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DRM

Submission + - WHSmith Putting DRM in eBooks without permission from the authors (simon-royle.com)

Submitted by
sgroyle
sgroyle writes: "DRM had, without my knowledge, been added to my book. I quickly checked my other books; same thing. Then I checked the books of authors who, because of their vocal and public opposition, I know are against DRM – Konrath, Howey, and Doctorow, to name a few – same result. ALL books on WHSmith have DRM in them.

Rather than assume WHSmith where at fault, I checked with my distributor, Draft2Digital. They send my books to Kobo, who in turn send my books to WHSmith. D2D assured me the DRM was not being added by them and were distressed to hear that this was the case. Kobo haven’t replied to any of the messages in this thread: “WHSmith putting DRM in books distributed via Kobo”. I’m not holding my breath."
Microsoft

Submission + - DOJ, SEC allege Microsoft bribed Chinese, other government officials (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Microsoft, which is often slow to comment with any substance when mud is flung its way, responded almost immediately after a Wall Street Journal article claimed Microsoft is the subject of probes being conducted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission; allegations were made that kickbacks were given to foreign government officials in China, Italy and Romania for software contracts.

WSJ reported that the kickbacks were allegedly made by a "former Microsoft representative in China" and reported to U.S. investigators in 2012 by an "anonymous tipster" who was responsible for landing "potential new business." This "tipster" claimed that "an executive of Microsoft's China subsidiary instructed the tipster to offer kickbacks to Chinese officials in return for signing off on software contracts."

Microsoft's John Frank, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, responded, "We take all allegations brought to our attention seriously, and we cooperate fully in any government inquiries. Like other large companies with operations around the world, we sometimes receive allegations about potential misconduct by employees or business partners, and we investigate them fully, regardless of the source."
Programming

Submission + - CS Faculty and Students to Write a Creative Commons C++ Textbook

Submitted by Cynic
Cynic writes: Inspired by an earlier Slashdot story about Finnish teachers and students writing a math textbook, I pitched the idea of writing our own much cheaper/free C++ textbook to my programming students. They were incredibly positive, so I decided to move forward and started a Kickstarter project. We hope to release the textbook we produce under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and sell cheap hard copies to sustain the hosting and other production costs.
Open Source

Submission + - Affordable, High-End, Audio-Responsive, Hackable LED Light (saikoled.com)

Submitted by Gibbs-Duhem
Gibbs-Duhem writes: SaikoLED is a little company in the US that after 5 years of engineering, feedback, and installation experience is launching a pretty awesome open source and open hardware audio-responsive RGB+W Arduino-based LED light for a starting price of $79. The light is being launched using a new crowdfunding platform, also launched today, called Crowd Supply where you can donate now if you like.

There is a wide variety of really neat stuff in the technical blog which is also being used as a repository for general Arduino and LED Lighting know-how. Some examples which generally include both media and code are autonomous audio responsive mode, a deriviation for how to convert from HSI colorspace to RGB+W optimally, how to get 4 channels of 16-bit PWM on any ATmega32u4 based device (including Arduino Leonardo), a color changing surface that can be used as either a beautiful table for artwork or as a neuroscience tool to study the function of flicker phosphenes in generating geometric hallucinations, how to get arbitrary color correction functions using HSI colorspace, cool shades that make neat patterns on walls, and a start to extensive documentation about how the device works from a low level to a high level. On top of it all, they plan to run events like the myki Challenge and donate a portion of their lights to schools and hackerspaces if they get funded.
Math

Submission + - Pierre Deligne wins Abel Prize for contributions to algebraic geometry (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated nearly four decades ago, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize , one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The prize is worth 6 million Norwegian krone (about US$1 million). In short, Deligne proved one of the four Weil conjectures (he proved the hardest, his mentor, Alexander Grothendieck, had proved the second conjecture in 1965) and went on to tools such as l-adic cohomology to extend algebraic geometry and to relate it to other areas of maths. “To some extent, I feel that this money belongs to mathematics, not to me,” Deligne said, via webcast."

Submission + - Supreme Court strengthens First Sale Doctrine (eff.org) 1

Submitted by
Tom
Tom writes: "The Supreme Court has sided with Supap Kirtsaeng regarding the resale of textbooks. Publisher Wiley had tried to keep a $600,000 judgement from the lower courts because the student had sold textbooks in the US that he had imported from his home country Thailand, where they are sold much cheaper. The Supreme Court ruled that while it realizes that US companies often try to get different prices in different markets, the copyright law does not provide a right to such business models."
KDE

Submission + - KDE releases Plasma Media Center 1.0 (kde.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos. Media files can be on the local filesystem or accessed with KDE’s Desktop Search."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft, Partners probed Over Bribery Claims (afr.com)

Submitted by c0lo
c0lo writes: US federal authorities are examining Microsoft’s involvement with companies and individuals that allegedly paid bribes to overseas government officials in exchange for business.
The United States Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opened preliminary investigations into the bribery allegations involving Microsoft in China, Italy and Romania.

The China allegations were first shared with United States officials last year by an unnamed whistle-blower who had worked with Microsoft in the country, according to the person briefed on the inquiry. The whistle-blower said that a Microsoft official in China directed the whistle-blower to pay bribes to government officials to win business deals.

U.S. government investigators are also reviewing whether Microsoft had a role in allegations that resellers offered bribes to secure software deals with Romania's Ministry of Communications. In Italy Microsoft's dealings with consultants in Italy that specialize in customer-loyalty programs are under scrutiny,with allegations that Microsoft's Italian unit used such consultants as vehicles for lavishing gifts and trips on Italian procurement officials in exchange for government business

In a blog post Tuesday afternoon, John Frank, a vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said the company could not comment about continuing investigations. Mr. Frank said it was not uncommon for such government reviews to find that the claims were without merit.

Somehow, given how the OOXML became a standard, it wouldn't surprise me to be an actual fire that caused this smoke.

Submission + - Samsung admits to and apologises for sexist behaviour at Africa Forum (girlguides.co.za)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week Samantha Perry sent an open letter to Samsung, stating her feelings with regards to the use of scantily clad women in the launch of the company’s new fridge and washing machine lines, last week at Africa Forum in Cape Town. The original post went viral, receiving media attention and creating international interest. This morning, Samsung South Africa issued a press statement formally apologising for the controversial launch of its consumer products at Africa Forum last week.
Government

Submission + - Cyber War Manual Proposes Online Geneva Convention (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "A new manual for cyber war has been compiled by international legal experts and published by NATO. The manual proposes that hospitals and dams should be off-limits for online warfare, and says that a conventional response is justified if an attack causes death or serious damage to property. The manual might get its first practical application today — South Korea's TV stations and banks have come under an attack which may well originate from North Korea."
Hardware

Submission + - Israel patrols its borders with 10 autonomous off-road vehicles (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since 2008 the Israeli Ministry of Defense has been operating up to 10 Guardian UGV autonomous off-road vehicles to patrol its borders. They look like armor plated jeeps, but are packed with tech allowing them to function independent of an operator.

Typically a Guardian UGV will be programmed to follow a set route continuously monitoring the surrounding area as it goes. If it spots something out of the ordinary it phones home and awaits further instructions. Alternatively, two guys with laptops can dial in and control the UGV directly. One has control of the vehicle movement while the other can position cameras and monitor an area using the built-in radar system.
Open Source

Submission + - Open-Xchange to launch open-source, browser-based office suite (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced this week. OX Text doesn't mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company. "We are not breaking anything and are leaving everything in place," he said. OX Text can edit about 80 percent of a Word document's elements, and 100 percent of the document survives with the formatting preserved, he said.
Network

Submission + - South Korea Suffers Massive Network Attack 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: South Korea is trying to figure out the cause of massive computer network failures at major TV stations and banks today. At least three broadcasters KBS, MBC and YTN, and two banks Shinhan Bank and Nonghyup, reported to the National Police Agency (NPA) that their computer networks were entirely halted around 2 p.m. for unknown reasons, police said. The suspects unsurprisingly include North Korea, but nothing has been determined yet, officials have said. Warnings reportedly appeared on some computer screens from a previously unknown group calling itself the 'WhoisTeam', showing skulls and a message stating it was only the beginning of 'our movement'.
Advertising

Submission + - Chameleon Botnet Costs Advertisers £4M Every Month (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by
DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: "The rise of ghost sites and the murky underbelly of online advertising has been exposed after Spider IO revealed the Chameleon botnet has been costing advertisers $6 million each and every month. With little or no restriction or regulation on online ad exchanges, this is potentially just the tip of the iceberg."

Submission + - South Korean servers hit by hacking attempt (yna.co.kr)

Submitted by bugbeak
bugbeak writes: Earlier in the day today, servers and computers part of major broadcasters and a bank here in South Korea were taken offline in what is believed to be a cyberattack. The source of the attack is still unclear at the moment.

According to a more recently published Korean article, the malware that affected the computers affected the Master Boot Record, and that the code was distributed through servers that are meant to provide updates, though the article did not mention which updates.
The Internet

Submission + - Researcher sets up illegal 420,000 node botnet for IPv4 internet map (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
iComp
iComp writes: "An anonymous researcher has taken an unorthodox approach to achieve the dream of mapping out the entire remaining IPv4 internet, and has broken enough laws around the world to make them liable for many thousands of years behind bars in doing so, if current sentencing policy prevails.

Getting the sheer numbers of IPv4 addresses involved would take a huge amount of scanners to make billions of pings. While noodling around with an Nmap scripting engine the researcher noticed a lot of virtually unsecured IPv4 devices – only requiring the admin/admin, root/root login, or either admin or root with the password field blank. What if these could be used as a temporary botnet to perform?

"I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected," the report "Internet Census 2012" states.

"I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will."

The report states a 46 and 60 kb binary was written in C with two parts; a telnet scanner to try the login connection and propagate and then control code to assign scan ranges and feed the results back. A reboot of the infected system would wipe the binary completely and the code didn't scan traffic running though the device or any intranet-connected systems."
Security

Submission + - Possible Cyber Attack Against South Korean Banks and TV Stations (ap.org)

Submitted by
B3ryllium
B3ryllium writes: "At least four broadcasters and two banks in South Korea are reporting massive computer accessibility issues, saying that their networks are 'paralyzed' by what looks like a cyber attack. Additional reports from Twitter suggest that hundreds of computers in the country powered off simultaneously at 2:20am, and reported "Boot device not found" errors. South Korea's military has upgraded its "Information Operation Condition (INFOCOM)" level from Level 4 to Level 3 in response to this situation."
Crime

Submission + - FAA grants Arlington Police Department permission to fly UAVs (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: The police department in Arlington can now use new tools in support of public safety over the Texas urban community – two small helicopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has granted permission for the Arlington police to fly these unmanned aircraft under certain circumstances: they must fly under 400 feet, only in the daytime, be in sight of the operator and a safety observer, and be in contact with the control tower at the nearby Dallas-Fort Worth airport – one of the busiest in the country.
Education

Submission + - Code.org Documentary Serving Multiple Agendas?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'Someday, and that day may never come,' Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, 'I'll call upon you to do a service for me.' Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for "Superman", a controversial 2010 documentary film that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a "Superman" cast member, show here in a clip that laments how U.S. public schools are producing 'American Idiots' of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to 'go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.' So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org's documentary short What Most Schools Don't Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation's schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft’s Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL's 'Team USA' and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he's shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn't have seen fit to send him to its blowout at 'absolutely amazingly beautiful' Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.' Fortunately, Ewing's project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here's Microsoft PiL's vision of what a classroom should be.

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