Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Google

Submission + - Google Video Race Against Time Goes Distributed (nicalderton.com) 3

Bottles writes: Following Google's announcement to shut down Google Video (previously reported on Slashdot), the Archive Team has inspired a group of volunteers to join together to preserve as much of the content as possible: some 2.5 — 2.8 million videos. In a few short days the effort has evolved from a simple wiki suggesting people band together to download automatically generated lists of video ID's via a crude automated script to a centralised, distributed batch management system which assigns unique video ID's to volunteers' machines for download. The system, developed by Alex Buie in less than 48 hours, is now the recommended way to preserve the content and to avoid duplicate downloads. Watch videos roll in live here thanks to PubNub and read on to find out how you can help.

The clock is ticking to download as much as possible by the 29th of April — before Google throws the switch. Thereafter, Archive.Org has assigned a 140TB buffer for uploads into its 1 petabyte of storage space to house the preserved content. After the cutoff, downloaders can offload their content at their leisure.

The team from around the world, spearheaded and coordinated by Jason Scott, has been working solidly and altruistically. No selection criteria have been applied to the content; the idea is to preserve everything, if possible; however various team members have been working on collating word lists for searches: by concept, year, country etc. In this way they have a growing master list of some 2449000 unique video ID's to be processed of which around 15% are already saved.

You can help out. Please visit the wiki and the #googlegrape irc channel on EFNET, download the scripts and donate a little bandwidth and storage to preserve as much as possible before the cutoff date. There is less than a week left.

Japan

Submission + - What the robots saw inside Fukushima (cio.com.au)

swandives writes: "The first images provided by robots from inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are in, following the massive March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

A pair of iRobot Packbots entered three of the reactor units on Sunday and Monday. Their job was to survey the conditions inside and help Tokyo Electric Power and evaluate whether it is safe to send humans in to continue the cleanup. It's expected to take up to nine months to bring the plant to a cold shutdown — if it can be done."

Submission + - Betty Boop and Indefinite Copyright (cartoonbrew.com)

An anonymous reader writes: US Court of Appeals officially recognizes that under the current regime, characters like Betty Boopy "would essentially never enter the public domain".

"Apparently the Fleischer estate has lost a court battle for the rights to Betty Boop, a character created by Grim Natwick at Max Fleischer’s studio in 1930."

"The Fleischer Studio tried to sue Avela Inc. over its licensing of public domain Betty Boop poster images (for handbags and T-shirts). The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (based in San Francisco) ruled against the Fleischers, saying in their decision, “If we ruled that AVELA’s depictions of Betty Boop infringed Fleischer’s trademarks, the Betty Boop character would essentially never enter the public domain.”"

"So where does that leave Ms. Boop? No longer represented by the heirs of Max Fleischer and King Features Syndicate? Does this make Harvey Comics – or by extention, its current owner Classic Media – the owner of the property? Or is the character now in public domain."

News

Submission + - UN Grants Mercenaries In Libya War Crime Immunity (telegraph.co.uk)

revealingheart writes: African mercenaries hired by the Gaddafi regime to kill Libyan protesters would be immune from prosecution for war crimes due to a clause in this weekend's UN resolution that was demanded by the United States.

The US insisted that the UN resolution was worded so that no one from an outside country that is not a member of the ICC could be prosecuted for their actions in Libya.

This means that mercenaries from countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia – which have all been named by rebel Libyan diplomats to the UN as being among the countries involved – would escape prosecution even if they were captured, because their nations are not members of the court.

News

Submission + - Shocking Images Show Gulf Bottom Still Dead (dailymail.co.uk)

intellitech writes: The Daily Mail is reporting that much of the oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. At a science conference in Washington today, Joye, a professor at the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't. New images from her submarine dives reveal a startling absence of life on the bottom of the Gulf.
Google

Submission + - Google May Kill Browser URL Bar (conceivablytech.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google is working on a “major” overhaul of its Chrome browser user interface (UI). Among the options on the table is the elimination of the URL bar, which could be one of the most significant UI changes to the web browser since its invention. Another feature that appears to be already signed off is the support of multiple user profiles that can be used in parallel.
Youtube

Submission + - Singing a song = 20 years in jail 2

Ihmhi writes: "Evan Emory got permission to play an innocent song in front of a classroom full of children. He then recorded a much different song with sexually explicit material in the empty classroom, and edited a video together to make it appear that he's singing quite the perverted song to a bunch of kids. Putting it on YouTube may have been poor taste, but does he deserve 20 years in jail?"
Censorship

Submission + - Egyptian 'Net Killed By Intimidation, Not A Switch (itworld.com)

jfruhlinger writes: "In the wake of the Egyptian revolution of the past weeks, much tech buzz has focused on the "kill switch" that Mubarak's government used to try to stop Internet-based networking. The New York Times gives the details; as blogger Kevin Fogarty points out, the process involved less high-tech derring do and more intimidation of tech workers by regime thugs."
Debian

Submission + - Debian 6 Squeeze Review (desktoplinuxreviews.com)

JimLynch writes: It wasn’t too long ago that I did a very late review of Debian 5. I’m happy to say that it didn’t take me nearly as long to get around to the latest release, Debian 6 Squeeze. If you aren’t familiar with Debian then this release is a great chance to learn about a distro that is the foundation for a lot of other distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint and others.

Submission + - Openleaks Founder Sabotaged Wikileaks (huffingtonpost.com)

SETIGuy writes: Former Wikileaks programmer Daniel Domscheit-Berg admits in his book that he sabotaged Wikileaks in a manner that threatens the anonymity of leakers. Since leaving Wikileaks, Domschiet-Berg has become one of the cofounders of Openleaks. This raises the question, if you had material to leak, would you trust it to someone who has already jeopardized the anonymity of leakers at a site where he worked?

Submission + - 172 doomed BBC sites saved by one geek, for $3.99 (thenextweb.com)

revealingheart writes: The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands.

The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these “lost” websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more that $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites.

Mozilla

Submission + - Chromeless replaces Prism - a new way to create de (i-programmer.info)

mikejuk writes: Mozilla Labs has dumped its Prism project, that was intended to bring web applications to the desktop, in favor of a revamped and repurposed Chromeless, a way of building experimental web browsers, to provide yet another way to create a desktop app using web technologies. Why is Mozilla reinventing the wheel and why does it fail to explain how the basic technology, XUL, that FireFox is based on is actually very good?

Submission + - Internet groups to stream live IPv4/6 announcement (nro.net)

revealingheart writes: On Thursday, 3 February 2011, at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) [14:30 UTC/GMT], the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) will be holding a ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses. We invite all interested community members to view the webcast of this event.

Submission + - Statistician Cracks Code for Lottery Tickets (lotterypost.com)

Hugh Pickens writes writes: Lottery Post has an interesting story about Mohan Srivastava, an MIT educated statistician who became intrigued by a particular type of scratch-off lottery ticket called an extended-play game — sometimes referred to as a baited hook — that has a tic-tac-toe grid of visible numbers that looks like a miniature spreadsheet. Srivastava discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off — the ticket could be cracked if you figured out the secret code. Srivastava's fundamental insight was that the apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie because the software that generates the tickets has to precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. "It wasn't that hard," says Srivastava. "I do the same kind of math all day long."

Slashdot Top Deals

Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Working...