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Submission + - Hasbro Claims IP Rights for Nations' Borders (google.com) 1

Submitted by JTech452
JTech452 writes: Hasbro is threatening legal action against Mario Ferrari, maker of the free "TurboRisk" (Now TurboRSC). TurboRisk is an excellent pc rendition of the classic risk, with lots of additional options. While trademark infringement of the name "RISK" is obvious, and was corrected by swapping to TurboRSC, Hasbro has gone so far as to claim rights to world map borders and territory connections. Surely a company can't claim IP (Intellectual Property) rights in how real nations border eachother and connect (Other than, perhaps, the made-up over-the-ocean connections). There are some differences in the TurboRisk, Hasbro Risk, and actual world map from that era. How different from the world map must the Hasbro map be for Hasbro to have IP rights? How different from the Hasbro map must the TurboRisk map be to be safe from litigation? By the way, if you like risk, TurboRSC is by far the best option for PC.
The Internet

Submission + - Blekko Launches a Search Engine with Bias (cnet.com)

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Previous specialized search engines including Cuil, Hakia, Powerset, Clusty, and RedZ--each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. Now Rafe Needleman reports in Cnet that along comes Blekko whose claim to fame is that you can tilt your search results in the direction you like by using a category of bias, like "liberal" or "conservative." Categorization lists are applied by appending a "slashtag." The query, "climate change /conservative" will give you politically slanted results, for example. "Climate change /science" will restrict your results to hits from scientific Web sites. Blekko won't have a real, Web-wide impact unless its concept--that bias is good and more aggressive search filtering is needed --gets some traction writes Needleman but "Blekko is a solid alternative to Google and Bing for anyone, and more importantly it's got great potential for researchers, librarians, journalists, or anyone who's willing to put some work into how their search engine functions in order to get better results.""
The Internet

Submission + - Facebook developers sold User IDs (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has revealed that app developers for the platform have been selling user-identifying data to a data broker.

The anti-social time-wasting site confessed on its developer blog that it had discovered "some instances" a data broker was paying developers for user IDs.
Hardware

Submission + - MIPS targets Arm, Intel in tablet, phone markets (goodgearguide.com.au) 1

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "MIPS Technologies has said it will put its processor architecture in tablets and smartphones as it prepares to duel rivals Arm and Intel in those fast-growing markets. In September, MIPS released the MIPS32 1074K family of application processors, which it hopes to push into mobile devices. The 1074K is scalable up to 1.5GHz and is capable of multithreading, which the company claims will give it a leg up on Arm processors."

Submission + - Phone Converter for iPod Touch Released (dcemu.co.uk)

Submitted by YokimaSun
YokimaSun writes: The iPod Touch has developed into one of the best gaming consoles thanks to the app store but also thanks to the jailbreaking of each new firmware which im sure gets right up Apple's Nose, the only thing the iTouch hasnt been able to do is to be used as a phone like its sibling the iPhone, well now thanks to some hardware geeks in China the iPod Touch can be used as a phone thanks to the Worldwide release of a Phone Converter for the system, you need to have a jailbroken Itouch to use it.
Advertising

Submission + - Fighting ad blockers with captcha ads (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Living in an ad-free internet thanks to ad blockers? That could be a thing of the past if software firm NuCatcha has their way: make captchas into ads. 'Instead of the traditional squiggly word that users have to decipher, the new system shows them a video advert with a short message scrolling across it. The user has to identify and retype part of the message to proceed. Companies including Electronic Arts, Wrigley and Disney have already signed up.'
United States

Submission + - White House Plans Open Access for Research

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. Now the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President is launching a “Public Access Policy Forum” to determine whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented. "The NIH model has a variety of features that can be evaluated, and there are other ways to offer the public enhanced access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications," OSTP says in the request for information. "The best models may [be] influenced by agency mission, the culture and rate of scientific development of the discipline, funding to develop archival capabilities, and research funding mechanisms." The OSTP will conduct an interactive, online discussion that will focus on three major questions: Should this policy be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented? In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information? What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? "It's very encouraging to see the Obama Administration focus on ensuring public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research as a key way to maximize our collective investment in science," says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition"

Submission + - Music while programming 6

Submitted by BubbaDoom
BubbaDoom writes: In our cublicle-ville, we have programmers intermixed with accounting, customer support and marketing. As a programmer, it is our habit to put on our headphones and listen to our portable music players to drown out all of the noise from everyone else. The boss recently sent an email just to the programmers demanding that we do not use our music players at work because he thinks it distracts us from our jobs and causes us to make mistakes. Of course we've explained to him that the prattle from the other people is much much more distracting but he insists his policy is the right one. What is the /. community's experience with music at work for programmers?

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