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Privacy

Submission + - Petraeus case shows FBI's authority to read email (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Back in April, we discussed how the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act defines email that has resided on a server for more than six months can be considered abandoned. The recent investigation of General Petraeus brings this issue to light again, and perhaps to a broader audience. Under current US law, federal authorities need only a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor — not a judge — to obtain electronic messages that are six months old or older. Do you know anyone these days who doesn't have IMAP accounts with 6+-month-old mail on them?
Microsoft

Submission + - Sinofsky leaves Microsoft, Julie Larson-Green now in charge of Windows Division (winbeta.org)

Submitted by BogenDorpher
BogenDorpher writes: Steven Sinofsky, the man who was behind the development and marketing of Windows (including the recently released Windows 8), Internet Explorer, Outlook.com, and SkyDrive had apparently left the company. In his place, Julie Larson-Green will run the Windows division while Tami Reller will take charge of the business of Windows.

Submission + - Lithium ion battery prices to drop? (anl.gov)

Submitted by
mtrachtenberg
mtrachtenberg writes: "A California company working with Argonne National Labs is talking about a new anode for lithium ion batteries; it claims a 300%+ increase in energy density and is talking about volume manufacturing by 2014.

The company, California Lithium Battery, is talking about a potential 70% price drop in the cost of EV battery packs. If this happens, EVs suddenly begin to make sense."
Firefox

Submission + - The Shumway Open SWF Runtime Project (mozilla.org)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Mozilla is looking for contributors interested in working on Shumway. Mozilla's Jet Villegas writes, 'Shumway is an experimental web-native runtime implementation of the SWF file format. It is developed as a free and open source project sponsored by Mozilla Research. The project has two main goals: 1. Advance the open web platform to securely process rich media formats that were previously only available in closed and proprietary implementations. 2. Offer a runtime processor for SWF and other rich media formats on platforms for which runtime implementations are not available.'
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft makes Direct X 11.1 a Windows 8 Exclusive! (theverge.com)

Submitted by BluPhenix316
BluPhenix316 writes: Microsoft has made Direct X 11.1 a Windows 8 Exclusive. I think this is merely a update to make Direct X more integrated with Windows 8. Is this going to be the trend? To lock you into the OS updates so Windows 7 doesn't last as long as Windows XP has?
Math

Submission + - Your Unconscious Brain Can Do Math, Process Language (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: It's hard to determine what the unconscious brain is doing since, after all, we're not aware of it. But in a neat set of experiments, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's consciousness lab found evidence that the unconscious brain can parse language and perform simple arithmetic. The researchers flashed colorful patterns at test subjects that took up all their attention and allowed for the subliminal presentation of sentences or equations. In the language processing experiment, researchers found that subjects became consciously aware of a sentence sooner if it was jarring and nonsensical (like, for example, the sentence "I ironed coffee").
Education

Submission + - "Clandestine" UK Database keeps Records on 8 Million School Children (rt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russia Today reports: 'A newly uncovered clandestine computer network, known as the ‘One System,’ can reportedly share children’s personal details across different UK agencies, including age, sex, address and their school behavior records – all without parents ever knowing. One of Britain’s biggest government contractors has created a database containing the personal details of 8 million children, the Sunday Times revealed. The database was created by Capita – a company specializing in IT systems – and includes information on a child’s sex, age, exam results, if they have special needs, bad behavior like absenteeism and how many minutes late they are to lessons. This information can then be shared with numerous agencies, including the police, the NHS and child protection units and charities, all without parental consent. Teachers collect data on all children, not just ones deemed to be at risk. This includes recording how many minutes late they are for class. The One System is already employed by about 100 local authorities, and was created two years after Contact Point – a similar database which was set up by the then-Labour government, but scrapped by the current coalition because of security concerns. Documents obtained by the Sunday Times revealed that classroom information is gathered by teachers and submitted to the One System up to six times a day to provide a “golden thread of data” that can be accessed by anyone working with children. In an Orwellian twist, the firm hires photographers to take pictures of schoolchildren, which they then offer for sale to their parents before uploading them onto the database.'
Businesses

Submission + - Amazon Donates 2,000 Kindles to Wounded Veterans (beyond-black-friday.com)

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "Amazon's just announced that they're donating 2,000 Kindles to a charity for wounded soldiers and their families. And they're also promising to hire at least 1,200 more veterans within the next year at fulfillment centers around the country through Amazon's
Military Talent Program. As the U.S. prepares to celebrate Veterans Day, Amazon's press release notes that they've been named one of the top military-friendly employers for two years in a row, by U.S. Veterans magazine, and one Kindle blog also notes that Amazon has even quietly created a special program which allows some customer service employees to work from home, for which Amazon has actively recruited military spouses for the program, as well as wounded veterans"
Linux

Submission + - Fully Open A13-OLinuXino Single-Board Linux Computer (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Penurious Penguin
Penurious Penguin writes: Via LXer, an article from PCWorld describes the A13-OLinuXino, produced by OLIMEX. Similar, but distinct from the Raspberry Pi, the Linux-powered OLinuXino is touted as "fully open", with all CAD files and source-code freely available for both personal and commercial reuse. Its specs include an Allwinner A13 Cortex A8 1GHz processor, 3D Maili400 GPU, 512MB RAM, all packed into a nano-ITX form and fit for operation in industrial environments between -25C and 85C. The device comes with Android 4.0, but is capable of running other Linux distros, e.g., ArchlinuxARM.
Science

Submission + - Artificial self-healing skin can sense touch (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by thomst
thomst writes: Science Magazines's Tim Wogan reports that chemical engineer Zhenan Bao of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and her team have increased the conductivity of a self-healing polymer by incorporating nickel atoms. The polymer they have produced is sensitive to applied forces like pressure and torsion (twisting) because such forces alter the distance between the nickel atoms, changing the electrical resistance of the polymer. Their work is published online in the November 1 issue of Nature Nanotechnology (abstract here, full article paywalled). Now Bao and her team are working on making the polymer more flexible.
Crime

Submission + - John McAfee accused of murder, wanted by Belize police (thehackernews.com) 1

Submitted by
thn
thn writes: "John McAfee, who started the antivirus software giant named after him, has been accused of murder in Belize and wanted. McAfee had taken to "posting on a drug-focused Russian message board...about his attempts to purify the psychoactive compounds colloquially known as 'bath salts,'" Gizmodo wrote. The scariest aspect of this story may be the fact that an entire lab was constructed for John McAfee’s research purposes. Because of his efforts to extract chemicals from natural chemical plans McAfee was able to justify his experiments in a country that is largely unregulated."
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA and AMD Launch New High-End Workstation, Virtualization and HPC GPUs (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Nvidia is taking the wraps off a new GPU targeted at HPC and as expected, it's a monster. The Nvidia K20, based on the GK110 GPU, weighs in at 7.1B transistors, double the previous gen GK104's 3.54B. The GK110 is capable of pairing double-precision operations with other instructions (Fermi and GK104 couldn't) and the number of registers each thread can access has been quadrupled, from 63 to 255. Threads within a warp are now capable of sharing data. K20 also supports a greater number of atomic operations and brings new features to the table including Dynamic Parallelism. Meanwhile, AMD has announced a new FirePro graphics card at SC12 today, and it's aimed at server workloads and data center deployment. Rumors of a dual-core Radeon 7990 have floated around since before the HD 7000 series debuted, but this is the first time we've seen such a card in the wild. On paper, AMD's new FirePro S10000 is a serious beast. Single and double-precision rates at 5.9 TFLOPS and 1.48 TFLOPS respectively are higher than anything from Intel or Nvidia, as is the card's memory bandwidth. The flip side to these figures, however, is the eye-popping power draw. At 375W, the S10000 needs a pair of eight-pin PSU connectors. The S10000 is aimed at the virtualization market with its dual-GPUs on a single-card offering a good way to improve GPU virtualization density inside a single server."

Submission + - Mega Finds New Home, Dotcom Says (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Kim Dotcom has revealed that Megaupload’s successor Mega, which is reportedly launching on January 20, 2012, will be operating through a new domain name Mega.co.nz. Through a tweet Dotcom announced that Mega has found a new home and that the new domain name is protected by the law and powered by legality. Dotcom also revealed that lobbyists won't be able to do anything about this as Judges are not influenced by politics in New Zealand. Recent announcements about Mega’s domain – Me.ga didn’t go as planned following a decision by Government of Gabon to suspend the domain name. Dotcom had announced at the time that despite the blockage, Mega will launch as planned and that they are in possession of an alternative domain name.

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