Kozz writes "Universal Pictures and NBC Universal Television Entertainment have closed a deal to turn Stephen King's mammoth novel series The Dark Tower into a feature film trilogy and a network TV series, both of which will be creatively steered by the Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code. 'The plan is to start with the feature film, and then create a bridge to the second feature with a season of TV episodes. That means the feature cast — and the big star who’ll play Deschain — also has to appear in the TV series before returning to the second film. After that sequel is done, the TV series picks up again, this time focusing on Deschain as a young gunslinger.'"

suraj.sun writes with this news from CNET: "A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site — Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the online privacy protection project called Tor — was detained by US agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference. He was also approached by two FBI agents at the Defcon conference after his presentation on Saturday afternoon about the Tor Project. Appelbaum, a US citizen, arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, airport from Holland Thursday morning, was taken into a room, frisked and his bag was searched. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said." Appelbaum told me that he just spoke at length with The New York Times, and quipped that his Defcon talk about Tor was "just fine, until the FBI showed up"; this post will likely be updated with more details. Update: 08/02 03:59 GMT by T : Here's the NYT's coverage.

beschra writes "Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) was developed as early as 1981. After launching in the UK 10 years ago, only 24% of listeners listen on DAB. The article credits a good part of the delay to the fact that the technology was largely developed under the Europe-wide Eureka 147 research project. How does government vs. commercial development help or hinder acceptance of new technology? From the article: '"If Nokia develops something, they'll be bringing out the handsets before you know it," [analyst Grant Goddard says]. "Because DAB was a pan-European development, you had to have agreement from all sides before you could do anything. That meant progress was extremely slow." But this alone did not account for the hold-up. The sheer complexity of introducing and regulating the system was also a major factor, Mr. Goddard adds."'

neonsignal writes "Iconic Australian band Men at Work have been ordered to pay royalties for an instrumental riff in their song 'Down Under.' The notes were sampled from a well-known children's song 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree,' written in 1934 for a Girl Guide's Jamboree. The Justice found the claims of the copyright owner Larrikin to be excessive, but ordered the payment of royalties and a percentage of future profits. Let's hope the primary schools are up to date with their ARIA license fees!"

teh31337one writes "Four short months after Opera 10.50, the latest version of Opera's lightweight web browser has been released. It not only claims to be the fastest browser, but also the first final browser with WebM video support. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux." Update: 07/04 21:53 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is Opera 10.60, rather than 10.6. Thanks to the readers who spotted this goof.

schlick writes with word that the Diaspora project (last mentioned here several weeks back) has an update with a demo and some screen shots. Diaspora's goal: to provide social networking without the privacy invasion possibilities inherent in sites like Facebook.

IonOtter writes "In what seems to be a common occurrence, and now a costly one, Metropolitan Police in the UK still don't seem to be getting the message that assaulting photographers is a bad idea. UK press photographer Jules Matteson details the event in his blog, titled The Romford Incident. The incident has already been picked up by The Register, The Independent, and the British Journal of Photography, which contains an official statement from the Metropolitan Police."

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla quietly posted the first beta build of its Firefox 4 browser early this morning. The 'Chromified' browser leaves a solid first impression with a few minor hiccups, but no surprises. If you have been using a previous version of Firefox 3.7, which now officially becomes Firefox 4.0, you should already feel comfortable with this new version. Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes." Update: 06/29 18:40 GMT by S : Mozilla's Asa Dotzler writes, "Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet." Changed headline to reflect this.

angry tapir writes "In keeping with Google's enthusiasm for the emerging HTML5 standard, many upcoming features of the company's Gmail Web-based e-mail service will be rendered in HTML5. One feature that the Gmail design team is now working on is the ability to drag files from the desktop into the browser. Gmail will also make use of HTML5's database standards. Currently the e-mail service uses Google Gears to store mail for offline reading, but over time that will migrate to the HTML5 standards."

benoliver writes to let us know that the FBI has failed to decrypt files of a Brazilian banker accused of financial crimes by Brazilian law enforcement, after a year of attempts. Five hard drives were seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha in July 2008. (The link is to a Google translation of the original article in Portuguese.) The article in English mentions two encryption programs, one Truecrypt and the other unnamed. 256-bit AES was used, and apparently both the Brazilian police and the FBI tried dictionary attacks against it. No Brazilian law exists to force Dantas to produce the password(s).

DragonHawk writes "Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4 went to general release today. The big new feature in this release is out-of-process plugins (OOPP). This means things like Flash, Java, QuickTime, etc., all run in separate processes, so when Flash decides to crash, it won't take your browser out with it. If Flash starts consuming all the CPU it can find, you can kill it without nuking your browser session. I've been using this feature since it was in the 'nightly build' stage, and it was still more stable than 3.6.3, just because Flash was isolated." And reader Trailrunner7 supplies another compelling reason to download 3.6.4: "Security researcher Michal Zalewski has identified a problem with the way Firefox handles links that are opened in a new browser window or tab, enabling attackers to inject arbitrary code into the new window or tab while still keeping a deceptive URL in the browser's address bar. The vulnerability, which Mozilla has fixed in version 3.6.4, has the effect of tricking users into thinking that they're visiting a legitimate site while instead sending arbitrary attacker-controlled code to their browsers."

adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe announced that it has released the final version of Flash Player 10.1 for Google's mobile operating system. The app will be available for download via the Android Market for those users who have Android 2.2 (Froyo) installed on their phones. Devices expected to offer the Android update include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, Droid by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, and Samsung Galaxy S. Flash Player 10.1 was also released to support devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months."

A few days ago we noted how Ukraine is driving out its software freelancers with the threat of onerous taxation. Now comes news that another former Soviet republic, Georgia, will become a tax-free zone for IT companies. It might be the Google translation, but it seems that officials there are somewhat worried about how to categorize the IT segment: "[T]he main difficulty ... is to determine which organization is the IT company, and what is not: 'While from a formal point of view it is impossible to distinguish between software developers from the oil.'"

QuantumG writes "The first episode of the new science fiction drama Pioneer One has debuted and it looks like a hit. The pilot was shot for just $6,000, raised through the micro-funding platform Kickstarter, and the production is being supported through donations on the show's website. Donations can be made on a sliding scale with 'bonus' rewards for each level, such as an MP3 of the opening theme and deleted scenes. The show is being distributed through file-sharing systems such as BitTorrent and LimeWire thanks to VODO, the group that also helped produce it. Is this the future of television?"

breser writes "The WebM licensing problems have been resolved. The copyright license is straight BSD now, and the patent license is separate and has no impact on the copyright license. Quoting Chris DiBona: 'As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do. Using patent language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses, in this new iteration of the patent clause we've decoupled patents from copyright, thus preserving the pure BSD nature of the copyright license. This means we are no longer creating a new open source copyright license, and the patent grant can exist on its own.'"