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Government

Submission + - UK IPv6 Promotion Body Gives Up The Ghost (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "A government backed body that was supposed to promote IPv6 has shut down, saying it can't do its job unless the government shows some support for the new Internet protocol. The volunteers on 6UK said that without any real government support organisations would find no reason to move to IPv6. “It beggars belief that you can’t access any UK government website using IPv6,” said the group's spokesman Philip Sheldrake."
Microsoft

Submission + - Outrage at Microsoft offshoring tax in the UK (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Master Of Ninja
Master Of Ninja writes: After the ongoing row about companies not paying a fair share of tax in the United Kingdom, and with companies such as Starbucks, Amazon and Google being in the headlines, focus has now turned to Microsoft. Whilst the tax arrangements are strictly legal, there has been outrage on how companies are avoiding paying their fair share of tax generated in the country.
Network

Submission + - O2 Compensates Users With 10% Refund After UK Network Outage (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by AlistairCharlton
AlistairCharlton writes: Millions of O2 customers who were left without service will be refunded with a ten percent discount from their September bill.

After a national network outage saw 7.6 million customers left without service, O2 said that a refund, equivalent to ten percent of customers' monthly bill, will be handed out to effected customer.
Programming

Submission + - Twitter Is Officially Killing the API (silicon-news.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Several blog posts on the Twitter development blog, statements issued, app updates and the now-tarnished Twitter-LinkedIn deal following the micro-blogging service cutting LinkedIn off from using its API all strongly support the fact that Twitter is phasing out its API in lieu of forcing users to use its own access methods to drive ad clicks and monetization. But is the service shooting itself in the foot by killing off custom user-facing apps, automated publishing methods and other niche apps in favor of the bland stock app?
Privacy

Submission + - Hidden government chemical signature laser scanners coming. (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by reubenavery
reubenavery writes: Everything about you will be written all over your face. Via Gizmodo:

Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 164 feet (50 meters) away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body. According to the undersecretary for science and technology of the Department of Homeland Security, you might start seeing [these scanners] in airports as soon as 2013. And, since it’s extremely portable, will this technology extend beyone the airport or border crossings and into police cars, with officers looking for people on the street with increased levels of adrenaline in their system to detain in order to prevent potential violent outbursts? And will your car be scanned at stoplights for any trace amounts of suspicious substances? Would all this information be recorded anywhere?
Science

Submission + - "Exercise" Shown to Improve the Performance of Lab-Grown Muscle Implants (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: We all know that you need to exercise if you want to develop your muscles. As it turns out, however, exercise also makes lab-grown muscle implants more effective when introduced to the body. Scientists from North Carolina’s Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have discovered that after being gently expanded and contracted, implants placed in lab animals were better able to stimulate new muscle growth than implants that were left “unexercised.”

Submission + - Copying metadata from one file to another

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since I had a daughter a year ago, I've found that the number of videos we've been taking has grown, and I'm starting to worry about hard drive space. I know that at some point I'll need to get a bigger hard drive, but I also don't really like the idea of storing the videos as uncompressed AVIs, which is what my camera stores them as. I've been able to save significant space by converting the videos to high quality MP4s using ffmpeg, but I ran into one problem with this approach—the metadata from the original video isn't copied over when I convert the file (things like date taken). I've tried using exiftool to copy the metadata, but it doesn't support writing to MP4 files yet. So, I though I'd ask Slashdot—does anyone have any suggestions on how I can copy the metadata from my original videos to my compressed versions?
Iphone

Submission + - New iPhone on track for fall release, 4G LTE and NFC confirmed (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: There are several reports suggesting that Apple has begun final production of its next-generation iPhone already, but we have learned from a trusted source that this isn’t quite true. Apple goes through multiple stages before a product is manufactured, and two of these include the “engineering verification test” stage and the “design verification test” phase. Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone is currently in the EVT3 stage, the third revision of the engineering test stage, and has not yet entered the DVT stage. 4G LTE and NFC are also confirmed to be included in Apple's next iPhone...
Science

Submission + - Punishing Cheaters: Are We the Dark Knight—Or Just Dark? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you could confront the pickpocket who ripped you off in the subway, would you simply demand your wallet back, or would you seek vengeance? Your decision to punish the thief might hinge on whether the thief ended up richer than you, a new study suggests. Scientists have found that our desire to crack down on wrongdoers is motivated by a sense of unfairness rather than mere revenge.
Software

Submission + - Jolla Confirms MeeGo App Store is Coming (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by
DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: "Jolla Mobile's MD, Jussi Hurmola has confirmed that it's first smartphone will be backed up by an app store at launch later this year — pointing out that a version of Angry Birds is already available on MeeGo.

And really, all you need to make an app store successful is Angry birds right?"
Security

Submission + - U.S. Navy preps for drone dogfights (cnet.com)

Submitted by
jehan60188
jehan60188 writes: "MONTEREY, Calif.--Imagine an aerial dogfight of epic proportions: Fifty aircraft on a side, each prowling the sky for advantage over dozens of adversaries.

If Timothy Chung has his way, such a battle could take place over Southern California by 2015. But before you worry that war is coming to American soil, you should know that Chung's vision is really about a high-tech game of Capture the Flag played by as many as a hundred small, lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles playing their role in a grand challenge of an experiment.

Chung is an assistant professor in the Systems Engineering department at the Naval Postgraduate School here, and one of his long-term projects is figuring out ways to help the U.S. military maintain an advantage in a world where aerial drones have dropped so much in price and complexity that there is substantial concern our enemies could soon have the ability to use them as weapons against us in combat."
Microsoft

Submission + - Skype 'Supernodes' Re-engineering may facilitate wiretapping (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Microsoft is re-engineering the architecture of Skype and the hacker community has already started sounding alarms that this change to Skype will enable law enforcements to spy on calls very easily. The matter of discussion here is whether the takeover of Skype by Microsoft was for betterment of the technology underlying the peer-to-peer VoIP service or is there a negative side of this? Skype’s technology is peer to peer VoIP but, the technology used is not purely p2p. It is a semi-distributed p2p network where there are these ‘supernodes’ that are used to connect the two end parties. The technology automatically turns some users into ‘supernodes’. A 2010 outage in Skype’s network was attributed to a software update that didn’t reach all the ‘supernodes’. Microsoft believes that relocating these ‘supernodes’ into its own secure data centres by using dedicated Linux servers would be the ideal way of preventing such outages from happening again.
Earth

Submission + - Small, big-brained animals dodge extinction (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "Large-brained animals may be less likely to go extinct in a changing world, perhaps because they can use their greater intelligence to adapt their behavior to new conditions, according to an analysis presented to a meeting of conservation biologists this week.
Plotting brain size against body size creates a tidy curve. But some species have bigger or smaller brains than the curve would predict for their body size. And a bigger brain-to-body-size ratio usually means a smarter animal.
The researchers looked at the sizes of such deviations from the curve and their relationships to the fates of two groups of mammalian species — ‘palaeo’ and ‘modern’. Analysis of each group produced similar results: species that weighed less than 10 kilograms and had big brains for their body size were less likely to have gone extinct or be placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list for endangered species. For species larger than about 10 kilograms, the advantage of having a large brain seems to be swamped by the disadvantage of being big — such as attracting the unwelcome attention of humans."

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