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The Internet

Submission + - P2P Source Arrested, OiNK.cd Raided, Shut Down (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "A British man was arrested who was allegedly the source of a distribution supply chain for leaking albums & movies to file sharers. He operated OiNK which was by invite only and would post files to be distributed which would then show up hours later further down the supply chain on other file sharing sites. This scheme stretched across many nations and is the result of a two year investigation by the IFPI. They hope that by infiltrating these layers of abstraction to the source, they can stop the early leaking of media."
Music

Submission + - Amazon DRM-Less Music Store goes Beta 2

Submitted by LowSNR
LowSNR writes: Amazon this morning moved their DRM-Free music store into open beta. According to the release, "Since all our digital music downloads are DRM-free, you can play them on anything that plays mp3s including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM), iPhones(TM), RAZRs(TM), and BlackBerrys. Plus, our Amazon MP3 Downloader application makes it easy to add your downloads to iTunes(TM) and Windows Media Player(TM), so you can sync up your devices or burn your music to CD hassle-free." Not to mention Linux.
The Courts

Submission + - Pirate Bay 'kept child porn link for two weeks' 1

Submitted by paulraps
paulraps writes: The Pirate Bay's legal position has just become decidedly murkier after it emerged that the torrent site hosted links to child pornography for two weeks after being made aware of its existence. The Swedish police say that it is a clear child pornography case, but the prosecutor says the Pirate Bay are not suspects since they did not actually host the material. What's more questionable is the response, grammar aside, of the site's moderator when the child pornography torrent was highlighted: "I don't give a **** if you folks are upset. Me and the other moderators job are NOT to have an opinion about if it is imoral or not."
Security

Submission + - Download music, share bank account info (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
jcatcw
jcatcw writes: "According to Computerworld, a surprisingly high number of consumers who are sharing music and other files on peer-to-peer systems are also exposing all sorts of bank account and similar personal information to criminals lurking on the networks to harvest data. And not all of that is their own information. Evidence shows that bank employees and contractors are also exposing customer data."
Robotics

Submission + - Battlefield 'Bear' robot to rescue fallen soldiers

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: A Maryland firm is developing a remote-controlled robot to rescue injured or abducted soldiers, New Scientist reports. The Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (Bear) prototype is already capable of lifting more than 135 kilograms with one arm, and recently showed how it can climb up and down stairs with a human-size dummy in its arms. There are videos of it carrying a dummy while standing and kneeling.
Media (Apple)

Submission + - Apple embeds account info in DRM-free music

Submitted by Cardiff
Cardiff writes: Apple may have removed the DRM but they didn't remove tracking information from DRM-free music. With embedded account names and email information, which can be viewed only by searching the files for strings, Apple (or a record label) could easily determine the origin of a file shared on P2P. Ars speculates that Apple wants to keep an eye on casual file trading among friends.
Privacy

Submission + - Google Is Watching You

Submitted by
BLueRibbon
BLueRibbon writes: "The Independent is reporting that Google "is setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives."

Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying ""The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'.""

And you thought Big Brother was bad?"
Software

Submission + - Vista more secure than MacOS 10.4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Macworld has an article up about security in MacOS 10.4, in which they post an email interview with Dino Dai Zovi, the New York-based security researcher who took home $10,000 in the highly-publicized MacBook Pro hijack on April 20. From the interview:

From your research on both platforms, is there a winner between Mac OS X 10.4 and Vista on security? I have found the code quality, at least in terms of security, to be much better overall in Vista than MacOS 10.4. It is obvious from observing affected components in security patches that Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) has resulted in fewer vulnerabilities in newly-written code. I hope that more software vendors follow their lead in developing proactive software security development methodologies.

I recommend that Mac users make their primary user a non-admin account, use a separate keychain for important passwords, and store sensitive documents in a separate encrypted disk image. I think these are fairly straightforward steps that many users can take to better protect their sensitive information on their computer.
Robotics

Submission + - First Hardware to go through Evolution Developed

Submitted by Masq666
Masq666 writes: A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on/off its "genes" it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20-30,000 generations in just a few seconds, that same number of generations took humans 8-900,000 years.
Security

Submission + - How Apple orchestrated web attack on researchers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=451 Apple continued to claim that there were no vulnerabilities in Mac OS X but came a month later and patched their Wireless Drivers (presumably for vulnerabilities that didn't actually exist). Apple patched these "non-existent vulnerabilities" but then refused to give any credit to David Maynor and Jon Ellch. Since Apple was going to take research, not give proper attribution, and smear security researchers, the security research community responded to Apple's behavior with the MoAB (Month of Apple Bugs) and released a flood of zero-day exploits without giving Apple any notification. The end result is that Apple was forced to patch 62 vulnerabilities in just the first three months of 2007 including last week's megapatch of 45 vulnerabilities.
Biotech

Submission + - Polymers from Maple Syrup

Submitted by codegen
codegen writes: The CBC is reporting a discovery where the syrup of the maple tree can be used as a base for a polymer that is biodegradable. Bacteria are used to transform the sugars into naturally occuring polymers. Maple syrup apparently works better than other sources such as apple juce waste products or corn/cane sugars. The polymers may also have medical applications as well.

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