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Piracy

Submission + - Returning NZ Soldier Fined Under Skynet Law (freezenet.ca)

Submitted by Dangerous_Minds
Dangerous_Minds writes: The publicity for the New Zealand three strikes law (or Skynet law) isn't getting any better. Freezenet is pointing to an article on Stuff which details the latest incident revolving around the Skynet law. Apparently, a soldier was just finishing a tour in Afghanistan and returning to New Zealand. When he got back to the country, he found out he received his third and final copyright infringement strike and was to appear before the copyright tribunal. Despite the obvious circumstances, he was fined $255.97 for downloading music from Hot Chelle and Rhianna anyway. Last month, it was revealed that RIANZ spent $250,000 just to reap the reward of $616.57.

Submission + - DOJ admits Aaron's prosecution was political (tumblr.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.
Earth

Submission + - Billionaires Secretly Fund Vast Climate Denial Network 4

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Suzanne Goldenberg reports that conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, helping build a vast network of think tanks and activist groups working to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives. "We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise," says Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust. Ball's organization assured wealthy donors that their funds would never by diverted to liberal causes with a guarantee of complete anonymity for donors who wished to remain hidden. The money flowed to Washington think tanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore. "The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It's also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing," says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records. "These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Changes Email Policy Making Spammers' Life Easier (microsoft.com)

Submitted by physics101
physics101 writes: It appears that Microsoft have made changes in the way that the email headers are formed for the mail sent from hotmail accounts. The X-Originating-Email tag now points to the IP belonging to Microsoft instead of the sender's IP. There are numerous threads (e.g. this one) at answers.microsoft.com. MS representatives are claiming that "the issue has already been forwarded to our Escalation team for further investigation". Despite of the bunch of dissatisfied users, this answer is being offered time and the time again for over two months. It suspiciously looks like a policy change for which they don't want to give any explanation.
Google

Submission + - Google speeds up Webstore with WebP (chromium.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: By converting PNGs and JPEGs to WebP, the Chrome Web Store was able to reduce image sizes by about 30% on average. Given the number of requests Chrome Web Store serves, this adds up to several terabytes of savings every day. WebP should translate into faster page loads and lower mobile data transfer costs, too.

Submission + - 550K Auction on Ebay For A Collection Dating Back 30 Years

Submitted by Busshy
Busshy writes: It seems the trend these days to put vast collections on ebay of Games Collections or just solitary rare games. DCEmu are reporting that a new auction with a rather staggering price of 550,000 Dollars has now appeared on the auction site. The collection which has been amassed over the last 30 years features 6850 games, 330 consoles, 220 controllers. The collector claims to have every game for Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kirby, Castlevania, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Sakura Wars, Super Robot Taisen and so on. Also rare consoles such as Hitachi Gamenavi Saturn, Both the Bio Hazard Dreamcast (red & blue), The Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles pearl white Gamecube, Game Boy Advance SP Famicom color for the 20th Mario Anniversary, The Metal Gear limited edition PSP. Still a heck of a lot of money though.
Medicine

Submission + - Crowdsourced coders take on immunology Big Data (nature.com)

Submitted by ewenc
ewenc writes: Mercenary computer coders are helping scientists cope with the deluge of data pouring out of research labs. A contest to write software to analyse immune-system genes garnered more than 100 entries, including many that vastly outperformed existing programs. The US$6,000 contest was launched by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School, both in Boston, Massachusetts. TopCoder.com, a community of more than 400,000 coders who compete in programming competitions, hosted the contest. The results are described in a letter published this week in Nature Biotechnology.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft rumored to be taking a 'meaningful look' at Office for Linux (engadget.com) 1

Submitted by alancronin
alancronin writes: Open source obsessive Michael Larabel says he has it on good authority that Microsoft is considering a native version of Office for Linux. Specifically, the company is taking a "meaningful look" at the idea, now that Linux is showing signs of becoming more of a player in the OS stakes. The information came to Larabel from an unnamed source during the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, and this voice in the shadows apparently also revealed the port could be ready in 2014.

Submission + - LibreOffice Site Experiences Major Design Change (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: LibreOffice team is on 'fire'. After releasing 4.0 which is a 'completely' different office suite than OpenOffice. The team has revamped the LibreOffice.org, bidding goodbye to the 'boring' and aged design. The new design is jazzy and reflects how aggressive the 'new' LibreOffice community is /a>, shedding the old brand image it inherited from the doomed OpenOffice. This change also gives a hint that the UI of this popular open source office suite may also get the same make-over
Security

Submission + - George W. Bush Nude Self-Portraits Revealed by Hacker (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by
DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: "George W. Bush is known for many things. his love of painting himself while washing is not one. Until now. A hacker has obtained sensitive and personal Bush family emails including portriats W painted of himself while in the shower and in the bath.

Besides the obvious embarrassment suffered, the hacker also revealed email conversations about the grave ill health of W's father as well as addresses, emails and mobile phone numbers for dozens of Bush family members."

Submission + - U.S. officials fault FAA for missing 787 battery risk (startribune.com)

Submitted by kemarnhan
kemarnhan writes: The nation’s top transportation safety official said Thursday that the Federal Aviation Administration accepted test results from Boeing in 2007 that failed to properly assess the risks of smoke or fire leaking from the batteries on Boeing’s new 787 jets. Deborah Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters that the problems seemed to have originated in the battery, when one of the eight cells had a short circuit and the fire spread to the rest of the cells. But she said that Boeing’s tests showed no indication that the new lithium-ion batteries on its 787 planes could erupt in flames and concluded they were likely to emit smoke less than once in every 10 million flight hours.
Bug

Submission + - Facebook tries to takeover the world with a redirection bug (news.com.au)

Submitted by johnsnails
johnsnails writes: Some of the biggest news sites in the world disappeared today when Facebook took over the internet with a redirection bug.

Visitors to sites such as The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Gawker network, NBC News and News.com.au were immediately transferred to a Facebook error page upon loading their intended site.
EU

Submission + - European Human Right Courts rules file-sharing human right (falkvinge.net) 2

Submitted by
swinferno
swinferno writes: "The European Court of Human Rights has declared that the copyright monopoly stands in direct conflict with fundamental Human Rights, as defined in the European Union and elsewhere. This means that as of today, nobody sharing culture in the EU may be convicted just for breaking the copyright monopoly law; the bar for convicting was raised considerably. This can be expected to have far-reaching implications, not just judicially, but in confirming that the copyright monopoly stands at odds with human rights."
Linux

Submission + - Moving Linux Console to the Userspace (phoronix.com) 2

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: David Herrmann has provided an update on his ambitious initiative to kill of the Linux kernel console. Herrmann has long been working on making the Linux kernel CONFIG_VT option unnecessary for providing a Linux console by punting it off to user-space. The Linux kernel VT console hasn't been changed much in the past two decades and Herrmann is hoping to see it replaced with a user-space solution he's been developing that would allow for multi-seat support, a hardware-accelerated console, full internalization, and other features.

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