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Submission + - File-Sharing for Personal Use Declared Legal in Portugal (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by M0j0_j0j0
M0j0_j0j0 writes: After receiving 2000 complaints regarding "illegal file sharing" from ACAPOR on P2P network the Portuguese justice refused to take the case into court on the premise that file sharing is not illegal on the territory, if, files are for personal and not commercial use. The court also stated that the complaints had as a sole evidence the IP address of users, and that it is a wrong statement to assume an IP address is directly related to one individual. Torrent freak has a piece in English with more details here and the original source in Portuguese here

Submission + - comcast dns (75.75.75.75) 1

Submitted by
randini
randini writes: "Dear slashdot,
    I work in I.T. for a small company, and we recently have been having problems with slow internet. After some digging we noticed that comcast DNS servers were dropping between 20-70% of packets. Dns Server Address 75.75.75.75, we switched to using opendns, and now our packet loss is at 0%, i was just wondering if anyone else has noticed this or if anyone is aware of an active attack against comacast. i recall a few months back anons claimed they were going to perform a "reflection attack" agianst dns servers on the net, but i am not sure what came of that. Any light you can shed on this for me would be great."
Google

Submission + - Google Maps App for iOS: When's It Coming? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "The controversy over Apple’s native mapping software hadn’t stopped some 100 million iOS users from downloading the latest version of the software by Sept. 24. But Apple dumping Google Maps in favor of its own app, along with that app’s widely-viewed-as-subpar performance, has left smartphone and tablet users wondering when Google will issue a Google Maps app for Apple’s App Store, akin to what it did with YouTube.

The apparent answer: be prepared to wait a bit.

“We have not done anything yet,” Google executive chairman (and former CEO) Eric Schmidt told an audience in Tokyo, according to Reuters.

The New York Times spoke with unnamed sources within Google, who said that Google is indeed developing a maps application for iOS with a target launch date of the end of 2012, but that the search-engine giant had been “caught off guard” by Apple’s decision to switch map apps."

Submission + - TSA Petition is back up! (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The TSA petition that was taken down last Thursday (http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/08/12/1521240/white-house-pulls-down-tsa-petition) has been recreated. Your help is needed to sign and push the petition back to its former glory.
NASA

Submission + - Could you hack into Mars rover Curiosity? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "NASA’s Curiosity rover has now been on the surface of Mars for just over a week. It hasn’t moved an inch after landing, instead focusing on orienting itself (and NASA’s scientists) by taking instrument readings and snapping images of its surroundings. The first beautiful full-color images of Gale Crater are starting to trickle in, and NASA has already picked out some interesting rock formations that it will investigate further in the next few days (pictures below). Over the weekend and continuing throughout today, however, Curiosity is attempting something very risky indeed: A firmware upgrade. This got me thinking: If NASA can transmit new software to a Mars rover that's hundreds of millions of miles away... why can't a hacker do the same thing? In short, there's no reason a hacker couldn't take control of Curiosity, or lock NASA out. All you would need is your own massive 230-foot dish antenna and a 400-kilowatt transmitter — or, perhaps more realistically, you could hack into NASA's computer systems, which is exactly what Chinese hackers did 13 times in 2011."
Education

Submission + - Creating a school computer lab with Ubuntu for $0 (ifixit.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here is an interesting story of a school in Oakland that used old computers running Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org to provide a school computer lab for students.

Comment Re:Yeah, but how do you measure 'Quality' (Score 2) 349

by Reasonable Facsimile (#40921575) Attached to: Bad Software Runs the World

There are ways to determine quality. One pretty standard way is to count the number of bugs found during testing each phase of development (design, coding, unit test, product test, integration tests and after its in production).

Those can be valuable metrics, but finding and fixing a lot of bugs can't improve the innate quality of the item under development/test. In other words, you can't test quality into the product.

Comment Re:Successful ad campaign is successful (Score 1) 244

by Reasonable Facsimile (#40846987) Attached to: Critics Blast Apple's Cheesy New Ad Campaign

but if apple had filmed a turd for 20 seconds and published that as an official advert it would have the highest viewcount on youtube - however I really doubt that would mean it's a successful advert for them in building of their brand image.

People would have said they liked the new fully cornerless design and swirly textures. Brown is obviously the new white (or black) and you have to be impressed by the new smell feedback technology. It's soft and warm to the touch as well, making it comfortable to hold.

I mis-read "cornerless" as "corn-less."

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