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Ubuntu

Submission + - RMS Speaks Out Against Ubuntu (fsf.org) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a post at the Free Software Foundation website, Richard Stallman has spoken out against Ubuntu because of Canonical's decision to integrate Amazon search results in the distribution's Dash search. He says, 'But not always. Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.) This is just like the first surveillance practice I learned about in Windows. ... What's at stake is whether our community can effectively use the argument based on proprietary spyware. If we can only say, "free software won't spy on you, unless it's Ubuntu," that's much less powerful than saying, "free software won't spy on you." It behooves us to give Canonical whatever rebuff is needed to make it stop this. ... If you ever recommend or redistribute GNU/Linux, please remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend or redistribute.'
China

Submission + - China Can Make Stealth Jets, But Not The Engine Inside Them (thediplomat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While over the last 18 months the internet has been abuzz with amazing pictures of very stealthy fighters, it would appear China can't make the engines to go inside them. Recent reports are detailing how China must use Russian and Ukraine engines in most of its military aircraft. Even planes it sells to other nations, 80% of these planes have foreign engines.

China is now developing a massive effort to fix this "Achilles Heel" in its military development. China’s jet engine makers, are expected to invest $16 billion in jet engine development in the near term, and perhaps up to $24 billion by 2015.

The Pratt and Whitney F135 powering the F-35 , which is the world’s most advanced and powerful tactical aircraft engine, is cost around US$8.4 billion to develop
Digital

Submission + - EU Commissioner Tonio Borg says beware of digital download ripoffs (timesofmalta.com)

Submitted by
wolverine1999
wolverine1999 writes: "Tthe results of an EU-wide “digital content sweep” have shown that around 75% of websites which sell games, books, videos and music that can be transferred to a mobile device, have some kind of illegality.

For instance some games are "free" but you end up having to pay for virtual items to proceed further.
Illegal websites will be forced to comply by August otherwise further action will be taken by the EU.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121207/local/Borg-beware-of-download-rip-offs.448571"
Moon

Submission + - Apollo Veteran: Skip Asteroid, Go to the Moon (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "It’s 40 years to the day that the final mission to the moon launched. Discovery News speaks with Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Harrison "Jack" Schmitt about where he thinks the Earth’s only satellite came from and why he thinks a NASA manned asteroid mission is a mistake. "I think an asteroid is a diversion," said Schmitt. "If the ultimate goal is to get to Mars, you have a satellite only three days away that has a great deal of science as well as resources. The science of the moon has just been scratched. We’ve hardly explored the moon.""
Medicine

Submission + - Stay Home When You're Sick!

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you've got Google CEO Larry Page's billions, you can reduce your chances of getting sick this winter by personally providing free flu shots to all San Francisco Bay Area kids at Target pharmacies. 'Vaccinating children,' explains the Shoo the Flu initiative's website, 'will not only improve children's health, it will also dramatically reduce the risk of the flu spreading to adults.' But Tim Olshansky doesn't have Page's money, so he'll have to settle for trying to get it through people's thick heads that they really have to stay home when they're sick. 'Why do people still come to the office when they're coughing up a lung?' asks the exasperated Olshansky. 'Because unfortunately, there is a still a strong perverse culture that equates staying at home when sick with weakness. This is a flawed belief and should be questioned. Given that we have the tools now to complete most tasks from home, there is no strong reason to compel people to come to the workplace.' So, does your employer encourage employees to stay home when they're sick? How?
Privacy

Submission + - Maker Of Hackable Hotel Locks Finally Agrees To Pay For Bug Fix (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: Slashdot readers are no doubt familiar by now with the case of Onity, the company whose locks are found on 4 million hotel room doors worldwide and, as came to light over the summer, can be opened in seconds with a $50 Arduino device. Since that hacking technique was unveiled by Mozilla developer Cody Brocious at Black Hat, Onity first downplayed its security flaws and then tried to force its hotel customers to pay the cost of the necessary circuit board replacements to fix the bug.

But now, after at least one series of burglaries exploiting the bug hit a series of hotel rooms in Texas, Onity has finally agreed to shoulder the cost of replacing the hardware itself--at least for its locks in major chain hotels in the U.S. installed after 2005.

Score one point for full disclosure.
Cloud

Submission + - Google Axes Free Google Apps (blogspot.com.au)

Submitted by Macfox
Macfox writes: In a move to focus on serving small business better, Google has Axed the popular Free Edition of Google Apps. From Dec 6th, it will not be possible to signup for the free edition, instead users must opt the a 30-day trial and pay to continue to use the service past that point. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Google's senior vice president in charge of Google Apps said Google wants to provide small businesses that use the free version of the software with dedicated customer support—something only paying customers currently get. "We're not serving them well," he said of the free users.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323316804578163531826571350.html
Crime

Submission + - Ransomware Is On The Rise (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
WheezyJoe
WheezyJoe writes: "Ransomware is becoming big enough that the NY Times is covering it. Essentially online extortion, ransomware involves infecting a user’s computer with a virus that locks it, scours the drive for personal info, and demands money before the computer will be unlocked. In some countries, the payout rate has been as high as 15 percent. Early variations of ransomware locked computers, displayed porno, and, in Russian, demanded a fee to have it removed. Now, fake messages from local law enforcement accuse victims of visiting illegal pornography, gambling or piracy sites and demand fines to unlock the computer, many originating from sites hacked from GoDaddy. 'This is the new Nigerian e-mail scam... We’ll be talking about this for the next two years.'"
Space

Submission + - Nearby Solar System Looks Like Home (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star just 21 light-years from Earth that boasts a number of planets. Now astronomers are reporting another feature that earthlings would find familiar: a ring of dust far from the star which resembles the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, a zone of objects, each much smaller than Earth, that lies beyond Neptune's orbit and includes Pluto. The newfound debris disk is about as large as the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, even though Gliese 581 is small and all of its known planets lie closer to their sun than Earth does to ours. The scientists speculate that the little red star harbors a more remote planet whose gravity stirs up the belt's small objects, causing them to collide and spew the dust that Herschel has discerned.
Advertising

Submission + - Advertising May Soon Follow You from One Device to the Next (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by moon_unit2
moon_unit2 writes: We're all familiar with ads that seem to follow you around as you go from one website to another. A startup called Drawbridge has developed technology that could let those ads follow you even when you pic up a smartphone or tablet. The company, founded by an ex-Google scientist employs statistical methods to try and match identify users on different devices. The idea is that this will preserve privacy while making mobile ads more lucrative, although some experts aren't convinced that the data will be truly anonymous.

Submission + - John McAfee Suffers Possible Heart Attack at Guatemala Detention Center (go.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Software millionaire John McAfee has been taken to a Guatemala City hospital via ambulance after suffering a possible heart attack at the detention center where he is being held.

McAfee, 67 — who may soon be deported back to Belize, where authorities want to question him about the shooting death of his neighbor — was reportedly prostrate on the floor of his cell and unresponsive. He was wheeled into the hospital on a gurney, but when nurses began removing his suit, he became responsive and said, "Please, not in front of the press."

Earlier today, McAfee had complained of chest pains.

Submission + - How Yucca Mountain was Killed (thenewatlantis.com)

Submitted by ATKeiper
ATKeiper writes: The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which was selected by the U.S. government in the 1980s to be the nation’s permanent facility for storing nuclear waste, is essentially dead. A new article in The New Atlantis explains how the project was killed: 'In the end, the Obama administration succeeded, by a combination of legal authority and bureaucratic will, in blocking Congress’s plan for the Yucca Mountain repository — certainly for the foreseeable future, and perhaps permanently.... The saga of Yucca Mountain’s creation and apparent demise, and of the seeming inability of the courts to prevent the Obama administration from unilaterally nullifying the decades-old statutory framework for Yucca, illustrates how energy infrastructure is uniquely subject to the control of the executive branch, and so to the influence of presidential politics.' A report from the Government Accountability Office notes that the termination 'essentially restarts a time-consuming and costly process [that] has already cost nearly $15 billion through 2009.'
Government

Submission + - Government board aims to revamp decrepit US security classification system (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The US government's overly complicated way of classifying and declassifying information needs to be dumped and reinvented with the help of a huge technology injection if it is to keep from being buried under its own weight. That was one of the main conclusions of a government board tasked with making recommendations on exactly how the government should transform the current security classification system."
Google

Submission + - Google Launches Private Android App Stores (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Malicious apps have emerged as perhaps the most serious threat to mobile devices at the moment, and the major players, such as Apple and Google, have tried several different methods of preventing them from getting into their app stores and into the hands of users. Now, Google is taking one more step with the launch of a new service called the Private Channel for Google Apps, which gives enterprises and other organizations the ability to create private app stores and control the apps their users can download.

Private Channel is essentially a way for organizations to stand up their own miniature app stores inside of Google Play--the main app store for Android devices--and publish apps to it. That gives these organizations the ability to point their users directly to the apps they want users to download for their Android devices. The new service will include some of the security features built into Google Play, most notably the antimalware system and the ability to authenticate users.
Space

Submission + - Golden Spike Working on Private Moon Flights (goldenspikecompany.com)

Submitted by medcalf
medcalf writes: NBC reports that Alan Stern's Golden Spike Company is planning commercial trips to the Moon:

A group of space veterans and big-name backers today took the wraps off the Golden Spike Company, a commercial space venture that aims to send paying passengers to the moon and back at an estimated price of $1.4 billion or more for two.

The venture would rely on private funding, and it's not clear when the first lunar flight would be launched — but the idea reportedly has clearance from NASA, which abandoned its own back-to-the-moon plan three and a half years ago.

Golden Spike's announcement came on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 17, the last manned moonshot. Backers of the plan, including former NASA executive Alan Stern and former Apollo flight director Gerry Griffin, were to discuss the company's strategy at a National Press Club briefing at 2 p.m. ET, but some of the details were laid out in a news release issued before the briefing.

A key element that makes our business achievable and compelling is Golden Spike's team of nationally and internationally known experts in human and robotic spaceflight, planetary and lunar science, exploration, venture capital formation, and public outreach," Stern said in the news release.
Apple

Submission + - Microsoft's Creepy Retail Experience (lee-phillips.org) 1

Submitted by
lee1
lee1 writes: "The author peers into a Microsoft store and spies a sea of Microsoft employees, vastly outnumbering the few customers. Later, he notices an animated crowd of civilians surrounding a Microsoft display. But it's not the product that they're excited about."
NASA

Submission + - Source of Pioneer space probe deceleration anomaly found. (ieee.org)

Submitted by deathcow
deathcow writes: After forty years, a fresh perspective on old Pioneer data leads to new conclusions as to why the Pioneer probes are decelerating. Many theories to the slowing probes have persisted over the years — was it gravity? some type of unforeseen radiation? dark matter?

Thanks to the data backup preservation efforts of a NASA Ames Research engineer, mountains of old telemetry data were still available for studying this curious anomaly.

Submission + - Khanna Axed Over Copyright Memo (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Bob9113
Bob9113 writes: Ars Technica reports that Derek Khanna is getting axed over his memo detailing the conflict between laissez-faire-oriented free market ideals and the regulatory monopoly that is copyright.
"The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of Republicans in the House of Representatives, has told staffer Derek Khanna that he will be out of a job when Congress re-convenes in January. The incoming chairman of the RSC, Steve Scalise (R-LA) was approached by several Republican members of Congress who were upset about a memo Khanna wrote advocating reform of copyright law. They asked that Khanna not be retained, and Scalise agreed to their request."
EU

Submission + - Facebook Says EU 'Right To Be Forgotten' Would Harm Privacy (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "The European Commission has proposed a "right to be forgotten" online, which would allow users to remove personal data they had shared. The idea has had a lot of criticism, and now Facebook claims it would actually harm privacy. Facebook says the proposal would require social media sites to perform extra tracking to remove data which has been copied to other sites — but privacy advocates say Facebook has misunderstood what the proposal is all about"

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