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Announcements

Submission + - Comcast makes you subject to Non-US laws (comcast.net) 4

boyfoot_bear writes: I just received an email from Comcast that tells me "we're introducing an updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, effective October 6, 2009." Included in the terms of service (which can be found here http://www.comcast.net/terms/web/2009-10/) is the following:
You specifically agree not to:
* use the Comcast Web Services to undertake or accomplish any unlawful purpose, including but not limited to, posting, storing, transmitting or disseminating information, data or material which is libelous, obscene, unlawful, threatening or defamatory, or which infringes the intellectual property rights of any person or entity, or which in any way constitutes or encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, or otherwise violate any local, state, federal, or non-U.S. law, order, or regulation;

It sounds to me like Comcast is making me subject to the laws of, say, China. I don't know about you but I sure don't know all of the non-US laws, orders or regulations that even this post runs afoul of but I am sure that Comcast is overstepping its authority.

Transportation

Submission + - Solar Roadways geta DOT funding. (autoblog.com) 1

mikee805 writes: Solar roadways a project to replace the over 25,000 square miles of road in the US with drivable solar panels just received $100K in funding from DOT for the 1st 12ft by 12ft prototype panel. Each panel consists of three layers: a base layer with data and power cabled running through it, an electronics layer with an array of LEDs, solar collectors, and capacitors and finally the glass road surface. With data and power cables the solar roadway was the potential to replace a lot of our aging infrastructure. With just a 15% efficiency this would project 3 time what US uses annually in energy! Also to head off a few problems the building costs are estimated to be competitive with traditional roads and the roads would heat themselves in the winter to keep snow from accumulating. Interview video here.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Atari is stealing music

An anonymous reader writes: A few month after the fight when Atari was claimed to left out graphic artist Dan Schoening in the final credits of the game Ghostbusters: The Video Game, even though Sony / Sierra had given them his word he would be in the final credits.... Atari does it again. Swedish musician Jonne Dahlberg, also known as "svenzzon" , famous for his underground demoscene music found in many scene related productions, can now find his music in the videogame. No credits, no compensation. The music is played during a visit in the Arcade hall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJVFntSiuWA and reflects the old commodore days. The music is actually a remix of Chris Huelsbecks old intro music to Turrican 2. Huelsbeck is also the legal owner to the Turrican music and he also confirms that no credits has been given to him, or Jonne Dahlberg. Its funny, these big publishers like Sony that stands for strict copyrights when asked about sites like The Pirate Bay, but when it comes to their own products, stealing is not an issue.
Social Networks

Submission + - Twitter XSS Exploit Allows Account Stealing (davidnaylor.co.uk)

semaj writes: "Looks like there's another big cross-site scripting problem with Twitter — allowing all sorts of nasty things to happen if you even view an exploited tweet! Apparently Twitter tried to fix the problem yesterday and have failed pretty badly. Might be an idea to stay of Twitter for a little while?"

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 297

And, I'm sorry... but D3 and SC2? Same game as the ones I already own from the series, it looks to me.

Not sure about SC2, but if you think D3 is the "same game" as D2, you're bloody nuts. I'm assuming you're simply ignorant of the details, rather than actually as stupid as that comment sounds. Of course, why you'd say "same game" without knowing any of the details of the game you'd need to know to make that judgment doesn't speak well for your cognitive abilities...

America Online

Submission + - top 40 Obsolete technology's

Hellswaters writes: MSNBC released a list of 40 technology's which are no longer used. This list included things such as calculator watch's, running out of hard drive space, and dot matrix printers.
Google

Submission + - Open Source Users Love Google, Hate Microsoft (chitika.com)

Daniel Ruby writes: "Open Source Users Love Google, Hate Microsoft

Following up on our recent study comparing Bing and Google ad clickthrough rates, we at Chitika started wondering what the breakdown of search engine to operating system looked like. So, we ran the numbers, and 163 million searches later, it's official: Linux users overwhelmingly use Google and won't touch Bing with a ten foot pole. Compare the numbers: while Windows users use Google 78% of the time and Bing 8% of the time, the numbers for Linux users are 95% and 0.77% respectively. No love for Microsoft in the open source community, it seems, even with something as innocuous as a search engine."

The Internet

Submission + - Pirate Bay Pirated (torrentfreak.com)

Mehall writes: "Torrentfreak reports that after a Pirate Bay user created a 21GB torrent of the entire site, there is now a working backup of the site, using the OpenTorrentTracker, and soon to have search working also. In related news, The Pirate Bay seems to be offline. Might this be the GGF updating the servers for their new implementation? Further, once TPB is back, you can now torrent the archive of user comments from TPB."
Security

Submission + - Sears.com Squelches Web Programming Blunder (foxnews.com)

blitzkrieg3 writes: Earlier today someone made public a trivial exploit on the Sears.com website. Sears was storing page paramaters from the client editable url into the catagory of the page, leading to some pretty funny results. Once the catagories were loaded into the cache, every subsequent hit would pull up the same user submitted catagories, even without any page paramaters. TMZ and Fox News have their own reports. Reddit has since been forced to take the post off of their front page by their parent Conde Nast, but the page can still be accessed via permalink.
Government

Submission + - Thinktank Aims to Crowdsource Gov Earmark Analysis (technologyreview.com)

Al writes: "The Sunlight Foundation, based in Washington, DC, hopes to raise an army of web volunteers to analyze all the earmarks in government bills. The groups new Sunlight Labs transparency corps invites users join an effort to analyze the information collaboratively. Users are presented with PDFs released by hundreds of different offices and asked to enter the pertinent information--the date and dollar amount of a request, name of the requester, description of the project, and so on. These then become part of a searchable database. The project's launch roughly coincided with the launch earlier this month of the government's new IT Dashboard. But this tool is somewhat limited--users can find the primary recipients of IT project funding, but not subcontractors; it's not easy to discern the origins of contracts or their geographic distribution, and it's almost impossible to see how they are connected to elected officials."

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