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Crime

Submission + - SAP's VP Arrested In False Barcode Scheme (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "With barcode scanning being so commonplace, nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Thomas Langenbach, the vice president of SAP, was found scanning boxes upon boxes of Lego toys before purchasing them. Little did anyone know, the 47-year-old Silicon Valley executive was actually engaged in a giant scam. Langenbach would visit several Target stores and cover the store's barcodes with his own, so when he would bring the boxes up to the register, Langenbach would pay a heavily-discounted price. For example, this tag swapping allowed him to buy a Millennium Falcon box of Legos worth $279 for just $49. Once he bought the discounted Lego boxes, the SAP executive would take to eBay (under the name "tomsbrickyard") and sell the items. Langenbach reportedly sold more than 2,000 items on eBay, raking in about $30,000. He was finally caught by Target security on May 8, and he was arraigned on Tuesday on four counts of burglary."
DRM

Submission + - Fresh voice against DRM (forbes.com)

Submitted by Vo1t
Vo1t writes: The makers of The Witcher series explain why they've chosen not to use DRM's with their own releases. Interesting fact that the DRM'd version (by Atari) was cracked before the non-DRM one (by CD Projekt on GOG).
Science

Submission + - ZeroN: Anti-Gravity metal ball for an interface (universetoday.com)

Submitted by
udas
udas writes: "HCI (Human Computer Interface) has gone from flicking switches for binary bits, to keyboards, to mice and trackballs, even cortical implants. Now, Researcher Jinha Lee at MIT has created an intelligent metal ball that can float in mid air. It can be used to record, imitate, replay motion, as well as demonstrate pre-programmed motions, potentialy to visaulize motion in complex force fields. Maybe a future classroom will have interactive toys to teach pricnciples of dynamics, gravity, etc!"
Government

Submission + - UK government staff caught snooping on citizen data (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 1,000 UK government staff have been caught snooping on citizen data — including criminal records, social security, and medical records.
Firefox

Submission + - Reset Firefox: Is this the answer to crashes, high memory, and slow problems? (pureinfotech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With Firefox you can come across a number of issues over time, most of them require different types of troubleshooting steps, and you still won’t know if the problem is going to get fixed. Ultimately we all end up doing the same thing: uninstall and reinstall the browser, but this also means that all the data (e.g., history, stored passwords, autofill forms, cookies, etc.) will be gone as well.

Today the Mozilla team is going to change that in the latest beta release of Firefox with a new feature...
Politics

Submission + - Idiotic Copyright Comparisons in Canadian Parliament (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "Politicians are always going the extra mile for their supporters, and nothing spells that out more clearly than this video, taken from the Canadian Parliaments discussion into C-11, the current attempt to give Hollywood what they want in Canada.

In it, MP Dean Del Mastro tries to make a comparison for format shifting, and why it’s ‘bad‘, using socks.

“It’s like going to a clothing store and buying a pair of socks and going back and saying by the way it wasn’t socks that I needed, what i really wanted was shoes. So I’m just going take these, I’m gonna format shift from socks to shoes and I’m not gonna pay anything because it was all for my feet,” he says.

Of course he gets it COMPLETELY wrong....."
Advertising

Submission + - General Motors: "Facebook Ads aren't Worth it" (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
Fluffeh
Fluffeh writes: "General Motors spends around $40 million per year on maintaining a Facebook profile and around a quarter of that goes into paid advertising. However, in a statement, they just announced that "it's simply not working". That's a bit of bad news just prior to the Facebook IPO — and while Daniel Knapp tries to sweeten the news, he probably makes it even more bitter by commenting "Advertising on Facebook has long been funded by marketing budgets reserved for trying new things. But as online advertising investments in general are surging and starting to cannibalize spend on legacy media, advertisers are rightfully asking whether the money spend is justified because it has reached significant sums now.""
Technology

Submission + - Initial reviews of the first fully customizably mouse come in (examiner.com) 1

Submitted by bobwrit
bobwrit writes: Cyborg is a company well known for their gaming peripherals. It has a line of mice, xBox controllers, keyboards, and the like. The Cyborg R.A.T. 7(the original one) is one of the most comfortable mice you'll ever own, once you have it customized to your hand. It is also very, very precise, and it one of the nicest mice out there on the market currently. Click here to see pictures of the mice.

Let's start with the physical design first. The outside is matte black, with an option of changing the back piece that sits in the middle of your palm. The options for the back piece are: a shiny/rubbery piece, a long matte black piece and a short matte black piece. Overall, the device looks very mechanical and very modern looking. The matte black is a nice finish, because it doesn't show fingerprints/finger grease as much as a glossy one would. The underside is a thick aluminum plate, with a hole in it for the scroll wheel. The scroll wheel is a rubberized one, instead of a matte finish. The scroll wheel is then accented on the side by more aluminum. The one item that you think people would have an issue with, would be the section just to the right of the left mouse button. It seems like a lot of people would hit that accidentally with their fingers, but that doesn't happen all that much. The button area's are quite large, and make it difficult to miss them.
Network

Submission + - The elusive capacity of networks (mit.edu)

Submitted by slashbill
slashbill writes: MIT's working on a way to measure network capacity. Seems no one really knows how much data their network can handle. Makes you wonder about how then do you calculate expense when building out capacity?

From the article: Recently, one of the most intriguing developments in information theory has been a different kind of coding, called network coding, in which the question is how to encode information in order to maximize the capacity of a network as a whole. For information theorists, it was natural to ask how these two types of coding might be combined: If you want to both minimize error and maximize capacity, which kind of coding do you apply where, and when do you do the decoding?

Submission + - Canadian Internet Surveillance dies a quiet, lonely death. (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by
Dr Caleb
Dr Caleb writes: "The Internet surveillance legislation sponsored by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has disappeared down a dark legislative hole. For all intents and purposes, the bill is dead. If the Harper government still wants to pass a law that would make it easier for police to track people who use the web to commit crimes, it will have to start from scratch.

A follow up from the Minister of "Against Online Surveillance? You Must Be 'For' Child Porn""
Medicine

Submission + - Paralyzed Man Regains Hand Function after Breakthrough Nerve Rewiring Procedure (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 71-year-old man who became paralyzed from the waist down and lost all use of both hands in a 2008 car accident has regained motor function in his fingers after doctors rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones in a pioneering surgical procedure, according to a case study published on Tuesday.
ISS

Submission + - Psychedelic Star Trails and City Lights From Orbit (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Streaks of psychedelic colors show the passage of cities below the International Space Station (ISS), airglow in Earth's atmosphere and the circling motion of stars in this stunning new image from Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit. Pettit created the image by combining 18 long-exposure digital images taken with a camera mounted inside the ISS on March 16, 2012. Because of the limitations of digital imaging sensors, multiple exposures are needed to get such an image."
Privacy

Submission + - 'Big brother' lamp posts can hear, see and bark 'Obey!' at you (rt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: America welcomes a new brand of smart street lightning systems: energy-efficient, long-lasting, complete with LED screens to show ads. They can also spy on citizens in a way George Orwell would not have imagined in his worst nightmare.
Security

Submission + - Fearmongering About Cyberwar And Cybersecurity Is Working: American Public Very, (techdirt.com)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "Well, it looks like all the fearmongering about hackers shutting down electrical grids and making planes fall from the sky is working. No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually connect such critical infrastructure to the internet (the proper response to which is: take it off the internet), fear is spreading. Of course, this is mostly due to the work of a neat combination of ex-politicians/now lobbyists working for defense contractors who stand to make a ton of money from the panic — enabled by politicians who seem to have no shame in telling scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality.

But it's all working. And, by working, I mean scaring the public unnecessarily. As reported by Wired, a new survey from Unisys finds that Americans are more worried about cybersecurity threats than terrorism, and they seem pretty worried about those threats. When asked about which security issues were the highest priority, survey respondents noted:"

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