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Education

Submission + - Do Hobbies Decrease Chances of CS Success?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Who knows what lexical analysis is?" asked the CS prof. "No one? What, don't you guys do this constantly in your spare time?" Quips like that, and fellow students who never seem to leave the computer lab, make CS student blogger Carolyn sometimes wonder if she really belongs in programming because she doesn't program all the time. "While I don't live to program, I do love to program," she explains, and in the end has decided that's good enough. Somewhere, the late, great, always-room-for-outside-interests Jeff Raskin is smiling.
Advertising

Submission + - NBC / SNL Stealing Ad Revenue? (donyougorouninrountorero.com) 2

Submitted by
DontLickJesus
DontLickJesus writes: "In a time when television networks are working hard to deal with the changes presented to them, NBC has been very successful in transition, providing much of their content online. However, it would seem this media giant doesn't want to shoulder all of the cost, to the detriment of their advertisers. Saturday Night Live recently featured skits with urls to see the skit again. These sites first load an intro page, simply showing an image of the skit which the user may click on to load the video. This may seem simple enough, but why the extra step?

Upon further examination, these pages have frames loaded first with advertisements which the user never sees. Both http://donyougorouninrountorero.com/ and http://www.badnewswurtz.com/ use this technique, helping us to understand this wasn't a simple coding mistake. I've collected the responses from requesting these sites at http://pastebin.com/Vj0TL08M in case they are changed later.

I cannot personally verify NBC's ties with the companies involved. However, it is not common for sites to be coded in the manner shown (though not unheard of). In my experience the most common use of the techniques involved are when sites are attempting to steal ad revenue or circumvent user anti-tracking mechanisms."
Censorship

Submission + - #china revolution set to start 2pm Shanghai time (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by h00manist
h00manist writes: Online pages call for protests in 13 cities in China, at 2:00 pm Shanghai time, 1:00 am EST, Twitter tag being used is #cn220. In spite of China censoring Middle East protests, now known as "Jasmin Revolutions", Chinese people are inspired. Instructions for participating are being censored, help re-posting is requested. They keep disappearing, and then popping up everywhere on the net, and being censored again. Yes, I used the google translated version to understand Chinese.
Security

Submission + - Police Chief Teaches Parents to Hack Facebook 3

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "LiveScience reports that James Batelli, the police chief of Mahwah, N.J., and his detectives conduct seminars that teach parents how to outfit a computer with keystroke logging software, giving them access to the full spectrum of the kids' online activities. Batelli explains that kids put themselves in potentially dangerous situations online every day, especially on Facebook, where they run the risk of coming into contact with child predators who troll the social networking site. "Read the paper any day of the week and you’ll see an abduction [or] a sexual assault that’s the result of an Internet interaction or a Facebook comment,” says Batelli. "When it comes down to safety and welfare of your child, I don’t think any parent would sacrifice anything to make sure nothing happens to their children." But not everyone agrees with Batelli's recommendations. “It’s a slippery slope to spy on your kids,” says Edi Goodman, chief privacy officer for Identity Theft 911, who has two young children. “Hopefully I can teach my kids the skill sets to be aware about these [online] dangers, because I can’t be with them all the time.”"
The Internet

Submission + - Is AT&T throttling Netflix? (att.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The AT&T forums are full of irate customers claiming that Netflix and other streaming has been unusable since at least the start of the month. Streaming via a VPN seems to work, suggesting AT&T is throttling video.
Software

Submission + - Feds Pay Millions for Bogus Spy Software (nytimes.com)

Submitted by gosuperninja
gosuperninja writes: The U.S. Government paid tens of millions of dollars to Dennis Montgomery because he said that he had created software that could decode secret Al-Qaeda messages embedded in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. Even though the CIA figured out that his software was fraud in 2003, other defense agencies continued to believe in it. To date, the government has not prosecuted Montgomery most likely to save itself the embarrassment.
Businesses

Submission + - Is Google Poisoning PDF?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As much as Google is crying about Microsoft paying too much attention to the details of how its software works, one may wish that Google would learn to do the same. Especially in the case of Google Chrome's built-in PDF viewer, which the search giant imposed on users last year, quietly enabling it by default. Not everyone is thrilled with how things turned out. "I got the impression that this built-in PDF viewer was never user tested before it went live," says one unhappy camper. "I was very annoyed to find that google had hijacked my PDF settings and implemented their own viewer," complained another. "I am not able to save PDFs from my internet-banking site any more," laments a third. A "horrible piece of software," is another's take. If you can't live with acknowledged bugs and feature omissions while its engineers "try to make this better," a Googler suggests: "type 'chrome://plugins' into the address bar, find the 'Chrome PDF Viewer' and click 'Disable.'" How intuitive. So, unless some kind of licensing agreement was struck, or there's a private action underway, why isn't Adobe crying foul over this switcheroo, which is causing product confusion and support headaches?
Books

Submission + - Fantasy Novel Starring J.R.R. Tolkien Incurs Wrath (associatedcontent.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Author Stephen Hillard has written a novel entitled "Mirkwood" which appears to be a fantasy epic in which none other than J.R.R. Tolkien appears as a character. The
Tolkien estate is not amused and has issued a cease and desist letter.

Hillard has responded by suing the Tolkien estate preemptively.

Submission + - New LTE Tower Blasting Home With EMI (digitalhome.ca) 2

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: A Canadian RF engineer could not locate the source of massive electromagnetic interference in his home until he realized that a new LTE communications tower had just been erected only 70 meters away, at a frequency of 734 MHz and a bandwidth of 10 MHz, running 1200 watts Effective Radiated Power. Additionally another 3000 watts ERP of PCS/Cellular went up in the same place. Rigging a detector out of a Schottky diode, a capacitor, an inductor, 6 inches of wire, and a piezo speaker, the sound was loud enough to be heard across the room. One would think that the Canadian telecom regulators would investigate and intervene, right? Nope: Industry Canada refused with a "not my job" email. See videos here and here of his plight.

Submission + - Ths Arizona Governor Sues the US Government (militaryringinfo.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "The governor of Arizona is fed up with illegals crossing into that state and even more so by the federal governments attempts to get the Enforcement Immigration Law which Arizona has passed nullified.

Arizona is the main corridor for illegals who cross into the US from Mexico and also for dope smugglers. As a result their border with Mexico seems to be out of control. Dope smugglers are fighting a territorial war over this area because it is such a popular route for smuggling drugs and people into the United States.

She in essence is filing a counter suit against the government because of the confrontation with the Arizona law. She is saying by filing the suit that the federal government needs to do more to help secure the Arizona border. They need to have a better plan to assist the State if they are going to interfere in State business. I can agree in principal to this line of reasoning. If the federal government is going to restrict the States doing what they have to do to maintain order then they need to offer an alternative.

I say that we can use our military ring customers to help us to control our borders. They can help out here at home just like they do in other countries who don’t even appreciate our presence."
Facebook

Submission + - facebook clickjacking that still works (fernandomagro.com)

Submitted by
magro
magro writes: "It's still possible to visit a website and be a victim of facebook clickjacking (STEALING facebook likes) just by clicking links in a page. The malicious website may hide a very low opacity facebook button that follows the mouse when the user hovers a link. When warez hits the social networks we should expect to see this technique used in such things as huge image galleries or fake file downloads (where a lot of clicking takes place). At the end of the day, we'll have a facebook like in our account for each click we did on those websites."
Science

Submission + - U.S. Navy breaks LASER record (foxnews.com)

Submitted by ectotherm
ectotherm writes: The U.S. Navy has broken the existing record for the power of a LASER. Their new free-electron LASER can burn through 200 feet of steel per second. Next step: weaponization. Now all we need to do is upgrade the sharks...
Patents

Submission + - Oil companies patent trolling on energy again (cleantechies.com) 1

Submitted by
Whatsmynickname
Whatsmynickname writes: "Thought oil companies had enough patent trolling to shut down any efforts to wean us off of crude oil (Chevron and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries)? Think again. BP and DuPont (Butamax) has taken an advanced biofuel company to court over infringement of newly awarded patents for developing biobutanol [see http://blog.cleantechies.com/2011/02/15/bp-dupont-biofuels-jv-takes-gevo-to-court/%5D. When an oil company advertises it is looking for alternative fuels, it's not because they want to be socially responsible..."
Chrome

Submission + - Facebook Develops HTML5 Gaming Benchmark (facebook.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A couple of Facebook engineers are developing an HTML5 gaming benchmark. They write, 'Two weeks ago Bruce and I released JSGameBench version 0.1. Today marks the release of version 0.2, a much faster and cleaner version. We continue to learn both from tightening the code and from the strong HTML5 community. Version 0.2 reinforces our belief in HTML5 as a strong, horizontal platform for games and highly interactive applications across the web.'
User Journal

Journal Journal: Things I learned today. Browser URL length limitations 2

Journal by JWSmythe

For a long time, I've followed what I've read regarding URL lengths. 255 characters is it. Never let it get longer than that.

By the RFC's, 255 characters is the guideline, to maintain backward compatibility with old browsers, old proxy servers, and other miscellaneous hardware that may be in the way.

I went looking for more information, but found conflicting or outdated information. Who cares what the limits on Netscape 4 or MSIE 5 were.

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