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Earth

Google Founders' Jets Caught On WSJ's Radar 427

Posted by samzenpus from the break-out-the-list dept.
theodp writes "Via an FOIA request, the Wall Street Journal acquired records of every private aircraft flight recorded in the FAA's air-traffic management system for 2007 through 2010, using them to build a private jet tracker database. Among the high fliers who found their records unblocked were Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose 767 and Gulfstream reportedly burned an estimated 52,000 gallons of aviation fuel and $430,000 on two round-trips from the U.S. mainland to Tahiti to catch last summer's total eclipse of the sun. A Google spokeswoman confirmed the pair's jaunt, but added that Page and Brin mitigated the greenhouse gas emissions from their aircraft usage by purchasing an even greater amount of carbon offsets. Tech-boom billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban seemed unfazed by the prospect of his past plane movements becoming public: 'I have a plane,' Cuban quipped. 'I bought it so I could use it. Shocking, isn't it?'"

Comment Re:sources close to the investigation (Score 1) 135

by Giant Ape Skeleton (#36138988) Attached to: Amazon Servers Used In Sony Playstation Hack

TFA is totally bullshit.

I think that the hackers used a few open L1 proxies on Amazon AWS.

In my list of open proxies, there are around 20 proxies on Amazon AWS, of the form ec2-??-??-??-???.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.compute-1.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 where ??-??-??-?? is an IP address.

...so in order to find the perpetrators, we simply need to determine which seven of those proxies were used in the attack!
The Internet

Vatican Warns That Internet Promotes Satanism 585

Posted by timothy from the perhaps-this-is-why-I'm-not-at-church dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Roman Catholic Church has warned that the internet has fueled a surge in Satanism that has led to a sharp rise in the demand for exorcists. 'The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Satanism. In just a few minutes you can contact Satanist groups and research occultism,' says Carlo Climati, a member of the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome who specializes in the dangers posed to young people by Satanism. Organizers of a six-day conference that has brought together more than 60 Catholic clergy as well as doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers and youth workers, co-sponsored by the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments and the Congregation for Clergy, say the rise of Satanism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years."
Music

Can You Really Be Traced From an IP Address? 246

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-are-you-who-who-who-who dept.
Barence writes "Identifying individuals using nothing more than their IP address has become a key part of anti-piracy and criminal investigations. But a PC Pro investigation casts serious doubt on the validity of IP-based evidence. 'In general, the accuracy of IP address tracing varies depending on the type of user behind the IP address,' Tom Colvin, chief technology officer with security vendor Conseal told PC Pro. 'Whilst big businesses can be traceable right back to their datacenters, standard family broadband connections are often hard to locate, even to county-level accuracy.'"
Science

Why Men Don't Have Sensory Whiskers and Spiny Genitals 226

Posted by samzenpus from the we'd-need-different-pants dept.
sciencehabit writes "Most male mammals wield a penis covered with spines made of keratin, the same material that forms fingernails, to sweep out competitors' sperm and irritate a female into ovulating. Even chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have penile spines. So why don't men? A new study suggests that this feature disappeared due to a chunk of DNA that went missing after our evolutionary divergence from chimps. The researchers have identified another DNA deletion that may have contributed to humans' bigger brains."
DRM

PS3 Piracy Threats Cause Phone-Home DRM 256

Posted by Soulskill from the fighting-fire-with-gasoline dept.
Stoobalou writes "The last time game developer Capcom tried to impose Internet-based copy protection on one of its games, it was forced to backtrack over a storm of complaints. In that instance Final Fight: Double Impact was hobbled with a piracy-busting scheme which phoned home every time the game was booted, but Capcom forgot to mention that little nugget of information to potential purchasers — an omission which eventually led to the DRM scheme being hastily withdrawn. The company has decided not to repeat the mistake with its latest release, Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, by making it clear that the game won't work unless it gets a sign-off from the company's servers."
Games

Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo? 418

Posted by Soulskill from the blame-dr.-evil dept.
danabnormal writes "Increasingly I'm being frustrated in my attempts to find a game I want to play. In an effort to catch up, I've been using my bog standard Dell laptop to dig out treasures I have missed, such as American McGee's Alice, Grim Fandango and Syberia. I don't often get the time to play games, so I like to have the opportunity to dip in and out of a title without feeling like I'm losing something by not playing it for periods of time. But when I find a title I like, I make the time. Heavy Rain is the last game that gripped me, that truly engaged me and made me want to complete it in a single sitting. I'm tired of the GTA formulas, bored of CoDs and don't have the reaction time to think on my feet for AOE III. Is it about time I tossed in the controller and resigned myself to the fact that the games I want only come out once in a blue moon? Or have I just not found that one great title that will open me up to a brand new genre? Lords of Ultima is going OK at the moment — is there anything of that ilk I've missed? What are your thoughts? Do you stick to a particular genre? Are you finding it harder, as you get more mature, to find something you want to play?"
Transportation

Digital Dashboard Device Detects Driver Drowsiness 117

Posted by timothy from the string-between-ceiling-and-nostril dept.
Pickens writes "Science Daily Headlines reports that researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology have developed a self-contained, dashboard-mounted assistant system that tracks a driver's eye movements and issues a warning before the driver has an opportunity to nod off to sleep. 'What we have developed is a small modular system with its own hardware and programs on board, so that the line of vision is computed directly within the camera itself,' says Professor Husar. 'Since the Eyetracker is fitted with at least two cameras that record images stereoscopically — meaning in three dimensions — the system can easily identify the spatial position of the pupil and the line of vision.' The cameras, which can be installed in any model of car, evaluate up to 200 images per second to identify the line of vision. If the camera modules detect that the eye is closed for longer than a user-defined interval, it sounds an alarm. The Eyetracker also has applications in computer games where players could look around themselves without requiring a joystick to change their viewing direction, and in marketing and advertising, where researchers could determine which parts of a poster or advertising spot receive longer attention from their viewers."
Graphics

Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced 184

Posted by Soulskill from the ach-mein-framen dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After showcasing Quake Wars: Ray Traced a few years ago, Intel is now showing their latest graphics research project using Wolfenstein game content. The new and cool special effects are actually displayed on a laptop using a cloud-based gaming approach with servers that have an Intel Knights Ferry card (many-core) inside. Their blog post has a video and screenshots."
Programming

Ask Sam Ramji About the CodePlex Foundation 77

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the life-after-microsoft dept.
This week the Codeplex Foundation announced its first project, the ASP.NET Ajax Library Project, as part of its first sponsored gallery, the ASP.NET Gallery. The CodePlex Foundation is now two months old, and Foundation President Sam Ramji has agreed to answer questions about the Foundation, its first project, and overall progress to date. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.
Censorship

AU Senator Calls Scientology a "Criminal Organization" 511

Posted by kdawson from the can't-do-that-here-either dept.
An anonymous reader passes along news that an Australian senator, Nick Xenophon, has denounced the Church of Scientology as "a criminal organization" from the floor of Parliament. "Senator Xenophon used a speech in Parliament last night to raise allegations of widespread criminal conduct within the church, saying he had received letters from former followers detailing claims of abuse, false imprisonment, and forced abortion. He says he has passed on the letters to the police and is calling for a Senate inquiry into the religion and its tax-exempt status." It wasn't that long ago that the CoS was calling for Net censorship in Australia; a month later the organization was convicted of fraud in France.
Censorship

Submission + - Great Firewall of Belgium

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Popular ISP's of Belgium (Telenet, Belgacom, Belnet, Mobistar, Base of Scarlet) where ordered by Belgian courts to block childporn sites. It was Minister of Enterprise and Simplification Vincent Van Quickenborne in early 2009 who called for a flexible system for blocking websites. He then negotiated with the ISPs and the Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU) of the federal police to a closing agreement under which websites can be blocked. Unfortunately one of the first sites to be blocked is stopkinderporno.eu (stopchildporn). When you do surf to the blocked sites you see a large stop sign and the text: "You are being redirected to this page because the website you are attempting to visit provides content considered illegal by the Belgian law." The article and the google translation, other article on same story and and its translation

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