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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 110 declined, 54 accepted (164 total, 32.93% accepted)

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China

Submission + - China Mafia-Style Hack Attack Drives California Firm to Brink (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "For three years, a group of hackers from China waged a relentless campaign of cyber harassment against Solid Oak Software Inc., Milburn’s family-owned, eight-person firm in Santa Barbara, California. The attack began less than two weeks after Milburn publicly accused China of appropriating his company’s parental filtering software, CYBERsitter, for a national Internet censoring project. And it ended shortly after he settled a $2.2 billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and a string of computer companies last April."
Books

Submission + - Here's Why Digital Rights Management Is Stupid And Anti-Consumer (consumerist.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Yesterday, I tried to download an ebook I paid for, and previously put on my Nook, a few months ago. When I tried, I got an error message stating I could not download the book because the credit card on file had expired. But, I already paid for it. Who cares if the credit card is expired? It has long since been paid for, so the status of the card on file has nothing to do with my ability to download said book. I didn’t see anything in the terms of service about this either, but it’s possible I missed it.

        This is just one more reason to either not buy ebooks, or strip the drm off of the ones you purchase so you can [use] the book you BUY on all your devices without having to purchase multiple copies for no reason and have access to something you already bought when you want it."
Mars

Submission + - Curiosity may have found precursor of life on Mars (lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "NASA's Curiosity rover may have found a precursor to life on Mars, the director of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday.
"Perhaps Curiosity has found simple organic molecules," Charles Elachi said at the fringes of a conference at Rome's La Sapienza University.
"It's preliminary data that must be checked (on) organic, not biological, molecules"."
Government

Submission + - Richard O'Dwyer strikes US deal to avoid extradition (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Richard O'Dwyer, the university student who created a website which linked to programmes and films online for free, has reached an agreement to avoid extradition to the US over copyright infringement allegations, the high court has been told.

The 24-year-old Sheffield Hallam undergraduate has signed a draft "deferred prosecution" agreement in the past two days which requires him to travel to the US and pay a small sum of compensation but will mean he will not face a trial or criminal record, the court was told."
Idle

Submission + - Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers (wired.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years living in the Bay Area, studying the community that builds the Debian Linux open source operating system and other hackers — i.e., people who pride themselves on finding new ways to reinvent software. More recently, she’s been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief.

When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group’s monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco’s Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out."
Businesses

Submission + - Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias (reuters.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Of the 18,335 employment cases filed in 2010 with California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing, one-fifth cited age. That puts age below retaliation as a discrimination claim, but above racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual orientation.

Nationally, retaliation is also the most frequently cited discrimination claim, according to the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. But age comes much lower down on the national list, below race, sex, and disability.

The federal agency says age is cited in 26 percent of total complaints in California, compared to 22 percent in New York and 21 percent in Texas. Among large states, Illinois had the highest ratio of age-related complaints, at 37 percent."
Government

Submission + - Red light cameras raise crash risk, cost (courierpostonline.com) 1

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "A pilot program for red-light cameras in New Jersey appears to be changing drivers’ behavior, state officials said Monday, noting an overall decline in traffic citations and right-angle crashes.

The Department of Transportation also said, however, that rear-end crashes have risen by 20 percent and total crashes are up by 0.9 percent at intersections where cameras have operated for at least a year."
Advertising

Submission + - Social Media Has A Black Friday (wsj.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Given the amount of attention paid by brands and retailers to building up their buzz on social platforms, consumers don’t seem to clicking through and buying much: just 0.34% of all online sales on Black Friday came from referrals from social networks like Facebook FB -0.86%, Twitter and YouTube"
Businesses

Submission + - Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Technology? Yes, but also toiling home-workers

Exclusive It's widely believed that Google search results are produced entirely by computer algorithms — in large part because Google would like this to be widely believed. But in fact a little-known group of home-worker humans plays a large part in the Google process. The way these raters go about their work has always been a mystery. Now, The Register has seen a copy of the guidelines Google issues to them."
Google

Submission + - How Google Plans to Find the UnGoogleable (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "If Google is to achieve its stated mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible,” says Wiley, it must find out about those hidden needs and learn how to serve them. And he says experience sampling—bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not—is the best way to do it. “Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it’s getting us better information that we really haven’t had in the past,” he says.

Wiley isn’t ready to share results from the study just yet, but this participant found plenty of examples of relatively small pieces of information that I’d never turn to Google for. For example, how long the line currently is in a local grocery store. Some offline activities, such as reading a novel, or cooking a meal, generated questions that I hadn’t turned to Google to answer—mainly due to the inconvenience of having to grab a computer or phone in order to sift through results."
IBM

Submission + - Believe it or not, the smartphone is 20 years old (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "The IBM Simon was rolled out on Nov. 23, 1992, at Comdex, though it was code-named “Angler” at the time. You likely couldn’t have fit it in your pocket, given that it was about the size of today’s Nexus 7, but then, at 18 ounces in weight, it probably would’ve made you walk funny anyway. It sported a 16MHz processor, 1MB of memory and 1MB of storage. Its operating system was a variant of DOS.

Its external app ecosystem consisted of exactly one program—a PC-to-Simon texting tool called DispatchIt, which cost $3000 for the PC software and an additional $300 for every Simon client. To be fair, however, it could do some things modern smartphones can’t, like accept fax transmissions."
Government

Submission + - Federal officials take down 132 websites in 'Cyber Monday' crackdown (thehill.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and European officials seized 132 websites on Monday for allegedly selling counterfeit merchandise in a coordinated crackdown timed to coincide with the holiday shopping season.

It is the third straight year that the government has seized websites on "Cyber Monday" — the marketing term for the Monday after Thanksgiving, when many online retailers offer steep discounts and promotions."
Google

Submission + - Will Google Go the Way of Microsoft? Ask the FTC (cio.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "The biggest threat to Google isn't Apple, Microsoft or Amazon — it's the U.S. government. Within the next several months, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission may sue Google for antitrust violations. If it does, Google will most likely end up like Microsoft after the government filed suit against it in the 1990s — distracted and unable to plan for the future.

The biggest potential antitrust issue is whether Google unfairly manipulates its search results to point at its own services rather than competitors'. So, for example, the suit might charge that Google manipulates search results to direct consumers to Google Places rather than Yelp or to Google Shopping rather than Pricegrabber or Shopzilla. Another potential issue is whether Google's AdWords marketplace discriminates against ads from services that compete with Google's services."

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