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Government

Submission + - Zof Lofgren Wants To Slow Down Domain Seizures By ICE & DOJ (rollcall.com)

Submitted by GovTechGuy
GovTechGuy writes: Rep. Zoe Lofgren sat down with Roll Call to discuss her proposal to slow down the seizure of domain names accused of piracy by the federal government. Lofgren turned to Reddit for help formulating the bill, and also discussed whether her colleagues in Congress know enough about technology to make informed decisions on tech policy.
Privacy

Submission + - WSJ Covers Tor outside Firewall (wsj.com)

Submitted by
retroworks
retroworks writes: "Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal does a mostly sympathetic portrayal of the Tor browser, despite leading with a cautionary allegory. William Weber of Austria allowed his computer to be used as a Tor server, and was arrested on November 28 for possession of child pornography — evidently streamed through his PC by another TOR user."
Facebook

Submission + - Updated terms let Instagram use your name, photos and metadata in ads (techradar.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:

Starting Jan. 16, 2013, Instagram is implementing new terms of service all users must agree to in order to use the photo sharing site's offerings. Between all the legal jargon, rules and warnings, Instagram slipped in a new "right," one that isn't in its current terms and an addition aimed at earning the social service some moolah. "To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata) and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you." Translated, Instagram can use Insta-info you've publicly posted to generate ads on the site or on Facebook (owner of Instagram) to make money while you won't see a cent.

Submission + - Anti-Piracy Chief Patents "Pay Up or Disconnect" Scheme (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Nyder
Nyder writes: Sick of patents? Well, this will make you puke. This Patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2012/0310846.html which is from Digital Right Corp’s CTO Robert Steele. The patent starts with a general description of the monitoring and notification process.

“The present disclosure provides a system, a method, and a computer program that may mine a data stream of infringement data over a period of time, process the mined data to find correlations in the data, and identify specific sets of IP addresses and ports associated with acts of copyright infringement,” it reads.

I guess next the Mafia will be patenting the protection scheme...
AMD

Submission + - AMD Unveils Preliminary Radeon HD 8000M Series Mobile GPU Details (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "AMD has just released some preliminary information regarding the company’s upcoming Radeon HD 8000M series of mobile GPUs. Based on the naming convention alone, it may obvious that the Radeon HD 8000M series is AMD’s second generation of products featuring the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, which debuted in the Radeon HD 7000 series. Like its predecessors, the Radeon HD 8000M series targets gamers with full DirectX 11.1 support and improved gaming performance over the previous-gen, but the architecture also lends itself to GPU compute applications as well. The Radeon HD 8500M sports 384 Stream Processors with an Engine Clock up to 650MHz. Memory clocks will vary based on the use of GDDR3 or GDDR5 memory. The Radeon HD 8600M is essentially the same, but with a slightly higher Engine Clock up to 775MHz. The Radeon HD 8700M is also based on the same GPU, but will be clocked at up to 850MHz, for a further increase in performance over the 8600M. The Radeon HD 8800M series, however, is based on a larger, more powerful chip and will sport 640 Stream Processors with an engine clock of up to 700MHz. GDDR5 memory will be used exclusively with 8800M, at speeds up to 1125MHz. It will be interesting to see how these new GPUs stack up versus NVIDIA's latest GeForce 600M series of mobile chips."
AT&T

Submission + - AT&T Extols Telecom Monopoly In Groovy 1970 Video (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "For many Slashdotters, the day in 1984 when the AT&T telecommunications monopoly was broken by court order is at best a hazy childhood memory, and they can't remember a time when the telephones in your house weren't your property. A Ma Bell propoganda video from 1970 was an early salvo in the fight to end that monopoly. With groovy, Sgt. Pepper-style graphics, AT&T explained why owning your own phone could damange phone service for everybody; why early experiments in competition were unfair (they were skimming off cheaper customers and leaving AT&T with the legal responsibility of connecting less profitable rural users); and why subsidizing high-quality phone service for everyone ought to be seen as a public good."
Hardware

Submission + - Open Hardware & Software Laptop

Submitted by mihai.todor85
mihai.todor85 writes: It looks like Andrew "bunnie" Huang has been quite busy lately, developing a nice open hardware laptop. He was even kind enough to provide all the schematics without NDA. For anybody interested in owning such a device, he says that he "might be convinced to try a Kickstarter campaign in several months, once the design is stable and tested" if enough people are interested.
Google

Submission + - Google Blames Nexus 4 Shortage on LG (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by
hugheseyau
hugheseyau writes: "Google's Nexus 4 debut is an prime example of how not to launch a product. There's nothing wrong with the hardware, mind you, it's the lack of availability that's driving potential buyers batty. How could Google have so ineptly predicted the strong demand than an unlocked and affordable smartphone running the latest version of Android would elicit? That's a great question, and Google is content to partially pass the buck.

The root cause of the shortage falls on LG's shoulders. Dan Cobley, Google's managing director for the company's U.K. and Ireland divisions, fielded a bunch of questions and complaints on Google+ with an explanation of what's going on, followed by an apology."
AMD

Submission + - AMD reveals 8000M series of GPU's (examiner.com)

Submitted by nyan.kitty256
nyan.kitty256 writes: From the article:
"
Today, AMD took the wraps off of it's latest line of graphics cards for the notebook market, the 8000M series. Specifically, the flavors of the cards that they announced was the 8800M, 8700M, 8600M, and 8500M lines. These lines have the engineering name 'Solar', compared to the current generation(the 7000M series) name, 'London'. The first laptop announced with this new line of cards has already been announced as the Asus Vivoook U38DT. All of these cards support DirectX 11.1, as well as(most likely) at least OpenGL 4.2, but AMD did not unveil details about their OpenGL compatibility with these cards.
"

Submission + - Pirate Party UK takes down Pirate Bay proxy following legal threats (pirateparty.org.uk) 1

Submitted by
StephanTual
StephanTual writes: "I reported on twitter around 40 minutes ago (https://twitter.com/stephantual/status/280773925456199680) that the Pirate Proxy was down on Bethere, Vfast and Virgin. I suspect they bowed to the legal threats described 7h hours ago on https://www.facebook.com/ThePirateBayWarMachine , name servers don't have a record so I'm pretty sure that's the case."
Google

Submission + - Gmail drops support for connecting to pop3 servers with self signed certs (google.com) 2

Submitted by DECula
DECula writes: In a move not communicated to it's users before hand, Google's Gmail servers were reconfigured to not connect to remote pop3 servers that have self-signed certificates, leaving folks with unencrypted connections, or no service when getting email from other services.
Not good for for the small folks. One suggestion was to allow placing the public keys on Googles side in the user configuration. That would be a heck of a lot better than just dropping users into never never land.

Submission + - Swedish Pirate Party Presses Charges Against Banks For WikiLeaks Blockade (falkvinge.net)

Submitted by
davecb
davecb writes: "Rick Falkvinge reports today that the Swedish Pirate Party has laid charges against at least Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal before the Finansinspektionen , for refusing to pass on money owed to Wikileaks. The overseer of bank licenses notes (in translation) that "The law states, that if there aren’t legal grounds to deny a payment service, then it must be processed.”"
Microsoft

Submission + - Dell Executive Claims He Warned Microsoft About Windows RT (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "As quoted in The Australian Financial Review, Dell vice-chairman Jeffrey Clarke told an audience at last week’s Dell World conference in Austin, Texas that he had warned Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about the Windows RT name. The “Windows” brand name, Clarke apparently told the CEO, was should be limited to operating systems capable of running Windows legacy software. As Windows RT does not, he felt it should be given a different moniker. While it’s unusual for executives from a Microsoft hardware partner to so candidly speak their mind about Windows, it’s not the first time it’s happened in the context of Windows 8. In the months heading up to the operating system’s release, an Acer spokesperson told Bloomberg: “We think that Microsoft’s launch of its own-brand products is a negative for the whole PC industry.” Intel also had to push back against rumors that CEO Paul Otellini had criticized Windows 8 in a private meeting with employees."
Programming

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How does an IT generalist get back into programming?

Submitted by CanadianSchism
CanadianSchism writes: So, I've been in the public sector for the past 6 years. I started off doing my work study in web design and a bit of support, eventually going through the interview process to fill in a data processing technician post, and getting the job.

The first four years of my work life were spent in various schools, fixing computers, implementing new hardware, rolling out updates/ghosting labs, troubleshooting basic network and printer problems, etc. I was eventually asked to work on the administrative information systems with an analyst, which I've been doing for the past 2 years. That's consisted of program support, installing updates to the pay/financial/purchasing/tax/energy systems, taking backups on SQL servers, etc.

I've never had the opportunity to take time for myself, and jump back into my first love: programming. I've picked up Powershell books (have two here at the office), but haven't gotten anything down yet, as there are always other projects that come up and whittle my attention to learning a language down to zilch.

This new year will see a change in that, however. I'll be setting aside an hour every day to devote to learning a new language, in the eventual hope that I can leave this company (take a sabbatical) and hop into the private sector for a few years. I'd like to do this for a few reasons: I'm feeling stagnant and bored in this seat, there's no upwards movement, I really want to program but I can't in this job, and finally I'm making about 20k less than what I should be.

My question to you all is, what language should I start with, to learn and get back into the principles of programming, that will help me build a personal portfolio, but will also lend to learning other languages. At this point, I'm not sure if I'd like to make/maintain custom applications, or if back-end web programming would be more interesting, or any of the other niches out there. I'm just having trouble taking that first step, as there's so much.

Submission + - HTML5 vs. Native apps: Developers offended by Zuckerberg knock on HTML5 make app (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
BButlerNWW
BButlerNWW writes: "A team of mobile app developers offended by Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg dissing HTML5 have created a Facebook app that they say works better than native versions because of the HTML5 coding.

Zuckerberg famously knocked HTML5 in an interview this fall when he said relying too much on it instead of developing native mobile apps was "the biggest mistake we made as a company."

"When Mark Zuckerberg said HTML5 wasn't ready, we took a little offense to the comment," wrote developers at Sencha, a mobile app company that focuses on HMTL5 development.

Sencha Monday released Fastbook, a mobile app that performs almost the exact same functions as native Facebook apps for smartphones, but is built on an HMTL5 framework. The HTML5 version has faster load times, more responsive formatting and increased ability to toggle between different views without needing to reload information compared to the iOS and Android native Facebook apps, the developers claim. "We set out to show that you can build the challenging parts of the native Facbeook app in HTML5 and we built a framework that makes that possible," says Jamie Avins, an engineering manager at Sencha. "We believe HTML5 is the technology and it's ready right now.""
Science

Submission + - Single Microbe May Have Triggered World's Largest Mass Extinction (medicaldaily.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: About 251 million years ago, 90 percent of the Earth's species became extinct. The mass extinction, called the "Great Dying" or the more scientific-sounding Permian-Triassic extinction event, made 96 percent of marine animals and 70 percent of land-dwelling animals extinct in just a few thousand years, and it took the earth as much as 10 million years to regain the biodiversity that it had lost. Researchers believe that they may finally know why the event occurred, but the theory is not without controversy.
There are several theories, including the possibility of a meterorite hitting the planet. Previously, most researchers believed that the Permian mass extinction was a result of a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. These eruptions would have caused a dramatic rise in the amount of greenhouse gases which would have, in turn, killed off a bulk of species.
However, Daniel Rothman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is floating around a different theory. As he presented in a meeting for the American Geophysical Union, he believes that the mass extinction could have been caused by something much smaller. His theory is that the extinction was caused by a single strain of bacteria.
Biotech

Submission + - Scientists "Squeeze" the Cancer out of Malignant Breast Cells (medicaldaily.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Although researchers have traditionally focused on genetic mutations within the cell from studying cancer development, recent studies have shown that malignant cells do not always develop into tumors, and that the fates of these cells depend on how they interact with their surrounding microenvironment.
While previous studies found that the manipulation of a cell's environment through the introduction of biochemical inhibitors could control malignant mammary cells into behaving normally, the latest research takes a step forward by introducing the concept of mechanical rather than chemical influences on cancer cell growth.
They found that "squeezing" stops malignant breast cancer cells from spreading and turns them back into healthy cells, according to new research revealing, for the first time, that simple mechanical forces alone can revert and stop out-of-control growth of cancer cells. More importantly, scientists found that this transformation can happen even if the genetic mutations responsible for the cancer remain, setting up a fight between nature and nurture in determining a cell's fate.
Earth

Submission + - NASA on full court press to deflate doomsday prophecies (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Insidious unknown planets lurking behind the sun ready to slam into Earth, supernova set to engulf the planet and giant, unseen asteroids screaming toward our globe are all theories espoused across the Internet as to how we will meet our demise next week on 12/21/2012. Do any of these theories even remotely hold out a scintilla of evidence they could happen? Not even remotely if you look at the material NASA has put out lately which pretty much debunks any and all of the notions being floated in across the cybersphere."

Submission + - W3C Finalizes HTML5 Specification (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced today that it has finalized specifications for HTML5 and that it is ready for interoperability testing. HTML5 hasn’t been given the status of standard yet but it is feature complete now thereby giving developers a stable target to develop their web applications. The W3C while making the announcement said "HTML5 is the cornerstone of the Open Web Platform" and that it provides an environment where cross-platform applications can be developed which can utilize all of a device’s capabilities like videos, animations, graphics and typography. The HTML5 specifications still have a long way to go before they hit the Recommendation status. HTML5 will have to go through a round of testing that looks specifically into interoperability and performance whereby it will be given a Candidate Recommendation title.

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