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Submission + - Google Street View in Antarctica (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Privacy concerns for Google's Street View may now extend to penguins, following the service's extension to a seventh continent — Antarctica.

The Antarctica imagery is so far limited, showing panoramas of the coast and penguins of Half Moon Island.

Google says its service now covers 25 nations on all the world's continents.
Open Source

Submission + - SugarCRM Users Required to Pay for Key Features (ecrmguide.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: SugarCRM continues its trend of making users of its open source customer relationship management (CRM) software pay for enterprise editions if they want user-friendly features, many of which are critical for serious business users. Want easy-to-use developer tools and user interfaces? That'll cost you. Want native mobile apps for your iPhone or Blackberry? Ka-ching. Sales forecasting and reporting? Open your wallets. Makes you wonder if there's anything useful in the community edition.
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - 'Death Strip' Game Sparks Controversy in Germany (spiegel.de)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: A new computer game where players assume the roles of border guards and shoot people trying to escape from communist East Germany has unleashed a storm of controversy in Germany. The game's creator says he wanted to teach young people about history, but he has been accused of glorifying violence.

The name of the multi-player FPS game, "1,378 (kilometers)", was inspired by the length of the border between East and West Germany. Players choose between the roles of the border guards or would-be escapees: the escapee only has one goal — to get over the wall, but the border guard has more options, and can shoot or capture the escapee. He can also swap sides and try to clamber over the border defenses himself. By choosing to play the boarder guard and kill the escapee, the player would won an in-game medal from the government of East Germany. But then the guard would time-travel forward to the year 2000, where he would have to stand trial.

Jens Stober, 23, designed the game as a media art student at the University of Design, Media and Arts in Karlsruhe. He said that his intention was to teach young people about German history. "In the game, you ask yourself: 'What would I do?'" explained Stober. "You may come to the conclusion that you would not shoot at your fellow countrymen and women." But others disagree. "Basically you are just picking off people, as if you were shooting rabbits," said Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation. Hubertus Knabe, head of the Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen Memorial to the victims of the Stasi secret police, has even filed criminal charges. He wants the Berlin public prosecutor to investigate whether the game glorifies violence. Rainer Wagner, from former East Germany, said it was like a punch in the face. "It feels like I'm being shot at again, emotionally," said Wagner, who was arrested by border guards during his escape attempt.

Initially, Stober's university and Professor Michael Bielicky, who had supervised Stober's work, defended the student. However, on Thursday a university spokesman said that the game will not be released on Sunday, the anniversary of German reunification, after all. Instead, the release is being postponed until December.

Submission + - Paypal withholds donations to TortoiseSVN (tortoisesvn.net) 1

Submitted by maphew
maphew writes: Paypal arbitrarily decided to withold the donations made to the TortoiseSVN project via Sourceforge's "donate to this project". After several days and unfruitful biolerplate exchanges the project lead, Stefan Küng, finally managed to get the account restored, and thereby access the money. However Paypal made it clear that future donations are not allowed, with the threat that if there are any the account will be frozen again. The grounds Paypal gave for freezing Küng's account appears to be because someone used Paypal Singapore to donate to his project. There is an associated ticket open with SourceForge, #13993, about warning SF users. As yet there is no information from SF as to how they will respond to this troubling development (it's been 5 days).

There was a similar story 2 weeks ago, PayPal Withholding Indie Game Dev's €600,000 Account

Submission + - U.S. Military "banned" from viewing Wikileaks. (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by carp3_noct3m
carp3_noct3m writes: The U.S. Pentagon has attempted to ban military members from viewing the recently leaked documents on Wikileaks. They say that just because the information is now in the public domain, that it is still classified, and that accessing the documents even from a personal computer is "willingly committing a security violation". I dug a bit further into this, and the Marine Corps apparently thinks that if military personell, especially those with security clearance, purposely accessed the wikileaks website to view classified info "they have willingly placed classified information on an open network not authorized to view classified information and have willingly committed a security violation." I am personally left almost speechless at this disconnect from reality the military is showing. I am an USMC Iraq war vet, and find these policies completely ridiculous and showing of the inability of our supposedly technologically knowledgeable military to fuse this knowledge with policy. Mostly due to the political pressure that has erupted to "take care of" the Wikileaks problem. What do my fellow /.ers think?
Education

Submission + - Steve Furber: why kids are turned off computing (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: UK computing legend Steve Furber — co-founder of Acorn and ARM designer — believes students are avoiding computing classes because they teach nothing but the boring basics. Currently studying why the number of students signing up for computing has halved in the past eight years, Furber said schools focus too much on teaching kids how to use spreadsheets, word processors and PowerPoint, rather than teaching more challenging areas such as programming. "What schools are presenting as ICT as an academic subject is very mundane compared with what students know they can do," he said. "It’s as if maths was just arithmetic or English was taught as just spelling. It’s not unimportant that you can do arithmetic or you can spell, but it certainly doesn’t open up the whole world of interest and challenge, if that’s all you do."
NASA

Submission + - NASA goes after huge lighting storms on Earth (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA this month will unleash its unmanned drone with a venerable tool mounted inside that will let it track and monitor storm lighting like never before. The Lightning Instrument Package (LIP) will for the first time fly aboard NASA's unmanned Global Hawk drone as it flies over the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of 60,000 feet looking for hurricanes to dive into. The LIP instrument has flown before; in fact it has monitored some 800 storms throughout its 15-year career, but never for 30 straight hours as it will inside the drone.
Operating Systems

Submission + - AmigaOS twenty-five years of check-ins visualized (hyperion-entertainment.biz)

Submitted by the_arrow
the_arrow writes:

As a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Amiga computer, Hyperion Entertainment has made a video using the Gource CVS visualization software showing a time-compressed version of 25 years of Amiga development, from the early days of AmigaOS 1.0 to the present. Personal commentary added by one of the current core full-time AmigaOS developers, Hans-Joerg Frieden (a.k.a. "Rogue").

Video in a couple of popular formats and resolutions availabe here.
Censorship

Submission + - UAE's Blackberry ban will affect visitors too (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Residents of the United Arab Emirates won't be the only ones affected by the upcoming Blackberry blockage. Anyone visiting the country will also be blocked from using Blackberry's e-mail, messaging, and Web browsing services when the ban is scheduled to take effect October 11th. That would affect business travelers and others flying through the Mideast's busiest airport in Dubai. Since the UAE announced its ban yesterday, Saudi Arabia announced it would also block the use of Blackberry's messaging service.
Google

Submission + - Google Gets Its iPhone Voice (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice, launching a Google Voice Web app that runs on iPhone 3.0 OS devices, as well as on Palm WebOS devices. The Google Voice application leverages HTML 5's functionality for running sophisticated Web applications on a browser at speeds matching those of native applications, Google said. The Google Voice-iPhone conflict is one of several issues putting the companies on a collision course, the latest of which involves Apple potentially courting Microsoft to tap Bing as the iPhone's default search.
Image

Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi Screenshot-sm 428

Posted by samzenpus from the have-you-never-wondered-why-I-drink-only-distilled-water-or-rain-water-and-only-pure-grain-alcohol dept.
Scyth3 writes "A man is suing his neighbor for not turning off his cell phone or wireless router. He claims it affects his 'electromagnetic allergies,' and has resorted to being homeless. So, why doesn't he check into a hotel? Because hotels typically have wireless internet for free. I wonder if a tinfoil hat would help his cause?"

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