destinyland writes "A Japanese company is preparing limited mass production of a cybernetic bodysuit which dramatically increases user strength up to ten times. The "Hybrid Assistive Limb" suit synchronizes movements of a mechanical exoskeleton to biological nerve signals detected by biopads on the body. (Originally envisioned for people with disabilities, the suit also has industrial applications, and the company is planning annual production of 400 units at $4,200 apiece.) Its battery life is five hours, according to the company's web site, which promises they're also opening an EU branch to begin sales outside of Japan."

FreedomFighter writes "In a Cloud Standards breakthrough, the FSF is teaming up with major cloud computing vendors to form the Free and Open Cloud Alliance (FOCA), a trade marketing association supporting Free(TM) and Open Cloud Computing (FOCC). The new CloudLeft Public License (CPL) is based on the ideas that data wants to be Free(TM) and all your Cloud(TM) are belong to us. It closes the 'user data loophole' by requiring the release of not only the source code for a CloudLeft platform but also the data passing through it. This renders most security issues void while appropriately setting the users' expectation of privacy. 'In the past, I've said that "cloud" is complete gibberish, but while discussing fashion during my weekly squash game with Stallman he convinced me that this was a great opportunity.' said Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. RMS, who previously said that 'cloud' is worse than stupidity was also pleased about the return of the advertising clause, requiring the use of the 'GNU/Cloud' name, as he is 'tired of haranguing the GNU/Linux community about this.' Full details will be available next Monday, including the first marketing and outreach program — 'FOCC: IT in 2009.'"

Microsoft has announced the upcoming release of Alpine Legend for the Xbox 360. Building upon the established titles of the music game genre, Alpine Legend takes you to the Swiss mountaintops, where you and your friends play up to three Alpenhorns at a time while a fourth yodels along. When you're done playing, you can disassemble the 8-foot horns for easy storage. "Jam with alpine legends like Franz 'The Manz' Lang and Johann Hornbostel. Shake the mountain tops with 100 classic Alphorn tracks including, 'Whose spit is in my horn?' and 'More goat bell (It needs).'"

Shlomi Fish writes "O'Reilly is publishing a new book titled 'Mastering cat,' about the UNIX 'cat' command. Here is an interview O'Reilly-Net conducted with the author about it. Read it to see if this book should be part of your bookshelf of technical books."

eldavojohn writes "Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ... as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second — and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time — we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. The third — a piece missing in most AI reasoning work thus far — was to give the entity access to a rich, realistic world from which to learn and upon which it could act directly.' It quickly started its own blog and YouTube video. Two hours after midnight, CADIE announced independence on its blog and decided to leave Google to venture out into the world. "

Jibbler writes "Following the recent Pwn2Own competition, in which Firefox, IE8 and Safari all fell quickly to exploits, Netcraft has observed a surge in popularity of the text-based Lynx browser. Netcraft points out that Lynx supports the latest cryptographic ciphers, and at least one online banking site has seen Lynx usage overtake that of Internet Explorer and Firefox. To boost Lynx's excellent security history, Netcraft has even developed a version of its anti-phishing toolbar for Lynx."

teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting: "A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."

In a concerted effort to compete with more popular MMOs like World of Warcraft, we've decided to add an Achievement system to Slashdot. We've retroactively granted around 900,000 achievements to our logged in users. You can view them from your user page, or you can see my list if you're curious what a REAL achiever looks like. Many achievements have been sprinkled throughout the system and are awaiting discovery by dedicated Slashdot users, but a starter list of achievements is in the FAQ. I'll toss you one freebie: you can register your wow main for points if you're that kind of person. Now go forth and achieve!

eldavojohn writes "A bill introduced today, similar to one that died in 2007, would reform the plague of National Security Letters and greatly narrow their scope. On top of that, it would mandate the destruction of any wrongly obtained information discovered in audits by the Inspector General that uncovered widespread improprieties in NSLs."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "After receiving a Rule 11 Sanctions Motion (PDF) in a Houston, Texas, case, UMG Recordings v. Lanzoni, the RIAA lawyers thought better of proceeding with the case, and agreed to voluntarily dismiss the case 'with prejudice', which means it is over and cannot be brought again. The defendant's motion papers detailed some of the RIAA's litigation history against innocent individuals, such as Capitol Records v. Foster and Atlantic Recording v. Andersen, and argued that the awarding of attorneys fees in those cases has not sufficiently deterred repetition of the misconduct, so that a stronger remedy — Rule 11 sanctions — is now called for."

je ne sais quoi writes "The Apple rumor mill is churning today. Reuters and the DOW Jones news wire are reporting that an anonymous source in Taiwan has leaked that Apple has ordered some 10-inch touch-screens from WinTek, the maker of the touch-screen for the iPhone. It looks like an Apple netbook could possibly be in the works for a delivery date in Q3 of this year, in time for back-to-school sales. CNET and Engadget have completely unsubstantiated mock-ups."

krou writes "The BBC is reporting that the Information Commissioner's Office has shut down a company in the UK for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. It claims that the company, The Consulting Association in Droitwich, Worcs, ran a secret system that it repeatedly denied existed for 15 years, selling workers' confidential data, including union activities, to building firms, allowing potential employers to unlawfully vet job applicants. About 3,213 workers were in the database, and other information included data on personal relationships, political affiliations, and employment histories. More than 40 firms are believed to have used the service, paying a £3,000 annual fee, and each of them will be investigated, too." The article says that The Consulting Association faces a £5,000 fine — after pulling in £1.8 million over 15 years with its illegal blacklist.