, please see these forums. 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available for download. ClamAV for Windows should not be confused with ClamWin, a separate project." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 16:40:

Smartphone As Your Most Dangerous Possession

Hugh Pickens writes "CNN reports that now that smartphones double as wallets and bank accounts — allowing users to manage their finances, transfer money, make payments, deposit checks and swipe their phones as credit cards — smartphones have become very lucrative scores for thieves and with 30% of phone subscribers owning iPhones, BlackBerrys and Droids, there are a lot of people at risk. Storing a password and keeping your phone locked is a good start, but it's not going to protect you from professional fraudsters. 'Don't think that having an initial password set on your phone can stop people from getting in there,' says Nikki Junker, a victim advisor at the Identity Theft Resource Center. 'It's a very low level of protection — you can even find 30-second videos on how to crack smartphone passwords on YouTube.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 15:36:

Robots May Inspire Suits Against Programmers

cpu6502 writes "Robert Silverberg wrote a recent editorial about the dangers of robots and the legal consequences for their programmers and engineers: 'Consider malicious kids hacking into a house that uses a robot cleaning system and reprogramming the robot to smash dishes and break furniture. If the hackers are caught and sued, but turn out not to have any assets, isn't it likely that the lawyers will go after the programmer who designed it or the manufacturer who built it? In our society, the liability concept is upwardly mobile, searching always for the deepest pocket.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 14:33:

Why Linux Loses Out On Hardware Acceleration In Firefox

devtty writes with some bad news for Linux users, from OSNews: "The release notes for Firefox 4.0 beta 9 noted that it comes with hardware acceleration for Windows 7 and Vista via a combination of Direct2D, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations 'using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9.' Furthermore, Mac OS X has excellent OpenGL support, they claim, so they've got that covered as well. No mention of Linux, and there's a reason for that. 'We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think "crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time" buggy) that we had to disable it for now,' explains Zbarsky, 'Heck, we're even disabling WebGL for most Linux drivers, last I checked...'" An update to the story softens this news slightly, saying that "hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 13:02:

Man Mines Facebook For Security Questions, Nabs Nude Photos From Email

itwbennett writes "George Bronk, 23, has pleaded guilty to charges that he broke into the e-mail accounts of thousands of women, scouring them for nude photos that he then posted to the Internet. How he did it: He searched his victims' Facebook pages for answers to common security questions and then logged in to their e-mail accounts. In one case he persuaded a victim to send him even more explicit photographs by threatening to post the ones he'd stolen if she didn't. Bronk faces 6 years in prison on felony hacking, child pornography and identity theft charges." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 10:18:

Tomcat 7 Finalized

alphadogg writes "The volunteer developers behind Apache Tomcat have released version 7.0.6 of the open-source Java servlet container. 'This is the first stable release of the Tomcat 7 branch,' developer Mark Thomas wrote in an e-mail announcing the release on various Tomcat developer mailing lists. While not a full application server, Tomcat implements the functionality described in the Java Enterprise Edition Web profile specifications. Most notably, it supports version 3.0 of the Servlet API (application programming interface) and version 2.2 of JavaServer Pages, both part of the recently ratified JEE 6. A servlet container manages Java-based applications that can be accessed from a Web browser. One big area of improvement is in configuration management for Web applications. Previous versions required all Web app configuration changes to be entered in a central file called web.xml, a process that led to unwieldy web.xml files as well as security risks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 07:23:

NASA's Next-Generation Airplane Concepts

faisy writes "NASA has taken the wraps off three concept designs for quiet, energy efficient aircraft that could potentially be ready to fly as soon as 2025. The designs come from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and The Boeing Company. In the final months of 2010, each of these companies won a contract from NASA to research and test their concepts during 2011." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 04:19:

New York Times Reports US and Israel Behind Stuxnet

Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "Confirming heavy speculation in the Slashdot community, the New York Times reports that joint US-Israeli efforts were almost certainly behind the recent Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear program." The article stops just short of saying in so many words that Israeli is the doer, but leaves little doubt of its conclusion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 01:31:

Extinct Mammoth, Coming To a Zoo Near You

Techmeology writes "Professor Akira Iritani of Kyoto University plans to use recent developments in cloning technology to give life to the currently extinct woolly mammoth. Although earlier efforts in the 1990s were unsuccessful due to damage caused by extreme cold, Professor Iritani believes he can use a technique pioneered by Dr Wakayama (who successfully cloned a frozen mouse) to overcome this obstacle. This technique will enable Professor Iritani to identify viable cell nuclei, and transfer them to egg cells of an African elephant which will carry the mammoth for a 600 day pregnancy." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-16 00:23:

Microsoft Seeks Do-Let-The-Bed-Bugs-Bite Patent

theodp writes "In its just-published patent application for Adapting Parasites to Combat Disease, Microsoft lays out plans to unleash 'altered parasitic organisms' on humans, including mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, bed bugs, leeches, pinworms, tapeworms, hookworms, heart worms, roundworms, lice (head, body, and pubic), and the like. 'Irradiated mosquitoes can be used to deliver damaged Plasmodium to individuals,' explains Microsoft. 'Instead of contracting malaria, an individual receiving the damaged Plasmodium develops an immune response that renders the individual resistant to contracting malaria.' Don't worry about runaway breeding, advises Microsoft — 'a termination feature [that] can include programmed death' makes this impossible. As David Spade might say, I liked this movie the first time I saw it — when it was called Jurassic Park." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 23:20:

Google To Push WebM With IE9, Safari Plugins

surveyork writes with this "new chapter in the browser wars 'Google in a defense of its decision to pull H.264 from Chrome's HTML5 revealed that it will put out WebM plugins for Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. Expecting no official support from Apple or Microsoft, Google plans to develop extensions that would load its self-owned video codec. No timetable was given.' So Google gets started with their plan for world-wide WebM domination. They'll provide WebM plugins for the browsers of the H.264-only league, so in practice, all mayor browsers will have WebM support –one way or the other. Machiavellian move?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 22:14:

Happy 10th Birthday To Wikipedia

Greg writes "Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, first launched on January 15, 2001. Today, the website is thus 10 years old. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Wikipedia is hosting some 400 conferences and parties across the globe. In traditional Wikipedia style, the events are being organized by its community of users. After a decade of growth, Wikipedia is an important source of information for millions of topics and remains among the Internet's top 10 most visited sites. It has over 400 million readers each month and has a very small budget for a website its size: just $20 million. Almost all its revenue comes from donations. In its last fundraising push, the organization saw 500,000 users donate $16 million." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 21:15:

Arx Fatalis Updated, Released Under GPL

Kevin Fishburne writes "According to WtF Dragon at Ultima Aiera, 'The long and short: Arkane Studios have released what is probably going to be the final patch for their Ultima Underworld-inspired game (which, indeed, they tried to license as the third entry in that series), Arx Fatalis. They have also released the source code for the game. That's right, the complete source of Arx Fatalis is available for download.' The readme notes that the original game installation is required in order to play the compiled game, as the data files are certainly still copyrighted. Linux is in need of a good FPS dungeon crawler, though the code will need a hell of a lot of cleanup as it's a VC8/9 project and uses DirectX (ugh...)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 20:13:

Notion Ink's Adam Android Tablet Said To Ship This Week

junaidslife86 writes with news that the Notion Ink Android tablet has gotten the regulatory go-ahead from US authorities, and should soon be shipping. From the article: "That's right, after several delays the tiny startup will finally condense its occassionally vapory molecules into a solid slab of shipping tablet starting 'around Wednesday' after the hardware receives its FCC tattoo. A tablet good enough to earn a Best of CES 2011 honorable mention at an event absolutely flooded with tablets from a who's who of consumer electronics companies. While our first impressions of the production unit were positive, we're holding off on making a final judgement until we've had the chance to perform a full review." The Notion Ink feature that grabs the most attention seems to be the optional Pixel Qi screen; Brad Linder of Liliputing has a hands-on video with the device from CES which (despite the bad lighting conditions) shows that screen in action. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 19:12:

Stars Remain In Their Usual Places; People Panic

asheller writes "The Star Tribune tells us the zodiac signs have shifted. Earth's wobble has shifted the signs, a new one's been added and many of us have changed signs. Formally a Cancer, I've apparently been upgraded to Gemini and am now married to an Ophiuchus, a new sign. What's yor sign? The new Zodiac Chart is pretty interesting." Here are some priceless reactions to this celestial development. As long as the Chinese Zodiac is unaffected, I'll still be able to accurately judge people based on when they were born, so please indicate in comments your (new) sign and birth year animal, so we'll be able to know where you're coming from. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 18:06:

US Scraps Virtual Fence Along Mexican Border

Pickens writes "The Arizona Republic reports that the federal government has officially cancelled its multibillion-dollar plan to build a virtual fence along the border with Mexico as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano disclosed in a congressional briefing that the program known as SBInet was costing too much and achieving too little. 'SBInet cannot meet its original objective of providing a single, integrated border-security technology solution,' says Napolitano. Boeing was hired in 2006 to develop the system under a three-year federal contract with cost projections for full build-out as high as $8 billion but efforts were plagued by delays, glitches, budget increases and congressional criticism. Napolitano has ordered Customs and Border Protection to launch a more modest and geographically tailored effort using SBInet funds and existing technology such as mobile-surveillance systems, unmanned aircraft, thermal-imaging devices and remote-video surveillance with proven elements of SBInet including stationary radar and infrared-sensor towers. SBInet cost nearly $1 billion for development along 53 miles of Arizona border." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 17:08:

Play Pacman, Pinball, and Pong With a Paramecium

An anonymous reader writes "Science is rarely ever this cool! 'Physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team from Stanford University have done just that by creating versions of classic games that you can navigate by physically controlling living organisms. A game called PAC-mecium is Pacman with a twist: players use a console to change the polarity of an electrical field in a fluid chamber filled with paramecia, which makes the organisms move in different directions. A camera sends real-time images to a computer, where they are superimposed onto a game board (see video above). By looking at the screen, a player can guide the paramecia to eat virtual yeast cells and make them avoid Pacman-like fish. A microprocessor tracks the movement of the organisms to keep score.' Also available are versions of Pinball, Pong, and soccer." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 16:09:

French ISP Throttles Direct Download Website

siliconbits contributes this snippet: "In what might be the first of many, French Internet Service Provider Orange has been caught throttling traffic to one of the world's biggest direct download websites, Megaupload. The site, which also operates Megavideo, states that Orange, which is owned by France Telecom, is preventing its users from accessing its downloading and video streaming service freely and says that it can prove it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 15:11:

Ridley Scott Abandons Alien Prequel

An anonymous reader writes "With Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox announcing that the much-vaunted 3D Alien prequel has now mutated into an original SF film project called Prometheus, starring Noomi Rapace, the author of this article recalls his 2007 interview with the late Dan O'Bannon, who presumably is happy about the news, wherever he is. Asked what he'd like to see happen to the xenomorph franchise, the Alien co-creator said: 'I'd like to see it stop. A horror movie's a fragile thing, and once you've gotten past the original, it isn't scary anymore. So you do a bunch of sequels to a horror movie, all they do is drain any remaining impact out of the original...it's not as effective as it would have been if you had just left it alone.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 14:07:

Amazon, Not Developers, Will Set New App Store's Prices

Trebortech writes "Looks like Amazon is changing the rules of the game for developers with their new Android App store. I'm curious how Amazon will determine the value of your app and if having control of your prices really matters." The core of the linked article: "Here's how it works: When developers submit apps to Amazon's app store, they will be able to set a suggested retail price ('MSRP'). It can be free, it can be $50, whatever. Then Amazon -- not the developer -- will set the retail price. It can be full price, it can be a sale price, or it can be free. Developers will get to take home the standard 70% of the app's retail price (what the app sells for) or 20% of the MSRP (what the developer thinks it should sell for), whichever is greater." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 11:12:

iPad + Macintosh Plus = Crazy Visualizer Helmet

An anonymous reader writes "I would like to share with you a helmet I made out of a Macintosh Plus and an iPad. Essentially, I purchased a Macintosh Plus on ebay, removed the inner parts, cut a hole in the bottom of the case, inserted the inner padding of a bicycle helmet (cut to fit), and cut a slot for the iPad to slide in. The iPad's thinness allows for plenty of room for the user's head and the inner helmet keeps the Macintosh situated properly. What started as a project for my sculpture class has now become a part of my good friend Kid Chameleon's DJ set and a way for us to showcase our visuals in a new way during live performances." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 08:17:

Military Aircraft To Get All-Fiber Network Gear

coondoggie writes "Looking to significantly reduce weight, improve on-board communications and make it easier to upgrade avionics, the US military is developing prototype phonic gear for use in all aircraft. Behind such a drastic shift is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project with an ungainly moniker: Network Enabled by Wavelength division multiplexing Highly Integrated Photonics (NEW-HIP)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 05:15:

Firefox 4 Beta 9 Out, Now With IndexedDB and Tabs On Titlebar

surveyork writes "''Mozilla today officially released Firefox 4 Beta 9 and it's a big improvement over previous betas and a parsec beyond the Firefox 3.6.x experience. At this stage, after months of development, Mozilla developers are clearly nearing the end of this development marathon.' After Firefox beta 9, a beta 10 and a single RC are scheduled (this road map can change, of course). The main features of Firefox beta 9 are IndexedDB and tabs on titlebar (just like Chrome and Opera). IndexedDB allows sites to store data on your computer (with your prior authorization). Tabs on titlebar is self-explanatory. Old-schoolers can always turn on the 'show menu bar' to get their familiar GUI back. Oh, and Fx beta 9 is fast and starts fast. Firefox beta 9 available here and in lots of official mirrors." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 02:12:

The Strange Disappearance of Dancho Danchev

rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev has gone missing since August of last year. Dancho, who was relentless in his pursuit of cyber-criminals, last blogged here on August 18. His personal blog has not been updated since September 11, 2010. 'At ZDNet, we made multiple attempts to contact him, to no avail. Telephone numbers are going to Bulgarian language voicemails and our attempts to reach him via a snail mail address also came up empty. Just recently, a trusted member of the malware research community reached out to us to say he had received a troubling letter from Dancho on September 9, 2010, about the threat of persecution in Bulgaria.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 01:20:

Russia Moves To Universal ID Card

prostoalex writes "On January 1st 2012, the Russian government will start issuing universal ID cards (Russian original) that will replace current national identification system (Russia has a system of internal passports), medical insurance cards, student IDs, public transport passes, and debit cards. The smart card contains unique personal identifiers and allows for multiple levels of authentication. The Russian government is pushing for local government agencies, transportation providers, banks and retail operators to adopt the government-issued ID to streamline their operations." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-15 00:29:

Airborne Prions Prove Lethal In Mouse Studies

sgunhouse writes "Wired has a story up on the lethality of airborne prions. It should be noted that prions (which cause 'mad cow disease' and similar disorders) are not normally airborne, and take a long time to kill the infected animal, but so far are 100% lethal if something else doesn't kill the animal first. So, they are not likely to be useful as a biological weapon (my first thought when reading their headline), but they present another safety precaution to consider." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 23:46:

Lustre File System Getting New Community Distro

darthcamaro writes "Oracle acquired a lot of open source tech from Sun that has since been forked — or is in the process of being forked. The open source Lustre high performance computing file system isn't on the list of forked projects, but it is getting a new, community-driven distro that is trying really hard to say that they're not officially a fork. 'Since April of 2010 there has been confusion in the community, and we've seen an impact in the business confidence in Lustre,' Brent Gorda, CEO and president of Whamcloud told InternetNews.com. 'The community has been asking for leadership, the commitment of a for-profit entity that they can rely on for support and a path forward for the technology.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 23:05:

Sony Must Show It Has Jurisdiction To Sue PS3 Hacker

RedEaredSlider writes "A California court today asked that Sony show it has jurisdiction over the hacker who publicized a 'jailbreak' for the PlayStation 3 console. Judge Susan Ilston, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, said Sony has to show that George Hotz, a hacker who posted a method of 'jailbreaking' PS3 consoles, has some connection to California if Sony is to claim damages for his work on the PS3." For his part, Geohot has moved quickly to fight back against Sony's accusations. His legal team issued a statement (PDF), and also pointed out, "On the face of Sony’s Motion, a TRO serves no purpose in the present matter. The code necessary to 'jailbreak' the Sony Playstation computer is on the internet. That cat is not going back in the bag. Indeed, Sony’s own pleadings admit that the code necessary to jailbreak the Sony PlayStation computer is on the internet. Sony speaks of 'closing the door,' but the simple fact is that there is no door to close. The code sought to be restrained will always be a Google search away." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 22:26:

Should Employees Buy Their Own Computers?

Local ID10T writes "Data security vs. productivity. We have all heard the arguments. Most of us use some of our personal equipment for work, but is it a good idea? 'You are at work. Your computer is five years old, runs Windows XP. Your company phone has a tiny screen and doesn't know what the internet is. Idling at home is a snazzy, super-fast laptop, and your own smartphone is barred from accessing work e-mail. There's a reason for that: IT provisioning is an expensive business. Companies can struggle to keep up with the constant rate of technological change. The devices employees have at home and in their pockets are often far more powerful than those provided for them. So what if you let your staff use their own equipment?' Companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Kraft, Citrix, and global law firm SNR Denton seem to think it's a decent idea." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 21:44:

Bastardi's Wager

DesScorp writes "AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi has a challenge for climate scientists. He wants one or more of their rank to accept a bet about temperature trends in the coming decade. Bastardi is making specific predictions. 'The scientific approach is: you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,' he says. 'That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.' Bastardi's challenge to his critics — who are legion — is to make their own predictions. And then wait. Climate science, he adds, 'is just a big weather forecast.' Bastardi's challenge is reminiscent of the famous Simon-Ehrlich Wager, where the two men made specific predictions about resource scarcity in the 80's." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 21:00:

The Biggest Hoaxes In Wikipedia's First Decade

jbrodkin writes "Wikipedia will celebrate its 10th birthday on Saturday, with founder Jimmy Wales having built the site from nothing to one of the most influential destinations on the Internet. Wikipedia's goal may be to compile the sum total of all human knowledge, but it's also, perhaps, the best tool in existence for perpetuating Internet hoaxes. Top hoaxes include a student who fooled the entire world's media with a fake obituary quote, Rush Limbaugh spouting inaccurate facts lifted from Wikipedia, the incorrect declaration of Sinbad's death, Stephen Colbert's African elephant prank, Hitler posters on the bedroom wall of a teenage Tony Blair, and several fake historical figures invented out of thin air. Wales has taken steps to head off vandalism including preventing unregistered editors from creating new pages and temporarily protecting controversial articles, but Wikipedia's very nature makes it susceptible to the hoaxes described in this story." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 20:18:

Patriot Act Up For Renewal, Nobody Notices

Ponca City, We Love You writes "When the Patriot Act was first signed in 2001, it was billed as a temporary measure required because of the extreme circumstances created by the terrorist threat. The fear from its opponents was that executive power, once given, is seldom relinquished. Now the Examiner reports that on January 5th, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced a bill to add yet another year to the soon-to-be-expiring Patriot Act, extending it until February, 2012, with passage likely to happen after little debate or contention. If passed, this would be the second time the Obama administration has punted on campaign promises to roll back excessive surveillance measures allowed under the act. Last year's extension passed under the heading of the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. 'Given the very limited number of days Congress has in session before the current deadline, and the fact that the bill's Republican sponsor is only seeking another year, I think it's safe to read this as signaling an agreement across the aisle to put the issue off yet again,' writes Julian Sanchez." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 19:37:

34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive

cold fjord writes "A scientist has made a weird and wonderful find. 'It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something... alive.' The Geological Society of America's current issue of GSA Today has the academic paper." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 18:55:

JFK Library Launches Largest Presidential Online Archive

Lucas123 writes "The JFK Library launched what it is calling the largest presidential online archive, offering the public 117TB of data related to John F. Kennedy's presidency. The four-year project digitized a plethora of analog material including 200,000 pages of documents; 300 reels of audio tape containing more than 1,245 individual recordings of telephone calls, speeches and meetings; 300 museum artifacts; 72 reels of film; and 1,500 photos. 'As young people increasingly rely on the Internet as their primary source for information, it is our hope that the library's online archive will allow a new generation to learn about this important chapter in American history,' said Carolyn Kennedy, the wife of the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was on hand at the opening of the archive." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 18:33:

Low Quality Alloy Cause of Shuttle Main Tank Issue

BJ_Covert_Action writes "NASA engineers have finally discovered the root cause of the cracks that have been found on space shuttle Discovery's main external tank. The main tank, one of the 'Super Lightweight Tank' models developed by Lockheed-Martin, employs an aluminum-lithium alloy developed by Lockheed-Martin specifically for this application. The new alloy is used in various structural stringers throughout the SLWT design. Unfortunately, the batch of this alloy used in the tank that is currently mated with the Discovery shuttle appears to be of low quality. The alloy used in the stringers has a 'mottled' appearance, compared to the nominal appearance typically used in the main tank stringers (see picture in article). This appearance is indicative of a fracture threshold that is significantly lower than typical. NASA has determined, through testing, that this low grade alloy has only 65% of the fracture strength of the nominal alloy typically used. NASA engineers have devised a potential fix to the problem that they are currently testing to ensure the repair will cause no unintended consequences. NASA plans to have the Discovery shuttle ready to launch again by February 24th, 2011." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 18:15:

HiJacking the iPhone's Headset Port

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Michigan describe how to hijack the iPhone's headset port to power peripherals, establish bi-directional communications with them, and interface various sensors, all without jailbreaking your iPhone or having to pay thousands to access to the Apple Dock Connector. This makes it possible for students, hackers, and DIYers to extend the phone's functionality to the physical world. The team is giving away 20 HiJack modules/programmers to enable new apps." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 18:12:

Research Suggests E-Readers Are "Too Easy" To Read

New research suggests that the clear screens and easily read fonts of e-readers makes your brain "lazy." According to Neuroscience blogger Jonah Lehrer, using electronic books like the Kindle and Sony Reader makes you less likely to remember what you have read because the devices are so easy on the eyes. From the article: "Rather than making things clearer, e-readers and computers prevent us from absorbing information because their crisp screens and fonts tell our subconscious that the words they convey are not important, it is claimed. In contrast, handwriting and fonts that are more challenging to read signal to the brain that the content of the message is important and worth remembering, experts say." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 17:33:

VP8 Decoder Implemented In Flash Using Alchemy

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla's Chris Double has an interesting post on his blog about a port of the VP8 decoder to Flash. He writes, 'Ralph Hauwert has been posting on twitter about work he's done on getting WebM decoding to work by compiling the libvpx source code using Adobe's Alchemy technology. Alchemy is a research project that allows compilation of C and C++ libraries into code that runs on the ActionScript virtual machine used by Flash.' Of course, it's very slow and Adobe says that they'll bring native VP8 support to Flash in due course, but implementing a VP8 decoder in ActionScript is an interesting project nonetheless." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 16:50:

Intel Plans Windows 8 Phones

Barence writes "Intel boss Paul Otellini says his company plans to offer Windows 8 on smartphones — putting the chipmaker on a collision course with Microsoft. Speaking during Intel's earnings call, Otellini said Microsoft's decision to port Windows to system-on-a-chip platforms had advantages for his company. 'We have the ability to put our lowest-power Intel processors running Windows 8 – or "next-generation Windows" – into phones, because it's the same OS stack.' That would appear to run contrary to Microsoft's plans for its OSes. Speaking at CES last week, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky said Windows Phone 7 was 'uniquely focused on small form factor' while Windows was designed for tablets and above." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 16:09:

Palin's E-Mail Hacker Imprisoned Against Judge's Wishes

Em Adespoton writes "It was a computer security story that made headlines around the world, involving the private emails of a woman who could have become Vice President of the United States. And now, it's ended with a young man sent to a federal prison, hundreds of miles from his family home. David C Kernell, the hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo email account, is reported to have been sent to jail despite a judge's recommendation that he should not be put behind bars." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 15:26:

Trend Micro Chairman Says Open Source Is a Security Risk

dkd903 writes "Steve Chang, the Chairman of Trend Micro, has kicked up a controversy by claiming that open source software is inherently less secure than closed source. When talking about the security of smartphones, Chang claimed that the iPhone is more secure than Android because being an open-source platform lets attackers know more about the underlying architecture." This comes a week after Trend Micro released a mobile security app for Android. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 14:45:

Fed Goes Hunting For Malcontents

snydeq writes "The wake of State Department document leaks to WikiLeaks may have the unhappy rousted from government agencies' 'privileged insiders' ranks, thanks to a recent memo from the US OMB asking agencies to spell out their strategies for minimizing insider risk. 'It's likely that federal contractors and government suppliers will also find themselves responding to this list of questions (PDF) and the central issue of preventing the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and classified materials. In a key section of the memo, the OMB requests information on whether organizations are measuring the "trustworthiness" of their employees and whether they use a psychiatrist or sociologist to measure the unhappiness of an employee as a measure of trustworthiness.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 14:02:

How To Get Around the Holes In IE9 Beta's Implementation of Canvas

mudimba writes "Microsoft has made grand announcements about how great their implementation of the HTML5 canvas specification is. However, while I was porting a large HTML5 application to work with IE9 beta I found that there are some key features missing. Workarounds are provided where possible. (Disclaimer: I am the author of the submitted article.)" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 12:29:

Why Sony Cannot Stop PS3 Pirates

Sam writes "A former Ubisoft exec believes that Sony will not be able to combat piracy on the PlayStation 3, which was recently hacked. Martin Walfisz, former CEO of Ubisoft subsidiary Ubisoft Massive, was a key player in developing Ubisoft's new DRM technologies. Since playing pirated games doesn't require a modchip, his argument is that Sony won't be able to easily detect hacked consoles. Sony's only possible solution is to revise the PS3 hardware itself, which would be a very costly process. Changing the hardware could possibly work for new console sales, though there would be the problem of backwards compatibility with the already-released games. Furthermore, current users would still be able to run pirated copies on current hardware." An anonymous reader adds commentary from PS3 hacker Mathieu Hervais about Sony's legal posturing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 11:05:

EDSAC Computer To Be Rebuilt

nk497 writes with this bit from PCPro: "The first working stored-program computer is set to be rebuilt at Bletchley Park, home to the UK's National Museum of Computing. The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator ran its first programme in 1949, and was two metres high. Its 3,000 vacuum tubes took up four metres of floor space, and it could perform 650 instructions per second. All data input was via paper tape. The EDSAC used mercury-filled tubes for memory, but in the interests of safety, the replica will use an alternative non-toxic substance. Rebuilding it will take four years, and the public can visit to watch the work as it happens." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 09:18:

Capcom 'Saddened' By Game Plagiarism Controversey

Capcom's recent release of action platformer Maxsplosion for the iPhone caused indie developer Twisted Pixel to call Capcom out for copying the concept from their successful Xbox Live game 'Splosion Man. Twisted Pixel said they had no plans for legal action, since they were "too small to take on a company like Capcom." The indie studio had even pitched the game to Capcom for publishing at one point, but were declined. Now, Capcom has released a statement denying that Maxsplosion's development team had any knowledge of the meetings and saying, "MaXplosion was developed independently by Capcom Mobile. Nonetheless, we are saddened by this situation and hope to rebuild the trust of our fans and friends in the gaming community." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 09:18:

Capcom 'Saddened' By Game Plagiarism Controversy

Capcom's recent release of action platformer Maxsplosion for the iPhone caused indie developer Twisted Pixel to call Capcom out for copying the concept from their successful Xbox Live game 'Splosion Man. Twisted Pixel said they had no plans for legal action, since they were "too small to take on a company like Capcom." The indie studio had even pitched the game to Capcom for publishing at one point, but were declined. Now, Capcom has released a statement denying that Maxsplosion's development team had any knowledge of the meetings and saying, "MaXplosion was developed independently by Capcom Mobile. Nonetheless, we are saddened by this situation and hope to rebuild the trust of our fans and friends in the gaming community." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 07:58:

North Korean Domain Names Return To the Internet

angry tapir writes "North Korean domain names have returned to the Internet over the last few days as the country continues to build its presence online. Websites, previously available only via IP addresses, are now accessible through dot-kp addresses and it appears more might be on the way." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 05:01:

Google Pushes New Chrome Release, Pays $14k Bounty

Trailrunner7 writes "Google has released version 8.0.552.237 of its Chrome browser, which includes fixes for 16 security vulnerabilities. The company also paid out more than $14,000 in bug bounties for the flaws fixed in this release, including the first maximum reward of $3133.7. The new version of Google Chrome has fixes for 13 high-priority bugs, but the most serious vulnerability the company repaired in the browser is a critical flaw resulting from a stale pointer in the speech handling component of Chrome. That flaw, along with four others, was discovered by researcher Sergey Glazunov, who earned a total of more than $7,000 in rewards for the bugs he reported to Google." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 01:57:

Is Samsung Blocking Updates To Froyo?

jfruhlinger writes "One of the complaints about Android is its fragmentation; many different versions of the OS are out there in the wild, and often users are held back from upgrading by their hardware or their carrier. But now a disturbing rumor has it that Samsung is strong-arming T-Mobile to prevent an over-the-air upgrade to Android 2.2 (Froyo) for Samsung Vibrant owners. The reason? Samsung wants people to shell out for the new Vibrant 4G — which, other than the fact that it ships running Froyo, is largely identical to the Vibrant." Reader CWmike contributes an informative link if you'd like to know which Android vendors are actually delivering timely upgrades. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 01:04:

Virgin Mobile To Start Throttling Broadband2Go

Daevad writes "Virgin Mobile sent an e-mail today informing me of their plans to start throttling the Broadband2Go Plan. The web site doesn't seem to reflect the change yet, but here is the message they sent to me: 'Here at Virgin Mobile, our mission is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Sometimes that means making difficult choices in order to provide the best possible service to the greatest number of customers. To make sure we can keep offering our $40 Unlimited Broadband2Go Plan at such a great price, we're putting a speed limit in place for anyone on that plan who uses over 5GB in a month. How will it work? Starting February 15, 2011, if you go over 5GB in a month on the $40 Unlimited Plan: Your data speeds will be limited for the remainder of the monthly plan cycle. During this time, you may experience slower page loads and file downloads and lags in streaming media. Your data speeds will return to normal as soon as you buy a new Broadband2Go Plan. This change will only affect plans bought on or after 2/15/2011. How will it affect me? Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it's about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails. So this change shouldn't affect you unless you're a heavy downloader/streamer/etc.'" Just when I was getting comfortable recommending it to people, too. I do prefer a slowdown to an absolute cap, but this sours me a bit on the (locked-to-Sprint) MiFi I bought to use the Virgin service. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 00:31:

Embedded Linux 1-Second Cold Boot To QT

An anonymous reader writes "The blog post shows an embedded device cold booting Linux to a QT application all in just one second. This post also includes a link which describes what modifications were made to achieve this." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-14 00:20:

Are 10-11 Hour Programming Days Feasible?

drc37 writes "My current boss asked me what I thought of asking all employees to work 10-11 hour days until the company is profitable. He read something from Joel Spolsky that said the best way to get new customers is to add new features. Anyways, we are a startup with almost a year live. None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary. Salaries are at normal industry rates. What should I say to him when we talk about this again?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 23:33:

NASA Says 2010 Tied For Warmest Year On Record

An anonymous reader writes "It may not seem like it, but 2010 has tied 2005 as the warmest year since people have been keeping records, according to data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. That difference is so small that it puts them in a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880." Adds jamie: "This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average — 0.62 +/- 0.07 C above, to be precise. It was the wettest year on record too, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 22:50:

Amazon EC2 Enables Cheap Brute-Force Attacks

snydeq writes "German white-hat hacker Thomas Roth claims he can crack WPA-PSK-protected networks in six minutes using Amazon EC2 compute power — an attack that would cost him $1.68. The key? Amazon's new cluster GPU instances. 'GPUs are (depending on the algorithm and the implementation) some hundred times faster compared to standard quad-core CPUs when it comes to brute forcing SHA-1 and MD,' Roth explained. GPU-assisted servers were previously available only in supercomputers and not to the public at large, according to Roth; that's changed with EC2. Among the questions Roth's research raises is, what role should Amazon and other public-cloud service providers play in preventing customers from using their services to commit crimes?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 22:04:

First Ceiling Light Internet Systems Installed

An anonymous reader writes "We last heard about LVX's LED ceiling light optical communication system in December, and now news has broken that the company recently implemented the technology at several city offices in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The LVX/ceiling light system is capable of transmitting data at about three megabits per second, which is about as fast as a residential DSL line. It works by placing light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in a standard-sized light fixture. This then transmits coded binary messages to the special modems attached to computers, which also respond via light waves." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 21:19:

Google vs. Bing — a Quasi-empirical Study

eko3 writes "SearchEngineLand.com is featuring an article that compares Google's result query relevance performance to Microsoft's Bing. Through the author's methodology and very small sampling, he argues Bing returns slightly more relevant results than Google. The article suggests that Google is riding its current market success based on its legacy namesake when internet search used to be a lot more painful than it is today." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 21:19:

Google vs. Bing — a Quasi-Empirical Study

eko3 writes "SearchEngineLand.com is featuring an article that compares Google's result query relevance performance to Microsoft's Bing. Through the author's methodology and very small sampling, he argues Bing returns slightly more relevant results than Google. The article suggests that Google is riding its current market success based on its legacy namesake when internet search used to be a lot more painful than it is today." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 20:34:

Jeopardy-Playing Supercomputer Beats Humans

An anonymous reader writes "Ok, this was just a practice round. But in short a demonstration today IBM's Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, a whiz by the name of Watson, thoroughly bested two talented human contestants. IBM has been working on this artificial intelligence project for years to prove that a computer can be programmed to understand conversational speech and wordplay. In today's demo, Watson seems to have proved the point: it started out on a roll in the category 'Chicks Dig Me,' about women and archaeology. The real man versus machine face-off (in which the same contestants compete for a $1 million prize) will be taped tomorrow, and aired in February." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 19:49:

FBI Seeks Suspect's Web Game Records

wiredmikey writes "The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday asked the administrator of an Internet game to hand over records of communications by Jared Loughner, following a Wall Street Journal article describing disturbing messages the accused shooter wrote over a three-month period last year. In an interview, David McVittie, the administrator of the Web game Earth Empires, said he was contacted by the FBI, which requested the files, including 131 messages that Mr. Loughner wrote." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 19:05:

Mozilla To Release Firefox 4 Next Month

Neil writes "Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 18:20:

Sony Says PSP2 "As Powerful as PS3"

Jason writes "Sony is reportedly pitching the PSP2 as a high-end portable equivalent to its PS3. The gaming content on the platform will clearly differentiate the handheld from Apple's and Google's mobile products as well as the games found on the App Store and the Android Market. The company will reveal the first concrete details regarding the handheld in Tokyo on January 27. This is a month before Nintendo's 3DS platform goes on sale in Japan. Sony is already planning to reveal more at GDC and E3 after the initial announcement this month." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 17:36:

WikiLeaks Gives $15k To Bradley Manning Defense

wiredmikey writes "The Web site supporting Bradley Manning, the Army soldier charged with leaking a massive number of U.S. classified information to WikiLeaks, posted an announcement on its site today, saying that WikiLeaks had transferred $15,100 to the legal trust account of Manning's attorney. WikiLeaks has been publicly soliciting donations specifically for the expenses of Manning's legal defense following his arrest in May 2010. The contribution by WikiLeaks brings the total funds raised and transferred to Bradley's civilian legal defense team, led by attorney David Coombs, to over $100,000. Supporters say that a 'vigorous defense' for Manning is estimated to cost $115,000." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 17:03:

Florida Man Sues WikiLeaks For Scaring Him

Stoobalou writes "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been accused of 'treason' by a Florida man seeking damages for distress caused by the site's revelations about the US government. From the article: 'David Pitchford, a Florida trailer park resident, names Assange and WikiLeaks as defendants in a personal injury suit filed with the Florida Southern District Court in Miami. In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange's negligence has caused "hypertension," "depression" and "living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke" as a result of living "in fear of being on the brink of another nuclear [sic] WAR."' Just for good measure, it also alleges that Assange and WikiLeaks are guilty of 'terorism [sic], espionage and treason.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 16:53:

Jimmy Wales Declares App Store Models a Threat

An anonymous reader writes "Wikipedia's chief says models such as the App Store on the iPad are not only a dangerous chokepoint to internet freedom, but that this is a real and immediate problem that's of more concern than the overblown what if's of the net neutrality debate." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 16:10:

Dual-core Chips Coming To All Smartphones In 2011

An anonymous reader writes "All top of the range smartphones will be sporting dual-core chips this year. So is it time to ditch your current pocket rocket? Not necessarily — dual-core will give a bit of a boost to multitasking and media streaming but probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android, says the writer." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 16:10:

Dual-Core Chips Coming To All Smartphones In 2011

An anonymous reader writes "All top of the range smartphones will be sporting dual-core chips this year. So is it time to ditch your current pocket rocket? Not necessarily — dual-core will give a bit of a boost to multitasking and media streaming but probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android, says the writer." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 15:28:

Ars Thinks Google Takes a Step Backwards For Openness

An anonymous reader writes "Over at ars technica, Peter (not so) Bright gives a long winded, read 4 pages of FUD, explanation of how Chrome dropping support for H.264 is a slight against openness. "The promise of HTML5's video tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora.""The reason Google has given for this change is that WebM (which pairs VP8 video with Vorbis audio) and Theora are "open codecs" and H.264 apparently isn't." "H.264 is unambiguously open"" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 14:53:

Apple May Remove the Home Button On the Next IPad

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs is notoriously frugal when it comes to buttons so the latest rumor emanating out of Cupertino might not come as a huge surprise. Apple is reportedly planning to do away with the home button on the next-gen iPad and iPhone and replace its functionality with multitouch gestures. And as luck would have it, the newly seeded iOS 4.3 includes support for new multitouch gestures, one of which is the ability to use a four or five finger pinch to go back to the homescreen" The attached video demonstrates the new gestures for switching applications and demonstrates how you could function without the home button. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 14:06:

Microsoft Slams Google Over HTML5 Video Decision

jbrodkin writes "Microsoft is accusing Google of some heavy-handed tactics in the battle over HTML5 video standards. In an attempt at humor, a clearly peeved Microsoft official wrote 'An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google,' which likens Google's adoption of WebM instead of H.264 to an attempt to force a new language on the entire world. Internet Explorer 9, of course, supports the H.264 codec, while Google and Mozilla are backing WebM. The hyperlinks in Microsoft's blog post lead readers to data indicating that two-thirds of Web videos are using H.264, with about another 25% using Flash VP6. However, the data, from Encoding.com, was released before the launch of WebM last May. One pundit predicts the battle will lead to yet another 'years-long standards format war.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 12:23:

Balancing Choice With Irreversible Consequences In Games

The Moving Pixels blog has an article about the delicate balance within video games between giving players meaningful choices and consequences that cannot necessarily be changed if the player doesn't like her choice afterward. Quoting: "One of my more visceral experiences in gaming came recently while playing Mass Effect 2, in which a series of events led me to believe that I'd just indirectly murdered most of my crew. When the cutscenes ended, I was rocking in my chair, eyes wide, heart pounding, and as control was given over to me once more, I did the only thing that I thought was reasonable to do: I reset the game. This, of course, only led to the revelation that the event was preordained and the inference that (by BioWare's logic) a high degree of magical charisma and blue-colored decision making meant that I could get everything back to normal. ... Charitably, I could say BioWare at least did a good job of conditioning my expectations in such a way that the game could garner this response, but the fact remains: when confronted with a consequence that I couldn't handle, my immediate player's response was to stop and get a do-over. Inevitability was only something that I could accept once it was directly shown to me." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 11:25:

RapidShare Threatens Suit Over Piracy Allegations

Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that RapidShare, named as a contributor to digital piracy by a MarkMonitor report, has threatened to sue for defamation. 'This defamation of RapidShare as a digital piracy site is absurd and we reserve the right to take legal action against MarkMonitor,' says RapidShare in a statement. 'RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers.' MarkMonitor, a Web site that specializes in 'enterprise brand protection,' says in their study that the most-trafficked domains engaged in digital piracy included three sites — rapidshare.com, megavideo.com, and megaupload.com — that combined yielded 21 billion pageviews per year. RapidShare acknowledged that copyrighted files do get uploaded to its site, however 'these users are in the absolute minority compared with those who use our services to pursue perfectly legitimate interests.' RapidShare says that it does not open and view the files of its users, and contains no search function so that other users may look for content." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 10:04:

Voting Opens For Mozilla Labs Web Gaming Competition

nikanth writes "Voting is now open for Game On 2010, Mozilla Labs' first international gaming competition. Game On is all about games built, delivered and played on the open Web and the browser. Out of the 160+ submissions to the first competition, 124 games have been selected to be showcased in the Game On Gallery.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 09:06:

Scientist Says NASA Must Study Space Sex

Velcroman1 writes "NASA has always been tight lipped on the subject of sex in space — which makes people all the more curious. How would it work? Has anyone done it before? Can a child be conceived in zero-G? With few animal tests and (virtually no human testing), there's been next to no scientific analysis of the issue. Until now. The Journal of Cosmology has published a special issue detailing the mission to Mars, which touches all the bases. In a chapter titled Sex on Mars , Dr. Rhawn Joseph from the Brain Research Laboratory in California discusses everything from the social conditions that would push astronauts to have sex to the possibility of the first child being born on another planet. Such an infant would be the first real Martian — at least by nationality, the researcher pointed out. 'On Mars, the light's going to be different, the gravity will be different, it's a completely different atmosphere,' he said. 'So if you put an infant on Mars, they would adapt to varying degrees of the new environment. And after several generations, you'd have a new species,' he said." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 06:35:

US Twitter Spying May Have Broken EU Privacy Law

Stoobalou writes "A group of European MPs will today push EU bosses to say if the US government breached European privacy laws by snooping on Twitter users with links to whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will today pose an oral question to the European Commission, seeking clarification from the US on a subpoena demanding the micro-blogging site hand over users' account details." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 04:22:

Nobel Prize Winner Says DNA Performs Quantum Teleportation

HJED writes "New Scientist is reporting that the joint winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008, Luc Montagnier is claiming that DNA can send 'electromagnetic imprints' of it self into distant cells and fluids which can then be used by enzymes to create copies of the original DNA. This would be equivalent to quantum teleportation. You can read the original paper here [PDF]." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 02:39:

Catching Exam Cheats With a Spectrum Analyzer

angry tapir writes "Police in Taiwan have used a set of spectrum analyzers to catch at least three people suspected of cheating on an exam by monitoring them for mobile phone signals. Officers used three FSH4 analyzers specially configured by the German manufacturer Rohde & Schwarz to monitor an exam in south Taiwan for prospective government workers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 01:52:

Apple Releases IOS 4.3 Beta To Developers

m2pc writes "Apple has just released iOS 4.3 beta to developers. New features include: Developer access to AirPlay API, Four and Five-finger gestures, and the return of the hardware orientation lock for iPad, a feature that upset many when Apple suddenly removed this feature with no software option to re-enable it. Also interesting to note is the lack of mention of the Mobile Hotspot feature rumored to be included in 4.3 for all iOS devices by the Verizon announcement yesterday." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 01:19:

Winners of Mozilla Open Data Competition

An anonymous reader writes "Back in November, Mozilla Labs and the Metrics Team together launched the first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. While we set out to discover creative visual answers to the open question, "How do people use Firefox," we really didn't know what level of participation to expect from the Mozilla and data analysis communities. In fact, we were overwhelmed by both the number and quality of submissions – so much so that we had to give ourselves an extra few days to thoroughly review them. In all, we received 32 high-caliber submissions. The "visualizations' took a number of forms, from tools to easily query the data to interactive web applications. They also covered a broad range of important topics, from plugin memory consumption to user web activities." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-13 00:30:

How Open Source Might Finally Become Mainstream

geegel writes "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article on how autocracies are now embracing open source, while at the same promoting national based IT services. The author, Evgeny Morozov, paints a bleak future of the future World Wide Web." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 23:48:

Microsoft To Disable Windows Phone 7 Unlocking

Alex writes "In the first update to Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is planning to block ChevronWP7, which allowed users to unlock any retail Windows Phone 7 device for application side-loading without having to pay $99 per year for a WP7 marketplace account. The update, which is slated for release this month, will also introduce copy and paste functionality, among other improvements. ChevronWP7 was discontinued less than a week after its release about two months ago. ChevronWP7's three developers, Long Zheng, Rafael Rivera, and Chris Walsh were approached by Brandon Watson, Director of Developer Experience for Windows Phone 7, and decided to kill their app." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 23:02:

Pentagon Credit Union Database Compromised

Trailrunner7 writes "The credit union used by members of the U.S. armed forces and their families has admitted that a laptop infected with malware.was used to access a database containing the personal and financial information of customers. The Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed) issued a statement to the New Hampshire Attorney General that said data, including the names, addresses, Social Security Numbers and PenFed banking and credit card account information of its members were accessed by the infected PC." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 22:19:

NASA Pitches Heavy Lift Vehicle To Congress

BJ_Covert_Action writes "Well, Congress demanded, last year, that NASA develop a budget plan and proposal for a new heavy lift vehicle in light of the Ares V cancellation. Recently, NASA gave Congress just what they wanted. On January 11th, Douglas Cooke pitched an interim report to Congressional members detailing the basic design concepts that would go into a new heavy lift vehicle. Congress required that the new heavy lift vehicle maximize the reuse of space shuttle components as part of its budget battle with President Obama last year. As a result, NASA basically copy-pasted the Ares V design into a new report and pitched it to Congress on the 11th. The proposed vehicle will require the five segment SRB's that were proposed for the Ares V rocket. It will utilize the SSME's for it's main liquid stage. It will reuse the shuttle external tank as the primary core for the liquid booster (the same tank design that is currently giving the Discovery shuttle launch so many problems). And it will utilize the new J-2X engine that NASA has been developing for the Ares V project as an upper stage. In other words, NASA proposed to Congress exactly what Congress asked for." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 21:35:

Drupal 6: Panels Cookbook

J. Ayen Green writes "When the request came for me to review Drupal 6: Panels Cookbook by Bhavin (Vin) Patel, I was excited. I've been a software developer forever, a Web developer for as long as there's been a Web, and a Drupal developer since D6 was imminent. I have two Drupal books myself, and am working one about D7 Views, but with all that, one glaring hole in my self-education has been Panels; it would be my first chance to use it." Keep reading for the rest of J. Ayen Green's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 20:55:

AMBER Alert Partners With Facebook

wiredmikey writes "The AMBER Alert program, credited with the safe recovery of 525 children across the country, has a new ally today: Facebook. Facebook users are able to sign up to receive AMBER Alert bulletins for their state which will be sent to them through the Facebook 'News Feed' feature. An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing every year. AMBER Alert is a voluntary partnership involving law-enforcement agencies and broadcaster's. The new Facebook AMBER Alert pages represent an important expansion of the secondary distribution system and will enable AMBER Alerts to dramatically increase the reach of and impact of these life-saving bulletins." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 20:12:

Google Holds Global Science Fair

theodp writes "Google put out an APB Tuesday, looking for young Einstein and Curie wannabes for its new global online Google Science Fair (nice Rube Goldberg YouTube promo, btw). Students between the ages of 13-18 with access to a computer, the Net and a browser can compete for prizes that include a trip to the Galapagos Islands, scholarships, and a five-day trip to CERN. Google hasn't yet figured out a way to web-enable science fair boards, so projects like Crystal Meth — Friend or Foe will have to be created as Google Sites (example). Unlike a typical local school science fair, the judges here are the real deal, so you can forget about blaming scientifically-clueless students, parents and teachers for your loss this time, kids!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 19:37:

Jerry Brown Confiscates 48,000 Cell Phones

Hugh Pickens writes "The Sacramento Bee reports that California Governor Jerry Brown, in his first executive order since taking office, has ordered the collection and return of 48,000 state government-paid cell phones — half of those now in use - by June 1. 'It is difficult for me to believe that 40 percent of all state employees must be equipped with taxpayer-funded cell phones," says Brown in a written statement. "Some state employees, including department and agency executives who are required to be in touch 24 hours a day and seven days a week, may need cell phones, but the current number of phones out there is astounding.' Brown's cell phone order directs state agency and department heads to retrieve the cell phones and the governor says he plans to continue reducing cell phone usage in months ahead. 'In the face of a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, a cell phone may not seem like a big expense,' adds Brown. 'But spending $20 million, and perhaps far more than that, on cell phones can't be justified.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 18:52:

Program Uses GPS To Track Sex Offenders

43 sex offenders in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County are wearing GPS monitoring devices as part of a pilot program designed to keep track of their movements. If the offender moves into an "exclusion zone," police are called. “Exclusion zones for example [are] schools, daycares, playgrounds, facilities where children congregate for those sex offenders,” John Hudson, a security consultant, said. “We’ve identified in their red zones. If an offender with a device goes into one of the red zones, an exclusion zone, we’ll be notified immediately.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 18:48:

Goodbye Bifocals - Electronic Glasses Change Focus

kkleiner writes "Move over Ben Franklin, we finally have a replacement for bifocals. Virginia-based Pixel Optics has developed a composite lens that can change the range of focus electronically. The emPower! glasses were created in cooperation with Panasonic Healthcare, and allow you to switch between long distance and short distance vision in a split second. Rather than having a lens divided into two sections, emPower! uses an LCD overlay that can change the focal length of the glasses via electric current. When the LCD layer is off, your lenses are good for intermediate/long distances. Turn the LCD layer on, and a section of the lens is suddenly magnifying close-up images – perfect for reading." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 18:02:

Covert Video of Apple IPad 2 Just Released

An anonymous reader writes "This video has just been snuck out of the CES show in Las Vegas last week. Apparently this prototype iPad 2 was given to a Chinese iPad accessory manufacturer, presumably in order to help with their case designs for the launch of the iPad 2, rumored to be February 2011." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 17:18:

Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’

netbuzz writes "Facebook, Google and Yahoo are among the major sites on board with what the Internet Society is dubbing 'World IPv6 Day,' a collective trial scheduled for June 8. ``It's an exciting opportunity to take IPv6 for a test flight and try it on for a full 24 hours,'' says Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's Chief Internet Technology Officer. ``Hopefully, we will see positive results from this trial so we will see more IPv6 sooner rather than later.''" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 16:42:

Sony Closing Plant 18M/CD/Month Plant

coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 16:42:

Sony Closing 18M/CD/Month Plant

coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 16:00:

Wireless GeForce Graphics Card Announced

arcticstoat writes "PC gamers who are sick of being constantly distracted by whirring fans could now have a helping hand from a new wireless graphics card. Galaxy sub-brand KFA2 has announced a graphics card with no display outputs. Instead, the KFA2 GTX 460 WHDI uses a wireless link to send the display output from your PC to your screen, whether that's a conventional monitor or the HD TV in your lounge. You just need to attach the bundled receiver to the back of your chosen screen and you're done. With a wireless keyboard and mouse, you could place your PC at the other end of the room, letting you crank up those fans without having to listen to the whirring next to you." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 15:21:

Opera Supports Google Decision To Drop H.264

An anonymous reader follows up to yesterday's Google announcement that they would drop H.264 support from Chrome. "Thomas Ford, Senior Communications Manager, Opera, told Muktware, 'Actually, Opera has never supported H.264. We have always chosen to support open formats like Ogg Theora and WebM. In fact, Opera was the first company to propose the tag, and when we did, we did it with Ogg. Simply put, we welcome Google's decision to rely on open codecs for HTML5 video.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 14:42:

Autism-Vax Doc Scandal Was Pharma Business Scam

Sockatume writes "In his second report, Brian Deer exposes how MMR-autism prophet Andrew Wakefield aimed to profit from the vaccine scare. Two years before the research that "discovered" the MMR-autism link, Wakefield began courting interest in a hundred-million-dollar diagnostics firm. The doctor hoped to seed the company with government legal aid money and profit by charging "premium prices" for new diagnostic tests to be used in vaccine injury lawsuits. By the time Wakefield published, the proposals had expanded into producing new "safe" vaccines, two businesses to gather legal aid funding, and interest from partners including Wakefield's own hospital. The scheme ultimately disintegrated with the arrival of new leadership at Wakefield's hospital and ongoing scrutiny into his research." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 13:59:

Sony Files Lawsuit Against PS3 Hacker GeoHot

Kayot writes "George Hotz, or, as he is known on the internet, GeoHot, has been served court papers. Shorty after Team fail0verflow discovered faults in the PS3's TPMs, Geohot and others figured out how to extract the long sought after holy grail encryption keys. Apparently Sony is not pleased and is very keen on defending their poorly defended system with the US legal system. The basis is that GeoHot released programs that allow the signing of homebrew which can be used to make PSN-like games out of normal PS3 games. However GeoHot has never supported any form of piracy and in fact has taken a constant stance against it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 12:20:

ErgoSlider Offers a New Mouse Alternative

Zothecula writes "First achieving widespread use with the release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the humble computer mouse has reigned supreme as the digital pointing device of choice for more than 20 years. During this time it has seen off countless pretenders to the throne, as well as undergoing some useful (and otherwise) redesigns such as Apple's Magic Mouse, Microsoft's Arc, the 3D-Spheric-Mouse, the AirMouse and the Orbita. The latest product to take a shot at the title is the Ergo-Slider Plus+, a device that looks like a padded wrist rest, but with a cylinder at the front that rolls and slides in a special groove to move the onscreen cursor." It reminds me of the Isopoint pointing device in the long-passed Apple-compatible Outbound Laptop. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 09:39:

Interview With KDE On Windows Release Manager Patrick Spendrin

paugq writes "Last week KDE 4.5.4 was released for Windows as a late Christmas present from the KDE on Windows team. Almost at the same time BehindKDE, the site for interviews with KDE contributors, has started a new series of interviews with the 'Platforms' theme. In the first interview, Pau Garcia i Quiles talks with Patrick Spendrin, the current release manager of KDE on Windows and asks about the current status of the project, challenges and difficulties. In future interviews, Mac, Solaris, BSD (it's not dead, after all!), Haiku, OS/2 and more." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 08:04:

Verizon iPhone Could Double US Mobile Games Biz

donniebaseball23 writes "Earlier today, Verizon and Apple finally confirmed what everyone knew was coming: iPhone will soon launch on the Verizon network. The hugely popular iPhone has been a hit with gamers and game developers on the App Store, and by bringing the phone to the largest carrier in the US, the installed base suddenly could get much larger. The folks at social gaming network OpenFeint believe the Verizon iPhone impact could be immediately felt this year. 'The iPhone coming to Verizon is a highly anticipated event by the mobile gaming community,' said Peter Relan, chairman of OpenFeint. 'Adding 13 million more potential gamers on the iPhone is going to be a watershed moment for mobile gaming. I wouldn't be surprised if the US mobile gaming industry doubles in revenue this year because of this deal.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 06:41:

Microsoft Fights Apple Trademark On 'App Store'

angry tapir writes "Microsoft is asking the US Patent and Trademark Office to deny Apple a trademark on the name 'App Store,' saying the term is generic and competitors should be able to use it. Apple applied for the trademark in 2008 for goods and services including 'retail store services featuring computer software provided via the internet and other computer and electronic communication networks' and other related offerings." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 03:34:

Tunisian Gov't Spies On Facebook; Does the US?

jfruhlinger writes "Tunisians logging into Facebook encountered extra JavaScript, probably a sign of their repressive government's attempt to spy on them. The question is: does the US government do the same thing, just more subtly? We're not talking about agents friending you on Facebook to get more information about you; we're talking monitoring your supposedly private information behind the scenes." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 01:52:

MySpace Lays Off 47% of Employees

tgtanman writes "CNN reports that MySpace has announced that it has laid off 500 employees, 47% of its total staff. From the article: 'MySpace's management kept most of the site's developers but gutted nearly every other job role, according to a staffer who survived the cuts ... "Today's tough but necessary changes were taken in order to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability," CEO Mike Jones said in a written statement. "These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product."'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 00:58:

Google To Drop Support For H.264 In Chrome

Steve writes "Google just made a bold move in the HTML5 video tag battle: even though H.264 is widely used and WebM is not, the search giant has announced it will drop support for the former in Chrome. The company has not done so yet, but it has promised it will in the next couple of months. Google wants to give content publishers and developers using the HTML5 video tag an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their websites." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-12 00:11:

Spam Volume Spikes After Holiday Respite

Trailrunner7 writes "The amount of spam hitting users' inboxes fell off a cliff in late December, with many security experts attributing the decline to the sudden disappearance of the Rustock botnet and other networks from the spam business. But the level of spam has begun to gain back some of the ground it lost today as other spammers have taken up the slack. Researchers say that after the sudden drop-off in spam volumes, things stayed fairly quiet for a time, but now it seems that other spammers have picked up where Rustock and the other spamming operations left off. The volume of spam took a big jump upward in the last 24 hours, according to researchers at Websense. The volume of spam hasn't made it all the way back to the levels of the last few months of 2010, but it seems to be on the way." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 23:30:

How To Use a Real Guitar With Rock Band 3

wirelessdreamer writes "Using a real guitar, with a hex-aphonic pickup, and guitar synth rock band 3 pro guitar mode can be played NOW with a real guitar. Thanks to the game2midi project for makeing g2ghpro a multiplatform release. Selfless promotion as the submitter is the game2midi project lead :)" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 22:43:

Evolution of the Batmobile

I noticed this sweet graphic tracking the evolution of the batmobile that I just spent a fairly ridiculously long time staring at. I've read my share of batman, but there are tons of designs that I'd never seen. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 21:58:

Assange Could Face Execution Or Guantanamo Bay

An anonymous reader writes "WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange faces the real danger of being executed or languishing in the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay if, as a result of his extradition to Sweden, he ends up in the hands of the Americans, his lawyers argue. In a skeleton summary of Assange's defence, posted online, Assange's lawyers argue that it is likely that the US would seek his extradition 'and/or illegal rendition" from Sweden. In the United States "there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere,' his lawyers write." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 21:17:

In the Google Navy

theodp writes "Having already assembled a private Air Force, Google's top execs now seem to be turning their attention to building a personal Navy. At last count, CEO Eric Schmidt's wife had assembled a stable of three classic racing boats — the Swan 80 Selene, the 46-foot W-class Equus and the Alerion Mischief. Perhaps not to be outdone, the press is reporting that Google founder Larry Page just snapped up a $45 million superyacht called Senses from New Zealand businessman Sir Douglas Myers, who referred to the ostentatious-yet-awesome yacht as his 'adventure boat.' As Google likes to say, 'just the latest steps in Google's commitment to a clean and green energy future.' So, do Google execs eat their own carbon footprint calculator dogfood?" All I know is if Larry wants to go fishing, I'll bring bait- or he can come here and fish on Zen's pontoon boat. It only leaked once, the engine usually starts right up, and while there's no helipad, I'd love to watch someone try. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 20:25:

An Interview With C++ Creator Bjarne Stroustrup

DevTool writes "Bjarne Stroustrup talks about the imminent C++0x standard and the forthcoming features it brings, the difficulties of standardizing programming languages in general, the calculated risks that the standards committee can afford to take with new features, and even his own New Year's resolutions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 19:55:

Universities Collaborate on Air-Purifying Dress

ecouterran writes "From the ecouterre article: 'We have dresses to impress, for success, even to kill, but "Herself" must be the first drapery number to clear the air. A collaboration between the University of Sheffield, London College of Fashion, and the University of Ulster, the sweeping gown is part of a larger project to engage the public in the science of environmental pollution. "Catalytic Clothing" explores how textiles can improve ambient quality, and the self-described textile sculpture, is the first prototype to emerge. Highly experimental, according to the designers, "Herself" is designed to illustrate how fabrics can eliminate pollutants so we can "breathe more beautifully."'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 19:55:

Universities Collaborate On Air-Purifying Dress

ecouterran writes "From the ecouterre article: 'We have dresses to impress, for success, even to kill, but "Herself" must be the first drapery number to clear the air. A collaboration between the University of Sheffield, London College of Fashion, and the University of Ulster, the sweeping gown is part of a larger project to engage the public in the science of environmental pollution. "Catalytic Clothing" explores how textiles can improve ambient quality, and the self-described textile sculpture, is the first prototype to emerge. Highly experimental, according to the designers, "Herself" is designed to illustrate how fabrics can eliminate pollutants so we can "breathe more beautifully."'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 19:43:

Playmate Photo From Apollo 12 Up For Auction

Kilrah_il writes "When the Apollo 12 crew left Earth for a trip to the Moon, they did not know that the ground crew hid a surprise in one of the command module lockers: a calendar photo of Playboy Playmate DeDe Lind. Now this card is offered for auction, after being kept in the personal collection of command module pilot Richard Gordon, who added the following memo: 'This is to certify that the accompanying 4.5" x 6.25" cue card did, indeed, accompany me on my trip to the moon in the Command Module Yankee Clipper aboard the historic Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. This cue card, which flew with me to the moon, has been in my sole possession and part of my personal space collection since my return from the moon in 1969 aboard America's second lunar landing mission, and it remains one of the all-time greatest Apollo era astronaut "Gotcha's!"' For those interested, the minimum bid is $1000." Warning, contains pixelated nudity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 19:03:

How Do You Visualize 100 GB of Google Text Data?

An anonymous reader writes "There is an amazing series of charts that visualizes trigrams and bigrams, portions of sentences that have been extracted from Google's web data set. The graphs highlight word associations and the frequency with which we use them on web pages. Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon University found, for example, that the word 'he' is often tied to 'argues,' while 'she' is found often with 'loves.' There are also word-relation charts that highlight words used in combination with their opposites, such as good and bad, peace and war, and PC and Mac." There are a lot of these things, and they're really interesting to browse through. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 18:26:

ISPs Warn Europe - Website Blocks Don't Work

Mark.JUK writes "The European Internet Services Providers Association (EuroISPA) has today warned the European Union (EU) that plans aimed at tackling online child sexual abuse content, which propose to force ISPs into adopting mandatory website blocking (censorship) technology, will not work because such methods are easy to circumvent; an ISP might cover your eyes but anybody can still take the blindfold off. Instead the EuroISPA has called for MEP's to consider permanently removing internet based child sexual abuse content at source, although this also runs into problems when the servers are based outside of your jurisdiction." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 18:26:

ISPs Warn Europe — Website Blocks Don't Work

Mark.JUK writes "The European Internet Services Providers Association has today warned the European Union that plans aimed at tackling online child sexual abuse content, which propose to force ISPs into adopting mandatory website blocking (censorship) technology, will not work because such methods are easy to circumvent; an ISP might cover your eyes but anybody can still take the blindfold off. Instead the EuroISPA has called for members of Parliament to consider permanently removing Internet-based child sexual abuse content at source, although this also runs into problems when the servers are based outside of your jurisdiction." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 17:40:

Verizon Finally Unveils Apple iPhone

Velcroman1 writes "The most asked question in all of technology finally has an answer. When will Verizon get the iPhone? The answer: early next month. Verizon COO Lowell McAdam unveiled a new iPhone Tuesday during a presentation in New York that was short on surprises as most of the tech press already knew what was coming. "If the press writes about something long enough and hard enough, eventually it comes true," McAdam joked. Nevertheless, the move clears a major hurdle for Apple as they face increasing competition in smartphones, particularly from devices based on Google Inc.'s Android software which has exploded in popularity. Verizon's Lowell McAdam described the unveiling as a "great day for wireless customers across the U.S."" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 17:02:

Google Goggles Solves Sudoku

mikejuk writes "Ever been frustrated when you can't solve a Sudoku — well now there's an app for that. It is just one more capability in the latest version of Google Goggles. All you have to do is point your phone's camera at a Sudoku puzzle, take a snap and pattern recognition and a bit of game logic sorts out the answer. Have you ever had the feeling that AI is getting just a little be too commonplace?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 16:21:

Hubble Confirms Nature of Mysterious Green Blob

An anonymous reader writes "In 2007, Dutch secondary school biology teacher Hanny van Arkel spotted something mysterious in the night sky. Combing through Galaxy Zoo, an online database set up to enlist the public's help in classifying galaxies, she came across a glowing green smudge of light approximately 650 million light-years away. The object, which became known as Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for 'object'), is one of the most mysterious in the universe. Now, detailed Hubble Space Telescope images and new x-ray observations presented here today at the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society may finally confirm what it is." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 15:40:

Google ReCAPTCHA Cracked

stormdesign writes "Despite denials from Google, a security researcher continues to assert that the Search King's reCAPTCHA system for protecting Web sites from spammers can be successfully exploited by Internet junk mail panderers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 15:03:

Aussie City Braces For Worst Flood In 118 Years

aesoteric writes "As parts of the Australian state of Queensland either experience or prepare for the worst floods to ravage the state in over 100 years, Australia's techies have taken it upon themselves to keep communications services on as the crisis unfolds. One man is mirroring flood information from a faltering Brisbane City Council website, and others have opened WiFi channels in their neighbourhood whilst mobile signal gets choked. But there is major damage to telco networks — at least one major fibre link has been severed by flood waters, telephone exchanges have been knocked offline and cell towers put on battery or generator back-up (or offline altogether). On a sombre note, the floods have claimed 10 lives, including children, and 78 people are still missing after facing a torrent of water up to 8 metres (26 feet) high." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 14:17:

Thunderstorms Proven To Create Antimatter

radioweather writes "Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter from thunderstorms in the form of positrons hurled into space. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. 'These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams,' said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor team. He presented the findings at a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 12:36:

Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score

An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 11:09:

Record Labels To Pay For Copyright Infringement

innocent_white_lamb writes "Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit. 'The 2008 class action alleges that the record companies "exploited" music owners by reproducing and selling in excess of 300,000 song titles without securing licenses from the copyright owners and/or without paying the associated royalty payments. The record companies knowingly did so and kept a so-called "pending list" of unlicensed reproductions, setting aside $50 million for the issue, if it ever arose, court filings suggest.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 09:28:

Microsoft CEO Says Kinect To Support PCs Eventually

Ken writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that the company will support Kinect for PCs sometime in the future. The motion controller is currently only officially supported for the Xbox 360, although it has been hacked and tweaked to work on pretty much any platform that can be plugged into via a USB port. 'We're trying to move beyond gaming to include the world of socialization, movies, TV, music, and we're trying to make the whole experience accessible to everybody in the family not just the traditional gamer.' When Ballmer was asked, 'Will you plug-in the Kinect to the PC, will you go for that in the near future?' he replied, 'We'll support that in a formal way in the right time and when we've got an announcement to make we'll make it.' Note that this is completely separate from the Kinect-like controller from PrimeSense and Asus." Other readers have tipped related articles about Kinect being used to enable 3D teleconferencing and help drive a small helicopter drone. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 08:12:

T-Mobile Slashes Fair Use Policy, Says Download At Home

nk497 writes "T-Mobile in the UK has revealed a new fair use policy, cutting caps from 1GB and 3GB to 500MB, saying mobile browsing doesn't include videos or large downloads. 'If you want to download, stream and watch video clips, save that stuff for your home broadband,' the company said. All those people who have bought smartphones with the aim of doing such things on the go may not agree with the mobile operator, however. Any user that goes over the new limit won't be charged, but will be blocked from downloading or streaming for the rest of the month." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 06:07:

AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Resigns

angry tapir writes "Advanced Micro Devices has announced that Dirk Meyer has resigned from the post of CEO, and that the company is beginning to search for a new chief executive. Meyer resigned in a mutual agreement with the board of directors, and the company has appointed Thomas Seifert, the company's chief financial officer, as the interim CEO. Meyer was installed as CEO in 2008 as a replacement to Hector Ruiz, just as the company was making its way out of rough financial times. In October, AMD posted a third-quarter net loss of US$118 million." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 04:08:

Gulf Bacteria Quickly Digested Spilled Methane

masterwit writes "From an AAAS news release: 'Bacteria made quick work of the methane released by the Deepwater Horizon blowout, digesting most of the gas within the four months after its release, according to a new study published online at ScienceExpress.' This study, however, did not deal with other chemicals (oil) from the disaster's fallout. A glimpse of good news from the disaster's aftermath." Reader iamrmani points out a related article suggesting that things may be looking up for BP after the Presidential Commission said blame for the disaster should be shared with service contractors and government regulators. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 02:05:

NASA's Kepler Spots Its First Rocky Exoplanet

coondoggie writes "NASA today said its star-gazing satellite Kepler has identified its first rocky planet orbiting a sun similar to our own — 560 light years from our solar system. While not in an area of space considered habitable, the rocky planet known as Kepler-10b is never-the-less significant because it showcases the ability of Kepler to find and track such small exoplanetary movements. 'Kepler's ultra-precise photometer measures the tiny decrease in a star's brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it. The size of the planet can be derived from these periodic dips in brightness. The distance between the planet and the star is calculated by measuring the time between successive dips as the planet orbits the star. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone, the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the planet's surface. However, since it orbits once every 0.84 days, Kepler-10b is more than 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun and not in the habitable zone.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 01:22:

Microsoft Looking Into Windows Phone 7's 'Excessive' Data Use

phands writes "A few users are complaining that Windows Phone 7 is eating data plans alive. One user estimates idle data usage at 3-5 Mb per hour. Not good for a phone which seems to be struggling against Android and iPhone." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-11 00:39:

Verizon To Offer iPhone Users Unlimited Data

Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that Verizon Wireless, the country's largest wireless carrier, is confident enough in its network that it will offer unlimited data-use plans when it starts selling the iPhone around the end of this month, a person familiar with the matter says. Such plans would provide a key means of distinguishing its service from rival AT&T Inc., which limits how much Internet data its customers may use each month. Verizon has a lot at stake as it starts to carry the iPhone, which it is expected to announce Tuesday at an event in New York City. Verizon, more than any other US carrier, has built its reputation on its network quality, and any stumble in handling iPhone traffic will call into question Verizon's major selling point. On the other hand, if it does handle the iPhone well, then AT&T will have a harder time arguing it didn't mismanage its own network. Anthony J. Melone, Verizon's chief technology officer, says the company has invested heavily in its 3G network to handle surging smartphone traffic, including nine million Android subscribers, up from none a year earlier.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 23:55:

Intel To Pay NVIDIA Licensing Fees of $1.5 Billion

wiredmikey writes "NVIDIA and Intel have agreed to drop all outstanding legal disputes between them and Intel will pay NVIDIA an aggregate of $1.5 billion in licensing fees payable in five annual installments, beginning Jan. 18, 2011. Under the new agreement, Intel will have continued access to NVIDIA's full range of patents." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 23:14:

Microsoft Server and Tools Head Muglia To Step Down

snydeq writes "Longtime Microsoft executive Bob Muglia, president of the company's server and tools business, will step down from his position later this year, according to a Steve Ballmer memo issued Monday to company employees. Muglia has been with Microsoft for 23 years, leading development efforts in Microsoft Office, Windows NT and online services businesses. More recently, Muglia shepherded Microsoft's entry into cloud computing, guiding the rollout of the company's Azure platform. Muglia's departure follows that of Ray Ozzie, whose exit was made all the more notable by a memo warning Microsoft to start thinking beyond the PC." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 22:32:

Tevatron To Shut Down At End of 2011

universegeek writes "It appears Fermilab's Tevatron will be shutting down by the end of 2011. Rumors confirmed today at the ISP220 conference say that the DOE denied further funding for the project. Looks like the LHC is our only hope in the hunt for the Higgs after all." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 21:49:

Book Piracy — Less DRM, More Data

macslocum writes "Ambiguity surrounds the real impact of digital book piracy, notes Brian O'Leary in an interview with O'Reilly Radar, but all would be better served if more data was shared and less effort was exerted on futile DRM. 'The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers. And what those look like could be community-driven. I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn't put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers. As to sales, Paulo Coelho is a good example. He mines the piracy data to see if there's a burgeoning interest for his books in a particular country or market. If so, he either works to get his book out in print or translate it in that market.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 21:09:

Hospital Wireless Networks May Be Regulated Medical Devices

Lucas123 writes "As hospitals continue to connect patient monitoring equipment, physician PDAs and laptops to wireless networks, and then collapse those data paths onto traditional IT networks, the closer the US Food and Drug Administration comes to regulating them, according to Computerworld. The focus of the FDA's regulation comes in its recently finalized 80001-1 standard that established risk management practices for those networks, the adherence to which may be voluntary, but would determine Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements. 'If you don't comply, then you have two choices. You can have the federal government come in and inspect your hospital, or you can decide not to accept money from Medicare or Medicaid. Voluntary sometimes isn't exactly voluntary,' said Rick Hampton, wireless communications manager for Partners HealthCare System in Boston." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 20:28:

The Logical Leap: Induction In Physics

FrederickSeiler writes "When David Harriman, this book's author, was studying physics at Berkeley, he noticed an interesting contrast: 'In my physics lab course, I learned how to determine the atomic structure of crystals by means of x-ray diffraction and how to identify subatomic particles by analyzing bubble-chamber photographs. In my philosophy of science course, on the other hand, I was taught by a world-renowned professor (Paul Feyerabend) that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests. I knew little about epistemology [the philosophy of knowledge] at the time, but I could not help noticing that it was the physicists, not the voodoo priests, who had made possible the life-promoting technology we enjoy today.' Harriman noticed the enormous gulf between science as it is successfully practiced and science as is it described by post-Kantian philosophers such as Feyerabend, who are totally unable to explain the spectacular achievements of modern science." Read on for the rest of Frederick's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 19:46:

Mars Journal Issue Inspires Hundreds of One-Way Trip Volunteers

Velcroman1 writes "An interplanetary trip to Mars could take as little as 10 months, but returning would be virtually impossible — making the voyage a form of self-imposed exile from Earth unlike anything else in human history. What would inspire someone to volunteer? A special edition of the Journal of Cosmology detailed exactly how a privately-funded, one-way mission to Mars could depart as soon as 20 years from now — and it prompted more than 400 readers to volunteer as colonists. 'I've had a deep desire to explore the universe ever since I was a child and understood what a rocket was,' said Peter Greaves, the father of three, and a jack-of-all-trades who started his own motorcycle dispatch company and fixes computers and engines on the side. 'I envision life on Mars to be stunning, frightening, lonely, quite cramped and busy,' he said. Given the difficulties of the mission, Lana Tao, the editor of the Journal, said she was surprised by the response. 'At first we thought the e-mails were a joke... then we realized they were completely serious.'" Of course, they'd have to compete with the thousands of you who said you'd go. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 19:07:

Some WikiLeaks Contributions To Public Discourse

Hugh Pickens writes "The EFF argues that regardless of the heated debate over the propriety of the actions of WikiLeaks, some of the cables have contributed significantly to public and political conversations around the world. The Guardian reported on a cable describing an incident in Afghanistan in which employees of DynCorp, a US military contractor, hired a 'dancing boy,' an under-aged boy dressed as a woman, who dances for a gathering of men and is then prostituted — an incident that contributed important information to the debate over the use of private military contractors. A cable released by WikiLeaks showed that Pfizer allegedly sought to blackmail a Nigerian regulator to stop a lawsuit against drug trials on children. A WikiLeaks revelation that the United States used bullying tactics to attempt to push Spain into adopting copyright laws even more stringent than those in the US came just in time to save Spain from the kind of misguided copyright laws that cripple innovation and facilitate online censorship. An article by the NY Times analyzed cables released which indicated the US is having difficulties in fulfilling Obama's promise to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and is now considering incentives in return for other countries accepting detainees, including a one-on-one meeting with Obama or assistance with the IMF. 'These examples make clear that WikiLeaks has brought much-needed light to government operations and private actions,' writes Rainey Reitman, 'which, while veiled in secrecy, profoundly affect the lives of people around the world and can play an important role in a democracy that chooses its leaders.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 18:15:

Intel To Integrate DirectX 11 In Ivy Bridge Chips

angry tapir writes "Intel will integrate DirectX 11 graphics technology in its next generation of laptop and desktop chips based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, a company executive revealed at CES. AMD has already implemented DirectX 11 in its Fusion low-power chips. Intel expects to start shipping Ivy Bridge chips with DirectX 11 support to PC makers late this year. Ivy Bridge will succeed the recently announced Core i3, i5, and i7 chips, which are based on Intel's Sandy Bridge microarchitecture." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 17:29:

Browser Exploit Kits Using Built-In Java Feature

tsu doh nimh writes "Security experts from several different organizations are tracking an increase in Windows malware compromises via Java, although not from a vulnerability in Windows itself: the threat comes from a feature of Java that prompts the user to download and run a Java applet. Kaspersky said it saw a huge uptick in PCs compromised by Java exploits in December, but that the biggest change was the use of this Java feature for social engineering. Brian Krebs writes about this trend, and looks at two new exploit packs that are powered mainly by Java flaws, including one pack that advertises this feature as an exploit that works on all Java versions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 16:39:

Disempowering the Singular Sysadmin?

An anonymous reader writes "Practically every computer system appears to be at the mercy of at least one individual who holds root (or whatever other superuser identity can destroy or subvert that system). However, making a system require multiple individuals for any root operation (think of the classic two-key process to launch a nuke) has shortcomings: simple operations sometimes require root, and would be enormously cumbersome if they needed a consensus of administrators to execute. There is the idea of a Distributed Administration Network, which is like a cluster of independently administered servers, but this is a limited case for deployment of certain applications. And besides, DAN appears still to be vaporware. Are there more sweeping yet practical solutions out there for avoiding the weakness of a singular empowered superuser?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 15:48:

FreeBSD Running On PS3

An anonymous reader writes "One week after Sony's PlayStation 3 private cryptography key was obtained, FreeBSD is up and running on the PS3. Nathan Whitehorn writes: 'Yesterday, I imported support for the Sony Playstation 3 into our 64-bit PowerPC port, expanding our game console support into the current generation. There are still a few rough edges due to missing hardware support, but the machine boots and runs FreeBSD stably. These rough edges should be smoothed out in time for the 9.0 release.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 14:58:

Hosting Company Appears To Be Violating the GPL

palegray.net writes "A web hosting provider called Appnor has recently moved the network diagnostics utility WinMTR off of SourceForge, and is now claiming the program to be a closed source, commercial application (it was previously made available under the GPL). I emailed the current maintainer of the original mtr utility about this, and have been informed that this event most likely constitutes an overt GPL violation, as it is presumed that WinMTR contains mtr code. Appnor claims that they have the right to do this, as there have been no external contributions to WinMTR in over ten years. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think copyright law works that way." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 14:08:

Anonymous Organizes Global Protests For WikiLeaks

pafein writes "Internet collective Anonymous launched a global protest for January 15 in support of beleaguered WikiLeaks. Anonymous has a history of defending Internet freedom, beginning with Project Chanology against the Church of Scientology. The group gained recent attention for itself with DDOS attacks on Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and the government of Tunisia." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 10:57:

Scientists Advocate Replacing Cattle With Insects

rhettb writes "Scientists in the Netherlands have discovered that insects produce significantly less greenhouse gas per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs. Their study, published in the online journal PLoS, suggests that a move towards insect farming could result in a more sustainable — and affordable — form of meat production." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 08:11:

Consumer Genetic Testing Available In Australia

Megaport writes "After the banning of direct-to-consumer genetic testing in Australia last July, new rules were imposed to require a physician to be involved in the process. Now a new Australian start-up, Lumigenix, has launched a genome decoding service for Australian (and global) consumers that meets the new regulatory requirements. Their products include genetic testing for health and ancestry information. The Australian government is planning to revisit the issue later this year and further regulation is anticipated in response to the emergence of direct-to-consumer genetic services." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 05:22:

UK Targets Twitter and Blog Endorsements

krou writes "The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is cracking down on 'Twitter users and bloggers using their online presence to endorse products and companies without clearly stating their relationship with the brand.' They described such endorsements, including 'comments about services and products on blogs and microblogs such as Twitter,' as 'deceptive' under fair trading rules. While the US Federal Trade Commission already requires such endorsements to be labelled with 'ad' or 'spon,' the UK doesn't have any such requirement. In relation to this, the OFT has launched an investigation into Handpicked Media, because the OFT is 'insisting that it must clearly state when promotional comments have been paid for.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 03:06:

Black Holes May Mature Early In Galaxy Evolution

masterwit writes "From Scientific American: 'An accidental find in a star-forming dwarf galaxy shows that black holes may mature early in galaxy evolution' also 'if giant black holes in star-forming dwarf galaxies prove to be common—that is, if Henize 2-10 is not an outlier but a representative of a larger population—they may have much to tell about the formation of primordial black holes and galaxies in the early universe.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 01:59:

Scientists Find Tears Are the Anti-Viagra

An anonymous reader writes "The male test subjects didn't know what they were smelling, they were just given little vials of clear liquid and told to sniff. But when those vials contained a woman's tears (collected while she watched a sad movie), the men rated pictures of women's faces as less sexually attractive, and their saliva contained less testosterone. Is this proof that humans make and respond to pheromones? The researcher behind the study doesn't use that controversial word, but he says his findings do prove that tears contain meaningful chemical messages." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-10 01:18:

Twitter Fights US Court For WikiLeaks Details

An anonymous reader writes "Micro-blogging site Twitter is opposing an order from a US court, to reveal the account details of supporters of WikiLeaks. Twitter has called on Facebook and Google to reveal whether they also received similar court orders. As part of the US government's investigation into WikiLeaks, a court ordered Twitter, in mid-December, to give details of accounts owned by supporters of the whistle-blower site. Twitter has protested against the subpoena and informed the individuals whose account information has been requested, while raising the possibility that other social networking players have received similar orders." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 23:30:

EMC Engineer Steals Almost $1 Million of Kit One Piece at a Time

aesoteric writes "An EMC test engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing almost $1 million worth of kit from his employer. He reportedly stole the unspecified goods from the storage giant's North Carolina factory using 'a small bag' to smuggle the kit out before selling it on the internet under a pseudonym." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 21:51:

Pot Grower's Privacy Challenged

damaged_sectors writes "A map marking what are supposed to be secret locations of 60 warehouses and other buildings where medical marijuana is grown in Boulder has accidentally been made public by the city. Officials say an 'oversight' led them to publish the map on the city's Web site. Kathy Haddock, Boulder's senior assistant city attorney who advises the council on medical marijuana issues, said Thursday that the map would be removed from the city's Web site. No conspiracy here folks. In other news the council will decide at its Jan. 18 meeting whether Boulder should circumvent the open records act exemption for cultivation centers by requiring applicants for medical marijuana business licenses to waive their right to privacy. The council could force all growing centers to sign such a waiver as a condition of receiving a city-issued business license. While the risk this would make it easier for Federal authorities to raid grow-ops might not concern council members and others opposed to medical marijuana — I have to wonder what sort of mentality thinks exposing growers to the very real risk of armed robbery by criminals is justifiable." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 20:10:

New Laser Makes Pirates Wish They Wore Eye-Patches

vieux schnock writes "The New Scientist has an article about a new laser developed by a company in Farnborough, UK, that aims to deter modern high-seas pirates. Devised as a 'warning shot' to 'distract suspected pirates rather than harm them,' the meter-wide bean can scan the pirates' 6-metre skiffs and make it difficult for them to aim their AK-47 or rocket-propelled grenades at the ship." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 18:31:

Vodafone Customer Database Breached

beaverdownunder writes "Vodafone has confirmed it believes its secure customer database has been breached by an employee or dealer who has shared the access password, revealing the personal details of millions of customers...According to Fairfax newspapers, 'criminal groups are paying for the private information of some customers including home addresses and credit card details.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 16:02:

US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks, Is Leaked

Jake writes "The US government's 11-page document on how to get various US government agencies to prevent future leaks has been leaked. It doesn't get any more ironic than that. After the various leaks made by WikiLeaks, the US government understandably wants to limit the number of potential leaks, but their strategy apparently isn't implemented yet. It's clear that the Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive steps to prevent further leaks. According to the document, these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness. The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 16:02:

US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked

Jake writes "The US government's 11-page document on how to get various US government agencies to prevent future leaks has been leaked. It doesn't get any more ironic than that. After the various leaks made by WikiLeaks, the US government understandably wants to limit the number of potential leaks, but their strategy apparently isn't implemented yet. It's clear that the Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive steps to prevent further leaks. According to the document, these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness. The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 14:14:

Is Mark Zuckerberg the Next Steve Case?

theodp writes "With all signs for Facebook pointing up, author Douglas Rushkoff goes contra, arguing that Facebook hype will fade. 'Appearances can be deceiving,' says Rushkoff. 'In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.' Rushkoff, who made a similar argument about AOL eleven years ago in a quashed NY Times op-ed, reminds us that AOL was also once considered ubiquitous and invincible, and former AOL CEO Steve Case was deemed no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg. 'So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won,' concludes Rushkoff. 'It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 11:11:

Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse

matty619 writes "An Information Week article warns that the computer systems that run the Social Security Administration may collapse by 2012 due to increased workload, and a half-billion-dollar upgrade won't be ready until 2015. One of the biggest problems is the agency's transition to a new data center, according to a report (PDF) by the SSA's Inspector General. The IG has characterized the replacement of the SSA's National Computer Center — built in 1979 — as the SSA's 'primary IT investment' in the next few years." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 08:05:

Aussie Team Smashes Land Speed Record For Solar-Powered Cars

snowdon writes "A record which has stood since 1987, set by General Motors, has been broken (YouTube video) by a university team. The land speed record for a solar powered car was 78km/h, and now stands at 88km/h despite the cloudy conditions... If only Doc Brown had used the metric system!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 04:59:

Android Passes iPhone In US Market Share

Adrian writes "61.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in November 2010, up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period. For the first time, more Americans are using phones running Google's Android operating system than Apple's iPhone, but RIM's BlackBerry is still in first place, according to comScore. RIM fell from 37.6 percent to 33.5 percent market share of smartphones, Google captured second place among smartphone platforms by moving from 19.6 percent to 26.0 percent of US smartphone subscribers, and Apple slipped to third despite its growth from 24.2 percent to 25.0 percent of the market. Microsoft, in fourth place, fell into single digits from 10.8 percent to 9.0 percent while Palm was still last and further slipped from 4.6 percent to 3.9 percent." This is no unexpected, since Android sales have been outpacing iPhone sales for some time, but it happened significantly earlier than Gartner's prediction: Q4 2012. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 01:55:

Internet Downloading Costs To Rise In Canada

An anonymous reader writes "According to CBC News, 'Surfing and downloading from the internet is about to get more expensive for many Canadians as internet companies Shaw and Primus have announced plans to impose new fees and caps on internet usage. Over the past year, the CRTC, Canada's communication regulator, let Bell and Rogers start charging extra for customers who download a lot of data. ... Primus and Shaw have said they will begin passing on higher fees to their customers beginning Feb. 1. Primus, for example, rents bandwidth on Bell's networks and said Bell is inflating the costs for everyone, including them. 'It's an economic disincentive for internet use,' said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus. 'It's not meant to recover costs. In fact these charges that Bell has levied are many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-09 00:35:

Thieves in South Africa Hit Traffic Lights For SIM Cards

arisvega writes "Some 400 high-tech South African traffic lights are out of action after thieves in Johannesburg stole the mobile phone SIM cards they contain. JRA (Johannesburg Road Agency) said it is investigating the possibility of an 'inside job' after only the SIM card-fitted traffic lights were targeted. The cards were fitted to notify JRA when the traffic lights were faulty. 'We have 2,000 major intersections in Johannesburg and only 600 of those were fitted with the cards,' the agency's spokesperson Thulani Makhubela told the BBC. 'No-one apart from JRA and our supplier knows which intersections have that system.' The thieves ran up bills amounting to thousands of dollars by using the stolen cards to make calls." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 23:18:

The Moon Has a Fluid Outer Core

mapkinase writes with this excerpt from Discovery News: "The Apollo Passive Seismic Experiment recorded motions of the ground from moonquakes and other activities generating sound waves until late 1977. The network was too limited to directly monitor waves bouncing off or scattered by the moon's core, leaving scientists dependent on more indirect techniques, such as measuring minute gravitational changes, to craft a picture of the moon's interior. Those models turned out to be pretty accurate, says lead scientist Renee Weber, with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The new research confirms the existence of a solid inner core and liquid outer layer, similar to Earth's. Unlike Earth, the moon also has a partly melted, mushy layer over that." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 22:01:

When Should I Buy an Android Tablet?

jpyeck writes "I've deliberately avoided the smartphone craze, due to the fact I've never utilized any phone (landline or otherwise) enough to justify the monthly fees. But the geek in me craves the 'smart' part of the equation, especially since I got a bonus this year-end that is burning a hole in my pocket. The iPad is out of the question because I need a bit more hack-ability in my gadgets. I am drooling over the Android Honeycomb demo from the CES. I've had my eye on the Galaxy Tab, though it sounds like it won't support Honeycomb. The Xoom looks great, but who knows when it will come out? The consensus seems to be 'wait a few months for Honeycomb.' If you were me, with limited patience, would you buy an Android tablet now? If so, which?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 20:50:

Congresswoman and Staff Gunned Down

tkprit writes "What a shame that a Congresswoman makes herself available to her constituents and she and six of her staff were gunned down for the effort. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot and killed, along with members of her staff, for trying to hear the concerns of the people she represents." CNN reports that at least 12 people were shot by the gunman. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 20:08:

Are You Ready For the Digital Afterlife?

theodp writes "Dave Winer's call for Future-Safe Archives goes mainstream in Rob Walker's NY Times Magazine cover story on how the Internet can provide a certain kind of immortality to those who are prepared. To illustrate how digital afterlives might play out, Walker cites the case of 34-year-old writer Mac Tonnies, who updated his blog on Oct. 18, 2009, sent out some public tweets and private messages via Twitter, went to bed and died of cardiac arrhythmia. As word of his death spread via his own blog, Tonnies's small, but devoted audience rushed in to save his online identity. 'Finding solace in a Twitter feed may sound odd,' writes Walker, 'but the idea that Tonnies's friends would revisit and preserve such digital artifacts isn't so different from keeping postcards or other physical ephemera of a deceased friend or loved one.' Unfortunately, how long Mac Tonnies's digital afterlife will remain for his Web friends and parents is still a big question, since it's preserved in a hodge-podge of possibly gone-tomorrow online services for which no one has the passwords. Hoping to fill the need for digital-estate-planning services are companies like Legacy Locker, which are betting that people will increasingly want control over their digital afterlife. 'We're entering a world where we can all leave as much of a legacy as George Bush or Bill Clinton,' says filmmaker-and-friend-of-Tonnies Paul Kimball. 'Maybe that's the ultimate democratization. It gives all of us a chance at immortality.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 18:56:

BP Gulf of Mexico Rig Lacked Alarm Systems

DMandPenfold writes "BP's monitoring IT systems on the failed Deepwater Horizon oil rig relied too heavily on engineers following complex data for long periods of time, instead of providing automatic warning alerts. That is a key verdict of the Oil Spill Commission, the authority tasked by President Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico disaster." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 17:40:

Apache To Steward NASA-Built Middleware

itwbennett writes "The Apache Software Foundation announced Wednesday that the Object-Oriented Data Technology (OODT), first developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has graduated to a top level project. The software 'provides a one-stop toolkit for building up a database, populating a database, setting up a work flow to get data into that database, and then serving out lots of different content from that database,' said Chris Mattmann, vice president of the OODT project. NASA uses the software to manage data from multiple domains, including astrophysics, earth carbon monitoring and land-water use. The National Cancer Institute also uses the software for its Daily Detection Research Network, which ties together multiple cancer research databases." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 16:26:

Major Security Flaws Discovered In Internet HDTVs

wiredmikey writes "Security researchers have discovered several security flaws in one of the best-selling brands of Internet-connected HDTVs, and believe it's likely that similar security flaws exist in other Internet TVs. The security researchers were able to demonstrate how an attacker could intercept transmissions from the television to the network using common 'rogue DNS,' 'rogue DHCP server,' or TCP session hijacking techniques. Mocana was able to demonstrate that JavaScript could then be injected into the normal datastream, allowing attackers to obtain total control over the device's Internet functionality." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 15:11:

Obama Eyeing Internet ID For Americans

Pickens writes "CBS News reports that the Obama administration is currently drafting the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which will be released by the president in the next few months. 'We are not talking about a national ID card,' says Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department will be in charge of the program. 'We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.' Although details have not been finalized, the 'trusted identity' may take the form of a smart card or digital certificate that would prove online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions. White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt says that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. 'I don't have to get a credential if I don't want to,' says Schmidt. There's no chance that 'a centralized database will emerge,' and 'we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 13:58:

WikiLeaks Supporters' Twitter Accounts Subpoenaed

HJED writes "The US Justice Department has served Twitter with a subpoena for the personal information and private messages of WikiLeaks supporters. There's a copy of the subpoena here (PDF); boing boing has a detailed article. Twitter has 3 days to turn over the information." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 11:00:

Google Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police

bonch writes "South Korean police say Google was in violation of Internet privacy laws when its Street View service archived private information in more than 30 countries, including email and text messages. The country's Cyber Terror Response Center broke the encryption on hard drives raided from Google last August and confirmed that private information had been gathered, violating South Korea's telecommunications laws. Police are seeking the original author of the program, though they say it is likely to be a US citizen. Google said it stopped collecting the information as soon as it realized what was happening. 40 states in the US are demanding access to the information gathered by the mapping service in order to determine what was archived, which Google refused to hand over. 'We have been cooperating with the Korean Communications Commission and the police, and will continue to do so,' said a Google Korea spokesperson." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 07:53:

OLPC Halves Power Consumption For XO 1.75

angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has reduced the price of the next version of its notebook to US$165 and power consumption has been slashed by half compared to the previous version. The XO-1.75, with its 8.9-inch touchscreen, will start shipping in the second quarter of this year." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 04:51:

US Revamps NIST's Standard-Setting Efforts

coondoggie writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been given new marching orders: expand work with the private sector to develop standards for a range of key technologies such as cloud computing, emergency communications and tracking, green manufacturing and high performance green building construction. NIST could also see its core science and technology budget double by 2017. NIST has also cut the number of labs it runs to 6 from 10. NIST labs now include, engineering, physical measurement, information technology, material measurement, the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the NIST Center for Neutron Research." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 04:36:

Cedega Being Replaced By GameTree Linux

An anonymous reader writes "TransGaming Cedega, the software forked from Wine that allows running Windows games under Linux, is being discontinued and replaced by TreeGame Linux. This new software is also free. From the new website: 'TransGaming is pleased to announce the continued development of Cedega Technology under the GameTree Developer Program. This repositioning of the technology that powered the Cedega Gaming Service will allow the entire Linux community to gain free access going forward. Cedega is a cross-platform enablement technology that allows for Windows-native games to be executed on both the Linux desktop and embedded Linux platforms.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 02:07:

Sandy Bridge Motherboards Dissected, Compared

crookedvulture writes "As we've learned, Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs are pretty impressive. If you're going to build yourself a system with one, you'll need a new motherboard with an 1155-pin socket. The Tech Report has an in-depth look at four such boards based on Intel's P67 Express chipset. Although the boards offer identical application performance, there are notable differences between their power consumption and the speed of onboard peripherals like USB 3.0 and Serial ATA ports. Some implement the new UEFI BIOS framework while others do not, and the quality of those implementations varies quite a bit. Recommended reading for anyone thinking about rolling their own desktop with one of Intel's latest CPUs." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 01:16:

Apple Pulls VLC Media Player From AppStore

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has removed VLC media player from the AppStore, putting an end to the controversy on the license (in)compatibilities. Indeed, the iTunes page for VLC media player stopped working: VLC developer Rémi Denis-Courmont notes that he is 'not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-08 00:37:

It's Surprisingly Hard To Notice When Moving Objects Change

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at Harvard have found that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. In a paper published yesterday (PDF) in Current Biology, the researchers present a new visual illusion that 'causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.' The finding has implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 23:56:

Study Says Software Engineers Have the Best US Jobs

D H NG writes "According to a new study by CareerCast.com, software engineers have the best jobs of 2011 in the United States, based on factors such as income, working environment, stress, physical demands and job outlook, using Labor Department and Census data. Mid-level software engineers make between $87,000 and $132,000 a year, putting them in the top 25% of the 200 professions studied by income. Software engineers beat out last year's number one job, actuary, which came in third, behind mathematician." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 23:36:

LotR Online's Free-To-Play Switch Tripled Revenue

Last June, Turbine made the decision to switch Lord of the Rings Online from a subscription-based business model to a free-to-play model supported by microtransactions. In a podcast interview with Ten Ton Hammer, Turbine executives revealed that the switch has gone well for the company, with game revenues roughly tripling. The active player base has also grown significantly in that time. Executive Producer Kate Paiz said, "This really echoes a lot of what we've seen throughout the entertainment industry in general. It's really about letting players make their choices about how they play." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 23:18:

Should Dolphins Be Treated As Non-Human Persons?

Hugh Pickens writes "Dolphins have long been recognized as among the most intelligent of animals, but now the Times reports that a series of behavioral studies suggest that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self, can think about the future and are so bright that they should be treated as 'non-human persons.' 'Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,' says Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University. 'The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions.' For example, one study found that dolphins can recognize their image in a mirror as a reflection of themselves — a finding that indicates self-awareness similar to that seen in higher primates and elephants. Other studies have found that dolphins are capable of advanced cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, artificial language comprehension, and complex social behavior, indicating that dolphins are far more intellectually and emotionally sophisticated than previously thought. Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, claiming that the current relationship between humans and dolphins is, in effect, equivalent to the relationship between whites and black slaves two centuries ago." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 22:38:

Microsoft Lays Claim To Patent On 'Fans'

theodp writes "A USPTO filing made public Thursday reveals that Microsoft is seeking a patent for something it calls 'One-Way Public Relationships' in social networks and other online properties, lawyer-speak for what's more commonly known as being a 'fan' of something online. It's unclear whether it's a goof on Apple, but Microsoft curiously used the example of a U2 fan named Steve to explain its 'invention' to the USPTO. Purported patent reformer Microsoft, which has called for the US to change from a first-to-invent patent system to a first-to-file system, filed the patent application in July 2009. Microsoft is a partner with and investor in Facebook, which first established its fan pages back in November 2007." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 21:55:

In-Car Technology Becoming More Important Than Horsepower

Gunkerty Jeb writes "It seems, and I think a lot of people have prophesied this for some time, that in-car features like internet radio and assisted driving technologies are surpassing horsepower, handling and design as automotive selling points. I just hope manufacturers have put in the time to consider all the security dangers that exist in owning internet synthesized cars." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 21:14:

Russian Team Prepares To Penetrate Lake Vostok

Lanxon writes "Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometers below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it's been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It's also oligotropic, meaning that it's supersaturated with oxygen — levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 20:35:

California County Bans SmartMeter Installations

kiwimate writes "Marin County in California has passed an ordinance (PDF) banning the installation of smart meters in unincorporated Marin. Among the reasons given are privacy concerns associated with measuring energy usage data moment by moment and the potential for adverse impact on emergency communication systems used by first responders and amateur radio operators. The ordinance also comments that 'the SmartMeters program ... could well actually increase total electricity consumption and therefore the carbon footprint,' citing 'some engineers and energy conservation experts.'" The ordinance also mentions "significant health questions" raised about "increased electromagnetic frequently radiation (EMF) emitted by the wireless technology in SmartMeters." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 19:53:

College Students Lack Scientific Literacy

An anonymous reader writes with news of research into the scientific literacy of college biology students. Earlier studies found that students tended to "rely on mainly informal reasoning derived from their personal experiences," so the researchers derived a new instructional framework that explicitly taught principle-based reasoning. While the number of students who used this method did increase, more than half continued to use informal reasoning, which the researchers say points to a flaw in the way biology is taught (PDF). "Most college-level instruction presents students with complicated narratives about the details of key processes (e.g., cellular respiration), but does not explicitly reinforce the use of key principles to connect those processes. Therefore, students are understandably occupied with memorizing details of processes without focusing on the principles that govern and connect the processes. ... As a result, students may leave an introductory biology course with the ability to recite the reactions in the Calvin cycle but still believing that plants obtain most of their mass from the soil rather than from the atmosphere, that plants photosynthesize but do not respire, or that the mass of a decomposing organism will primarily return to the soil." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 19:45:

6 Homeless People Saved By the Internet

An anonymous reader writes "With Ted Williams's story (the homeless man with the golden voice, saved by the internet) blowing up online, and in the traditional media, we figured it was time to tell the stories of 5 other homeless people who've found success, be it financial or personal, through the wonderful use of this series of tubes we call The Internet." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 19:10:

Hypersonic Radio Black-Out Problem Solved

KentuckyFC writes "Russian physicists have come up with a new way to communicate with hypersonic vehicles surrounded by a sheath of plasma. Ordinarily, this plasma absorbs and reflects radio waves at communications frequencies, leading to a few tense minutes during the re-entry of manned vehicles such as the shuttle. However, the problem is even more acute for military vehicles such as ballistic missiles and hypersonic planes. Radio blackout prevents these vehicles from accessing GPS signals for navigation and does not allow them to be re-targeted or disarmed at the last minute. But a group of Russian physicists say they can get around this problem by turning the entire plasma sheath into a radio antenna. They point out that any incoming signal is both reflected and absorbed by the plasma. The reflected signal is lost but the absorbed energy sets up a resonating electric field at a certain depth within the plasma. In effect, this layer within the plasma acts like a radio antenna, receiving the signal. However, the signal cannot travel further through the plasma to the spacecraft." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 18:28:

Facebook's Revenues Leaked

eldavojohn writes "Think that Goldman Sachs spent too much on Facebook with the $450 million investment? Well, a very wealthy customer of theirs decided to leak Facebook's financials yesterday after receiving it over lunch: '... during the first nine months of 2010, Facebook generated $1.2 billion in revenue. Net income at the firm was $355 million. The financial statements were not audited and offered little detail about how Facebook generates its revenue, said the source, who did not want to be identified because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement.' Expanding this nine-month period to a year yields $1.6 billion in revenue and under half a billion in income. Given that, should Facebook be valuated at $50 billion?" Reader frontwave adds news that other social tech companies are hurriedly considering IPOs of their own. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 17:48:

Honeywell To Sell Miami-Dade Police a Surveillance Drone

AHuxley writes "The Miami-Dade Police Department recently finalized a deal to buy a 20-pound drone from defense firm Honeywell. The drone can fly for 40 minutes, reach heights of 10,500 feet and cruise in the air at 46 miles an hour. As the Miami-Dade Police Department has recently made a lot of budget cuts, the funding may have come from a federal grant. An eye in the sky like over Iraq and Afghanistan may soon be looking down over South Florida 'to keep people safe.' Honeywell has applied to the FAA for clearance to fly the drone in urban areas." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 17:26:

AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has just released their open-source driver for the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards (sans the Cayman GPUs) with KMS, 2D, and 3D acceleration." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 17:26:

DIY FireHero Project

If you have a propane tank, an ultrasonic sensor, a copy of Guitar Hero and a touch of pyromania, this is the project for you. From the article: "For version 1 of FireHero, the player simply watches a video of the guitar hero chart and plays on the guitar accordingly. Version 2 of FireHero will have a much better system, with Autoplay functionality. I will be able to take a custom guitar hero chart, convert it into a MIDI file, and use Processing to analyze it and play FireHero to the track." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 17:06:

Intel Insider DRM Risks Monopoly Investigations

Blacklaw writes "Intel's Sandy Bridge line of processors is impressing the tech community with its power, but a sneaky little feature designed to appease Hollywood has some concerned about Intel's intentions: Intel Insider. If a major video streaming service, such as Lovefilm or the US-based Hulu, were to implement Intel Insider technology on their movie streams — as a way of convincing Hollywood to release films sooner and in high definition without worrying about piracy — it would mean that only those who use Intel's very latest Sandy Bridge CPUs would be able to stream movies. Not only would those using older Intel chips that don't support the technology be cut off from the service, but those on systems featuring CPUs from rival manufacturers such as AMD and low-power specialist VIA would also be excluded." In a blog post about this new feature, Intel denies that it is DRM. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 16:25:

'SMS of Death' Could Crash Many Mobile Phones

space_in_your_face writes "Research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers. Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications, a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. The trick works for handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 15:45:

Star Wars Coming To Blu-ray In September

wiredog writes "A bundle of all six movies will sell for $139.99, while sets of the original three films, and the three prequels, will go for $69.99 apiece. Obsessive types can pre-order them on Amazon now. Han shot first!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 14:54:

Mac App Store Apps Already Hacked

Stoobalou writes "The Mac App Store has only been open for 24 hours but methods for circumventing Apple's DRM are already hitting the Web." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 14:03:

Bufferbloat — the Submarine That's Sinking the Net

gottabeme writes "Jim Getty, one of the original X Window System developers and editor of the HTTP/1.1 spec, has posted a series of articles on his blog detailing his research on the relatively unknown problem of bufferbloat. Bufferbloat is affecting the entire Internet, slowly worsening as RAM prices drop and buffers enlarge, and is causing latency and jitter to spike, especially for home broadband users. Unchecked, this problem may continue to deteriorate the usability of interactive applications like VOIP and gaming, and being so widespread, will take years of engineering and education efforts to resolve. Being like 'frogs in heating water,' few people are even aware of the problem. Can bufferbloat be fixed before the Internet and 3G networks become nearly unusable for interactive apps?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 12:28:

Atari Loses Copyright Suit Against RapidShare

dotarray writes "Online copyright lawsuits aren't all about music. Video game publisher Atari Europe recently became concerned that copies of its game Alone in the Dark were floating around one-click file-hosting service RapidShare, so it took the hosting company to court. While they won the initial case, the decision was overturned on appeal, finding that RapidShare is doing nothing wrong." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 11:10:

BBC Astronomer Misses Meteor During Live Show

krou writes "BBC astronomer Mark Thompson wasn't having a good night for the BBC's Stargazing Live show. He turned to the camera to complain of poor cloud visibility and a lack of activity in the sky ... only for a meteor to shoot past in the background. A rather sheepish Thompson said, 'I must admit I was oblivious to it. I think I'm probably the only person in the entire country who didn't see it.' (YouTube video of the original live footage)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 09:43:

Razer Unveils Portable Gaming Device Concept

MerelyASetback writes "Razer has shown a new concept for a gaming device that uses a pair of 7-inch multitouch displays as well as a layer of tactile, dynamic keys on the lower screen. Much like the Optimus Maximus of yesteryear, this keyboard would enable gamers to place different screens underneath depending on the title, and even within a game — you could imagine the keys shifting to account for different POVs, levels, scenarios, etc. Internally, the concept is based around an Intel Atom processor, but there's no word on what kind of GPU would work alongside of it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 08:02:

Aussie Retailers Lobby For Tax On Online Purchases

An anonymous reader writes "Major Australian retailers are running a print advertising campaign to get the government to decrease the amount where the Goods and Services tax (Australian aales tax) comes into effect for all online purchases. Currently, the tax free amount is at $1000 AUD for online purchases. The retailers, such as Target, Harvey Norman, David Jones, Myer and other retailers are lobbying through newspapers and are considering launching a television commercial. The print adverts are claiming that if the amount remains the same, Australian jobs will be lost and the economy will be harmed. This is facing a massive backlash from consumers, and the government's assistant treasurer said it was an action by stores to fix the issues affecting them." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 04:50:

Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502

trebonian writes "For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 (used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES), the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: 'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) "transistor circuit" simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 01:47:

The Guardian's Complicated Relationship With Julian Assange

Sonny Yatsen writes "Vanity Fair has published an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the unlikely and tumultuous working relationship between Wikileak's Julian Assange and The Guardian as the Iraq War Logs were being published. The piece highlights the differences and conflicts between the Guardian's journalistic standards and Wikileak's transparency. Particularly interesting is the revelation that Julian Assange threatened to sue The Guardian if they publish a portion of Iraq War Logs leaked to them by a disgruntled Wikileaks volunteer, claiming 'he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-07 00:52:

Running Your Own Ghost Investigation?

Quirkz writes "I am a skeptic, but have friends and family who swear by their ghost stories. I have access to a supposedly haunted house and been tempted to run a proper scientific investigation. My first question is what sorts of tools or measurements would make for sensible metrics to test during a hunt? Temperature change seems to be a common one, but the other devices you'll see ghost hunters use seem pretty random. The second question is what kinds of results would it take to be 'interesting'? Baseline readings at several presumably non-haunted locations seem to be obvious requirements for comparison. Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not? I don't have much hope of changing the minds of those who believe, but it would be satisfying to at least be scientific about it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 23:59:

Man Arrested For Exploiting Error In Slot Machines

An anonymous reader writes "A man awaiting trial in Pennsylvania was arrested by Federal agents on Jan. 4, and accused of exploiting a software 'glitch' within slot machines in order to win payouts. The exploit may have allowed the man to obtain more than a million dollars from casinos in Pennsylvania and Nevada, and officials say they are investigating to see if he used the method elsewhere. The accused stated that 'I'm being arrested federally for winning on a slot machine. Let everybody see the surveillance tapes. I pressed buttons on the machine on the casino. That's all I did.' Apparently, slot machine software errors are fairly common. The lesson here seems to be that casinos can deny you a slot machine win any time they wish by claiming software errors, and if you find an error that you can exploit, you may find yourself facing Federal charges for doing so." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 23:08:

Hackers Find New Way To Cheat On Wall Street

GMGruman writes "The high-speed trading exchanges that conduct the business of buying and selling stocks and mutual funds are so fast that hackers can introduce delays of a few microseconds completely unnoticed by today's network monitoring technology — and manipulate prices in the process to reap millions of dollars to the detriment of everyone else, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. This kind of activity creates new reason to distrust Wall Street and shows how the computer networks we all rely on for conducting business and moving information are ripe for undetectable hacking." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 22:20:

New Cars Vulnerable To Wireless Theft

tkrotchko writes "In a story published by Technology Review, researchers have demonstrated multiple times that they can bypass the security of wireless entry and ignition systems to take a car without the owner's permission. As researchers in the article point out, car security systems will begin have a real impact to every day use if a thief can simply walk up to your car and drive it away. Although this article is light on technical details, a companion article shows how the researchers accomplished the security bypass. An interesting read, and certainly something that will no doubt be the subject of a new movie any day now." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 20:42:

Magnetic Pole Shift Affects Tampa Airport

RFSSystems writes "I thought this was an amazing and rather rare phenomenon and wanted to share. 'The airport has closed its primary runway until Jan. 13 to repaint the numeric designators at each end and change taxiway signage to account for the shift in location of the Earth's magnetic north pole.' It appears that the shifting poles have began to affect air travel in a somewhat modest way. Could this also be the explanation for the falling/dead birds this week?" I hope the gradualists are right, but scenarios for rapid magnetic pole shift are fun to think about. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 19:04:

Crowdfund a Moon Monolith Mission?

Jamie found a somewhat amusing little essay on putting together a crowd-sourced mission to put a monolith on the moon. The author estimates it would cost half a billion dollars, which is a sum he thinks could be raised. Although personally, I think a half a billion dollars could be put to better use, it's a fun thought exercise. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 18:13:

Kneber Botnet Strikes, Targets Gov't Agencies

Batblue writes "A botnet fingered for stealing a treasure trove of information last year has struck again, harvesting sensitive documents from dozens of government agencies and contractors, according to a pair of security experts. The botnet, dubbed "Kneber" by Alex Cox, principal research analyst at NetWitness, was behind a campaign of fake Christmas e-mails waged two weeks ago against government workers. NetWitness deals in advanced threat detection technologies, and conducts post mortem network forensics for firms that have been hit with attacks or data breaches." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 17:35:

The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn

eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format removing two derogatory racial slurs: "injun" and "nigger." The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word "slave." An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter" and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 16:53:

Mac OS X 10.6.6 Introduces App Store

Orome1 writes "Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.6 which which increases the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. What's also very important in this release is the introduction of the long-awaited Mac App Store with more than 1,000 free and paid apps." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 16:10:

Famous British Autism Study an 'Elaborate Fraud'

Charliemopps writes "An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 15:33:

Smartphones For Text SSH Use Re-Revisited

Kainaw writes "This was asked in 2005 and 2008. I think it should be revisited yet again... With iPhone, Android, and Windows smartphones running around, which (if any) of them are well-suited to Unix/Linux server administration on the run? SSH is a must. A good screen resolution. A physical keyboard won't block the screen with a virtual keyboard. Many physical keyboards omit the numeric keys now, making the typing of numbers rather difficult. Nearly every smartphone has WiFi capability now. Some will do an X display through SSH tunnelling. So, pushing through all the bells and whistles that have nothing to do with effective server administration, what is left?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 14:50:

Journal Article On Precognition Sparks Outrage

thomst writes "The New York Times has an article (cookies and free subscription required) about the protests generated by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology's decision to accept for publication later this year an article (PDF format) on precognition (the Times erroneously calls it ESP). Complaints center around the peer reviewers, none of whom is an expert in statistical analysis." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 14:02:

Next Generation of Windows To Run On ARM Chip

Hugh Pickens writes "Sharon Chan reports in the Seattle Times that at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft showed the next generation of Windows running natively on an ARM chip design, commonly used in the mobile computing world, indicating a schism with Intel, the chip maker Microsoft has worked with closely with throughout the history of Windows and the PC. The Microsoft demonstration showed Word, PowerPoint and high definition video running on a prototype ARM chipset made by Texas Instruments, Nvidia. 'It's part of our plans for the next generation of Windows.,' says Steve Sinofsky, president of Windows division. 'That's all under the hood.' According to a report in the WSJ, the long-running alliance between Microsoft and Intel is coming to a day of reckoning as sales of tablets, smartphones and televisions using rival technologies take off, pushing the two technology giants to go their separate ways. The rise of smartphones and more recently, tablets has strained the relationship as Intel's chips haven't been able to match the low-power consumption of chips based on designs licensed from ARM and Intel has also thumbed its nose at Microsoft by collaborating with Microsoft archrival Google on the Chrome OS, Google's operating system that will compete with Windows in the netbook computer market. 'I think it's a deep fracture,' says venture capitalist Jean-Louis Gassee regarding relations between Microsoft and Intel." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 12:06:

Zynga and Blizzard Sued Over Game Patent

eldavojohn writes "Thinking about developing a game involving a 'database driven online distributed tournament system?' Well, you had better talk to Walker Digital or risk a lawsuit, because Walker Digital claims to have patented that 'invention' back in 2002. The patent in question has resulted in some legal matters for the makers of 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 and 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: World at War, Blur, Wolfenstein, DJ Hero 2, Golden Eye 007, World of Warcraft and its expansions, Mafia Wars, and many others.' Walker Digital (parent company of Priceline.com) said it's not sure how much damages are going to be, and requested that through discovery in the court. If you think Walker Digital is not a patent troll, check out their lawsuit from two months ago against Facebook for using privacy controls Walker Digital claims to have patented. It would seem that any online competitive game that uses a database to select and reward contestants in a tournament could potentially fall under this patent — of course, those with the deepest coffers will be cherrypicked first." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 10:03:

SEGA Brings Gaming To Public Restroom Toilets

kkleiner writes "SEGA recently announced that they are testing their Toylets male urinal video game at select locations around Tokyo. Toylets uses a pressure sensor located on the back of the urinal to measure the strength and location of your urine stream. A small LCD screen above the urinal allows you to play several simple video games including a simulator for erasing graffiti and a variation on a sumo wrestling match. At the end of a game, the screen displays advertisements. Whether you find the concept hilarious, disturbing, or disgusting, urinal video games are simply another way that interactive media could invade every part of our lives. It also shows that no space is safe from digital ads." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 08:52:

Why Creators Should Never Read Their Forums

spidweb writes "One full-time Indie developer writes about why he never goes to online forums discussing his work and why he advises other creators to do the same. It's possible to learn valuable things, but the time and the stress just don't justify the effort. From the article, 'Forums contain a cacophony of people telling you to do diametrically opposite things, very loudly, often for bad reasons. There will be plenty of good ideas, but picking them out from the bad ones is unreliable and a lot of work. If you try to make too many people happy at once, you will drive yourself mad. You have to be very, very careful who you let into your head.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 07:38:

French Minister Sells Surveillance Legislation With Fake Benefits

Dangerous_Minds writes "The debate over LOPPSI 2, the legislation that would allow police to upload malware including Trojan Horses and key loggers to unwitting users without a court order, is heating up in France. Interior minister Brice Hortefeux told the media that LOPPSI 2 would stop the theft of smart phones because vendors would then be able to discontinue use of on-board SIM cards. Critics are pointing out that the theft of stolen portable phones is not covered under LOPPSI 2 in its current form. Others also point out that the discontinued use of SIM cards on stolen phones is already possible in France without the legislation. It's unclear if this is just a case of the minister not knowing what is actually in the legislation he is trying to pass." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 02:55:

Amazon To Launch 'Amazon Appstore For Android'

angry tapir writes "Amazon is preparing to open an Android app store to compete with Google's Android Market, and has launched a beta portal where developers can submit applications for Android-based smartphones. The applications will be sold on the Amazon Appstore for Android, which the company expects to launch later this year. At launch, the Appstore will be available for customers in the U.S., and it will be compatible with Android 1.6 and higher. Users will be able to shop for applications from their PCs, which isn't possible with the existing version of Android Market, or from their smartphones, and pay with their existing Amazon account." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 01:37:

Military Set To Develop Smart, Robotic Cameras

coondoggie writes "In a move seemingly strait out of the Terminator movies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week said it has contracted with 15 companies or universities to begin building software and hardware that will give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 00:45:

Microsoft Puts Datacenter In a Barn

aesoteric writes "Microsoft has announced that it will open a new datacenter in Washington State housed in a 'modern' barn-like structure that is 'virtually transparent to ambient outdoor conditions'. It was not the first time Microsoft had toyed with the idea of a datacenter without walls. In September 2008, it successfully ran a stack of HP servers in a tent for seven months, apparently with no failures." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-06 00:01:

Google Ready To Rule NFC-Based Mobile Payments?

itwbennett writes "Google may seem like an odd pioneer for mobile payments, says blogger Ryan Faas, but according to recent reports, the company is developing its own NFC payment solution. Here's why Faas thinks Google has a leg up in this emerging market: 'Google does have a lot of clout when it comes to NFC because the recent launch of the Nexus S and Gingerbread (the most recent Android release) offer the first truly widespread smartphone/NFC integration. That could give Google significant bargaining power. It also makes a certain sense to expect Google to try to lead in this area when you consider that the company is hyping mobile search and recommendation features.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 23:16:

First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter

Frosty Piss writes "The first clear pictures of what appears to be a Chinese stealth fighter prototype have been published online The photographs, published on several unofficial Chinese and foreign defense-related websites, appear to show a J-20 prototype making a high-speed taxi test — usually one of the last steps before an aircraft makes its first flight—according to experts on aviation and China's military. Several experts said the prototype's body appeared to borrow from the F-22 and other U.S. stealth aircraft. The U.S. cut funding for the F-22 in 2009 in favor of the F-35, a smaller, cheaper stealth fighter that made its first test flight in 2006 and is expected to be fully deployed by around 2014." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 22:25:

Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb

snydeq writes "The underfunding of routine hardware replacement purchases and the degradation of aging enterprise apps pose systemic risk for many IT organizations, thanks to a ballooning 'deferred IT maintenance debt' in the decade since Y2K fears pushed enterprises to invest heavily in essential system upgrades, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. And with sysadmins 'scrambling to keep systems up and running with budgets that barely cover the basics,' this 'IT debt' promises only to increase in the coming years, especially as IT continues to defer routine maintenance in favor of new 'cost-saving' initiatives, particularly around the cloud." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 21:59:

Linux 2.6.37 Released

diegocg writes "Version 2.6.37 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a networking block device based on top of the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules, LZO compression in the hibernation image, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers for devices like the Brocade BNA 10GB ethernet, Topcliff PCH gigabit, Atheros CARL9170, Atheros AR6003 and RealTek RTL8712U. The fanotify API has also been enabled. See the full changelog for more details." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 21:37:

IBM's Jeopardy Strategy

jfruhlinger writes "Developing a computer that could play chess once seemed like a worthy AI goal — but it turned out to be something of a dead end, as chess is very abstract and simple when compared to the real world. Will creating a game-show-playing computer lead to more interesting results? IBM hopes so, and its Watson machine will tackle problems in parallel processing, data searching, and natural language comprehension in an attempt to beat Jeopardy legends Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. " IBM announced the man vs. machine competition last month. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 20:50:

Securing the Smart Grid

brothke writes "Securing the Smart Grid: Next Generation Power Grid Security, authors Tony Flick and Justin Morehouse provide a comprehensive and first-rate overview of smart grid technology and what is needed to ensure that it is developed and deployed in a secure and safe manner. An issue is that smart grid has significant amount of hype around it, including the promise that it will make energy more affordable, effective and green. With that, promises around security and privacy are often hard to obtain." Read on for the rest of Ben's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 20:06:

Will Facebook Become the Net's SSO?

lordDallan writes "Simson Garfinkel at MIT Technology Review muses on the idea of your Facebook account becoming an 'Internet Driver's License', ruminating on the idea of an individual's Facebook login becoming their single sign on for the web. I say NO THANKS!!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 20:03:

When Smart People Make Bad Employees

theodp writes "Writing for Forbes, CS-grad-turned-big-time-VC Ben Horowitz gives three examples of how the smartest people in a company can also be the worst employees: 1. The Heretic, who convincingly builds a case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons; 2. The Flake, who is brilliant but totally unreliable; 3. The Jerk, who is so belligerent in his communication style that people just stop talking when he is in the room. So, can an employee who fits one of these poisonous descriptions, but nonetheless can make a massive positive contribution to a company, ever be tolerated? Quoting John Madden's take on Terrell Owens, Horowitz gives a cautious yes: 'If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you'll be so late that you'll miss the game, so you can't do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you'll have a player that's so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.' Ever work with a person who's so good that he/she gets his/her own set of rules? Ever been that person yourself?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 19:24:

Doctor Marries Doctor's Daughter, TARDIS Explodes

techmuse writes "In a veritable Who's Who of Doctor Who, 10th Doctor David Tennant is marrying Georgia Moffett, the daughter of 5th Doctor Peter Davison, who played the Doctor's daughter in an episode of Doctor Who. Except that the Doctor's daughter was a clone of the Doctor, which meant that she really was Who. So a newer Doctor is marrying an older Doctor's daughter, who is a clone of the newer doctor, but only has half the DNA of the older Doctor." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 18:35:

Swedish Firm Proposes City Buildings On Rails

Lanxon writes "A Swedish architecture firm that came up with a plan to roll buildings through a city on rails has won third prize in a competition to develop the Norwegian city of Åndalsnes. The company, Jagnafalt Milton, suggested that existing and new railroads could be built to provide the base for buildings that could be positioned differently depending on the seasons and on the weather. It proposed designs for rail-mounted single- and double-berth cabins, along with a two-story suite, reports Wired." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 17:45:

Apple Creating Cloud-Based Mac?

hostedftp writes "In speculation news making the rounds — Apple's recent activities in the Cloud has been leading to conclusions of the what the innovative giant plans to unleash in 2011. The most recent news of Apple applying and securing a patent for a network-boosted OS has made speculators believe Apple is going to launch a Cloud-based operating system for the Mac." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 17:00:

First PlayStation 3 Custom Firmware Created

Stoobalou writes "Hot on the heels of the discovery of the the PlayStation 3 private root key, and its subsequent leakage by iPhone hacker Geohot, the first custom firmware for the formerly inpenetrable console has been released. A code wrangler known only as Kakaroto reckons he has created the world's first custom firmware for the popular console — although if you're expecting it to help you play pirated games, you might be a little disappointed." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 16:15:

Smart Grid Brings Powerline Broadband Back?

judgecorp writes "The UK is giving powerline broadband a serious trial once again, in up to 1000 homes in Liverpool. The technology was once hailed as an alternative to ADSL, delivered over the electricity mains, but lost out because of radio interference and price. The UK government is backing the installation of smart meters across the country, and it seems a new generation of 200Mbps powerline broadband could ride on that, cutting the installation costs. What about the interference issues? A recent FAQ from the regulator, Ofcom, says it has not found any eficdence of a breach of EMC rules, but is keeping an eye on it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 15:30:

For Mac Developers, Armageddon Comes Tomorrow

kdawson writes "David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 14:51:

Houston We Have a Problem

thanosk writes "NASA has started releasing the transcripts from the early NASA missions and started with releasing the transcripts of the Apollo 13 mission and the famous 'Houston we have a problem' quote" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 14:03:

Spoofed White House Card Dupes Many Gov't Employees, Steals Data

tsu doh nimh writes "A run-of-the-mill malware-laced e-mail that spoofed seasons greetings from The White House siphoned gigabytes of sensitive documents from dozens of victims over the holidays, including a number of government employees and contractors who work on cybersecurity matters, writes krebsonsecurity.com. The story looks at several victims who fell for the attack, and suggests it may be related to a series of similar document-harvesting runs throughout 2010. Government security vendor NetWitness notes that these types of incidents are blurring the lines between online financial fraud and espionage attacks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 12:29:

Why BioWare's Star Wars MMO May Already Be Too Late

Since the announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic, many gamers have been hopeful that its high budget, respected development team and rich universe will be enough to provide a real challenge to the WoW juggernaut. An opinion piece at 1Up makes the case that BioWare's opportunity to do so may have already passed. Quoting: "While EA and BioWare Austin have the horsepower needed to at least draw even with World of Warcraft though, what we've seen so far has been worryingly conventional — even generic — given the millions being poured into development. Take the opening areas around Tython, which Mike Nelson describes in his most recent preview as being 'rudimentary,' owing to their somewhat generic, grind-driven quest design. Running around killing a set number of 'Flesh Raiders' in a relatively quiet village doesn't seem particularly epic, but that's the route BioWare Austin seems to be taking with the opening areas for the Jedi — what will surely be the most popular classes when The Old Republic is released. ... the real concern, though, is not so much in the quest design as in BioWare Austin's apparent willingness to play follow the leader. Whenever something becomes a big hit — be it a movie, game or book — there's always a mad scramble to replicate the formula; in World of Warcraft's case, that mad scramble has been going for six years now. " Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 11:00:

MIT Media Lab Researcher Prints Playable Flute

conner_bw writes "What if making an acoustic instrument was a matter of hitting 'print'? MIT Media Lab researcher Amit Zoran did just that. He created a flute using the Objet Geometries Connex500 3D printer. The instrument is playable and the results are surprisingly good for a first attempt. As an aside, rumour has it that Amit has a bumper sticker that reads: My other printer prints food." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 08:11:

Samsung Develops Power-Sipping DDR4 Memory

Alex writes with this excerpt from TechSpot: "Samsung Electronics has announced that it completed development of the industry's first DDR4 DRAM module last month, using 30nm class process technology, and provided 1.2V 2GB DDR4 unbuffered dual in-line memory modules (UDIMM) to a controller maker for testing. The new DDR4 DRAM module can achieve data transfer rates of 2.133Gbps at 1.2V, compared to 1.35V and 1.5V DDR3 DRAM at an equivalent 30nm-class process technology, with speeds of up to 1.6Gbps. In a notebook, the DDR4 module reduces power consumption by 40 percent compared to a 1.5V DDR3 module. The module makes use of Pseudo Open Drain (POD) technology, which allows DDR4 DRAM to consume just half the electric current of DDR3 when reading and writing data." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 06:27:

OnLive To Be Built Into Vizio Devices

Gamasutra reports that cloud gaming service OnLive has reached an agreement with Vizio to integrate OnLive directly into the hardware manufacturer's TVs and blu-ray players. "Vizio also announced that it will introduce ... tablets and smartphones based on Google's Android operating system that integrate the gaming service through its Via Plus ecosystem. OnLive is already publicly available for Apple's iPad, but that app is exclusively for spectating other people who are playing Onlive through PCs or the MicroConsole. Perlman said Onlive is coming to Vizio's mobile devices with playable games. ... Perlman also said that thanks to the open nature of the Android platform, manufacturers are creating more traditional game controllers for Android tablets. Some resemble a gamepad cut in half, where one half snaps on either side of the table screen, Perlman said. Certain Android tablets will also potentially work with Onlive's official controller, if the mobile device supports the appropriate RF interface." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 05:09:

Reverse Engineering Doctor Who Into Color

Lanxon writes "In 1967, the BBC set about junking its Doctor Who archive: a moment sci-fi fans wish they could travel back in time to prevent. There are 108 vintage episodes missing, but since 1978 a number have been rediscovered as 16mm black-and-white films. The BBC shot many of these series in color, but made monochrome copies for countries such as Australia, where many TV companies were still broadcasting in greyscale. The reels had sat in archives since. Now, the Doctor Who Restoration Team, an independent group contracted by the BBC, is using a new technique to regenerate The Doctor in color." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 03:56:

Honeycomb To Require Dual-Core Processor

adeelarshad82 writes "According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 02:20:

Apple Patent Hints at Net-Booting Cloud Strategy

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has received a patent that hints at the intent of providing network computers that will boot through a 'net-booted environment.' It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft. However, it appears that Apple has been working for some time on an operating system, conceivably a version of a next-generation Mac OS or iOS, that could boot computers and other devices via an Internet connection." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 01:27:

Unwise — Search History of Murder Methods

nonprofiteer writes "Mark Jensen's home computer revealed Internet searches for botulism, poisoning, pipe bombs and mercury fulminate. A website was visited that explained how to reverse the polarity of a swimming pool — the Jensens had a pool — by switching the wires around, likening the result to the 4th of July. The State pointed out the absence of Internet searches on topics like separation, divorce, child custody or marital property. Julie Jensen died as a result of ethylene glycol in her system, an ingredient found in antifreeze. On the morning of her death, someone attempted to 'double-delete' (apparently unsuccessfully) the computer's browsing history, which included a search for 'ethylene glycol poisoning.'" What if searches for devious, undetectable methods of murder were in everyone's history? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 00:49:

Microsoft Confirms Zero-Day Hours After Exploit

CWmike writes "Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday an unpatched vulnerability in Windows just hours after a hacking toolkit published an exploit for the bug. A patch is under construction, but Microsoft does not plan to issue an emergency update to fix the flaw. The bug was first discussed Dec. 15 at a South Korean security conference, but got more attention Tuesday when the open-source Metasploit penetration tool posted an exploit module crafted by researcher Joshua Drake. Metasploit says successful attacks are capable of compromising victimized PCs, then introducing malware to the machines to pillage them for information or enlist them in a criminal botnet." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-05 00:02:

Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet

Shareable writes "Douglas Rushkoff: 'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.' And he goes on to suggest citizens fork the Internet & makes a call for ideas how to do that." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 23:20:

Microsoft Ready To "Take On'' Google and Apple TV

Antisyzygy writes "Microsoft is getting ready to offer an internet television solution of its own, and will demo a TV box this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas." The rumor is under $200 putting it more on price point with GoogleTV at the moment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 22:28:

Pink Floyd Give In To Digital Downloads

An anonymous reader writes "Tripped out old rockers Pink Floyd have inked a deal with EMI to allow single tracks by the band to be peddled as digital downloads. The remains of the band was in court less than a year ago, arguing that cutting up their albums and selling individual tracks undermined the 'artistic integrity' of their work. Now, though they've given in to the Man, and the likes of Money, Shine on you Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb will soon no doubt be available as 99p downloads on iTunes. Have a cigar." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 21:44:

Double Eclipse Photographed, Sun, Moon, and ISS

The Bad Astronomer writes "The exceptionally talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a picture extraordinary even for him: the space station passing in front of the Sun while the Sun was being partially eclipsed by the Moon! He traveled all the way from France to the Sultanate of Oman to take this amazing shot. I have more information about the picture itself on the Bad Astronomy blog, but you should go to Thierry's website to see more amazing pictures he's taken over the years. They're simply jaw-dropping." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 20:55:

45 Years Later, Does Moore's Law Still Hold True?

Velcroman1 writes "Intel has packed just shy of a billion transistors into the 216 square millimeters of silicon that compose its latest chip, each one far, far thinner than a sliver of human hair. But this mind-blowing feat of engineering doesn't really surprise us, right? After all, that's just Moore's Law in action isn't it? In 1965, an article in "Electronics" magazine by Gordon Moore, the future founder of chip juggernaut Intel, predicted that computer processing power would double roughly every 18 months. Or maybe he said 12 months. Or was it 24 months? Actually, nowhere in the article did Moore actually spell out that famous declaration, nor does the word "law" even appear in the article at all. Yet the idea has proved remarkably resilient over time, entering the public zeitgeist and lodging hold like a stubborn computer virus you just can't eradicate. But does it hold true? Strangely, that seems to depend more than anything on who you ask. "Yes, it still matters, and yes we're still tracking it," said Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration. "Semiconductor chips haven't actually tracked the progress predicted by Moore's law for many years," said Tom Halfhill, the well respected chip analyst with industry bible the Microprocessor Report." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 20:05:

The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

bonch writes "Charles Ying argues that Android's UX architecture has serious technical issues because, unlike the iPhone and Windows 7, Android composites the interface in software to retain compatibility with lower-class devices. Additionally, Android runs Java bytecode during animation, and garbage collection blocks the drawing system. Google engineers dismiss the desire for hardware-accelerated compositing and cite more powerful hardware and an avoidance of temporary objects as a solution to the collection pauses, but Ying argues that will just lead to an average battery life compared to devices like the iPhone." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 19:20:

Saudi Arabia Requiring License For Online Media

Beetle B. writes "According to Saudi Arabia's leading English newspaper, Arab News, online newspapers, blogs and forums will now need to register with the Ministry of Information and Culture for licenses to operate, according to new regulations that the ministry announced Saturday it is to introduce. Abdul Aziz Khoja, minister of information and culture, said that the system is "in line with the development moves that the media sector is witnessing." He added that the rules do not include any clauses restricting freedom of speech and that the ministry is eager to ensure there is transparency. He also said that the rules will be made open to improvement in the future." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 18:40:

US Begins Sophisticated Wireless Jamming Project

coondoggie writes "Looking to begin developing algorithms and other technology to automatically learn to jam certain new wireless transmissions that may threaten US military personnel. BAE Systems recently got about $8.4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to begin work on what's known as the Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare (BLADE) system. According to DARPA: As wireless communication devices become more adaptive and responsive to their environment by using technology such as Dynamic Spectrum Allocation, the effectiveness of fixed countermeasures may become severely degraded. The BLADE program will develop algorithms and techniques that will let our electronic warfare systems to automatically learn to jam new RF threats in the field." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 18:00:

Mobile Users More Vulnerable To Phishing Attacks

Orome1 writes "Trusteer recently gained access to the log files of several web servers that were hosting phishing websites. Analyzing these log files provided visibility into how many users accessed the websites, when they visited them, whether they submitted their login information, and what devices they used to access the website. As soon as a phishing website is broadcast through fraudulent email messages the first systems to visit it are typically mobile devices. Most fraudulent emails call for immediate action. For example, they usually claim that suspicious activity has been detected in the user's account and that immediate action is required. Most victims who fall for this ploy will visit the phishing site quickly." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 17:10:

NASA Names Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time

mvar writes "Working through the year-end best/worst movie lists can be a feat of Olympic proportions, but there's one list which is so damn cool you'll definitely want to give it a whirl. NASA and the Science and Entertainment Exchange have compiled a list of the 'least plausible science fiction movies ever made,' and they ranked the disastrous (in more ways than one) 2012 as the most 'absurd' sci-fi flick of all time." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 16:32:

Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results

krou writes "The Guardian's tech blog is running an interesting piece on Google's next big challenge, which is dealing with the spammers it helped create. 'Google is the 900-pound gorilla of search, with around 90% of the market (excluding China and Russia), and there's an entire industry which has grown up specifically around tickling the gorilla to make it happy and enrich the ticklers.' They quote Paul Kedrosky who notes that 'Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.' Whether searching for reviews, products, businesses, or even conducting academic research, scraper sites are ranking higher than original content. The article speculates that Google may try fix the problem but, from Google's perspective, most of these type of sites use AdSense ads, and generate revenue for Google (89% of clicks come from the first page of results), so Google may not have an incentive to change things too much. Alternatively, people could stop using Google, 'because its search is damn well broken... The question is whether it would be visible enough — that is, whether enough people would do it — that it would show up on Google's radar and be made a priority.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 15:48:

Oversupply Sends DRAM Prices To One-year Low

alphadogg writes "DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said. Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of $0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 15:48:

Oversupply Sends DRAM Prices To One-Year Low

alphadogg writes "DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said. Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of $0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 15:02:

BT Content Connect May Impact Net Neutrality

a Flatbed Darkly writes "BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet; BT has denied the allegations, from Open Rights Group among others, that this, despite certainly being an anti-competitive service, does not create a two-tier internet. From the article: ""Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery," a BT spokeswoman said."" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 14:15:

Police Can Search Cell Phones Without Warrants

Hugh Pickens writes "The California Supreme Court has ruled 5 to 2 to allow police to search arrestees' cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they're carrying when taken into custody. Under US Supreme Court precedents, 'this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee's body... but also to open and examine what they find,' the state court said. The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn't be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data and that the decision allows police 'to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee's person.' Interestingly enough, the Ohio Supreme Court reached an opposite conclusion in a December 2009 ruling that police had violated drug defendants' rights by searching their cell phones after their arrests. The Ohio-California split could prompt the US Supreme Court to take up the issue, says California Deputy Attorney General Victoria Wilson, who represented the prosecution in the case." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 11:10:

The Challenge In Delivering Open Source GPU Drivers

yuhong writes "After the recent Intel Sandy Bridge launch left Linux users having to build the latest source from Git repositories in order to have full support for the integrated graphics, Phoronix looked at the problems involved in delivering new graphics drivers for Linux." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 08:14:

Apache Subversion To WANdisco, Inc: Get Real.

kfogel writes "The Apache Subversion project has just had to remind one of its corporate contributors about the rules of the road. WANdisco, Inc was putting out some very odd press releases and blog posts, implying (among other things) that their company was in some sort of steering position in the open source project. Oops — that's not the Apache Way. The Apache Software Foundation has reminded them of how things work. Meanwhile, one of the founding developers of Subversion, Ben Collins-Sussman, has posted a considerably more caustic take on WANdisco's behavior." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 07:07:

How To Make a Good Gaming Sequel

Kantor48 writes "In today's world of unimproved gaming sequels and saturated franchises, Arthur Kabrick looks at the best and worst sequels in recent history, and compares the changes they've made to the formulae of their franchises. By doing this, he comes up with a list of lessons that any game developer creating a sequel should follow, if at all possible, to ensure that the new game is a step up, rather than a step sideways or, as in some cases, a step down. The criteria include ensuring the game does not spend too much time in development, updating technology, and trying not to change the development team, as well as being wary of changing the basic formula so much that fans of the franchise are alienated." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 06:10:

Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World

An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 05:20:

Kinect Creators To Make PC Controller

Hugh Pickens writes "PrimeSense, the privately held Israeli company that licensed core Kinect technology to Microsoft, is teaming up with PC and peripheral maker Asus to create a similar device for the PC that can be used for browsing multimedia content and accessing the Internet and social networks — basically, the main things consumers use their PCs for. Last month, a Korean game developer claimed that Microsoft was working on a version of Kinect for the PC, but Microsoft hasn't confirmed any such plans." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 04:08:

Interactive, Emotion-Detecting Robot Developed

cylonlover writes "A team of Cambridge University researchers have now developed a system that can not only detect a user's emotional state, but can also make expressive responses of its own. Using a robotic likeness of the godfather of the programmable computer, Charles Babbage, the team has hooked the system up to a driving simulator and created a computerized driving companion and navigator that reacts to the driver in much the same way as a human passenger." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 02:06:

French Use Space Tech To Find Parking Spots

itwbennett writes "Using technology developed by French space agency CNES (Centre Nationale d'Etudes Spatiales) to explore the planet Venus, drivers in the city of Toulouse are discovering something much more down-to-earth: vacant parking spots. The system is based on 3,000 sensors buried just under the pavement that detect changes in the electromagnetic environment around them and communicate the results via coaxial cable to a server, which makes the information available in real time to drivers' smartphones." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 01:19:

Windows 7 Trumps Vista By Reaching 20% Share

CWmike writes "Windows 7 cracked the 20% share mark last month, a milestone the problem-plagued Vista never reached, Web measurement vendor Net Application said over the weekend. Gregg Keizer reports that Windows 7's online usage share reached 20.9% in December, up 1.2 percentage points from the month before. Windows Vista, meanwhile, fell by half a point to 12.1%, its lowest share since July 2008. Vista peaked at 18.8% in October 2009, the same month that Microsoft launched Windows 7. The other standout finding: XP is projected to still account for 13% when it's retired in 2014." An anonymous reader adds news that Google's Chrome browser is nearing 10% market share. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-04 00:25:

Radiation Detection Goes Digital

RedEaredSlider writes "In science fiction, explorers wave around a single device and pick up many kinds of radiation — think of the tricorders on Star Trek or Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver. A professor at Oregon State University is bringing that a bit closer to reality, though in this case it's for finding radioactive material. It's a radiation spectrometer, and it works on a very old principle: particles and photons that hit certain materials will make them emit flashes of light. But for decades, radiation spectrometers had been limited to detecting only one kind of radiation at a time. David Hamby, an OSU professor of health physics, felt that there was a need for a device that could see at least two kinds of radiation, as well as be smaller than the models currently available." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 23:37:

How a Guy Found 4 New Planets Without a Telescope

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jalowiczor is a gas worker from South Yorkshire, England. He's also the discoverer of four giant exoplanets, according to the University of California's Lick-Carnegie Planet Search Team. But he's not an astronomer and he doesn't even have a telescope. '...in 2005, astronomers at the university released millions of space measurements collected over several decades and asked enthusiasts to make of them what they would. ... From March 2007 Peter, 45, spent entire nights reading the data, working the figures, creating graphs. ... He then sent discrepancies he discovered back to the scientists in California where they were further analyzed to see if the quirks were caused by the existence of an exoplanet.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 22:53:

NJ Server Farms Remake the US Financial Markets

1sockchuck writes "The engine of Wall Street has shifted from the stock exchange floor to data centers in New Jersey, where computer-driven trading now accounts for 56 percent of all trading activity, according to the New York Times. 'While this Tron landscape is dominated by the titans of Wall Street, it affects nearly everyone who owns shares of stock or mutual funds, or who has a stake in a pension fund or works for a public company,' the Times writes. 'For better or for worse, part of your wealth, your livelihood, is throbbing through these wires.' There are also photos of the data centers powering the high-speed trading operations, while 60 Minutes has video of a huge new 'liquidity center' run by the NYSE." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 22:07:

Why Digital Newsstands Stink

An anonymous reader writes "As Google prepares to compete with Apple in the digital newsstand business, both companies seem to be glossing over the fact that consumer demand for digital magazines is dropping. 'Wired's collapse from 100,000 iPad copies in June to 23,000 in November was most dramatic, but the story is not much different at Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ or Men's Health.' Meanwhile, issues of subscriber privacy continue to crop up — Google has reportedly told publishers it will supply certain information about subscribers, and it's not clear whether users will have the ability to opt-out. And according to the Wall Street Journal, 'Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher's app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 21:25:

Using Technology To Enforce Good Behavior

Ismellpoop writes "With the new year upon us and resolutions being made to change unwanted behavior, many tools are now available to help people stay in line, such as a GPS-enabled app that locks down texting once a car gets rolling and a program that cuts off credit-card spending. Another device monitors your workout and offers real-time voice feedback. Have we entered an era in which electronics serve as mother, cop and coach because we can't manage our own desires?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 20:40:

PS3 Root Key Found

An anonymous reader writes "The PlayStation 3 'root key' used for code signing has been found by GeoHot. This enables running homebrew without the need for psjailbreak-style USB-devices, and also provides hope for those at firmware version 3.55 that currently cannot be downgraded. The key also cannot be changed without hardware modifications. Oops." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 19:56:

Groklaw — Don't Go Home, Go Big

jfruhlinger writes "You may have caught PJ's Christmas Day post on Groklaw, expressing her anger and frustration that, after she helped save Novell's Unix patents from SCO's clutches, Novell turned around and sold many of those patents to an open source-unfriendly coalition. She's feeling at a crossroads and wondering what Groklaw should become. Brian Proffitt has a suggestion: a bigger, more community-oriented site." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 19:12:

Researchers Claim 1,000 Core Chip Created

eldavojohn writes "Remember a few months ago when the feasibility was discussed of a thousand core processor? By using FPGAs, Glasgow University researchers have claimed a proof of concept 1,000 core chip that they demonstrated running an MPEG algorithm at a speed of 5Gbps. From one of the researchers, 'This is very early proof-of-concept work where we're trying to demonstrate a convenient way to program FPGAs so that their potential to provide very fast processing power could be used much more widely in future computing and electronics. While many existing technologies currently make use of FPGAs, including plasma and LCD televisions and computer network routers, their use in standard desk-top computers is limited. However, we are already seeing some microchips which combine traditional CPUs with FPGA chips being announced by developers, including Intel and ARM. I believe these kinds of processors will only become more common and help to speed up computers even further over the next few years.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 18:29:

Goldman Invests $450m In Facebook

An anonymous reader writes "The news that Goldman has taken a stake in Facebook, the white-hot social networking giant, has tongues wagging from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. As first reported by DealBook, Goldman has invested $450 million in a deal that values Facebook at $50 billion. As part of the deal, Goldman is looking to raise as much as $1.5 billion from its wealthy clients to invest in Facebook alongside the firm." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 17:48:

Does Windows Phone 7 Have a Data Transmission Bug?

blarkon writes "Microsoft commentator and Windows Phone 7 Expert Paul Thurrott has reported a serious bug that indicates Windows Phone 7 is uploading up to 50 MB of unidentified data every day. The phone operating system apparently ignores Wi-Fi connections for sending this data, leading some Windows Phone 7 owners hitting their 2 GB plan data limit while doing little more than checking email and social networking sites. Thurrott has written a book on Windows Phone 7 and is unlikely to be making such a claim unless it has some substance. At the moment no one knows what this data contains or where it is going, though Thurrott suspects it may be related to the Windows Phone Marketplace" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 17:00:

MS Asks Google To Delay Fuzzer Tool

eldavojohn writes "Polish Google security white hat Michal Zalewski has announced concerns that one of a hundred vulnerabilities his fuzzer tool found in IE is well known to third party hackers in China. His simple explanation provides an interesting counter argument to Microsoft's usual request that security problems not be released until they can slowly investigate them. From the article, 'Microsoft asked Zalewski to delay cross_fuzz's release, but he declined, in part because of his fear the IE vulnerability was already being explored by Chinese hackers, but also because the company's security experts had not responded to information he provided.' You can read about and download cross_fuzz for your own use." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 16:15:

Android vs iPhone - Who Wins In 2011?

Hugh Pickens writes "Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes in Fortune Magazine that Apple and Google have two very different strategies in the competition shaping up in 2011 between Android and iPhone. According to the conventional wisdom as espoused by Don Dodge, a Developer Advocate at Google, both Apple and Google will win because they are playing different games. Android will win the market share battle, but Apple will generate bigger profits. "Apple goes for the high end of the market where they can charge high prices and enjoy great profit margins. Apple has been successful with this strategy multiple times, and will do it again with iPhone," writes Dodge adding that Google's strategy with Android is to generate revenue streams from mobile search and advertising. Another Google employee, Tim Bray, sees things differently and says he won't be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone and if this time next year, dirt-cheap iPhones were competing against Androids that push the user-experience lever farther than Apple. "There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers, testing the hypothesis that these things are central to Apple's success."" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 15:32:

Wikipedia Meets $16M Budget Goal

netbuzz writes "Thanks to some 630,000 individual contributions that averaged $22 apiece, Wikipedia has reached its fundraising goal of $16 million, founder Jimmy Wales announced over the weekend. Writes Wales: ' this year is a little more incredible than most because this year we celebrate Wikipedia's tenth anniversary. It's so important that we kick the year off just like this: by fully funding the Wikimedia Foundation's budget to support Wikipedia and all the sister projects as we head into the next decade of our work together.' The online encyclopedia now boasts of being the Internet's fifth largest site, which renews questioning by some as to whether it can afford over the long haul to stand by its policy of refusing advertising." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 14:44:

Intel Sandy Bridge Desktop and Mobile CPUs

Vigile writes "The new Intel Sandy Bridge architecture is being launched at CES this week but the reviews and benchmarks are out today. PC Perspective took a look at both the desktop and mobile variants, the former of which turns out to be quite an impressive processor for both highly threaded and single threaded applications. With some tweaks to the execution unit, a new Turbo Boost mode that increases clock speeds dynamically and a vastly improved integrated graphics implementation, the Core i7-2600K improves in every aspect. Also interestingly, the most expensive desktop part will start at $317, putting the screws to AMD yet again. On the mobile side of things, PC Perspective tested the quad-core Core i7-2820QM and the benchmark results are equally impressive; especially when looking at the gaming performance using integrated graphics. Sandy Bridge will no doubt put quite a dent in the discrete notebook graphics market for NVIDIA and AMD." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 14:04:

The 10 Best Android Hacks

Barence writes "The Android vs iPhone debate will continue until the apocalypse, but there's no doubt Android wins on customability. PC Pro has listed its ten favorite Android hacks, which include the ability to open your garage door with your smartphone, install Ubuntu on your handset, and overclock your phone's processor. There's also instructions on how to replace your dashboard satnav with Google's version." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 09:44:

How Do You Prove Software Testing Saves Money?

cdman52 writes "I work at a small software development company. We have one app that is used by a few hundred clients and was initially developed by a few undergrads about 10 years ago. The app is collection of about 25 developers preferences and ideas. Testing wasn't an initial concern since it was created as an internal application, I guess. Anyway, the app is now large and used frequently. Part of my duties are to fix bugs users find, I'm on a team with a few other people and at least once every 2-3 months I see some bug I fixed come back, and I can only assume it's because we don't have a formal test suite. The owner doesn't want to invest time or money in getting one set up, but I'm sure that in the long run it would save time and money. Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 07:04:

Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead

Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 05:59:

Apple Support Company Sues Customer For Complaint

tekgoblin writes "An Apple authorized Service Provider called Stemgraph is suing a customer who complained online about poor service from them. The customer Dimitrios Papadimitriadis took his iMac to them because he was seeing gray spots on his LED panel. The Greek company Stemgraph recommended a full interior cleaning of the iMac and performed the service for Dimitrios. He then got his iMac back and noticed moisture behind the screen and that it still did not work properly and took it back to the repair center. Stemgraph then told him that they needed to keep his iMac to replace the LED screen and he would be without it for another week. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 03:27:

Google Nexus S Processor Overclocked To 1.2GHz

dkd903 writes "Though Google's Nexus S is powered by a single core Hummingbird processor, it looks like the one core would be enough to put LG's dual-core processor powered Optimus to shame. An XDA Forums user morfic has overclocked the processor on Nexus S up to 1.2GHz in a new kernel based on the Bionix NS1 mod." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-03 00:51:

Battle Escalates Between Airlines and Online Agents

Ponca City writes "The Epoch Times reports that online travel booking giant Expedia has removed American Airlines from its travel website over disagreements with American's fee structure in the latest incident in an escalating battle between airlines and online travel agents. Although American gets roughly two-thirds of its revenues from third-party travel agents like Expedia, American has been looking for online agents to cut their fees as one way to lower fares — something that Expedia was not prepared to do. Expedia released a statement that American's action 'will result in higher costs and reduced transparency for consumers, making it difficult to compare ticket prices and options with offerings by other airlines,' while American urged customers to book directly on American's website for the lowest prices. Meanwhile Google is waiting in the wings with its recent proposal to purchase ITA Software, the developer of the Internet's leading technology to compare flights fares. 'Though 49 percent of travelers purchase travel online, it is still time consuming and slow to search for travel options online,' says a statement from Google, defending the ITA acquisition which is being opposed by Microsoft on anti-trust grounds. 'We plan to work with ITA to create a new, easier way for users to find better flight information online.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 23:02:

Storm Botnet Returns as Part of New Year's Attacks

Trailrunner7 writes "A new spam campaign that appeared shortly before the New Year is part of a new effort by the crew behind the Storm/Waledac botnet and is using some rather elementary tactics--in combination with fast-flux--to attempt to compromise unsuspecting users. The new attack emerged late last week and is fronted by a fairly lame spam campaign that is sending millions of emails that appear to be holiday e-cards, one of the older and more threadbare techniques in this particular game. According to an analysis of the attack by the researchers at the Shadowserver Foundation, victims who click on the link in the email are directed to one of a number of compromised domains, which then redirect the user to another page that displays a message asking the user to download a fake Flash player. This, of course, installs a piece of malware on the victim's machine." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 21:10:

Microsoft Patents Looks-Are-Everything Dating

theodp writes "Screw that eHarmony Compatibility Matching System nonsense. 'Physical appearance is generally considered one of the most important search criteria among users of online dating services,' according to a patent granted Tuesday to five Microsoft Research Asia inventors. Its Image-Based Face Search technology not only allows people to specify the 'gender, age, ethnicity, location, height, weight, and the like' of their prey, explains Microsoft, it also allows them to 'provide a query image of a face for which they would like to search for similar faces.' So, even though you can't have the real Angelina Jolie or Natalie Portman, Microsoft will fix you up with a look-alike." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 19:17:

IBM Files the Patent Troll Patent

An anonymous reader writes "It's all or nothing over at IBM as the company goes for the gold and files the patent troll patent. Forget the Hyperlink patent or the POS shutdown patent, IBM wants the patent patent. Its idea is centered around an approach to manage patents from inventor training to filing and protection strategies, including competitive monitoring. At least in theory, IBM could get approval to own the idea how to manage patents and make a business out of IP. The next time you file a patent, you may want to contact them as you may need a license to file for filing." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 17:27:

Why Published Research Findings Are Often False

Hugh Pickens writes "Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article in the New Yorker reporting that all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings in science have started to look increasingly uncertain as they cannot be replicated. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology and in the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only anti-psychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants. 'One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work,' says researcher Jonathon Schooler. 'He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.' For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. 'If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?' writes Lehrer. 'Which results should we believe?' Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to 'put nature to the question' but it now appears that nature often gives us different answers. According to John Ioannidis, author of Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls 'significance chasing,' or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. 'The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 15:55:

Online Impersonations Now Illegal In California

theodp writes "TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reports that a California bill criminalizing online impersonations went into effect on January 1st. 'There has to be intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud another person — not necessarily the person you are impersonating,' explains Arrington. 'Free speech issues, including satire and parody, aren't addressed in the text of the bill. The courts will likely sort it out.' So, Fake Steve Jobs, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 14:21:

Some Hotmail Accounts Wiped

tomhudson writes "PC Magazine reports that many Hotmail accounts have lost all their emails. Users' entire email histories have apparently been lost. 'Users can still log in sans issue. However, they arrive at empty inboxes: No custom folders, no messages in "Sent" or "Deleted," nothing. As one might expect, the abruptness (and unexpectedness) of the purge has left some of Hotmail's long-time users a bit in the dark.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 12:36:

Super Mario Bros. 3 Level Design Lessons

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Significant Bits about how the early level design in Super Mario Bros. 3 gradually introduced players to the game without needing something as blatant and obtrusive as a tutorial: "Super Mario Bros. 3 contains many obvious design lessons that are also present in other games, e.g., the gradual layering of complexity that allows players to master a specific mechanic. What surprised me during my playthrough, though, was how some of these lessons were completely optional. The game doesn't have any forced hand-holding, and it isn't afraid of the player simply exploring it at his own pace (even if it means circumventing chunks of the experience)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 11:16:

Detailing the Security Risks In PDF Standard

crabel writes with this quote from the H Online: "At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin security researcher Julia Wolf pointed out numerous, previously hardly known security problems in connection with Adobe's PDF standard. For instance, a PDF can reportedly contain a database scanner that becomes active and scans a network when the document is printed on a network printer. Wolf said that the document format is also full of other surprises. For example, it is reportedly possible to write PDFs which display different content in different operating systems, browsers or PDF readers — or even depending on a computer's language settings." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 09:28:

Microsoft Research Takes On Go

mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has used F# and AI to implement a consumer-quality game of Go — arguably the most difficult two-person game to implement. They have used an interesting approach to the problem of playing the game, which is a pragmatic cross between tree search with pruning and machine learning to spot moves with a 'good shape.' The whole lot has been packaged into an XNA-based game with a story." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 08:10:

iPhone Alarms Hit By New Year's Bug

An anonymous reader writes "Non-recurring iPhone alarms stopped working on January 1 for devices running iOS 4.02, 4.1, and 4.2.1. Apparently, it will fix its self by January 3, and the current workaround is to set the alarm to repeat. My girlfriend wasn't impressed, sleeping in, and I wasn't either, having to race her to work!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 05:11:

Samsung Set To Introduce Android-Based iPod Touch Competitor

blixtech writes "Virtually unchallenged in the portable media player market, Apple's iPod Touch is set to receive a pretty strong competitor at CES 2011. Samsung has just announced they will showcase an Android-powered PMP called the Galaxy Player, featuring almost the same hardware as the Galaxy S smartphone." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 02:14:

Pirate Party Founder Steps Down After 5 Years

ktetch-pirate writes "Five years to the day after he created the first Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge has stepped down as leader of Piratpartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party. The announcement was made in a webcast with Falkvinge and his deputy Anna Troberg, with Troberg taking on his duties effective immediately." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-02 00:59:

Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed

hackingbear writes "In an interview published in Sina.com.cn, Chinese rail engineers gave a detailed account of the history, motivation, and technologies behind the Chinese high-speed rail system. More interestingly, they blatantly revealed the strategies and tactics used in acquiring high-speed rail tech from foreign companies (Google translation of Chinese original). At the beginning, China developed its own high-speed rail system known as the Chinese Star, which achieved a test speed of 320km/h; but the system was not considered reliable or stable enough for operation. So China decided to import the technologies. The leaders instructed, 'The goal of the project is to boost our economy, not theirs.' A key strategy employed is divide-and-conquer: by dividing up the technologies of the system and importing multiple different technologies across different companies, it ensures no single country or company has total control. 'What we do is to exchange market for technologies. The negotiation was led by the Ministry of Railway [against industry alliances of the exporting countries]. This uniform executive power gave China huge advantage in negotiations,' said Wu Junrong, 'If we don't give in, they have no choice. They all want a piece of our huge high speed rail project.' For example, [Chinese locomotive train] CRH2 is based on Japanese tech, CRH3 on German tech, and CRH5 on French tech, all retrofit for Chinese rail standards. Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 23:50:

Security Researcher Finds Hundreds of Browser Bugs

An anonymous reader writes "PC Magazine reports on a very understated late night post to the full-disclosure mailing list, in which security researcher Michael Zalewski shared a fuzzing tool reportedly capable of identifying over a hundred browser bugs. Some of these bugs, he says, may be already known to third parties in China. The report also includes an account of how browser vendors fared fixing these flaws so far. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's response timeline appears depressing." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 22:38:

Android Text Messages Intermittently Going Astray

theodp writes "Reports from Engadget and others suggest that Tiger Woods and Brett Favre might want to avoid Android for the time being. It seems Android's default text messaging app still has horrible text messaging bugs that can that intermittently send texts to the wrong person. 'This is ticking me off like no other technology glitch that I experienced in recent years,' reads one unhappy camper's post on a lengthy Help Forum thread opened on March 16th. 'If a bank deposited my paycheck into another person's account I wouldn't stress so much cause I can always get the money back. How the hell do you take words back? "Oh sorry boss you had to find out that I think you're an idiot, can I still keep my job, please please please?"' Over at Google Code, Issue 9392 — SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact — carries a priority of 'Medium,' even though it has 600+ comments and has been starred by 3,600+ people." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 21:28:

Hungarian Officials Can Now Censor the Media

An anonymous reader writes "Hungary is set to regulate the media, including web-published content, under a new law applicable today. The law requires all the media to provide a 'balanced view' and must not go against 'public morality,' and places all publications under the control of a new regulating body, whose top members have all been nominated by Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Orban, whose strong ways have been compared to Putin's, has been tightening his grip over Hungary. 'In the seven months since Orban came to power with a two-thirds parliamentary majority, he has implemented retroactive taxes in violation of the constitution, curbed the Constitutional Court's power, effectively nationalized private pension funds and put ruling-party allies in charge of at least four independent institutions, including the audit office.' Citizens sentenced in application of the new law can still challenge it at the European Court of Human Rights — see you in a few years." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 20:12:

Has the Industrialized World Reached Peak Travel?

Harperdog sends this excerpt from Miller-McCune: "A study (abstract) of eight industrialized countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years of the 21st century, well before the recent escalation in fuel prices. It could be a sign, researchers said, that the demand for travel and the demand for car ownership in those countries has reached a saturation point. 'With talk of "peak oil," why not the possibility of "peak travel" when a clear plateau has been reached?' asked co-author Lee Schipper ... Most of the eight countries in the study have experienced declines in miles traveled by car per capita in recent years. The US appears to have peaked at an annual 8,100 miles by car per capita, and Japan is holding steady at 2,500 miles." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 19:02:

Replacing Traditional Storage, Databases With In-Memory Analytics

storagedude writes "Traditional databases and storage networks, even those sporting high-speed solid state drives, don't offer enough performance for the real-time analytics craze sweeping corporations, giving rise to in-memory analytics, or data mining performed in memory without the limitations of the traditional data path. The end result could be that storage and databases get pushed to the periphery of data centers and in-memory analytics becomes the new critical IT infrastructure. From the article: 'With big vendors like Microsoft and SAP buying into in-memory analytics to solve Big Data challenges, the big question for IT is what this trend will mean for the traditional data center infrastructure. Will storage, even flash drives, be needed in the future, given the requirement for real-time data analysis and current trends in design for real-time data analytics? Or will storage move from the heart of data centers and become merely a means of backup and recovery for critical real-time apps?'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 17:50:

Ubisoft's Draconian DRM Patched?

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Ubisoft's controversial DRM scheme launched last year that required players to have a permanent connection to the Internet has been patched to no longer stop the game when connectivity drops, though an Internet connection is still required when starting the game." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 16:37:

Zimbabwe Gov't Websites Hit By Pro-WikiLeaks DDoS Attack

An anonymous reader writes "Pro-WikiLeaks hacktivists have struck a blow against the-powers-that-be in Zimbabwe, bringing down three government websites through distributed denial-of-service attacks. The attacks appear to be in support of newspapers who published secret cables in the ongoing WikiLeaks saga, to the annoyance of the country's leadership. Grace Mugabe, wife of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, was recently reported to be suing a newspaper for $15 million after it published a WikiLeaks cable that claimed she has benefited from illegal diamond trading. The Zimbabwe government's online portal at www.gta.gov.zw and the official ZANU-PF website continue to be offline, and the Finance Ministry's website now displays a message saying it is under maintenance." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 15:25:

Apple Privacy Concerns Go To Court

An anonymous reader writes "From the article: 'Apple is being sued for allegedly letting mobile apps on the iPhone and iPad send personal information to ad networks without the consent of users.' Some of the apps listed are on the Android Market as well, but there is no mention of a similar problem for Google. One wonders if Apple could be persuaded to strip access to the unique phone identifiers from apps." A followup article with an industry lawyer suggests that this lawsuit could be the first of many as users push back against privacy intrusions by app developers and ad networks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 14:14:

Do Sleepy Surgeons Have a Right To Operate?

Hugh Pickens writes "BusinessWeek reports that a commentary from the New England Journal of Medicine calls on doctors to disclose when they're deprived of sleep and not perform surgery unless a patient gives written consent after being informed of their surgeon's status. 'We think that institutions have a responsibility to minimize the chances that patients are going to be cared for by sleep-deprived clinicians,' writes Dr. Michael Nurok, an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician. Research suggests that sleep deprivation impairs a person's psychomotor skills — those that require coordination and precision — as much as alcohol consumption and increases the risk of complications in patients whose surgeons failed to get much shuteye." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 11:15:

Some Hard Drive Nostalgia To Start Off the Year

ColdWetDog writes "It's the end of another calendar year and time for all sorts of retrospective pieces. Instead of going back to last year or even last decade, MacWorld has a quick slide show on the The Evolution of Hard Drives which more accurately would be described as 'A Dozen Pictures of Ancient Magnetic Storage Devices.' Still and all, it might be interesting to those young'uns who think that 10 Gigabytes is small." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 08:11:

Micro-USB Cellphone Charger Becomes EU Standard

An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has put into effect a June 2009 agreement stating that major cellphone manufacturers should standardize their charging/data connection ports to the popular Micro-USB format. CEN-CENELEC and ETSI provided the standards by which these 14 companies will abide by to make cell phone recharging and data transfer easy." Apple may even bring the next-gen iPad along for the ride. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 05:04:

EU Wants Power To Block China's Tech Buying

itwbennett writes "In an interview with German daily paper Handelsblatt, the EU's industry commissioner Antonio Tajani said he wants the power to block China from buying up European tech companies. Tajani envisions an authority along the same lines as the United States' Committee on Foreign Investment and would determine 'if the acquisition (of a company) with European know-how by a private or public foreign company represented a danger or not.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 02:02:

'No Refusal' DUI Checkpoints Coming To Florida?

schwit1 writes "With New Year's Eve only days away, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration expects this to be one of the deadliest weeks of the year on the roads. But now a new weapon is being used in the fight against drunk driving. ... Florida is among several states now holding what are called 'no refusal' checkpoints. It means if you refuse a breath test during a traffic stop, a judge is on site, and issues a warrant that allows police to perform a mandatory blood test." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 01:09:

Four IT Consultants Charged With $80MM NYC Rip-Off

theodp writes "It's I-told-you-so time for Slashdot commenter frnic, who smelled a crime last March after reading that New York City had dropped $722 million on its still-under-development CityTime Attendance System. Nine months later, US Attorney Preet Bharara charged 'four consultants to the New York City Office of Payroll Administration ... for operating a fraudulent scheme that led to the misappropriation of more than $80 million in New York City funds allocated for an information technology project known as "CityTime."' Three of the four consultants were also charged — along with a consultant's wife and mother — with using a network of friends-and-family shell corporations to launder the proceeds of the fraud. Dept. of Investigations Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn called it a shame that 'supposed experts hired and paid well to protect the city's interests were exposed as the fox guarding the hen house.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2011-01-01 00:06:

R2-D2 Creator Grant McCune Dead At 67

CBC reports on sad news for Star Wars fans: "Grant McCune, a special effects artist who earned an Oscar for his work on the 1977 film Star Wars, has died. He was 67. McCune died Monday at his home in Hidden Hills, Calif., of pancreatic cancer. McCune created scenes with miniatures, models and special effects for dozens of movies, including Spaceballs, Ghostbusters II and 2008's Rambo. He began in special effects in 1975 when he and friend Bill Shourt were hired to make a giant white shark model for Steven Spielberg's Jaws. They got no credit for the film, but McCune caught the eye of the film community and he became chief model maker for Star Wars, where he created R2-D2 and many of the creatures that populate the film." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 23:10:

YouTube Legally Considered a TV Station In Italy

orzetto writes "Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that YouTube and similar websites based on user-generated content will be considered TV stations (Google translation of Italian original) in Italian law, and will be subject to the same obligations. Among these, a small tax (500 €), the obligation to publish corrections within 48 hours upon request of people who consider themselves slandered by published content, and the obligation not to broadcast content inappropriate for children in certain time slots. The main change, though, is that YouTube and similar sites will be legally responsible of all published content as long as they have any form (even if automated) of editorial control. The main reason for this is probably that it will force YouTube to assume editorial responsibility for all published content, which facilitates the ongoing € 500M lawsuit of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi against YouTube because of content copyrighted by Berlusconi's TV networks that some users uploaded on YouTube. Berlusconi's Spanish TV station, TeleCinco, was previously defeated in court on the grounds that YouTube is not a content provider." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 22:13:

Our Lazy Solar Dynamo — Hello Dalton Minimum?

tetrahedrassface writes "Solar maximum is supposed to be occurring, and everything from satellite communications to your toaster or radio could be affected. The only problem is that this just isn't happening, and NASA continues to revise downward the original prediction. In fact, the new forecast for Solar Cycle 24 is a lot smaller, and is now pegged at almost 40% of what was previously predicted. Recently, two scientists at the National Solar Observatory have followed the lead of a prominent Russian scientist, who almost five years ago forecast a dearth of sunspots and the subsequent cooling of Earth for the next several cycles. With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum, or worse still, yet another Maunder?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 21:20:

Tech History Behind New York's New Year's Eve Ball

Toe, The writes "A perennial icon of New Year's Eve is the geodesic ball which first dropped in Times Square in 1907. Over the past century, there have been seven iterations of this ball. The first one, made out of iron and wood, weighed 400 pounds and sported one hundred 25-watt bulbs. The current ball weighs almost six tons and uses 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDs. The designers expect there to be more tech improvements to the ball soon. What do you think of the ball and the bizarre status it holds in our culture? How would you change it for years to come?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 20:24:

Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Hack Demonstrated

broggyr writes "Seems it didn't take long to hack the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. Quoting WPCentral: 'For developers, the weakness in Microsoft's DRM for Windows Phone 7 applications has been well known for quite some time, and there have been calls for Microsoft to address these concerns ... Since then, a "white hat" developer has provided WPCentral with a proof-of-concept program that can successfully pull any application from the Marketplace, remove the security and deploy to an unlocked Windows Phone with literally a push of a button. Alternatively, you could just save the cracked XAP file to your hard drive. Neither the app nor the methodology is public, and it will NOT be released ... It is important to note that this was all done within six hours by one developer.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 19:33:

'Colonizing the Red Planet,' a How-To Guide

Velcroman1 writes "A manned mission to Mars would be the greatest adventure in the history of the human race. And one man knows how to make it a reality. In fact, he just wrote the book on it — literally. Joel Levine, senior research scientist with NASA's Langley Research Center and co-chair of NASA's Human Exploration of Mars Science Analysis Group, just published 'The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet.' The book reads like a who's who of Mars mission science, featuring senators, astronauts, astrophysicists, geologists and more on getting to Mars, studying its atmosphere and climate, the psychological and medical effects on the crew and other details. The most interesting bit: Levine presents a solution for funding the trip, something unprecedented for NASA: advertising. 'The suggestion is marketing to different corporations and professional sports leagues for advertising, which is something NASA never does.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 18:26:

Cheap GSM Eavesdropping a Reality

Techmeology writes "GSM eavesdropping has been demonstrated at the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin using a €10 Motorola phone and open source GSM firmware. Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut replaced the firmware on the phone, enabling them to process all the data it received. They used already available rainbow tables to decrypt data being sent to and from other mobile phones. They have no plans to release the hack publicly, however they expect others to successfully attempt the hack. Mr. Nohl said the objective was to raise awareness of GSM's insecurity." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 17:34:

Google Patenting 'Exponential' Friend Spamming

theodp writes "'The web is better when it's social,' declared Google as it unveiled its OpenSocial initiative. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not so much, unless you're keen on giving companies the capability to 'exponentially' bombard you with advertising across all of your social networking sites. On Thursday, the USPTO published Google's patent application for Propagating Promotional Information on a Social Network, which the search giant explains 'generally relates to creating and providing promotional information (e.g., advertising, public service announcements, etc.) to users of a social network (e.g., FACEBOOK, MYSPACE, ORKUT, LINKEDIN, TWITTER, etc.).' By doing so 'across multiple social networks,' Google adds, 'the impact of the other promotional information may exponentially expand to other users of a social network." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 16:39:

China Censors 60,000 Porn Sites, 5,000 Arrested

lothos writes with news that China has arrested thousands more people and shuttered 60,000 websites in an ongoing anti-pornography crackdown. "Wang Chen, director of the Information Office of the State Council, said at a news conference that some 350 million pieces of pornographic and indecent internet content were eliminated, according to the Xinhua report. The government launched a special campaign a year ago to rid the internet of pornographic and vulgar content, Xinhua reported. Overall, the campaign included 2,197 criminal cases involving 4,965 people who violated Chinese law by disseminating pornography via the internet or mobile phones, the news agency said. Of those, 58 people received prison sentences exceeding five years." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 15:46:

'Zombie' Satellite Returns To Life

realperseus writes "The American telecommunications satellite Galaxy 15 has been brought under control after spending most of the year traversing the sky and wreaking havoc upon its neighbors. The satellite is currently at 98.5 degrees west longitude (from 133 west). An emergency patch was successfully uploaded, ensuring that the conditions which caused it to 'go rogue' will not occur again. Once diagnosis and testing have been completed, Intelsat plans to move the satellite back to 133 west." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 14:55:

One Tip Enough To Put Name On Terrorist Watch List

Frosty P writes "As a result of the US Government's complete failure to investigate credible warnings about 'Underwear Bomber' Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from none other than Abdulmutallab's father, senior American counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip can lead to a name being placed on the watch list. Civil liberties groups warn that it is now even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in America's security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel. 'They are secret lists with no way for people to petition to get off or even to know if they're on,' said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 14:03:

FBI Raids Texas ISP For Anonymous DDoS Info

jcombel writes with this link to The Smoking Gun, which says "As part of an international criminal probe into computer attacks launched this month against perceived corporate enemies of WikiLeaks, the FBI has raided a Texas business and seized a computer server that investigators believe was used to launch a massive electronic attack on PayPal." Computerworld has a story, as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 11:08:

Solar Cells Integrated In Microchips

cylonlover writes "In a new, more efficient approach to solar powered microelectronics, researchers have produced a microchip which directly integrates photovoltaic cells. While harnessing sunlight to power microelectronics isn't new, conventional set-ups use a separate solar cell and battery. What sets this device apart is that high-efficiency solar cells are placed straight onto the electronics, producing self-sufficient, low-power devices which are highly suitable for industrial serial production and can even operate indoors." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 09:25:

Seller of Counterfeit Video Games Gets 30 Months

wiredmikey writes "The FBI reported this week that Qiang 'Michael' Bi, of Powell, Ohio was sentenced to 30 months in prison for selling more than 35,000 illegally copied computer games over the Internet between 2005 and 2009. According to a statement of facts read during Bi's plea hearing, agents executed a search warrant at Bi's house and found multiple CD duplicators and more than 1,000 printed counterfeit CDs. Some of the CDs were still in the duplicator. During their investigation, agents learned that Bi would buy a single copy of a game, illegally duplicate it and sell the copies on eBay.com and Amazon.com. He also set up a website for customers to download the games they bought. Bi accepted payment through eBay and PayPal accounts in his name and in others' names." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 08:17:

Most Android Tablets Fail At GPL Compliance

polar_bear` writes "Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has been checking to see who's naughty and nice. Most Android tablet vendors? Naughty, naughty, naughty, when it comes to GPL compliance. The current crop of Android tablets fails miserably when it comes to GPL compliance, with most of the vendors flouting the GPL and failing to ship source." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 05:20:

Beware of Using Google Or Open DNS For iTunes

Relayman writes "Joe Mailer wanted to download an iTunes movie recently and his Apple TV told him it would take two hours. When he switched his DNS resolver settings, the download time dropped to less than 20 seconds. Apparently, iTunes content is served by Akamai which uses geolocation based on the IP address of the DNS request to determine which server should provide his content. When you use Google or Open DNS to resolve the Apple domain name, all the requests to Akamai appear to be coming from the same location and they're all directed to the same server pool, overloading that pool and causing the slow downloads. The solution: Be wary of using Google or Open DNS when downloading iTunes files or similar large files. Use your own ISPs DNS servers instead or run your own resolving DNS server." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 02:31:

World's Plant Life Far Less Diverse Than Thought

Meshach writes "A report out of FOX News (I know, I know) says that there are far fewer unique species of plants than previously thought. The report states that only about a third of named species are actually unique. The rest have been 'discovered' multiple times, often by separate scientists." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 01:36:

PC Gamers Crush Console Brethren

l_bratch writes "Since December 22nd DICE have been running a competition between each target platform of their latest Battlefield expansion — Bad Company 2: Vietnam. Players were required to complete a large number of 'team actions' in game, in order to unlock a hidden, remastered version of the Operation Hastings map from the original Battlefield: Vietnam. PC gamers have completed the task, whereas gamers on both console platforms are only about halfway there." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-31 00:35:

Kodachrome Takes Its Final Bow Today

Ellis D. Tripp writes "Today marks the end of an era for photo geeks, with the shutdown of the world's last Kodachrome film processing line. Dwayne's Photo, of Parson, KS will pull the plug on their K-14 processing equipment at the end of business today." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 23:42:

A Guitar Robot That Can Really Shred

botPatrol writes "As reported today by Create Digital Music and the Wired blog, PAM (Polytangent Automatic (multi-)Monochord) is a robot who has discovered a love for vintage Metallica riffs, and can churn them out non-stop at superhuman speeds without ever requiring anger management therapy or treatment for drug abuse." (Read more, below.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 22:50:

Democrats Crowdsourcing To Vote Palin In Primaries

SharpieMarker writes "In what could be the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing project ever, Democrats are beginning to organize to purposely vote for Palin in the 2012 Republican primaries. Their theory is by having Palin as an opponent, Obama will have the best odds at winning reelection. Recent polls have shown that Obama comfortably leads Palin by 10-20 points, but Obama is statistically tied with Romney and barely ahead of Huckabee. They even have a state-by-state primary voting guide to help Democrats navigate various states' rules for voting Palin in Republican primaries." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 22:03:

New App Mixes New Drinks With What You Have

Pickens writes "The magic of a new app called 'Top Shelf' is that if you want to mix a new drink, the app thinks the way most of us do — instead of going out to buy the ingredients, it shows you how to build a new drink with the ingredients you have available? Feeling indecisive? Let Top Shelf pick a random recipe for you. You can get a random drink from the entire database, a specific category, your favorites, search results, or the liquor cabinet." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 21:46:

What Can a Lawyer Do For Open Source?

zolltron writes "I have a friend who went to law school. He really enjoyed intellectual property law, and he seems to genuinely regret that he didn't end up as an IP lawyer. But, what's done is done, and he's not going to radically change career trajectories now. But, I think he might be interested in volunteering a little of his time if there was an interesting project he could get behind. Computer folks are always trying to figure out how to get involved in open source even if it won't be their full time job. So, now I ask you Slashdot, how can my friend use his expertise to help an open source project?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 20:51:

Android Trojan Found, Spreading From Chinese App Stores

wiredmikey writes that researchers from Lookout Mobile have discovered a sophisticated Trojan targeting Android devices, who "say the mobile malware is 'The most sophisticated Android malware we've seen to date, Geinimi is also the first Android malware in the wild that displays botnet-like capabilities. Once the malware is installed on a user's phone, it has the potential to receive commands from a remote server that allow the owner of that server to control the phone.' What makes the Trojan different from most 'standard' mobile malware is that Geinimi is being 'grafted' onto repackaged versions of legitimate applications, primarily games, and distributed in third-party Chinese Android app markets ..." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 20:01:

VoIP Now Technically Illegal In China

ironfrost writes "A recent ruling by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has declared that VoIP services are illegal, except for the ones operated by state-owned telecom operators China Telecom and China Unicom. According to the article, "the decision is expected to make Skype, UUCall and other similar services unavailable in China", and is widely seen as a way to protect the traditional telecom operators' profits. Here's a more in-depth story in Chinese (Google Translate version)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 19:08:

Most Anticipated Tech Products of 2011

adeelarshad82 writes "2011 is just around the corner, and with the new year comes expectations. Based on hype and recent announcements, PCMag put together a list of twelve most anticipated tech products of 2011. Some are new, like the technology to bridge Wi-Fi, PowerLine, and Ethernet or the 3D camcorders, which will let you create content for your 3D TV. Others will just carry over from what we anticipated in 2010 but never materialized like iPhone on the Verizon network or Phones with dual core processors." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 18:13:

Skype For IPhone Now Makes Video Calls

tekgoblin writes "Today Skype has released an update that allows iPhone users to make video calls from their device. There had been rumors that this update was in the works and now they have been made fact. So, was the Skype outage the other day part of this internal update? Possibly. But Skype has proven to be one of the most important communication tools in the world and now has gotten even better." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 18:13:

Skype For iPhone Now Makes Video Calls

tekgoblin writes "Today Skype has released an update that allows iPhone users to make video calls from their device. There had been rumors that this update was in the works and now they have been made fact. So, was the Skype outage the other day part of this internal update? Possibly. But Skype has proven to be one of the most important communication tools in the world and now has gotten even better." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 17:09:

The 10 Worst Tech Products of 2010

Barence writes "PC Pro has a count down of the ten worst tech gadgets of the year. Included in its hall of shame are: iPad Made Simple "a book containing 704 pages of advice on how to use a device that's universally acknowledged as being ridiculously easy to use"; the Dell Inspiron Duo, "a tablet that leaves you longing to return to a keyboard and a touchpad"; and the £99 Next Tablet, the highlight of which was the "eight-page Quick Start Guide"." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 16:17:

Lessons Learned From Skype’s Outage

aabelro writes "On December 22th, 1600 GMT, the Skype services started to become unavailable, in the beginning for a small part of the users, then for more and more, until the network was down for about 24 hours. A week later, Lars Rabbe, CIO at Skype, explained what happened in a post-mortem analysis of the outage." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 15:21:

The Significant Decline of Spam

Orome1 writes "In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the worlds pharmacy spam. Analysis of the spam trends to date reveals a further drop in the amounts of spam sent during Q4 2010. December's daily average was around 30% less than September's. The average spam level for the quarter was 83% down from 88% in Q3 2010. The beginning of December saw a low of nearly 74%." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 14:03:

Amazon Censorship Expands

Nom du Keyboard writes "Recently word leaked out about Amazon removing titles containing fictional incest. Surprisingly that ban didn't extend to the 10 titles of Science Fiction Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein that incorporate various themes of incest and pedophilia. Now, it seems that the censorship is expanding to m/m gay fiction if it contains the magic word 'rape' in the title. Just how far is this going to be allowed to proceed in relative silence, and who is pushing these sudden decisions on Amazon's part?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 12:06:

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year

Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 10:00:

Should Colleges Ban Classroom Laptop Use?

theodp writes "If you were a college prof, think you could successfully compete for the attention of a lecture hall of Mac-packing students? CS student Carolyn blogs that a debate has sprung up on her campus about whether it is acceptable to use a laptop in class. And her school is hardly alone when it comes to struggling with appropriate in-classroom laptop use (vendor/corporate trainers would no doubt commiserate). The problem, she says, is that the OCD Facebookers aren't just devaluing their own education — there's a certain distraction factor to worry about. 'Students,' she suggests, 'should also communicate with each other more and tell their classmates when their computer use bothers them. I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 08:40:

Periodic Table Etched Onto a Single Hair

adeelarshad82 writes "The University of Nottingham's Nanotechnology Center decided to help Professor of chemistry, Martyn Poliakoff celebrate his special day by 'etching' a copy of a Periodic Table of Elements onto a single strand of the scientist's hair using a 'very sophisticated' electron ion beam microscope. The microscope creates a very fine etching of the periodic table only a few microns across by shooting a 'focused ion beam' of gallium ions at the hair. The technology here is nothing revolutionary, but it is inspiring to see a grown man get so giddy with the prospect of seeing science in action." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 07:21:

OSI Refers Novell Patent Deal To Authorities

WebMink writes "Worried that the unholy alliance of Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC — hardly known for their collaboration — is establishing a patent troll called CPTN to attack open source software, the Open Source Initiative has announced that they have referred the Novell deal over to the German competition authorities." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 04:17:

Intel Intros 310 Series Mini SSDs

crookedvulture writes "Intel has added a couple of tiny 310 Series solid-state drives to its storage lineup. Measuring just 51 x 30 x 5.8mm, the mini-SATA SSDs are about a tenth the size of a standard notebook hard drive. Impressively, their performance ratings track with full-sized SSDs. Intel is pushing the 310 Series as a solution for dual-drive notebooks that combine solid-state and mechanical storage to give users the best of both worlds. Next-gen notebooks just got a little more interesting." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 03:18:

Real-Life Frogger Ends In Hospital Visit

BigSes writes "A 23-year old man has been hospitalized after police in South Carolina say he was hit by an SUV while playing a real-life version of the video game Frogger. Authorities said the 23-year-old man was taken to a hospital in Anderson after he was struck Monday evening. Before he was hit, police say the man had been discussing the game with his friends. Chief Jimmy Dixon says the man yelled 'go' and darted into oncoming traffic in the four-lane highway. Has it come time to ban some of the classics before someone else goes out and breaks a few bricks with their heads after eating a large mushroom?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 02:11:

Nintendo Warns 3D Games Can Ruin Children's Eyes

Hugh Pickens writes "Fox News reports that Sony has posted a cautionary note on its Japanese website that 'vision of children under the age of six has been said [to be in the] developmental stage,' adding that 3D content 'delivers 3D images with different left and right images, [which] has a potential impact on the growth of children's eyes.' The notice went to say that Sony recommends that all viewers take regular breaks while watching 3D video or playing stereoscopic 3D games (google translation). Dr. Michael Ehrenhaus, an ophthalmologist with New York Cornea Consultants, thinks Nintendo and Sony may be getting ahead of themselves with these disclaimers. 'It's hard to say that it'll ruin development,' says Ehrenhaus." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 01:05:

South Korea Launches First Electric Bus Fleet

An anonymous reader writes "The Seoul Metropolitan Government just rolled out the world's first commercial all-electric bus service. The buses were designed to be as efficient as possible — each bus can run up to about 52 miles on a single charge and they have a maximum speed of about 62 miles per hour. The vehicles' lithium-ion battery packs can be fully charged in less than 30 minutes and they also feature regenerative braking systems that reuse energy from brakes when running downhill." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 00:33:

Tales From the Tech Trenches

GMGruman writes "Anyone in IT has a story or two involving stupid users, crazy co-workers, kludgy technology, and airhead managers. Lisa Blackwelder has collected top tales of the tech trenches, covering user antics, office politics, and unusual technical challenges that IT pros faced (usually) with aplomb, insight, and savvy." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-30 00:08:

Solar Storms Could Bring Northern Lights South

RedEaredSlider writes "Increased solar activity could give residents of the continental U.S., southern Europe and Japan the chance to see the northern lights for the first time in several years. The National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center says the sun is entering a period of high activity, marked by more sunspots and a greater chance of a coronal mass ejection, or CME, hitting the Earth. That would result in auroras being visible much further from the poles than they usually are." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 23:12:

Wikileaks and Democracy In Zimbabwe

OCatenac writes "The Atlantic has an interesting story on the collateral damage of exposing diplomatic communications in Zimbabwe. From the article: 'The reaction in Zimbabwe was swift. Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.' Undoubtedly there are lots of things that our governments hide from us which should not be hidden but it's a shame that no one from Wikileaks could be troubled to consider the potential repercussions of this particular exposure." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 22:19:

Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good

ReportedlyWorking writes "It appears that Sony's PS3 has been fatally compromised. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a team named 'fail0verflow' revealed that they had calculated the Private Keys, which would let them or anyone else, generate signed software for the PS3. Additionally, they also claim to have a method of jailbreaking the PS3 without the use of a Dongle, which is the current method. If all these statements are true, this opens the door to custom firmware, and homebrew software. Assuming that Sony doesn't take radical action and invalidate their private keys, this could mean that Jailbreaking is viable on all PS3, regardless of their firmware! From the article: 'Approximately a half hour in, the team revealed their new PS3 secrets, the moment we all were waiting for. One of the major highlights here was, dongle-less jailbreaking by overflowing the bootup NOR flash, giving complete control over the system. The other major feat, was calculating the public private keys (due to botched security), giving users the ability to sign their own SELFs Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 21:23:

Court Rules Website Doesn't Have To Remove Defamatory Comments

DustyShadow writes "In the case of Blockowicz v. Williams, The US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to force Ripoff Report to remove allegedly defamatory comments posted by a user. The Ripoff Report has a well-publicized no-takedown policy, even if the author wants to remove his/her post, so the Ripoff Report refused. The Blockowiczs then claimed that the Ripoff Report violated FRCP 65(d) because the Ripoff Report was 'in active concert or participation' with the initial posters by refusing the injunction's removal order. The district court (and the Court of Appeals) disagreed with the Blockowiczs. Absent the 'active concert or participation,' the website was outside the court's control. Ripoff Report has released a statement concerning this case: 'In keeping with our core mission of protecting speech to the fullest extent of the law, we decided that it was not just our right but also our duty to ask questions and dig deeper before we could comply with such an order. Other sites claim they support free speech, but when the going gets rough, they will usually protect their bottom line rather than the Constitutional rights and freedoms this country was founded upon. Unlike other sites, even when the speech involved is harsh or negative and even if our position sometimes generates negative press for us, we think that the First Amendment requires us to put our principles before our pocketbook and fight against censorship.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 20:26:

Drupal 7 Module Development

Michael J. Ross writes "While it is possible to create a simple website using a base installation of Drupal, the real power of this content management system is achieved through the use of modules, which can be thought of as add-ons that extend the capabilities of Drupal in specific ways — oftentimes in conjunction with other modules. These modules are developed and contributed by PHP programmers who understand how to use one or more of the Drupal application programming interfaces (APIs) to access information stored in a Drupal database, such as content, user profiles, and theme settings. These APIs have changed with Drupal version 7, and thus Drupal coders could benefit from a book that explains how to create Drupal 7 contrib modules." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 19:34:

Amazon Cloud Not Big Enough For Feds and WikiLeaks

theodp writes "Dave Winer was already upset that Amazon Web Services (AWS) pulled the plug on WikiLeaks for posting classified U.S. government documents. So, he wasn't exactly thrilled to receive email three weeks later from an AWS PR flack boasting that 'the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments'. Writes Winer: 'It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon's web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.' Amazon, which wowed the White House with its ability to scale video slideshow site Animoto, was able to get its foot in the Federal door as a Recovery.gov redesign subcontractor." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 18:56:

German Kindergartens Ordered To Pay Copyright For Songs

BBird writes "Deutsche Welle reports: 'Up until this year, preschools could teach and produce any kind of song they wanted. But now they have to pay for a license if they want children to sing certain songs. A tightening of copyright rules means kindergartens now have to pay fees to Germany's music licensing agency, GEMA, to use songs that they reproduce and perform. The organization has begun notifying creches and other daycare facilities that if they reproduce music to be sung or performed, they must pay for a license.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 18:41:

IBM Makes a Super Memory Breakthrough

adeelarshad82 writes "IBM says they have made a significant leap forward in the viability of "Racetrack memory," a new technology design which has the potential to exponentially increase computing power. This new tech could give devices the ability to store as much as 100 times more information than they do now, which would be accessed at far greater speeds while utilizing "much less" energy than today's designs. In the future, a single portable device might be able to hold as much memory as today's business-class servers and run on a single battery charge for weeks at a time. Racetrack memory works by storing data as magnetic regions (also called domains), which would be transported along nanowire "racetracks." Instead of forcing a computer to seek out the data it needs, as traditional computing systems do, the information would automatically slide along the racetrack to where it could be used." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 17:42:

Cheaters Exposed Analyzing Statistical Anomalies

Hugh Pickens writes "Proctors and teachers can't watch everyone while they take tests — not when some students can text with their phones in their pockets, so with tests increasingly important in education — used to determine graduation, graduate school admission and, the latest, merit pay and tenure for teachers, Trip Gabriel writes that schools are turning to "data forensics" to catch cheaters, searching for data anomalies where the chances of random agreement are astronomical. In addition to looking for copying, statisticians hunt for illogical patterns, like test-takers who did better on harder questions than easy ones, a sign of advance knowledge of part of a test or look for unusually large score gains from a previous test by a student or class. Since Caveon Test Security, whose clients have included the College Board, the Law School Admission Council and more than a dozen states and big city school districts, began working for the state of Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, says James Mason, director of the State Department of Education's Office of Student Assessment. "People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you're going to get caught," says Mason." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 16:42:

Paul Allen Amends Lawsuit Against Facebook, Apple

itwbennett writes "A Federal judge dismissed Paul Allen's initial patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, Facebook, Google and others earlier this month because it was too vague and gave Allen until Dec. 28 to file an amendment providing more details of his claims. His lawyers responded with a 35-page document filed late Tuesday. The amendment details features of the defendants' websites that are alleged to infringe on the patents and also includes a last-minute amendment that targets Google's Android mobile operating system in a move that could spell trouble for phone manufacturers and app developers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 15:47:

Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers

daveschroeder writes "The recent release of classified State Department cables has often been compared to the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has said he supports WikiLeaks, and sees the issues as similar. Floyd Abrams is the prominent First Amendment attorney and Constitutional law expert who represented the New York Times in the landmark New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713 (1971)) Supreme Court case, which allowed the media to publish the Pentagon Papers without fear of government censure. Today, Abrams explains why WikiLeaks is unlike the Pentagon Papers, and how WikiLeaks is negatively impacting journalism protections: "Mr. Ellsberg himself has recently denounced the 'myth' of the 'good' Pentagon Papers as opposed to the 'bad' WikiLeaks. But the real myth is that the two disclosures are the same."" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 14:54:

The Empire Strikes Back Added To National Film Registry

aztec1430 writes " Airplane!," "The Empire Strikes Back," "The Exorcist," and "All the President's Men," were among the 25 films named by the Library of Congress to the National Film Registry on Tuesday for their cultural, historical or aesthetic significance. Now which version was added? and will each new Lucas-a-fied version need to be resubmitted every year? ;)" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 14:03:

Wired Responds In Manning Chat Log Controversy

Hugh Pickens writes "Earlier this week Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon about the arrest of US Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source and criticized Wired's failure to disclose the full chat logs between Manning and FBI informant Adrian Lamo. Now Wired's editor-in-chief Evan Hansen and senior editor Kevin Poulsen have responded to criticisms of the site's Wikileaks coverage stating that not one single fact has been brought to light suggesting Wired.com did anything wrong in pursuit of the story. 'Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time,' writes Hansen." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 12:42:

How Zynga's CityVille Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a Month

An article at Gamasutra takes an in-depth look at how Zynga's new browser-based social game CityVille managed to accumulate tens of millions of players in the relatively short time since its launch early this month. Quoting: "The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a 'Featured in the App Store' style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users' eyeballs. With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 11:11:

Living Earth Simulator Aims To Simulate Everything

H3xx writes "An international group of scientists are aiming to create a simulator — nicknamed The Living Earth Simulator — that will collect data from billions of sources and use it to replicate everything happening on Earth, from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on highways. The project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world. Perhaps this is Asimov's concept of Psychohistory come to fruition." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 08:09:

Elliptic Labs To Bring Touchless Gestures To iPad

An anonymous reader writes "Elliptic Labs will reveal their Touchless Gesture User Interface technology at CES 2011. Elliptic Labs sprung forth from the signal processing environment at the University of Oslo and what they've come up with is an iPod dock which creates a 'touchless zone' that extends out about 1 foot in front and to the sides of the iPad screen. Users can then initiate a number of gestures, much like on Microsoft Kinect, to manipulate onscreen content." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 05:11:

Paris To Test Banning SUVs In the City

thecarchik writes "Paris may be the first city to experiment with such a policy. Next year, it will begin to test restrictions on vehicles that emit more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometer — the measure of a car's contribution to greenhouse gases. An official within the Parisian mayor's office, Denis Baupin, identified older diesel-engined cars and sport-utility vehicles as specific targets of the emissions limit. Residents and travelers have responded by buying thousands of electric cars, including the low-speed fiberglass G-Wiz — despite major safety concerns with the vehicle." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 02:06:

Why Teach Programming With BASIC?

chromatic writes "To answer the perennial question "How can we teach kids how to program?", we created a web-based programming environment. As we began to write lessons and examples, we surprised ourselves. Modern languages may be powerful and useful for writing real programs, but BASIC and Logo are great languages for demonstrating the joy of programming." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-29 00:50:

Thin Client, Or Fat Client? That Is the Question

theodp writes "If virtual desktops are so great, asks Jonathan Eunice, then why isn't everyone using them? However encouraged folks are by the progress virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has made, and however enthused they may be about extending the wins of server virtualization over into the desktop realm, you don't see analysts and developers eating the virtual desktop dog food. And even the folks you meet from Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, VMware, and Wyse — the people selling VDI — use traditional 'fat' notebooks. So, are you using virtual desktops? Why, or why not?" I wonder how long the abbreviation VDI will stick around. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 23:41:

Can Movies Inspire Kids To Be Future Scientists?

Hugh Pickens writes "MSNBC reports on a recent panel that discussed studies showing that people, especially children, often model their behavior on what they see on the big (or small) screen and science shows up in many Hollywood films. In fact, 22 of the 60 top-grossing movies of all time are science-fiction or superhero flicks, including history's No. 1 box office hit, "Avatar." The movie science doesn't even have to be entirely accurate, some of the panelists added when asked to consider the role and impact of science in cinema. As long as it plants a seed of curiosity in viewers, it may spur them to investigate scientific issues on their own — and perhaps consider a career in science down the road. "It's not an educational medium, it's an emotional medium," says Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "Kids get turned on by the emotion." Interestingly enough although movies work hard to get the science right, many make errors ranging from the understandable to the egregious, but that's ok, say the panelists. "Even if a film or media product is not very accurate, that becomes a teaching moment," says Arvind Singhal. "So there's room for everything."" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 22:45:

Is Wired Hiding Key Evidence On Bradley Manning?

Hugh Pickens writes "Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon that for more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed but refuses to publish the key evidence in the arrest of US Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. "In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year," writes Greenwald. Wired has only published about 25% of the logs writes Greenwald and Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding journalists who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do. "Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning arrest," concludes Greenwald. "This has long ago left the realm of mere journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of active truth-hiding by a 'journalist' I've ever seen."" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 21:52:

France Planing Non-Windows Tablet Tax?

An anonymous reader writes "Lots of countries around the world have private copying "levies," which are effectively taxes on products that store data, which is put into a pool to be handed out to copyright holders, as a sort of payment for the "copying" that individuals do. This was quite popular with blank CDRs for example, but has been expanded in certain countries to cover hard drives, iPods and other such devices. Over in France, they're looking to expand the levy to tablet computers, but apparently if that tablet computer is running Microsoft Windows, it will be exempted from the tax. iPads and Android-powered tablets will have the tax. Why? Well, the argument is that if a tablet is running Windows, it's really a "computer." But if it's running one of those "mobile" operating systems, suddenly it's a brand new category. Not surprisingly, makers of Android tablets — including the French company Archos — are not at all happy about this." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 21:52:

France Planning Non-Windows Tablet Tax?

An anonymous reader writes "Lots of countries around the world have private copying 'levies,' which are effectively taxes on products that store data, which is put into a pool to be handed out to copyright holders, as a sort of payment for the 'copying' that individuals do. This was quite popular with blank CDRs, for example, but has been expanded in certain countries to cover hard drives, iPods and other such devices. Over in France, they're looking to expand the levy to tablet computers, but apparently if that tablet computer is running Microsoft Windows, it will be exempted from the tax. iPads and Android-powered tablets will have the tax. Why? Well, the argument is that if a tablet is running Windows, it's really a 'computer.' But if it's running one of those 'mobile' operating systems, suddenly it's a brand new category. Not surprisingly, makers of Android tablets — including the French company Archos — are not at all happy about this." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 20:49:

Dell Reveals Specs For the Looking Glass Tablet

adeelarshad82 writes "Dell hasn't officially unveiled its Looking Glass tablet, but it's on record at the FCC. The spec sheets reveal a device with a 7-inch screen, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, and an SD card slot. The Looking Glass will likely be announced at next week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is sure to have no shortage of new tablets. Dell filed the documents for device approval by the FCC on December 17. The Looking Glass is expected to be one of the first devices to pack an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, a powerful chip for mobile devices that can support both typical functions (like e-mail and Web browsing) as well as advanced graphics — all while preserving battery life." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 19:49:

Chinese Written Language To Dominate Internet

Zothecula writes "In the beginning, the language of the World Wide Web was English. Times change though, and the United States' military's gift to civilization knows no national boundaries, and growing worldwide adoption of the internet has changed the audience make-up to such an extent that the dominant language of the internet is about to become Chinese. That's not to say the Chinese are all that comfortable with this either. There has just been an official decree requiring the use of Chinese translations for all English words and phrases in newspapers, magazines and web sites. While all countries have watched the unregulated global nature of the internet erode traditional cultural values and the integrity of national languages, it seems the Chinese powers-that-be have concluded that the purity of the Chinese language needs to be preserved." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 18:50:

Apple's $1 Billion Data Center Mystery

1sockchuck writes "One of year's most tantalizing technology secrets involves Apple's $1 billion investment in a new data center in North Carolina. Is it the Death Star in Apple's plan for galactic domination? Some Apple watchers predict it will be the hub for a 21st century broadcasting network. Other enthusiasts are doing flyovers to film videos of the 500,000 square foot facility. There's also an unofficial FAQ about the new data center. What is Apple up to with this huge facility?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 17:54:

Ubuntu Powered Tablet Spotted!

dkd903 writes "The year 2010 had been all buzz with tablets and a similar trend is expected during the year 2011 too. We have already seen a lot of Android powered tablets. But how does a tablet powered by Ubuntu sound? A Chinese manufacturer TENQ has launched a tablet called P07. The device is said to be running Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and the boot time reported to be almost instant." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 16:58:

Open Source After 12 Years

GMGruman writes "12 years ago, seven people in a room coined the term "open source" and launched what initially seemed like a quixotic exercise. Today, open source is mainstream, with original believers such as Red Hat worth billions and superpowers such as Oracle buying in. But open source has changed along the way, says InfoWorld's Peter Wayner, and may change more in coming years." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 16:46:

Solar Panels For Your Pants

Phoghat writes "A new line of clothes come with its own solar panels to charge small electronics in your pocket. It might be overdoing the 'Green' technology but for the low, low price of $920, you can own a pair of Go Urban Cargo Pants, which boasts 'fly front, low-slung drawstring waist, and two back patch pockets with button down flaps,' but the main reason you might want them is the: "'two side cargo pockets with independently functioning power supply.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 16:01:

The Right's War On Net Neutrality

jamie writes "To understand the debate being waged in the United States over Net Neutrality, it's important to understand just how drastically one side has been misled. The leaders of the American Right are spreading the lie that Net Neutrality is a government takeover of the internet, with the intention of silencing conservative voices. (Limbaugh: "All you really have to know about Net Neutrality is that its biggest promoters are George Soros and Google.") This may be hard to believe to those of us who actually know what it's about — reinstating pre-2005 law that ensured internet providers could discriminate on the basis of volume but not content. Since the opposing side is so badly misinformed, those of us who want the internet to remain open to innovation and freedom of expression have to help educate them before the debate can really be held." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 15:11:

4chan Has Been DDOSed

An anonymous reader writes "According to the 4chan status page all of the 4chan boards have been DDOSed and are down." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 14:13:

NASA To Continue Funding Canceled Ares Project Until March

wooferhound passes along this quote from the Orlando Sentinel: "Thanks to congressional inaction, NASA must continue to fund its defunct Ares I rocket program until March — a requirement that will cost the agency nearly $500 million at a time when NASA is struggling with the expensive task of replacing the space shuttle. About one-third of that money — $165 million — will go to Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, which has a $2 billion contract to build the solid-rocket first stage for the Ares I, the rocket that was supposed to fill the shuttle's role of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. ... The odd scenario, in which NASA is throwing money at a canceled rocket program but can't fund a modernization program, is because of several twists in the legislative process that started a year ago and came to a head this month. At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget — by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states — that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later. That should have happened before the Oct. 1 start of the federal fiscal year. But Congress never passed a 2011 budget and instead voted this month to extend the 2010 budget until March — so NASA still must abide by the 2010 language." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 12:26:

Microsoft Kinect With World of Warcraft

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies have developed software that enables control of PC video games using the Microsoft Kinect sensor. Their toolkit, known as the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), emulates custom-configured keyboard controls triggered by body posture and specific gestures. This video shows a user playing the online game World of Warcraft using the Kinect. Potential applications of this technology include video games for motor rehabilitation after stroke and reducing childhood obesity through healthy gaming." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 11:14:

Mozilla Posts File Containing Registered User Data

wiredmikey writes "Mozilla yesterday sent an email to registered users of its addons.mozilla.org site, letting them know that it had mistakenly posted a file to a publicly available Web server which contained data from its user database including email addresses, first and last names, and an md5 hash representation of user passwords." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 08:18:

London Police Credit CCTV Cameras With Six Solved Crimes Per Day

stoilis writes "CCTV cameras across London help solve almost six crimes a day, the Metropolitan Police has said. According to the article, 'the number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year. The rise in the number of criminals caught also raises public confidence and counters bad publicity for CCTV.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 05:11:

Tron: Legacy — Too Much Imagination Required?

MoldySpore writes "Stepping back from the positive and negative reviews of the new Tron sequel, Tron: Legacy (which has so far amassed over $111,000,000 world-wide), something occurred to me after seeing the movie and reading the numerous reviews. It seems many of the reviews, and perhaps the reviewers themselves, can be split into two categories: those who saw the original Tron when it came out and can put the new movie in context, and those who either watched Tron recently to prepare for the sequel or never saw it and jumped right into the new movie." Read on for the rest of MoldySpore's thoughts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 02:10:

Greed, Zealotry, and the Commodore 64

jira writes "On the occasion of the Commodore 64's rebirth as an Atom-equipped nettop, the Guardian's Jon Blyth remembers what the original Commodore 64 taught him. Among other things: 'But look at it, all brown, ugly and lovely. It taught me so much. The Commodore 64 taught me about zealotry. After upgrading from the inferior ZX Spectrum, I would try to convince the Sinclair loyalists to follow me. I would invite them to my house, and let them see that with just eight colors and a monophonic sound chip, their lives lacked true depth. My evangelism quickly faded into impatience. So, I can now see why American Baptists get so miffy about atheists — it's horrible dealing with people who don't realize how much better you are.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 01:12:

Auditors Question TSA's Tech Spending, Security Solutions

Frosty P writes "Government auditors have faulted the TSA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, for failing to properly test and evaluate technology before spending money on it. The TSA spent about $36 million on devices that puffed air on travelers to 'sniff' them out for explosives residue. All 207 of those machines ended up in warehouses, abandoned as unable to perform as advertised, deployed in many airports before the TSA had fully tested them. Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent roughly $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors, including $8 billion for the famous new body scanners that have recently come under scrutiny for being unable to perform the task for which they are advertised. 'TSA has an obsession of finding a single box that will solve all its problems. They've spent and wasted money looking for that one box, and there is no such solution,' said John Huey, an airport security expert." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-28 00:09:

Ford To Offer Fuel-Saving 'Start-Stop' System

Ponca City writes "The Detroit Free Press reports that Ford plans to offer start-stop systems on many cars in 2012 that save fuel by turning an engine off when the vehicle is idling and quickly restart it when the driver releases the brake or steps on the gas pedal, improving fuel economy by 4% to 10%, depending on driving conditions. The system, common in Europe on cars with manual transmissions, is already in use in the US on gasoline-electric hybrids, including the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Automakers have been reluctant to add the feature to cars in the US because the testing method that the Environmental Protection Agency uses to determine fuel efficiency ratings doesn't include many stops and thus doesn't recognize the technology's effectiveness." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 23:05:

Putin Orders Russian Move To GNU/Linux

Glyn Moody writes "Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of 'a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power.' There have been a number of Russian projects to roll out free software, notably in the educational sector, but none so far has really taken off. With the backing of Putin, could this be the breakthrough free software has been waiting for?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 22:02:

Using LED Ceiling Lights For Digital Communication

PatPending writes "A Minnesota start-up company, LVX, is developing products under several patents and about a dozen pending applications, e.g., 'Building illumination apparatus with integrated communications, security and energy management,' that put clusters of LEDs in a standard-sized ceiling light fixture. The LEDs are in optical communication with special modems attached to office computers. The first generation of the LVX system will transmit data at speeds of about three megabits per second, roughly as fast as a residential DSL line. LVX Chief Executive Officer John Pederson said a second-generation system that will roll out in about a year will permit speeds on par with commercial Wi-Fi networks. It will also permit lights that can be programmed to change intensity and color. Pederson said the next generation of the system should get even more efficient as fixtures become 'smart' so the lights would dim when bright sunlight is coming through a window or when a conference room or hallway is empty. Hurdles: speed and installation costs. No word on the reliability and security of this system." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 21:01:

Old Facebook Apps Still Plunder Your Privacy

tcd004 writes "If you added the YouTube Facebook app prior to 2009, you're given YouTube free access to nearly all the data in your profile (as well as many of your friends). But if you install the same app today, it gets very limited access. Older versions of Facebook apps, it turns out, still have 'grandfathered' access to data that the social networking service has restricted for new apps. If you're protective of your privacy, it might be a good idea to delete and reinstall any older apps in your profile." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 20:04:

Hello, Android Third Edition

eldavojohn writes "The third edition of Hello, Android brings the book up to date on Android versions from 1.5 to 2.2 (FroYo). The book is predominantly tied to the Eclipse editing environment with several pages devoted to screen shots of the IDE. As the title suggests, this book aims to give the user the equivalent of a "Hello, world!" application in Android and succeeds in doing that but doesn't take the reader much further. From creating a sudoku application with increasing support to dabbling in OpenGL ES, the book's prime audience are people who know a little Java (with no aversion to Eclipse) and XML but absolutely no Android. You can find the source for all the examples." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 19:05:

California Rare-Earth Mine Reopens

burnin1965 writes in to let us know that the looming crisis in rare-earth materials (which we have discussed recently) has prompted Molycorp, the erstwhile operator of a California mine closed in 2002, to announce plans to reopen it. "With increasing prices on rare earth ore, tariffs raised by the Chinese government, and the threat of embargoes that would damage United States high-tech manufacturing Molycorp now has the needed incentive to reopen the California Mountain Pass mine. They will spend the capital needed to implement badly needed updates to environmental controls that will mitigate the radioactive waste water releases that plagued the mine in the past. Chinese imports in the 90s nearly halved ore prices and the California mine experienced multiple failures in environmental controls that resulted in the release of huge volumes of radioactive waste water. Updating the mine to address the environmental issues was not financially viable due to the cheap Chinese imports so it was closed in 2002." Within two years the mine could be producing 20% of the amount of rare earths we import from China. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 19:04:

Satellite-Based Laser Hunts Woodpeckers From Space

University of Idaho scientists have figured out a more effective way to track woodpecker populations than following the incessant laughter. They're using a laser onboard NASA's Icesat spacecraft to determine where the birds might be living. From the article: "NASA's Icesat satellite was initially intended for measuring glacial surfaces at the Earth's poles but has proven to be quite effective in measuring vegetation also. The satellite's laser bounces off of forest canopies, tree trunks and the ground making important characteristics about the forest easily measurable. For example, forest density is determined by the relative amount of light returned versus that which is returned from the ground. Once ideal woodpecker locations are identified 'we actually conduct ground-based woodpecker surveys in these locations as well to verify it,' says team-member Patrick Adam." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 18:02:

North Magnetic Pole Racing Toward Siberia

RogerRoast sends along a backgrounder from Scientific American on the best current theory as to why the north magnetic pole drifts. "The NMP, also known as the dip pole, is the point on Earth where the planet's magnetic field points straight down into the ground. Scottish explorer James Clark Ross first located the NMP in 1831 on the Boothia Peninsula in what is now northern Canada... [T]he NMP drifts from year to year as geophysical processes within Earth change. For more than 150 years after Ross's measurement its movement was gradual, generally less than 15 kilometers per year. But then, in the 1990s, it picked up speed, ... bolting north–northwest into the Arctic Ocean at more than 55 kilometers per year. If it keeps going it could pass the geographic north pole in a decade or so and carry on toward Siberia." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 16:59:

After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function?

An anonymous reader writes "36 countries in the world have over 100% per-capita usage of mobile phones, and this is driving a real crunch on IPv4 addresses as more and more of these devices are data-capable. The mobile network operators are acting fast to deploy IPv6, and T-Mobile USA has had an IPv6-only trial going on for over 9 months now using NAT64 to bridge to IPv4 Internet content. It is interesting to note that the original plan for IPv6 transition, dual-stack, has failed since IPv4 addresses are effectively already exhausted for many people who want them. Dual-stack also causes many other issues and has forced the IETF to generate workarounds for end users called happy eyeballs (implying that eyeballs are not happy with dual-stack), and a big stink around DNS white-listing. How will you ensure that your network, users, and services continue to work in the address-fractured world of the future where some users have only IPv4 (AT&T ), some users have only IPv6 (mobile and machine-to-machine as well as developing countries), and other Internet nodes have both?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 16:03:

African Villages Glow With Renewable Energy

Peace Corps Online writes "The NY Times reports that as small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries playing an epic, transformative role. With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford. 'You're seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,' says energy adviser Dana Younger. In addition to small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and 'mini' hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village. 'It's a phenomenon that's sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,' says Younger." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 15:00:

Assange Has Signed Book Deals Worth $1.5 Million+

cold fjord writes "Julian Assange has signed a major book deal for his autobiography worth more than one million pounds (1.2 million euros, 1.5 million dollars). Assange told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the money would help him defend himself against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. 'I don't want to write this book, but I have to,' he said. 'I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.' The Australian said he would receive 800,000 dollars (600,000 euros) from Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher, and a British deal with Canongate is worth 325,000 pounds (380,000 euros, 500,000 dollars). Money from other markets and serialisation is expected to raise the total to 1.1 million pounds, he said. Assange is currently out on £240,000 bail under what his lawyer refers to as not so much 'house arrest' as 'manor arrest', fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning. The Telegraph adds, 'Mr Assange said he regarded himself as a victim of Left-wing radicalism. Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism,' he said. 'I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.' .... A full extradition hearing is due in London on February 7th." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 13:57:

Is Reading Spouse's E-Mail a Crime?

Hugh Pickens writes "The Detroit Free Press reports that Leon Walker is charged with unlawfully reading the e-mail of Ciara Walker, his wife at that time, which showed she was having an affair with her second husband, who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her son. Walker says he gave the e-mails to her first husband, the child's father, to protect the boy. 'I was doing what I had to do,' says Walker. 'We're talking about putting a child in danger.' Now prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker with a felony for logging onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife. Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Walker. 'The guy is a hacker,' says Cooper, adding that the Gmail account 'was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded [the emails] and used them in a very contentious way.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 11:18:

AMD Radeon HD 6950 Can Be Unlocked To HD 6970

An anonymous reader writes "AMD's new Radeon HD 6950 can be unlocked to a HD 6970 via BIOS mod. Performance of the unlocked card is identical to the full blown HD 6970!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 08:28:

Structure In Brain Linked To Varied Social Life

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered that the amygdala, a small almond shaped structure deep within the temporal lobe, is important to a rich and varied social life among humans. The finding was published this week in a new study in Nature Neuroscience and is similar to previous findings in other primate species, which compared the size and complexity of social groups across those species." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2010-12-27 05:19:

Did Stuxnet Take Out 1,000 Centrifuges At Natanz?

AffidavitDonda writes "In late 2009 or early 2010, Iran decommissioned and replaced about 1,000 IR-1 centrifuges in the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz, implying that these centrifuges broke. Iran's IR-1 centrifuges often br