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Apple

Submission + - Apple granted patent on wedge-shaped laptops (cnet.com)

Submitted by Nick Fel
Nick Fel writes: Apple has been granted a broad patent on the wedge-shaped design of the Mac Air. The design has been copied by most ultrabooks, and their manufacturers are likely starting to feel a little uneasy about the news.
Piracy

Submission + - Game of Thrones Crowned Most Pirated TV-Show of the Season (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "With nearly 4 million downloads per episode, the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is the most pirated TV-show of the season. Worldwide hype combined with restricted availability are the key ingredients for the staggering number of unauthorized downloads. How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory complete the top three, albeit with significantly fewer downloads than the chart topper.

As predicted, Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most downloaded TV-show of the spring season.

While there are many reasons for people to download TV-shows through BitTorrent, airing delays and HBO’s choice not to make it widely available online are two of the top reasons.

Game of Thrones is particularly popular in Australia, where people have to wait a week after the U.S. release comes out. Nevertheless, even in the U.S. hundreds and thousands are downloading the show for free, although many would love to pay for it if HBO offered a standalone HBO GO subscription."
Entertainment

Submission + - NPR's "Car Talk" Closing (yahoo.com)

Submitted by stevegee58
stevegee58 writes: After 25 years on the air, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (aka Click and Clack, The Tappet Brothers) are calling it quits in September.
With their nerdy humor, explosive laughter and geek cred (both MIT alums) Tom and Ray will be sorely missed by the average NPR-listening Slashdotter.
Earth

Submission + - Sprint moves to eliminate "blood minerals" from cell phones (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: So-called “blood diamonds” or conflict diamonds are the well-publicized face of the decades-long human rights challenge in Africa. But the mining and sale of a lesser-known but more widely used group of natural resources known as “blood minerals” has also fueled civil wars in Congo and Uganda — and they're in the latest smartphones, including the rumored iPhone 5 and many Android phones. Congress sought to address the issue through the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which included a requirement for companies to disclose conflict minerals. In 2011 the SEC opened a public debate about this disclosure — but Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington is critical of the process. “They are afraid of being sued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the World Gold Council,” McDermott said. Ahead of the SEC ruling, Sprint has made baby steps to come to terms with the controversy, joining the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) and the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA), and said it is working to make device manufacturers aware of the issue. But are they doing enough?
Advertising

Submission + - Foursquare Wants To Be the Mayor of Ad Revenue (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Foursquare's big new redesign is based on 'seeing how our 20-million strong community has used the app,' says co-founder Dennis Crowley. But the redesign is probably equally about monetization, and that probably means advertising. As blogger Kevin Purdy puts it, 'when a startup claims that they’re looking into new and creative revenue models, it’s almost inevitable they'll be selling old-fashioned advertising in three years' time.' Which is really too bad, says Purdy, when it could have 'jumped on two really interesting models dreamed up by small firms riding on its API.'"
IBM

Submission + - Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "IBM’s Watson made major headlines last year when it trounced its human rivals on Jeopardy. But Watson isn’t just sitting around spinning trivia questions to stump the champs: IBM is working hard on taking it into a series of vertical markets such as healthcare, contact management and financial services to see if the system can be used for diagnosing diseases and catching market trends. Does this spell the end of your BI career? Not really, but it does raise some interesting thoughts and issues."
Security

Submission + - LinkedIn Password Leak: Salt Their Hide (acm.org)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Following yesterday's post about Poul-Henning Kamp no longer supporting md5crypt, the author has a new column at the ACM where he details all the ways that LinkedIn failed, specifically realted to how they failed to 'salt' their passwords, making them that much easier to crack.
"On a system with many users, the chances that some of them have chosen the same password are pretty good. Humans are notoriously lousy at selecting good passwords. For the evil attacker, that means all users who have the same hashed password in the database have chosen the same password, so it is probably not a very good one, and the attacker can target that with a brute force attempt.""
Hardware

Submission + - MIT creates self-assembling 3D nanostructures, could be the future of chips (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "MIT has devised a way of creating complex, self-assembling 3D nanostructures of wires and junctions. While self-assembling structures have been made from polymers before, this is the first time that multi-layer, configurable layouts have been created, opening up the path to self-assembled computer chips. Basically, MIT uses diblock copolymers, which are large molecules formed from two distinct polymers (each with different chemical and physical properties). These copolymers naturally form long cylinders — wires. The key to MIT’s discovery is that the scientists have worked out how to exactly control the arrangement of these block copolymers. By growing tiny, 10nm-wide silica “posts” on a silicon substrate, the researchers can control the angles, bends, spacing, and junctions of the copolymer wires. Once the grid of posts has been built, the wafer is simply covered in the polymer material, and chip’s wires and junctions self-assemble. The reason everyone is so excited, though, is that the silica posts can be built using equipment that is compatible with existing semiconductor fabs. Theoretically, chips built using this technique could have a much smaller feature size than the 28nm and 22nm chips produced by TSMC and Intel. According to Caroline Ross of MIT, it should be possible to build posts that are much smaller than 10nm."
The Military

Submission + - Drones, Computer Viruses and Blowback

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Michael Crowley writes that using drones rather than soldiers to kill bad guys is appealing for many reasons, including cost, relative precision and reduction of risk to American troops but there’s plenty of evidence that drones antagonize local populations and create more enemies over the long term than we kill in the short term. The failed 2010 Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad has said that about the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan and the Washington Post has described how drone strikes may be breeding sympathy for al-Qaeda in Yemen. "It is the politically advantageous thing to do--low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries," says Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence until May of 2010. "Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term." Now there’s another component to the new warfare that threatens blowback: cyberwar. Like drones, cyberweapons are relatively cheap and do their work without putting American troops in harm’s way. The blowback comes when those viruses get loose and inflict unintended damage or provide templates to terrorists or enemy nations that some experts think could lead to disaster and argue that cyberweapons are like bioweapons, demanding international treaties to govern their use. "We may indeed be at a critical moment in history, when the planet's prospects could be markedly improved by an international treaty on cyberweapons, and the cultivation of an attendant norm against cyberwar," writes Richard Wright. "The ideal nation to lead the world toward this goal would be the most powerful nation on earth, especially if that nation had a pretty clean record on the cyberweapons front. A few years ago, America seemed to fit that description. But it doesn't now.""
Unix

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Getting a tech job with skills but no formal degree 3

Submitted by
fmatthew5876
fmatthew5876 writes: "I have a friend who graduated with a degree in philosophy and sociology. He has been spending a lot of his spare time for the last couple years learning system administration and web development. He has setup web servers, database servers, web proxies and more. He has taught himself php, mysql, and how to use Linux and openBSD without any formal education. I believe that if given the chance with an entry level position somewhere and a good mentor he could really be a great unix admin but the problem is that he doesn't have a degree in computer science or any related field. He is doing stuff now that a lot of people I graduated with (I was a CS major) could not do when they had a bachelors degree.

Do you all have any advice on what my friend could do to build up his resume and find a job? I know a lot of people think certifications are pretty useless or even harmful, but in his case do you think it would be a good idea? Thank you all very much!"
Space

Submission + - Full moon affects LHC operations (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by NervousWreck
NervousWreck writes: Physicists report that tidal conditions are affecting the hardware at the LHC. In other news, scientists and technicians are asked to join the effort searching the area for a werewolf reported to be living near Lake Geneva.

Submission + - Materials from Tough-as-Nails Crustacean Could Inspire Better Body Armor (cen-online.org)

Submitted by
carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes: "The peacock mantis shrimp, a crustacean which is neither a mantis nor a shrimp, has hammer-like clubs for smashing the shells of its prey, so strong that regular glass aquariums can’t hold them. But what’s interested researchers for some time is how the clubs stand up to all that stress. Now, a team’s figured out why- the mantis shrimp club's molecular structure is set up to resist fractures. That discovery could lead to stronger and lighter car frames or body armor."
Hardware

Submission + - Odd Laptop-Tablet Hybrids Show PC Makers' Panic (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Taipei's Computex trade show has seen array of strange devices on sale that are somewhere between PCs and tablets: laptops with screens you can twist in every direction, tablets with detachable keyboards, all-in-one PCs with detachable monitors. Some have Intel chips, some ARM chips; some run Windows 8, some Android. They all exist because of cheaper components now available, and because Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible — but mostly they exist because PC makes are starting to freak out about being left behind by the tablet revolution."
Open Source

Submission + - AR.Drone published source and toolchain thanks to Jens, telnet, and the GPL (ardrone.org)

Submitted by leorleor
leorleor writes: From their forums: As the AR.Drone runs a modified version of Linux kernel 2.6.27, we had to comply with GPL requirements. You can download here the diff between Linux kernel 2.6.27 and the AR.Drone kernel tag... Thanks for releasing the diff! But I am afraid that it might not be enough. Please take a look at http://gpl-violations.org/faq/sourcecode-faq.html . In response they published the source and toolchain: Now you can find all information in our Gpl page: toolchain, Linux base version and modifications, and other unpatched GPL-licensed userland software!
Robotics

Submission + - MH-2 is the Wearable Telepresence Humanoid Robot You've Always Wanted (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: The MH-2 is a telepresence robot like no other we have ever seen. This tiny humanoid figure is always there for you, perching on your shoulder, ready to be remotely inhabited by your friends. Conceived by the researchers at Yamagata University in Japan, MH-2 is designed to imitate human behavior accurately enough for you to feel like your friend is actually there with you.
Canada

Submission + - Canadian IP Lobby Calls For ACTA, SOPA & Warrantless Search (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian intellectual property's lead lobby group, the Canadian IP Council (which represent the music, movie, software and pharma industries) released a new policy document yesterday that identifies its legislative priorities for the coming years. Anyone hoping that the SOPA protests, the European backlash against ACTA, and the imminent passage of Canadian copyright reform might moderate the lobby group demands will be sorely disappointed. Michael Geist says it is the most extremist IP policy document ever released in Canada, calling for the implementation of ACTA, SOPA-style rules including website blocking and stopping search queries from resolving, liability for advertisers and payment companies, massive surveillance at the border and through delivery channels including searching through individual packages without court oversight, and spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars on private enforcement.
Science

Submission + - CERN: Neutrinos Respect Cosmic Speed Limit (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto today, CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci presented results on the time of flight of neutrinos from CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory on behalf of four experiments situated at Gran Sasso. The four, Borexino, ICARUS, LVD and OPERA all measure a neutrino time of flight consistent with the speed of light. This is at odds with a measurement that the OPERA collaboration put up for scrutiny last September, indicating that the original OPERA measurement can be attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibre optic timing system. 'Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked,' said Bertolucci, 'it is what we all expected deep down. The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action – an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That’s how science moves forward.'
Censorship

Submission + - UN to debate taxing internet data (cnet.com)

Submitted by Wowsers
Wowsers writes: In an effort to get ever more taxes for doing absolutely nothing, the United Nations are to consider a European proposal to tax the internet based on data that gets sent. The proposal is designed to get money from large bandwidth users like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix. Smaller companies that have high bandwidth would be forced off the internet due to the taxes.

The proposed measure is also claimed to be an effective tool for censorship as companies will just block access to countries to limit the amount of taxes they pay for data.
Japan

Submission + - OpenRelief project launches open drones to help save lives at LinuxCon Japan (linux.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We’ll never forget last year’s LinuxCon Japan conference, which took place shortly after the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March. As the country still reeled from the disaster, LinuxCon presenters discussed how open source software could contribute to disaster relief.

One year later, a team of developers has returned to LinuxCon in Yokohama this week to announce OpenRelief, a new project aimed at building a low-cost, remote-controlled robotic plane to report damage in hard-to-reach, disaster stricken areas.

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