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Media

Submission + - Amarok is being ported to Windows (kde.org)

NightFears writes: Amarok, the popular Linux multimedia player, is being prepared for a Windows port. As highly-demanded as it is, the port spawned a lot of controversy among the dedicated Linux users, since many of them feel that after the release there'll be one strong argument less for convincing people to switch to Linux.

The amazing part here is that it only took two days. Basically most of Amarok was already so portable that it compiled without changes. I really expected it to be much more work. Shows that it pays off to use an excellent cross-platform toolkit like Qt in the first place.
Ah yes, and there's a screenshot.

Books

Submission + - Orson Scott Card Confirms Ender's Game Video Games (filefront.com)

lymeca writes: In an interview over at Gaming Today, Orson Scott Card confirms the development of an Ender's Game video game and elaborates on the multitude of potential future games in the Ender universe. He also talks about his experiences writing for and playing games, as well as why he believes games inherently never have the potential for storytelling on the level of novels and films. From the interview: "What makes a game work is the opposite of what makes a story work. In a story, you are seeking to find out what really happened — why people do what they do, what the results of their choices are. You identify with the character(s) but you do not control them. Instead, the author has the ultimate authority. ... In a game, the opposite illusion must be created. Even though most games absolutely force you to follow preset paths, the gamewrights try to give you the illusion that you are making free choices."
Censorship

Submission + - Wikipedians want Spoiler Warnings Gone - Do You? (wikipedia.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Tensions are always high in Wikipedia, but this time it's serious. Many Wikipedians want all spoiler warnings on Wikipedia gone. Real encyclopaedias don't have spoiler warnings. Then again, real encyclopaedias don't have articles about anything recent enough to warrant them.

Should Wikipedia remove its spoiler warnings? Are spoiler warnings a violation of the no censorship policy? Is Wikipedia bound by netiquette?

I know you care about this.

The Courts

Submission + - Student Blogger Loses Small Claims Defamation Case

An anonymous reader writes: Yaman Salahi, a UC Berkeley student and blogger, lost a lawsuit brought against him by Lee Kaplan, a journalist for FrontPageMag.com. Kaplan had sued Salahi for tortious business interference and libel in a California small claims court suit in response to a blog Salahi had set-up about him called "Lee Kaplan Watch." Judge Marshall Whitley presided over the appeal on June 8, 2007, and entered his ruling on June 13, 2007 in favor of the plaintiff, asking that Salahi pay him $7,500 (the maximum in small claims court) plus court fees. No written opinion was offered with the decision, though all other court filings are available here. From Salahi's update on the blog:

"...because [Kaplan] sued me in small claims court, I did not have the protections of the anti-SLAPP [Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Policy] statute. I initially did not have the protection of a lawyer, nor did I have the assurances that the trial would be conducted with consistency and integrity, ensuring me my due process rights, because the standards for acceptable evidence are much lower and more informal for small claims court than they are for real courts. Furthermore, I will never know why I lost the initial hearing, or why I lost the appeal, because small claims judges are not obligated to release written opinions with their rulings.... I will never have the opportunity to take this to a real appellate court where my first amendment rights might be protected."
What does this mean for bloggers' rights, in general? Should defamation cases be heard before small claims court in the first place? What are bloggers with little or no available resources to do when they are targeted for their political slant?
Privacy

Submission + - Creeper discovers intelligence agencies (gnuheter.com)

mpawlo writes: Patrik Wallstrom of Gnuheter fame has released his new privacy project Creeper. Creeper is basically a picture you place on your blog, website or bittorrent tracker site. Creeper will check the IP of everyone accessing the blog, web site etc and do a lookup into a predefined database over governmental agencies. The result is aggregated on a publicly accessible web site. Creeper will disclose a lot of interesting information regarding how and when governmental officials use their computers and what they monitor at work.

The project was initiated in Sweden a few weeks ago and has already raised serious concerns over privacy matters in Sweden. One of the three letter combination-agencies was discovered monitoring a password protected piracy bittorrent site, i.e. it hacked the web site and kept track of everything happeningthere. This will probably keep happening for six months or so, until all agencies will learn to cover their tracks and use other IP numbers and so forth. Or perhaps the ignorance will continue... Meanwhile, we can all learn what to expect in terms of surveillance and Big Brother tendencies online.

An independent German "Creeper" should be released any day now ("überwach" it is called and is not related to Creeper). Patrik is willing to offer the code to anyone interested in releasing the corresponding service in other countries.

Privacy

Submission + - Identity Thief Apprehended by Victim

ewhac writes: "Karen Lodrick was entering her sixth month of hell dealing with the repercussions of having her identity stolen and used to loot her accounts. But while she was waiting for a beverage, there standing in line was the woman who appeared on Wells Fargo security video emptying her accounts. What followed was a 45 minute chase through San Francisco streets that ended with the thief being taken into custody by police."
The Media

Submission + - Projectionist fired for online review

mcgrew writes: "CNN is reporting that movie projectionist Jesse Morrison has been fired for panning the new 'Fantastic Four' movie on the Ain't It Cool web site, allegedly after Fox threatened the chain he worked for. There was no non-disclosure agreement. 'If they had sat me down and told me that this has caused such a stink and that we would like you to sign some waiver, I probably would have signed it,' CNN quotes Mr. Morrison as saying. There is more on CNN's site."
Quickies

Submission + - Weapon found in Whale blubber from the 1800's (cnn.com)

LABarr writes: AP and CNN are carrying this story. "A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time. It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890." One tough whale...
Software

Submission + - Computer vision for people with regular computers?

An anonymous reader writes: So I finally got myself a nifty little webcamera, and naturally, the first thing I did was to look around the wide internets for cool computer vision things to do with it. I know the computer vision field has come pretty far, and I found what looks to be an excellent open source computer vision library (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=22870) but for the life of me I cannot seem to find nifty apps, hacks and tricks to do with my web camera. So I Ask Slashdot — where are my face recognizing,
gesture interpreting, image vectorizing applications?
The Internet

Submission + - How the Facebook platform is changing the world

malbrech writes: "An article in the Guardian technology blog points us to how the Facebook platform makes web applications explode virally. There is also an excellent analysis of Facebook by Marc Andreesen (remember? the guy who did Mosaic and Netscape). In a nutshell: the carefully designed instant awareness of your friends of the application you just started using, makes them use it too. That cascades onto their friends, and so on. The result: your servers get blown apart in very short time. You might be famous, but flat out beaten by traffic."
Power

Submission + - PC's are only 50% energy efficient

Matt writes: "An awful 50 percent of the power delivered from a wall socket to a PC simply gets wasted says Urs Hölzle, Google fellow and senior vice president of operations. Half the energy gets converted to heat or is dissipated in some other manner in the AC-to-DC conversion. Around 30 percent of the power delivered to the average server gets lost, he added. The power in both cases is lost before any work is accomplished by a computer: later, even more energy is lost by PCs sitting idle, or as heat dissipated by other components."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - LOLCODE: proof programmers can has humor

lisah writes: In the old days (about six months ago), lolcat junkies had to console themselves with adding their own captions to the comments at I Can Has Cheezburger? but these days its possible to program your computer using LOLCODE. A tutorial at Linux.com shows you how.
Software

Submission + - Is Microsoft getting paid for patents in Linux?

kripkenstein writes: "In an interview, Jeremy Allison (of the Samba project) implies that Microsoft is secretly getting paid for patent licenses on Linux-related products:

[Interviewer:] One of the persistent rumors that's going around is that certain large IT customers have already been paying Microsoft for patent licensing to cover their use of Linux, Samba and other free software projects.[...]

Allison: Yes, that's true, actually. I mean I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using [...] But they're not telling anyone about it. They're completely doing it off the record.
If true, is this slowing down Linux adoption? Or are these just rumors — which may accomplish much the same effect?"
Microsoft

Submission + - DirectX10 drops Hardware Acceleration for Audio.

shrewd writes: ""Imagine your surprise when you fire up one of your favourite games in Vista — say World of Warcraft or Prey — only to find your fancy EAX-endowed soundcard and 5.1 surround speakers are dribbling out flat, unenhanced stereo sound. Then, in a vain attempt to spruce up the audio by enabling EAX, you get a nice taut error message saying EAX is not detected on your hardware. What's going on? Welcome to the world of Vista audio. And a brave new world it is.""

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