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Electronic Frontier Foundation

Submission + - Seattle police want more drones, even while two sit unused (muckrock.com)

Submitted by
v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: "The Seattle Police Department is seeking to buy more unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones) even as the two it currently owns site warehoused until the city develops a policy for their use, documents released as part of the EFF and MuckRock's Drone Census show.

More frightening than the $150,000 price tag? The fact that the drone vendors market the fact that these lease agreements do "not require voter approval.”"
Intel

Submission + - The Story of Nokia MeeGo

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: TaskuMuro, a Finnish tech news site, has anonymously interviewed various Nokia employees and pieced together an interesting timeline of the events which led to the abandonment of the Nokia MeeGo platform and Nokia's current affiliation with Microsoft and Windows Phone. It appears the MeeGo project was rather disorganized from the get go and fell victim to the company-internal tug-of-war, aimless management causing several UI redesigns and a none-too-wise reliance on Intel components which lacked some key features – namely, LTE support.
Science

Submission + - Rejected papers get more citations when eventually published (nature.com)

Submitted by scibri
scibri writes: In a study of more than 80,000 bioscience papers, researchers have illuminated the usually hidden flows of papers from journal to journal before publication.

Surprisingly, they found that papers published after having first been rejected elsewhere receive significantly more citations on average than ones accepted on first submission.

There were a few other surprises as well...Nature and Science publish more papers that were initially rejected elsewhere than lower-impact journals do.

So there is apparently some reason to be patient with your paper’s critics — they will do you good in the end.
Government

Submission + - Libertarian Candidate Excluded From Debate For Refusing Corporate Donations (fishmanforcongress.com) 3

Submitted by
fishdan
fishdan writes: "I'm a long time /. member with excellent karma. I am also the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress in Massachusetts 6th District. I am on the ballot. I polled 7% in the only poll that included me, which was taken 6 weeks ago, before I had done any advertizing, been in any debates or been on television. In the most recent debate, the general consensus was that I moved a very partisan crowd in my favor. In the 2 days since that debate, donations and page views are up significantly.

Yesterday I received a stunning email from the local ABC affiliate telling me that they were going to exclude me from their televised debate because I did not have $50k in campaign contributions, even though during my entire campaign I have pointedly and publicly refused corporate donations. They cited several other trumped up reasons, including polling at 10%, but there has not been a poll that included me since the one 6 weeks ago — and I meet their other requirements."

Submission + - A woman in France received a telephone bill of nearly 12 quadrillion Euros (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Chrisq
Chrisq writes:

A woman in south-west France, who received a telephone bill of nearly 12 quadrillion euros, has had the real amount she owed waived — after the company admitted its mistake. Solenne San Jose, from Pessac outside Bordeaux, said she received a huge shock when she opened the bill for 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros (£9.4qn). This is nearly 6,000 times France's annual economic output.

If only she paid the bill Europe could have been out of recession and France the world's strongest economic power!
Apple

Submission + - Apple stays on EPEAT's green list after MacBook checks (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes: "Apple has kept its place on a controversial green registry, despite previously suggesting its products wouldn't meet the necessary requirements. Earlier this year, Apple walked away from EPEAT — a green buying guide — leading to speculation that new MacBook Pros wouldn't meet its recycling requirements. After a bit of a backlash, Apple rejoined the group, and EPEAT said it would verify the devices in question. According to EPEAT's CEO, the group looked at all "ultralight" unibody laptops on the registry, finding all conformed to the four issues in question: whether they were upgradable, if tools were easily available, and if the battery and screen could be removed easily for recycling. The ideas behind some of those decisions may raise eyebrows: anything is upgradeable if it has a high-speed connection, such as to allow an external hard drive, and tools are "easily available" if they can be bought online — rather than if it uses standard screws."

Submission + - Linux Foundation offer non-Microsoft boot loader (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by dgharmon
dgharmon writes: The Linux Foundation has announced plans to provide a general purpose solution suitable for use by Linux and other non-Microsoft operating systems. The group has produced a minimal bootloader that won't boot any operating system directly. Instead, it will transfer to control to any other bootloader—signed or unsigned—so that that can boot an operating system
The Courts

Submission + - EFF To Ask Judge To Rule Universal Abused DMCA

Submitted by xSander
xSander writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge a federal judge in San Jose, CA to rule that Universal abused the DMCA to take down a video of a toddler dancing to a Prince song.

The case in question, whose oral argument will be Tuesday, October 16, is Stephanie Lenz vs. Universal, a case that began back in 2007. Lenz shared a video on YouTube of her son dancing to "Let's Go Crazy" on a stereo in the background. After Universal took the video down, Lenz filed a suit with help of the EFF to hold Universal accountable for taking down her fair use. The court had already decided that content owners must consider fair use before sending copyright takedown notices.
Patents

Submission + - Samsung Galaxy Nexus ban overturned by US appeals court (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Maow
Maow writes: The US Court of Appeals has overturned a ban on sales of Samsung's Galaxy Nexus phone, in a blow to Apple in the ongoing battle between the two rivals.

It said the district court in California, which had issued the ban in June, had "abused its discretion in entering an injunction".

Link to the decision.

I always wondered why the pure Google (Nexus) model was banned, and why Google didn't file an Amicus Curae filing in that suit...
Censorship

Submission + - Saudi Arabia Calls For Global Internet Censorship Body (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Onymous Hero
Onymous Hero writes: Following the recent YouTube video "The Innocence of Muslims" and the subsequent Muslim violence, Saudi Arabia has stated that there is a “there is a crying need for international collaboration to address ‘freedom of expression’ which clearly disregards public order”. The World Telecommunications Policy Forum (a UN body) is the vehicle by which Saudi Arabia (and possibly other states) will try to use to implement a global set of internet content standards.
Security

Submission + - Lone packet crashes telco networks (scmagazine.com.au)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: A penetration tester has shown that GSM communications systems can be taken down with a handful of malformed packets.

The weakness was in the lack of security around the Home Location Register server clusters which store GSM subscriber details as part of the global SS7 network.

A single packet, sent from within any network including femtocells, took down one of the clusters for two minutes.
Cloud

Submission + - Leaving your email in the Cloud isn't Electronic Storage (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Ibhuk
Ibhuk writes: As many users of email, especially Gmail with the ever expanding storage limit, I leave my email stored online. I don't bother downloading every email I receive. According to the South Carolina Supreme Court this isn't electronic storage. This means most email users are not protected by the Stored Communications Act. All your emails are fair game so be careful what you write.
IT

Submission + - 12 IT Industry Disaster Scenarios (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "The end of the world may or may not be nigh, but in the tech industry, many of these 12 possibilities could easily become reality for IT. From legislation against municipal fiber, to Oracle starting charging for the JDK, to the bad guys win the war on general-purpose computing, a number of scenarios could play out in the coming years to seriously damage the technology industry and all the people who depend on it."

Submission + - Treehouse Sues Turbine over Patent Issued in 2012 (gamepolitics.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ontario-based web services company Treehouse is getting ready to rock and troll. The company, who was awarded a vague patent (United States Patent No. 8,180,858) for the "Method And System For Presenting Data Over A Network Based On Network User Choices And Collecting Real-Time Data Related To Said Choices" (or the 858 patent as they refer to it in their lawsuit) has decided to sue Turbine in Delaware for violating the patent with its game Dungeons & Dragons Online. Interestingly enough, the patent was awarded on May 15, 2012.

The company claims that Turbine's games violate its patent because its games — Dungeons & Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online — allow "tallying the number of times the selected character attribute(s) have been selected by users of the game."
Space

Submission + - Small Telescopes Make Big Discoveries

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Hakeem Oluseyi, an astronomer at the Florida Institute of Technology and president of the African Astronomical Society, says his goal is to put one research telescope in every country, starting with African and Southern Hemisphere nations because there is now an amazing opportunity for small telescopes to discover and characterize new planetary systems, as well as measure the structure of the Milky Way. "Astronomers are no longer looking at high-definition pictures but at HD movies, scanning for objects that change and for transient ones," says Oluseyi. "A 4-inch telescope was used to discover the first exoplanet by the transit method, where you watch the brightness vary." Small telescopes capable to doing real science are a lot cheaper than people think. A 1-meter telescope costs $300,000 but reduce the size by 60 percent, and it falls to just $30,000. For example the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) uses hardware costing less than $75,000 to look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, and at low resolution to see if the starlight dims just a little — an indication that a planet has crossed in front of the star. The KELT team has already discovered the existence of a very unusual faraway planet — KELT-1b, a super hot, super dense ball of metallic hydrogen so massive that it may better be described as a 'failed star' and located so close to its star that it whips through an entire "yearly" orbit in a little over a day."
NASA

Submission + - New NASA robot could help paraplegics walk (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "NASA said today it has helped develop a 57-lb robotic exoskeleton that a person could wear over his or her body either to assist or inhibit movement in leg joints. The X1 was derived from NASA and General Motors Robonaut 2 project and the could find applications as an in-space exercise machine to supply resistance against leg movement more importantly as a way to help some individuals walk for the first time."
Programming

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Dedicating Code?

Submitted by The_Buse
The_Buse writes: This week I lost my grandmother and after returning to work (as a web developer) I find myself looking for some way to dedicate something to her memory. Unfortunately, I'm no author so I can't dedicate a book to her, and I can't carry a tune so penning a song in her honor is out of the question. What I can do is write one hell of a web app, and after nearly a year of development my (small) team and I are nearing the release date of our next product. My question is, have you ever dedicated a project/app/code in honor of someone? What's the best way to do it: comment blocks in the header, tongue-in-cheek file names, easter eggs? Or is this a horrible idea all together?
Microsoft

Submission + - Office for iPad may be exactly what Microsoft wants (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: It's endemic of 21st century journalism how this news story broke: a Microsoft product in the Czech Republic spilled the beans on a native iOS and Android port of Office 2013 for March of 2013, which was picked up by the Czech site IHNED.

Microsoft was quick to issue a denial to the press. "The information shared by our Czech subsidiary is not accurate. We do not have anything further to share at this time." Translation? They are doing it. Maybe a few facts are off, but they are doing a port. It's not a flat-out denial; it's a claim of inaccuracy. That's all the wiggle room a company needs to avoid being called a liar.

It's an acknowledgement of two facts: the iPad is the tablet of choice at the moment, and the enterprise really likes its tablets. At the Tablet Strategy conference last April, Chris Hazelton from 451 Research said its own research showed 78.4% of companies surveyed allowed employees to bring in their own devices. That contrasts with just 18% of employers actually providing their employees with tablets. Supporting iOS and Android means no matter what tablet you use, Office will be there. And isn't that what Microsoft wants in the end?

Submission + - Coming Next: TSA Taser Bracelets? (thenewsmakersoftoday.com)

Submitted by CaVp
CaVp writes: From the article: "The TSA’s security policies are getting more and more bizarre, from testing people’s drinks for explosives to ordering all travelers to freeze on command, but could a frightening policy that was seriously explored by the DHS be resurrected – forcing people to wear taser bracelets that would deliver an electric shock if they got out of line?" Fox coverage here.

Imagine a nutjob with a radio transmitter tuned to the bracelet radio frequency... instant bacon!...

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