dodgerfan - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google to acquire Postini (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

Dynamoo

on Monday July 09, 2007 @09:17AM

Dynamoo writes: "Google has announced that it is to acquire Postini — a company best known for its corporate spam filtering and security service, but also active in Instant Messaging and compliance areas.

The deal is to purchase Postini for $625m in cash. The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio, and Google will also acquire several very large Blue Chip customers that have previously eluded it. More details can be found here."

Submission + - Swedish ISPs to reveal file-sharers' IP addresses

Submitted by paulraps on Monday July 09, 2007 @09:11AM

paulraps writes: Sweden's Justice Department is backing a new proposal that would enable copyright holders to find out the identities of people illegally sharing their material on the internet. If the draft proposal results in new legislation it will allow courts to order internet providers to reveal the identities of people suspected of sharing files containing copyrighted material.

Submission + - BJ the Linux powered robotic dog

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09, 2007 @09:10AM

An anonymous reader writes: IXS Japan has announced a 4 legged walking robot BJ which is almost the same size as the Sony Aibo. The Linux powered dog has 3 joints for each leg (12 in all), 2 for neck, 1 for jaw and 16 for tail. It is powered by an i.MX Core 11 CPU, 64MB RAM and 16MB Flash ROM. BJ has a 350,000 pixel CMOS sensor (30 fps), 1 x Distance sensor, 1 x Acceleration sensor and 4 x Metal sphere sensors. It goes on sale later this year for $4850.

Submission + - China's new ballistic-missile sub on Google Earth

Submitted by MsManhattan on Monday July 09, 2007 @09:09AM

MsManhattan writes: A rare public view of China's new ballistic-missile submarine is available on Google Earth, according to Hans Kristensen, a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists. The Chinese military typically keeps a low profile, by the image was captured by the commercial Quickbird satellite late last year. While some features of the sub are discernible from the photograph, such as the overall length, 'the picture was not clear enough to resolve a debate over whether the Jin-class submarine has tubes for 12 or 16 nuclear-tipped missiles,' Kristensen says.

Submission + - AMD-ATI TV Wonder 650 PCIe Card Launched (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid on Monday July 09, 2007 @08:56AM

MojoKid writes: ATI's TV Wonder series of TV tuners have been around for a long time, with recent flavors supporting HDTV tuning and output for free-to-air programming only. Today AMD-ATI has launched their new TV Wonder 650 PCI Express-based card. This review and showcase explores the card's capabilities with both local air HDTV feeds, as well as cable driven local HDTV content. The new TV Wonder 650 utilizes a PCIe X1 slot but the product still doesn't support cable card just yet. The addition of an FM radio tuner was a nice bonus though.

Submission + - IRS Tracking Party Affiliation (thenewstribune.com) 1

Submitted by

cybermage

on Monday July 09, 2007 @08:00AM

cybermage writes: "According to the News Tribune, the IRS is tracking the party affiliation of taxpayers in the over twenty states that require identification of party affiliation on voter registration forms. The IRS is using the voter registration data to try to locate tax cheats. Some in Congress are looking to take steps to have the IRS purge such information and put a halt to IRS plans to outsource collections until the issue is resolved."

Submission + - Germany's Home Seretary plans new anti terror laws

Submitted by on Monday July 09, 2007 @07:11AM

An anonymous reader writes: According to Germany minister of Interior Wolfgang Schaeuble terror suspects should not be able to use the phone. Heise reports about the new plans of the controversial politician:

In an interview with German newsweekly Der Spiegel, Germany's Home Secretary says that "conspiracy" needs to be made a crime and "dangerous parties" need to be "incarcerated" as "combatants." [...] Schäuble also says that the "intentional killing of suspects" is not a taboo strictly ruled out by the German Basic Law, but rather a "legal problem" that the Home Secretary says "still has to be looked into." The example he mentioned was the possible capture of Osama bin Laden. Schäuble is thus calling for the German government to be given more legal "leeway."[...] Germany's Home Secretary believes that these measures are necessary because Germany is "in the crossfire of Islamic terrorism"; he also remembers the time before September 11, 2001. For that reason, Schäuble says the "monitoring of communication" is "vital.

Schaeuble plans also to enact a law that would allow state authorities to search computers per internet connection, but many experts suspect that the Federal Police is not capable to enforce this "online searches".

Submission + - PA budget fight brings partial shutdown (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

JagsLive

on Monday July 09, 2007 @06:36AM

JagsLive writes: "AP reports, " Gov. Ed Rendell late Sunday ordered a range of state government services shut down and placed about a third of the state work force on indefinite unpaid furlough after frantic last-minute negotiations failed to break a budget stalemate. Rendell, appearing outside his Capitol office, said the shutdown would go forward but added that he was optimistic that he and legislators could come to an agreement within a day. ""

Submission + - Unlimited Virgin Media ISP not quite so Unlimited (virginmedia.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday July 09, 2007 @06:24AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "For a while, since Virgin Media rolled out 20mbit broadband across the UK they quietly set about throttling every connection that consumes X amount of bandwidth during peek times. Causing the connection to drop from, 20mbit all the way down to 5mbit. The cheaper packages suffer further, as you will see from the information they provide.

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traf fic.html

They still provide 'unlimited' service, according to their advertising but that is not true."

Submission + - Recovering A Hosed HD... For Dummies 1

Submitted by AC on Monday July 09, 2007 @06:03AM

AC writes: If you have ever lost tens of gigabytes of data due to sudden hard drive failure (which, of course, typically happens the day before your backup solution was scheduled to be deployed), you are not alone in this. This article documents for the common good how to recover nearly everything off a badly broken drive thanks to a variety of tools ranging from a freezer to a small Python script.

Submission + - Great Firewall of EU

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05, 2007 @01:57PM

An anonymous reader writes: Captain's Quarters points out that the EU wants to ban the communication of bomb-making instructions on the Internet. ISPs would be responsible for blocking sites with undesirable content.

Submission + - MP3Spark.com's Traffic Soars, Then Site Goes Down

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05, 2007 @01:54PM

An anonymous reader writes: For those who questioned whether former AllofMP3.com users would really switch over to MP3Sparks.com a look at Alexa shows that traffic to MP3Sparks shot up so high it briefly became one of the top 1000 sites on the Net. Briefly, because the site is now offline and no one knows if it's because the site was downed by the heavy traffic or because the Russian govt shut it down too.

Submission + - Making the sky searchable

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Thursday July 05, 2007 @01:41PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "Computer scientists at the University of Toronto (U of T) have teamed up with astronomers at New York University on an ambitious project. You can send them a picture of the sky above your head and their special software will identify the stars that are in the image. In other words, their computer program will make night sky searchable. The team is organizing and mixing images coming from astronomical databases with images coming from 'all kinds of cameras, amateur telescopes, large ground-based telescopes, and space telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope.' This specialized search engine is still in beta-version, but is available to both professional and amateur astronomers. Read more for additional details and pictures of the Lagoon Nebula before and after processing."

Submission + - Yahoo! Photos closing up shop in September (yahoo.com)

Submitted by ApolloX on Thursday July 05, 2007 @01:28PM

ApolloX writes: Just got an e-mail from Yahoo! (confirmed on their website) saying the following:

"For some time now, we've supported two great photo sharing services: Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we've decided to close Yahoo! Photos to focus all our efforts on Flickr — the award-winning photo sharing community that TIME Magazine has called 'completely addictive.' We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT."

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