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Submission + - Libya Rebels in Tripoli, Gadhafi Securities Collap (hotenews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Libyan rebels charged over the capital Tripoli on Sunday and moved close to center with little resistance as Moammar Gadhafi's defenses collapsed and his regime
Crime

Police To Begin iPhone Iris Scans 197

Posted by samzenpus from the look-at-the-phone-citizen dept.
cultiv8 writes "Dozens of police departments nationwide are gearing up to use a tech company's already controversial iris- and facial-scanning device that slides over an iPhone and helps identify a person or track criminal suspects. The smartphone-based scanner, named Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, is made by BI2 Technologies in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and can be deployed by officers out on the beat or back at the station. An iris scan, which detects unique patterns in a person's eyes, can reduce to seconds the time it takes to identify a suspect in custody. This technique also is significantly more accurate than results from other fingerprinting technology long in use by police, BI2 says. When attached to an iPhone, MORIS can photograph a person's face and run the image through software that hunts for a match in a BI2-managed database of U.S. criminal records. Each unit costs about $3,000."
Piracy

Suppressed Report Shows Pirates Are Good Customers 291

Posted by samzenpus from the biting-the-hand-that-steals-from-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The movie and music industry think pirates are criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales. In order to prove this fact a number of studies have been commissioned to help demonstrate the effect a pirate has on sales of entertainment. GfK Group is one of the largest market research companies in the world and is often used by the movie industry to carry out research and studies into piracy. Talking to a source within GfK who wished to remain anonymous, Telepolis found that a recent study looking at pirates and their purchasing activities found them to be almost the complete opposite of the criminal parasites the entertainment industry want them to be. The study states that it is much more typical for a pirate to download an illegal copy of a movie to try it before purchasing. They are also found to purchase more DVDs than the average consumer, and they visit the movie theater more, especially for opening weekend releases which typically cost more to attend."
Communications

Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees 220

Posted by samzenpus from the fine-print-on-the-fine-print dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN reports that a one-year study by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee shows about $2 billion a year in 'mystery fees' show up on the landline phone bills of Americans. Known as cramming, the extra charges include:long distance service, subscriptions for Internet-related services, access to restricted websites, entertainment services with a 900 area code, collect calls, and club memberships. The Commerce Committee's report says phone companies receive a small fee — often just a dollar or two — for allowing charges from third-party vendors to appear on their bills but due to the large number of customers the charges eventually add up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the panel people are unaware their phone numbers can be charged almost like a credit card and her investigations indicate customers are not even getting services in return. 'My office has yet to see a legitimate third-party charge on a bill,' says Madigan, who added most customers don't detect the charges on their bills. Senator Jay Rockefeller says Congress needs to pass legislation to protect customers from unauthorized third-party charges on their phone bills because the telephone industry has failed to prevent the practice. 'It's pretty obvious at this point that voluntary guidelines aren't solving this problem,' says Rockefeller. 'It's time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all.'"
Botnet

Submission + - Microsoft: Rustock Take-Down Shows Botnet Can Fall (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Microsoft said Tuesday that the coordinated take-down of the Rustock botnet and follow-up efforts had purged the malware from over half of the PCs once controlled by Russian hackers. 'This shows that disruptive action [against botnets] is viable and possible,' said Richard Boscovich, a senior attorney with Microsoft's Digital Crime Unit. 'Once you start taking apart the infrastructure of botnets, you drive up the cost of [botnet gangs] doing business," Boscovich told Computerworld. 'Disruptive action is just as good as trying to arrest someone.' Since March, when Microsoft lawyers and U.S. Marshals seized Rustock command-and-control servers at five Web hosting providers in seven U.S. cities, the number of Windows PCs infected with the malware has dropped worldwide from 1.6 million to just over 700,000 as of June 18, Boscovich reported in a blog post Tuesday. Microsoft also released a detailed report (PDF document) on Rustock, the take-down effort it led, and the impact of its anti-botnet campaign."
Image

Bug With "Singing Penis" Is World's Loudest Screenshot-sm 117

Posted by samzenpus from the animal-idol dept.
sciencehabit writes "The world's loudest animal relative to its size has been revealed to be a tiny bug with a big organ. The water boatman, Micronecta scholtzi, rattles its penis along grooves in its abdomen to produce a chattering song—that registers at 99.2 decibels—about the volume of a loud orchestra heard from the front row. Even though the water boatman does its 'singing' from the bottom of rivers to attract mates, humans walking along the riverbank can clearly hear it. The area along its abdomen that the bug uses to make the noise is only about the width of a human hair, and researchers aren't sure exactly how it produces so loud a song."
Government

Homeland Security Running NBC-Owned PSAs 240

Posted by Soulskill from the help-us-help-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A few months ago, Homeland Security's ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) group started placing an anti-piracy video PSA on various domains that it had seized. What it didn't say was who created the PSA. A Freedom of Information Act request by Techdirt has revealed that the videos are actually created & owned by NBC Universal, but nowhere does Homeland Security publicly admit this. As Techdirt writes: 'Could you imagine how the press would react if, say, the FDA ran PSAs that were created and owned by McDonald's without making that clear to the public? How about if the Treasury Department ran a PSA created and owned by Goldman Sachs? So, shouldn't we be asking serious questions about why Homeland Security and ICE are running a one-sided, misleading corporate propaganda video, created and owned by a private company, without mentioning the rather pertinent information of who made it?'"
Sony

Geohot Denies Involvement In PSN Hack Attack 136

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-what-i'd-say-too dept.
Stoobalou writes "Soon-to-be-celebrity hacker and thorn in Sony's side George 'Geohot' Hotz has denied any involvement in the ongoing breach at the PlayStation Network. The 21-year-old hacker — who is best known for creating the first software-based hack for the iPhone, and getting hypervisor access and exposing the root key to the PlayStation 3 — has made it clear that he had nothing to do with filleting Sony's online gaming servers, saying 'I'm not crazy.'"
The Internet

White House Wants New Copyright Law Crackdown 652

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-that'll-work-out-fine dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The White House is concerned that 'illegal streaming of content' may not be covered by criminal law, saying 'questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works.' To resolve that ambiguity, it wants a new law to 'clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances'""
Games

Kinect Self-Awareness Hack 82

Posted by samzenpus from the how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess? dept.
One can only imagine how enraged the Kinect would have been if it found out he had broken the ToS.
Twitter

Twitter Discards Client UI Community 127

Posted by Soulskill from the pack-your-junk dept.
Antique Geekmeister writes "Twitter has just decided to discard the community of developers who've created interesting and innovative UI applications. The announcement shows that they intend to switch from the 'bazaar' model of development to the 'cathedral,' with much tighter control of user interfaces for 'security' and 'consistency.'"
Government

Senate Passes Landmark Patent Reform Bill 362

Posted by samzenpus from the problem-solved dept.
inkscapee writes "The US Senate is congratulating itself for passing a 'landmark' piece of patent reform legislation. Some key elements are 'first to file' instead of first to invent, and ending fee diversion, which means fees paid to the Patent Office will actually fund the Patent Office. Curiously, this practice has resulted in a backlog of 700,000 patent applications. The House is reportedly working on a similar bill, and soon harmony and rationality will triumph."
IT

A Letter On Behalf of the World's PC Fixers 638

Posted by CmdrTaco from the and-stop-clicking-links-from-strangers dept.
Barence writes "PC Pro's Steve Cassidy has written a letter on behalf of all the put-upon techies who've ever been called by a friend to fix their PC. His bile is directed at a friend who put a DVD bought on holiday into their laptop, and then wondered what went wrong. 'Once you stuck that DVD in there and started saying "yes, OK" to every resulting dialog box, you sank the whole thing,' Cassidy writes. 'It doesn't take 10 minutes to sort that out; it requires a complete machine reload to properly guarantee the infection is history. No, there is no neat and handy way I've been keeping secret that allows you to retain your extensive collection of stolen software licenses loaded on that laptop. I do disaster recovery, not disaster participation.'"
Desktops (Apple)

Backdoor Trojan For Windows Ported To Mac OS 263

Posted by CmdrTaco from the run-for-cover dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Remote Access Trojan (RAT) for Windows, known as darkComet, has been ported to Mac OS X. The new backdoor Trojan is not yet finished, but it could be indicative of more underground programmers attempting to take advantage of Apple's growing market share."

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