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Media

How the Pirate Bay Will Be Legalized 265

Posted by Soulskill from the by-nobody-going-there-anymore dept.
Death Metal sends along this excerpt from Torrentfreak about how Global Gaming Factory, the company who is buying The Pirate Bay, plans to change the site in order to avoid the wrath of the entertainment industry: "In a letter addressed to [shareholders], the company confirms that the new Pirate Bay will become a pay site, while revealing some additional details on how GGF plans to legalize it. To please the entertainment industry, GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the 'illegal' torrent or have it removed from the site. If the copyright holder chooses the first option, they will be compensated every time the file is downloaded. In addition, the board says that it will pay penalties if it has to. 'The holder will be able to leave the file and obtain compensation or ask for removal of the file. GGF will also pay any penalties that may arise,' the GGF board announced."
Input Devices

Submission + - Nathan Myhrvold, digital photography, Moore's law

Submitted by astoria
astoria writes: Nathan Myhrvold has penned an interesting ditty on Luminous Landscape about Moore's Law as it applies to digital cameras. It's here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/not-so-fast.shtml. Myhrovold is responding to a piece claiming that Moore's Law no longer applies to digital photography: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/brick-wall.shtml. It's a geeky topic that slashdotters might enjoy, even if they aren't photographers, or aren't especially fond of Myhrvold.
Censorship

Submission + - SPAM: Five technologies Iran is using to censor the Web

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: One month after a disputed presidential election sparked widespread unrest in Iran, the country's government has initiated a cyber-crackdown that is challenging hackers across the globe to find new ways to help keep Iranian dissidents connected to the Web. While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online. One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to "help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize." NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper [spam URL stripped] detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers, says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not.
Link to Original Source
Space

Submission + - What if Sergey Korolyov had lived?

Submitted by MrKaos
MrKaos writes: The Space Race that culminated with the Apollo moon landings was driven by the vision of Wernher von Braun on the U.S side and Sergey Korolyov on the Soviet side. Despite both being in the center of a maelstrom of two immense political machines both men were absolutely dedicated to bringing the space age into reality.

Korolyov put Sputnik 1 into orbit and thus began the space race. The Soyuz rocket family and spacecraft, designed and built under his guidance put the first man into space and continues to serve carrying crew and equipment to the International Space Station. His existence was a state secret that was not revealed until his death from cancer in 1966. It was a tragic loss to both sides as he injected vitality into the space race that ultimately meant the U.S could cut-back space spending.

At the time of his death Korolyov was working on a new project N1 moon rocket which was attempting to implement so advanced propulsion concepts. Given the man's drive, charisma and ability there is every chance he would have succeeded, even if the U.S ultimately got to the moon first.

Recent navel gazing in New Scientist about the Apollo program was interesting. But as an impetus, what if Soviet's were able to complete their moon plans and forced the U.S into spending more on space? What would our space programs look like now?
Security

Pentagon Confirms Cyber Command, Under NSA Control 120

Posted by timothy from the does-a-cool-museum-justify-tapping-my-phone? dept.
eldavojohn writes "The Pentagon's been planning a cyber command for a while now but it's just been confirmed. The Pentagon will set up a Cyber Command outfit most likely around — surprise surprise — Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. From the article, 'The head of the Cyber Command would also be the director of the U.S. National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance and communications interception and is also based at Fort Meade.' The Air Force has been no stranger to digital warfare."
Google

Submission + - Google Chrome violating LGPL?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Google has recently added FFMpeg to Chrome to better support HTML5's video element. FFMpeg is licensed under LGPL 2.1 which states that "if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Library by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Library". Google admits to having obtained a patent license for their use, but still claims they are not violating LGPL. Among the confused we find Håkon Wium Lie and Miguel de Icaza, who wonders what FSF might say. Google doesn't feel like asking FSF for clarification.
Security

What a Hacked PC Can Be Used For 364

Posted by kdawson from the fifty-ways dept.
An anonymous reader points out that the Security Fix blog is running a feature looking at the different ways hacked/cracked computers can be abused by cyber scammers. "Computer users often dismiss Internet security best practices because they find them inconvenient, or because they think the rules don't apply to them. Many cling to the misguided belief that because they don't bank or shop online, that bad guys won't target them. The next time you hear this claim, please refer the misguided person to this blog post, which attempts to examine some of the more common — yet often overlooked — ways that cyber crooks can put your PC to criminal use."
Image

Cancer Patient Held At Airport For Missing Fingerprints 323

Posted by samzenpus from the john-doe dept.
A 62-year-old man visiting his relatives in the US was held for four hours by immigration officials after they could not detect his fingerprints because of a cancer drug he was taking. The man was prescribed capecitabine, a drug used to treat cancers in the head, neck, breast, and stomach. Some of the drug's side-effects include chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet, which can cause the skin to peel or bleed. "This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time," explained Tan Eng Huat, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore's National Cancer Center. "Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back, but details are scanty. No one knows the frequency of this occurrence among patients taking this drug and nobody knows how long a person must be on this drug before the loss of fingerprints," he added.
Bug

Submission + - BSA Admits Canadian Software Piracy Rates A Guess (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by
psema4
psema4 writes: "Following yesterdays story ("Canada's Conference Board Found Plagiarizing Copyright Report") Michael Geist reports following up with Canadian arm of the Business Software Alliance:

Yet what the BSA did not disclose is that the 2009 report on Canada were guesses since Canadian firms and users were not surveyed. While the study makes seemingly authoritative claims about the state of Canadian piracy, the reality is that IDC, which conducts the study for BSA, did not bother to survey in Canada. After learning that Sweden was also not surveyed, I asked the Canadian BSA media contact about the approach in Canada.

"
Handhelds

Submission + - New bad marketing move from Palm: Not You (wired.com)

Submitted by Yehuda
Yehuda writes: Wired has a story about a wew Palm document shows prices and plans for Palm Pre.

"We Can't Afford to Sell the Pre to the Wrong Customers"

The text appears in big pink lettering on page 11 of the guide, which explains the the Pre is not for everyone. Titled "Sell the Palm Pre to the Right Customer", the official line is that the Pre is "best suited for non-IT Centric business users." That sounds to us like the Pre isn't up to the job of being a proper business smartphone, and it's for the exact same reason that the iPhone was a hopeless business phone on launch — web apps.
The Pre can't run proper applications, instead using the WebOS, essentially a way to run web pages locally using javascript and CSS. Rememeber the iPhone's web apps? This is the same kind of thing, albeit with local storage for offline use. Palm admits as much. The questionnaire reads thus:

  • Does your company have specific application requirements?
  • Does your line of business require specific product features on mobile devices?
  • If YES, then the Tro Pro is your best mobile device option

Yes. According to Palm, if you are a business customer, you should buy the Treo. The Pre, the much-hyped Palm-saviour, is not good enough for you.

See the entire 21 page document on Engadget
Space

Submission + - Pulsar Signals Could Be Used For Interstellar GPS (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "We're all familiar with GPS. It consists of a network of satellites that each broadcast a time signal. A receiver on Earth can then work out its position in three-dimensional space by comparing the arrival times of the signals from at least three satellites. That's handy but it only works on Earth. Now astronomers say that the millisecond signals from a network of pulsars could allow GPS-style navigation on a galactic scale. They propose using four pulsars that form a rough tetrahedron with the Solar System at its centre, and a co-ordinate system with its origin at 00:00 on 1 January 2001 at the focal point of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, the radio telescope near Cambridge in the UK that first observed pulsars. The additional complexity of sending signals over these distances is that relativity has to be taken into account (which is why the origin is defined as a point in space-time rather than just space). The pulsar GPS system should allow users to determine their position in space-time anywhere in the galaxy to within a few nanoseconds, which corresponds to an accuracy of about a metre."
NASA

Submission + - Soyuz Blasts Off To Expand ISS Crew To Six

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The Russian Soyuz Rocket shook the ground Wednesday and left a fiery tail in the sky as it left to rendezvous with the International Space Station in a mission that has been long-awaited, to increase the space lab's crew from three to six full-time crew members. The Soyuz TMA-15 Spacecraft, which lifted off at 6:34AM EDT, holds commander Roman Romaneknko, Frank De Winne, and Robert Thirsk. The take off went according to plan, several minutes after the takeoff the spacecraft reach its orbit and had deployed its solar panels and antennas in order to achieve external power and communications.
Books

Amazon Culls "Offensive" Books From Search System 470

Posted by timothy from the streisand-effect dept.
Miracle Jones writes "Amazon has instituted an overnight policy that removes books that may be deemed offensive from their search system, despite the sales rank of the book and also irrespective of any complaints. Bloggers such as Ed Champion are calling for a 'link and book boycott,' asking people to remove links to Amazon from their web pages and stop buying books from them until the policy is reversed. Will this be bad business for Amazon, or will their new policies keep them out of trouble as they continue to grow and replace bookstores?"

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