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Medicine

Submission + - Researchers Track the Origins of HIV Virus (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new study suggests that HIV may have affected humans much longer than is currently believed. In fact, the virus might have been around undetected for so many centuries that a human community developed some degree of resistance to the virus.
Researchers hypothesized that if HIV was affecting people for such a long time, then selection might have favored genetic traits that had a protective effect on the human population. To look for evidence, his team analyzed genetic map of people belonging to BiAka people.
The BiAka are nomadic pygmy people that live in the forests of Africa inhabited by the chimpanzee subspecies believed to be the source of the current HIV outbreak. Researchers compared genome of this community with four other African communities that live outside the chimpanzee's range.
Piracy

Submission + - UK Pirate Party forced to give up legal fight (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Grumbleduke
Grumbleduke writes: The UK Pirate Party has been forced to shut down its proxy of The Pirate Bay. The Party had been running the proxy since April, initially to support the Dutch Party's efforts, then as a means of combating censorship after the BPI obtained uncontested court orders against the UK's main ISPs to block the site across the UK.

In a statement released through their lawyers, the Party cited the impossibly-high costs of legal action for their decision, but vowed to keep fighting for digital rights however they can.
Space

Submission + - Need help recovering a solar-powered ballon next week (wordpress.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We are a small group of high-altitude balloon enthusiasts based in Socorro, New Mexico. Our current endeavor is to launch a solar-powered balloon (one that only uses the sun to generate all lift rather than helium as a weather balloon would) sometime between 12/22 and 12/28. The balloon is estimated to reach 50k-80k feet and will be carrying a payload that includes a full flight profile recorder. The only problem? While we will know where it comes down, we probably won't be able to drive that far. We would like to crowdsource the recovery. Getting the payload back means we can validate our flight models and better design future balloons.
Patents

Submission + - Kodak Patents Sold to Patent Trolls - Cheap! (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intellectual Ventures and RPX Rational Patent, two companies frequently referred to as patent trolls, have snapped up the troubled Kodak company's imaging patents. Bloomberg reports that Kodak has agreed to sell the patent portfolio for $525 million dollars, despite previous valuations of over $2 billion. According to the article, the patents "relate to the capture, manipulation and sharing of digital images".
The Military

Submission + - X-47B Stealth Drone: A Cylon is Born? (bbc.com)

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: The BBC reports on a U.S. Navy program to develop an autonomous reconnaissance/strike drone. Designed to take off and land on an aircraft carrier, the drone is intended to operate with little human intervention. Special bonus: it even looks like a Cylon.
The Internet

Submission + - Pirate Party not giving up after BPI legal action (pctechtalk.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: UK political group, the Pirate Party insists it will continue to fight for digital rights despite being threatened with legal action by the UK’s music industry body over links to the Pirate Bay website

Elected members of the parties National Executive Committee, along with the head of IT, received letters from lawyers acting for British Phonographic Industry (BPI), threatening them personally with High Court legal action.

A proxy server was initially provided in solidarity with other parties in Europe, but soon became an anti-censorship resource for UK users after the 'Big Six' ISPs were forced by court order to begin blocking The Pirate Bay. Access to the proxy server has been removed.

Frances Nash, IP Lawyer at Manchester solicitors, Ralli, commented on behalf of the Pirate Party:

"Despite attempts by elected members to resolve this situation, the law at present is clear and makes any decision to continue hosting the proxy untenable.

This is not the outcome the party wanted however, any challenge to this proposed action would make it financially impossible for the party to deal with other issues for which they actively campaign on a daily basis.

The Pirate Party strongly believe that site blocking is both disproportionate and ineffective and will continue to lobby for digital rights and their wider manifesto.”

Submission + - Samba Team Releases Samba 4.0 (samba.org)

Submitted by dgharmon
dgharmon writes: As the culmination of ten years' work, the Samba Team has created the first compatible Free Software implementation of Microsoft’s Active Directory protocols. Familiar to all network administrators, the Active Directory protocols are the heart of modern directory service implementations. Samba 4.0 comprises an LDAP directory server, Heimdal Kerberos authentication server, a secure Dynamic DNS server, and implementations of all necessary remote procedure calls for Active Directory. Samba 4.0 provides everything needed to serve as an Active Directory Compatible Domain Controller for all versions of Microsoft Windows clients currently supported by Microsoft, including the recently released Windows 8.

The Samba 4.0 Active Directory Compatible Server provides support for features such as Group Policy, Roaming Profiles, Windows Administration tools and integrates with Microsoft Exchange and Free Software compatible services such as OpenChange.

The Samba 4.0 Active Directory Compatible Server can also be joined to an existing Microsoft Active Directory domain, and Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controllers can be joined to a Samba 4.0 Active Directory Compatible Server, showing true peer-to-peer interoperability of the Microsoft and Samba implementations of the Active Directory protocols.
IT

Submission + - Highest Profile Software Failures of 2012 (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: SQS compiled a list of the worst software failures over the past 12 months. This year’s annual survey is based on major software failures throughout 2012 and highlights the continuing problems faced by the financial and banking sector, which have dominated the software glitch top ten lists over the past three years. In this year's survey, financial services software glitches represent five of the top ten. Legacy systems in banks and trading firms are not being updated or replaced due to financial constraints and this is one major cause of failure.
Twitter

Submission + - UK Director of Public Prosecutions defines criminal posts (huffingtonpost.co.uk)

Submitted by Kupfernigk
Kupfernigk writes: Following some high profile cases in which the Crown Prosecution Services initiated prosecutions for offensive tweets or posts that resulted in convictions quashed on appeal, the DPP has issued guidelines on what are criminal, and what are merely offensive or annoying, posts.
Hardware

Submission + - 17-yo builds fusion reactor, keynotes Berlin's EHSM

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes: Will Jack is a 17 year old high school student from the US who enjoys nothing more than building nuclear fusion reactors in his basement. He will be the keynote speaker later this month at Berlin's Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting, a conference on the frontiers of open source and DIY. Other topics covered by the conference are the CERN open hardware initiative, microchip reverse-engineering, DIY vacuum tubes, and more.
Iphone

Submission + - Brazilian company launches IPHONE that runs on Android (engadget.com)

Submitted by rodmm
rodmm writes: Gradiente, a consumer electronics brazilian company filed for trademark registration in Brazil in 2000, years ahead of Apple's product. This week they launched Gradiente iphone Neo One, already available at company's website. Although we can imagine that there will be some legal fight around it, first impression is that, legally speaking, the brazilian company has a right in this issue.
Privacy

Submission + - Cookie consent banners draw complaints (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes: "Earlier this year, the UK's data watchdog the ICO started enforcing an EU rule that means websites must ask visitors before dropping cookies onto their computers. However, it was willing to accept "implied consent" — telling visitors that cookies are used on the site, and assuming they were fine with that if they keep using the site. That led to banners popping up on every major website, including the ICO's site, warning users about cookies.

Now, the ICO has revealed that many of the cookie-related complaints it's received in the past six months are actually about those banners — and the law itself. The ICO said people "are unhappy with implied consent mechanisms, especially where cookies are placed immediately on entry to the site", adding "a significant number of people also raised concerns about the new rules themselves and the effect of usability of websites.""
Privacy

Submission + - Newest Gov't Tracking Threat: Cell-Site Data Without a Warrant (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, the Supreme Court put an end to warrantless GPS tracking. Now, federal prosecutors are trying to get similar data from a different source. A U.S. District Judge has ruled that getting locational data from cell towers in order to track suspects is just fine. 'But Huvelle sidestepped the Fourth Amendment argument and declined to analyze whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jones’ case has any bearing on whether cell-site data can be used without a warrant. Instead, she focused on a doctrine called the "good-faith exemption," in which evidence is not suppressed if the authorities were following the law at the time. The data in Jones’ case was coughed up in 2005, well before the Supreme Court’s ruling on GPS. "The court, however, need not resolve this vexing question of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, since it concludes that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies," (.PDF) she wrote.'
Science

Submission + - Let the White Tiger Go Extinct

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Many people are under the impression that the white tiger is a variety of Siberian tiger, camouflaged for a snowy climate. Others applaud zoos with white tigers for supporting conservation of white tigers while lamenting a lag in reintroduction efforts. But Jackson Landers writes that almost no one knows that white tigers are not a subspecies at all but rather the result of a mutant gene that has been artificially selected through massive inbreeding to produce oddball animals for human entertainment. "Many of the venues that display white tigers have a long history of shading the truth about their mutants," writes Landers. "The Cincinnati Zoo, an otherwise respectable institution, labels their white tigers as a “species at risk!” Nowhere on the zoo’s website or at its tiger enclosures does it point out that this species at risk is in fact an ecologically useless hybrid of Bengal and Siberian strains, inbred at the zoo’s own facility for big money." One of the Cincinnati Zoo’s biggest sales was to the illusionists Siegfried and Roy who bought three white tigers from the zoo in the early 1980s and quickly set up their own breeding program referring to the cats as “royal white tigers” and giving the public the impression that this was an endangered species that they were helping to protect. "Humanity has a collective responsibility to care for the two-headed calves and white tigers that we create for our own entertainment, but do we really need to be creating more of the genetic disasters that pull resources away from truly endangered species," concludes Landers. "We can choose a future in which white tigers disappear into memory and hopefully one in which truly endangered subspecies of tigers maintain enough genetic diversity to be successfully reintroduced into a wild that can sustain them.""
Space

Submission + - BREAKING NEWS: Possible Habitable Planet Just 12 Light Years Away (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Astronomers have discovered what may be five planets orbiting Tau Ceti, the closest single star beyond our solar system whose temperature and luminosity nearly match the sun's. If the planets are there, one of them is about the right distance from the star to sport mild temperatures, oceans of liquid water, and even life.
Programming

Submission + - Whose bug is this anyway? (codeofhonor.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Patrick Wyatt, one of the developers behind the original Warcraft and StarCraft games, has a post about some of the bug hunting he's done throughout his career. He covers familiar topics: crunch time leading to stupid mistakes, bugs in compilers rather than game code, and shares a story about finding a way to diagnose hardware failure for players of Guild Wars. Quoting: '[Mike O'Brien] wrote a module (“OsStress”) which would allocate a block of memory, perform calculations in that memory block, and then compare the results of the calculation to a table of known answers. He encoded this stress-test into the main game loop so that the computer would perform this verification step about 30-50 times per second. On a properly functioning computer this stress test should never fail, but surprisingly we discovered that on about 1% of the computers being used to play Guild Wars it did fail! One percent might not sound like a big deal, but when one million gamers play the game on any given day that means 10,000 would have at least one crash bug. Our programming team could spend weeks researching the bugs for just one day at that rate!'
Education

Submission + - How Much Are You Worth To An Online Lead-Gen Site? (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "You may remember the tale of the blogger who found that an infographic he'd put on his site was the front end of an SEO spam job. Well, he's since followed the money to figure out just who's behind this maneuver: the for-profit college industry. He discovered that the contact info of someone who expresses interest in online degree programs can be worth up to $250 to an industry with a particularly sleazy reputation."
Privacy

Submission + - Instagram responds to press around it's new Privacy Policy (instagram.com)

Submitted by
hugheseyau
hugheseyau writes: "Yesterday Instagram introduced a new version of their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service that will take effect in thirty days. Since making these changes, many users were confused and upset about what the changes mean.

Instagram now says that "it is not our intention to sell your photos" and that "users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos". This is good news for Instagram users."
Linux

Submission + - Tell me about your workstation's desktop

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I want to hear from people who have extensively customized things like their window manager and editor.

Background:

I've been writing C++ in QtCreator for a while now. I've started working on Python projects and I'm using Sublime Text for my Python. I would like to move to one editor for both C++ and Python (preferably something that can support the handful of vi key combinations I have in my muscle memory), but I don't want to lose the IDE-like features I have grown accustomed to in QtCreator.

I have looked at coaxing Emacs, Vim, and Sublime Text into supporting things like auto-complete, refactoring tools, jump to definition, switch header/source, etc. and it looks like a lot of work. Some of what I have read suggests that if I want an IDE, I should use an IDE, not a text editor. However, I only want one tool for the job of text editing.

Furthermore, I have been experimenting with tiling window managers since buying one of those Korean 27" IPS displays on eBay. I've also been playing with plugins for Chrome and Firefox that enable keyboard-only web browsing. I know that people can become incredibly productive using a tiling wm, browser, handful of xterms, and a text editor, driving everything primarily from the keyboard. I would like to hear from people who have a setup like what I have described. What I am describing is the reason people use things like Emacs, right? What works for you, what does not? What WM do you use? Editor? Terminal? Browser? Do you have commented rc files on github documenting your favorite tweaks? What tweaks do you recommend, to increase your productivity? How much time do you have to spend fucking with something like Emacs or Vim or Wmii or Xmonad to get it to the point where you can do work with it?

P.S. I'm looking for wisdom here, not a debate about the relative merits of using different software packages.

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