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Communications

Submission + - LA wants 911 callers to be able to send pics (mercurynews.com)

Submitted by
mikesd81
mikesd81 writes: "San Jose Mercury News reports the Police Commission on Tuesday approved a proposal to buy a software program that would allow witnesses with cell phone cameras to take pictures of accident and crime scenes and transmit the images to 911 call centers.

When a witness dials 911 to report an incident and has taken cell phone pictures of the scene, a dispatcher can send a text message to the caller requesting the image. The caller replies to the message with the images attached, according to software maker PowerPhone Inc. of Madison, Conn. "It seems like a good way to make our city safer and help law enforcement officials know about the crime scene," said City Council President Eric Garcetti, who introduced a motion in April asking the city to implement the program. The cost of the program hasn't been determined, but Garcetti estimated it will be "in the hundreds of thousands range." "If it saves a life, if it helps prevent a crime from occurring, then it's a price well worth it," Garcetti said."

Feed Ask Relaunches as Search Takes a Turn (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
The fourth-ranked search engine behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, launches a new design of its default search page Tuesday called Ask3D. Ask.com's new page finds multimedia content and presents it alongside traditional text-based results in a three-paned web interface.


GNOME

Submission + - Linus' patch is in Metacity 2.19.8 (gnome.org)

Submitted by deadowl
deadowl writes: Linus Torvalds' patch is in Metacity 2.19.8, an unstable release of Metacity. Hopefully it will stay around. Apparently the release is mostly about cleaning up RTL (right to left text) support. I guess that's good for those who go by Hebrew or Arabic. Still, Linus' patch for configuration of titlebar actions is what makes this release an eye-catcher because of what happened earlier this year.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft demands developer withdraw free software

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet reports : "Microsoft has demanded that a London-based Windows developer withdraws a version of his free debugging tool from distribution, and is claiming that the tool breaches its licensing conditions."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft bullies UK developer (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by
ZDOne
ZDOne writes: "Microsoft has shown that once again despite having a near bottomless marketing budget — it is supremely talented at coming across as ruthless and uncaring. The boys at Redmond have demanded — with very unsubtle lawyers' letters — that a London-based Windows developer withdraws a version of his free debugging tool from distribution, and is claiming that the tool breaches its licensing conditions. What's this about Microsoft finally seeing the light around the benefits of an open source community approach to software development — we are not convinced.

Microsoft angered by UK developer

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3928 7310,00.htm"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - New AACS "fix" hacked in a day

Submitted by
VincenzoRomano
VincenzoRomano writes: "ArsTechnica has just published an update to the neverending story about copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs and hacker hefforts against it. Quoting the original article:


The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top.
The hacker "BtCB" posted the new decryption key for AACS on the Freedom to Tinker web site, just one day after the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA) issued the key.
The article proposes a simple description of the protection schema and a brief look back at how the cracks have slowly chipped away at its effectiveness.
It seems it'll be a long way to an effective solution ... if any.
One could also argue whether all those money spent by the industry in this reace will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - RMS Talks about Binary Drivers and Open Source

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Newsforge has an article about a talk RMS recently gave to students at UCSD. RMS fielded a number of interesting questions relevant to the future of the free software movement including, "Do you support the Creative Commons license?" and "Can I use ATI and NVIDIA drivers because Mesa isn't nearly as complete?". Can we expect Linux ever to see main stream adoption with these persistent driver and licensing issues still hanging around?
Microsoft

Submission + - Gates and Jobs to share the stage

Submitted by Rob
Rob writes: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Apple chief Steve Jobs will make a rare joint appearance to wax lyrical about their visions of future technologies at the D: All Things Digital conference, which is to be held in Carlsbad, California. Expect no miraculous joint announcement from the event, which will be a 75-minute joint interview. "We expect to use the occasion to get them to reflect on both the past — how we got here — and the future," said Mossberg, who is personal tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, in an email. He declined to give any color about the questions he and Swisher are preparing, or any additional information. Most likely, Gates and Jobs will use the occasion to do some friendly sparring on their polar-opposite philosophies on personal computing. Jobs may bang on about the benefits of a software-hardware approach, while Gates may rattle off the joys of partnering with hardware partners.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Zune team getting amnesty for iPod use

Submitted by MsManhattan
MsManhattan writes: The Zune development team at Microsoft is apparently offering amnesty to employees who give up their iPods in favor of using the Zune MP3 player. An MSNBC employee has posted a photo on Flickr of the company's "iPod Amnesty Bin," which sports an image of a bitten green apple and the words "Bite me." Whether it's to be taken seriously or is a joke to boost employee morale is anyone's guess, and naturally no one at Microsoft was available for comment. From what can be seen in the photo, only a few early-model iPods have been deposited.
Space

Submission + - A Static Universe in 3 Trillion Years

Submitted by ultracool
ultracool writes: When Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter proposed a static model of the universe in the early 1900s, he was some 3 trillion years ahead of his time. Now, physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the visible horizon. What remains will be "an island universe" made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void.
Enlightenment

Submission + - China bans horror books to protect children

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China's capital is seizing ghost and horror books from shops to protect the "physical and mental health" of its youngsters, local media said on Tuesday. The tales are usually printed by small illegal publishers or circulated on the Internet, often borrowing from a rich pool of classic Chinese ghost stories, giving them up-to-date settings such as elevators or night buses. "The illegal publications are quite popular among students and are apt to harm the physical and mental health of young people," the newspaper quoted a government circular as saying. Collections of scary tales have found a frantic readership in China in recent years, especially among students and white-collar workers who find them a ready outlet from stressful lives. Among the blacklisted stories are adaptations of "Death Note", a Japanese manga comic series about a high school student who has a supernatural notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, the Beijing News said.
Yahoo!

Submission + - Yahoo! Photos to shut down

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Yahoo has finally made a decision regarding Yahoo! Photos vs. Flickr battle, and will be shutting down Yahoo! Photos by the fall of this year. Even though Yahoo! Photos currently maintains a higher share of Internet visits, Flickr growth convinced the company to maintain a single photo site from now on. Says USA Today: "Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr in 2004 with wife Caterina Fake, says the move is a "validation" of the central idea of Flickr: that photos in the digital age are very different from a physical print. "We saw it as a means of communication and connecting with people," says Butterfield, Flickr's general manager. "People can take a picture and get immediate feedback from all over the world, and you can't do that with a printed photo."""
Operating Systems

Submission + - No Windows on OLPCs (officially)

Submitted by
Kadin2048
Kadin2048 writes: "Despite reports last week in major news sources indicating that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was in negotiations with Microsoft to bring Windows XP to the low-cost platform, Walter Bender, president of Software and Content at OLPC, said in an interview with Ars Technica, "We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO.""

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