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Privacy

Submission + - IPRED law in Sweden - Watching the watchers

Submitted by digithed
digithed writes: In response to Sweden's recent introduction of new laws implementating the European IPRED directive a new Swedish website has been launched allowing users to check if their IP address is currently under investigation. The site also allows users to subscribe for email updates telling them if their IP address comes under investigation in the future, or to report IP addresses known to be under investigation. The site can be found at: http://ipred.bitchware.se/

This is an interesting use of people power "watching the watchers". The new Swedish laws implementing the IPRED directive require a public request to the courts in order to get ISPs to forcibly disclose potentially sensitive private information, and since all court records are public in Sweden (as are all government records) it will be easy to compile a list of IP addresses which are currently being investigated.
Security

Submission + - WebHostingTalk Hacked Again, Credit Cards Stolen 3

Submitted by kstatefan40
kstatefan40 writes: WebHostingTalk was hacked about three weeks ago and was discussed here on Slashdot due to the unique nature of the attack, targeting the company's backup systems. Today, it seems they have been hacked again and this time the stolen data includes decrypted credit card information. If you have used them for advertising or bought a premier membership through them, it is time for you to cancel the credit card you used and consider purchasing credit monitoring services. The speculation can now begin: what the hell went wrong this time?
Biotech

Scientists Begin Mapping the Brain 129

Posted by kdawson from the writing-it-down-in-silicon dept.
Raindance writes "A team at the University of Utah has unveiled a system to map and digitize brain tissue — thus fulfilling one of the long-standing holy grails of neuroscience and enabling for the first time in-depth analysis of how mammalian neural networks function. So far, maps for the entire retina and related neural networks have been released; no ETA on a full-brain digital reconstruction yet. (One of the lead authors hangs out here on Slashdot.)"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Sued for $558 Million Over Uniloc Patent (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Microsoft has been served papers claiming their state of the art product activation system infringes on a Singapore based company named Uniloc's patent. Bloomberg is reporting that a lawyer for Uniloc asked a federal court for $558 million in royalties from Microsoft. The official court order is here in PDF. This concerns the activation system of Windows XP operating system and some Office programs--Uniloc has decided that royalties of $2.50 for each of the 223 million activations is a fair price for Microsoft to pay. The patent ax swings both ways. The two seem to have a long history of court action.
The Courts

Submission + - SPAM: effect of Jacobsen case on Open Source

Submitted by viralMeme
viralMeme writes: ..despite the great interest in open source licensing, there has been virtually no precedent construing or applying any of these widely used "copy-left" licenses (or indeed any open source licenses) prior to the Federal Circuit's December decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer, 535 F.3d 1373 (Fed Cir. 2008).

Although Jacobsen left many issues still to be decided (a point well demonstrated on remand), the Federal Circuit held that breach of an open source license does not merely permit a breach of contract claim, but that violating the "conditions" to the intellectual property license creates a cause of action for copyright infringement — with associated remedies. Indeed, in turning the focus from contract to infringement, the Federal Circuit remanded for the district court to reassess its denial of a preliminary injunction.
Link to Original Source
NASA

Submission + - SPAM: Heat shield from hell to protect future astronauts

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "NASA today made one of the most important decisions for the future of its space flights — the heat shield material that will protect future space explorers from the hellish heat of space travel. The space agency went with a technology it was quite familiar with, a fiberglass, silica, epoxy combination known as Avcoat. The heat protection technology was used on the current space shuttle missions as well as the Apollo spacecrafts, NASA said. On the blistering return through Earth's atmosphere, the module will encounter temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Heating rates may be up to five times more extreme than rates for missions returning from the International Space Station, NASA said. Orion's heat shield, the dish-shaped thermal protection system at the base of the spacecraft, will endure the most heat and will erode, or "ablate," in a controlled fashion, sending heat away from the crew module during its descent through the atmosphere. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Businesses

Submission + - SPAM: Disaster Supply Source First aid kit store online

Submitted by
calico28
calico28 writes: "Welcome to Disaster Supply Source, the premier wholesale distributor of emergency supplies and disaster kits. We have a variety of products ranging from our wilderness survival gear to discount antiseptics, as well as an assortment of 72 hour survival kits and CPR supply items. Find bargain priced survival preparedness packs and individual first aid kit items among our great stock of emergency equipment. We invite you to view our outdoor and survival kit selection, not to mention our collection of rescue responder kit and flood survival kit items."
Link to Original Source
IBM

Submission + - Sun made colossal mistake in turning down IBM (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "With IBM/Sun negotiations reportedly at a standstill, a consensus seems to be emerging among industry analysts: Sun has made a colossal mistake in turning down IBM's $7 billion acquisition offer. "My first thought was, IBM threw Sun a rope. They used it to make a noose," says Annex Research analyst Bob Djurdjevic. "Pure insanity" is the phrase used by Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau to describe Sun turning down the premium offered by IBM. IBM/Sun merger talks collapsed after "disputes over millions of dollars of payout to Sun executives, in addition to the takeover price and conditions attached to the deal," the Bloomberg news service reported Monday. "If it is indeed true that the Sun Board turned down the IBM offer because they thought a 100% premium on the value of their listing ship was too low a price in the midst of an economic storm, then Sun deserves to go down," Djurdjevic says. "And to go down in the history of IT as yet another company that let pride get in the way of good judgment.""
The Internet

Submission + - New ICANN TLDs May Cause Internet Land Rush (usatoday.com)

Submitted by
wiryd
wiryd writes: "A new ICANN proposal would allow applications for almost any TLD. From the article: Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop. "Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history.""
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Geeks blaimed for economic trouble (google.com)

Submitted by lahvak
lahvak writes: Quants, the mathematicians and physicists who devised the financial instruments and computer programs for financial markets, are now being blamed for the markets collapse.
Software

Submission + - Twitter on Scala (artima.com)

Submitted by
machaut
machaut writes: "Twitter, one of the highest profile Ruby on Rails-backed websites on the internet, has in the past year started replacing some of their Ruby infrastructure with an emerging language called Scala. Although they still prefer Ruby on Rails for user-facing web applications, they have started replacing Ruby daemon servers with Scala alternatives, and plan to eventually serve API requests, which comprise the majority of their traffic, with Scala not Ruby. This week several articles have appeared that discuss this shift at Twitter. A technical interview of three Twitter developers was published on Artima. One of those developers, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead, gave a talk on this subject at the Web 2.0 Expo this week. His talk was covered in articles at Technology Review, Internet Evolution, and The Register."
Government

Submission + - Research: Legalization of drugs makes more sense (tdpf.org.uk)

Submitted by
mariushm
mariushm writes: "A new research paper from the thinktank Transform, funded by charitable foundations and individual donors, comes to the conclusion that at least in the case of UK, it is primarily the fact of drugs being illegal which makes them so damaging to society and furthermore, if drugs were legalized — even assuming a huge increase in their use — the public would have more benefits from regulation and legalization versus the current system.
The research shows that:
It is a relatively small subset of the using population, made up of marginalised low income dependent users offending to fund their drug use, who are disproportionately responsible for creating the secondary £13.9 billion in acquisitive crime costs from the £3.7 billion turnover of the illicit market for heroin and cocaine. That the heroin and cocaine market, freed of the distorting influence of criminal market economic pressures, would likely be worth around one tenth of the £3.7 billion figure highlights this particular negative impact of prohibition economics even more starkly.
Over half of all UK property crime is to fund drug misuse, primarily heroin and cocaine. If drugs were available on prescription or at affordable prices comparable to those paid by dependent drinkers, it is assumed that levels of acquisitive crime related to fundraising would be negligible. Intoxication-related offences would be unchanged (at a given level of use).
The paper also points out that drug users' health would improve because the drugs would be controlled and of better quality compared to the ones on the market.
It's worth noting that the report assumes health costs for the drug users would remain the same but does note the health costs will probably be lower, as people will no longer share possibly infected needles to inject themselves with drugs.
Also something to think about is the fact that the estimated financial advantages that would be brought by the regulation and legalization of drugs do not include taxes."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Build Your Own Multi-Touch Tabletop "Surface&# 1

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: We've all seen the nifty demos of Microsoft's Surface PC, but you may not have known that you can build your own multi-touch tabletop PC today. Maximum PC details the process, showing how you can build the cabinet and combine that with a standard PC, a decent projector, about $350 worth of assorted hardware (cameras, lenses, mirrors, and screens), and a handful of free apps to build your own Surface-like PC--without giving Microsoft $10,000.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - The History of Elite: The Space Sim (gamasutra.com)

Submitted by
Matt Barton
Matt Barton writes: "Gamasutra has published our History of Elite, a 1984 game that launched a genre. Despite its legendarily difficulty (particularly the infamous docking sequences), Elite proved highly successful in the U.K. (its country of origin) and the United States, inspiring later games such as Wing Commander: Privateer and Eve Online. The article features several exclusive images of the game, packaging, and related material."
Privacy

Submission + - Canadian Privacy Commissioner educates on DPI

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian Privacy Commissioner has published a website to educate Canadians and others to Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. Online are some essays from different interested parties. The site is: http://dpi.priv.gc.ca/ CBC article regarding new site is: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/06/tech-090406-deep-packet-inspection-privacy-commissioner.html

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