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The Internet

Pirate Bay Shuts Down Tracker, Switches To Distributed Hash Table 327

Posted by timothy from the look-at-our-semi-clean-hands dept.
think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."
Mars

NASA, European Space Agency Want To Go To Mars 129

Posted by Soulskill from the merging-to-beat-their-competitors dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are aiming to cooperate on all manner of robotic orbiters, landers and exploration devices for a future trip to Mars. Specifically, NASA and ESA recently agreed to consider the establishment of a new joint initiative to define and implement their scientific, programmatic, and technological goals for the exploration of Mars. The program would focus on several launch opportunities with landers and orbiters conducting astrobiological, geological, geophysical, climatological, and other high-priority investigations and aiming at returning samples from Mars in the mid-2020s."
Databases

The NoSQL Ecosystem 381

Posted by kdawson from the no-relation dept.
abartels writes 'Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as NoSQL databases. The fundamental problem is that relational databases cannot handle many modern workloads. There are three specific problem areas: scaling out to data sets like Digg's (3 TB for green badges) or Facebook's (50 TB for inbox search) or eBay's (2 PB overall); per-server performance; and rigid schema design.'
The Media

Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content 504

Posted by timothy from the what-part-of-come-in-don't-you-understand? dept.
Hugh Pickens writes Weston Kosova writes in Newsweek that Rupert Murdoch gave an impassioned speech to media executives in Beijing decrying that search engines — in particular Google — are stealing from him, because Google links to his stories but doesn't pay News Corp. to do so. 'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,' Murdoch says. 'But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.' But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.'"
PC Games (Games)

Star Guard — an Old-School Platformer Done Right 107

Posted by Soulskill from the 39-deaths-i-am-terrible dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a new game called Star Guard, a Flash-based platformer for Mac and PC that's a throwback to the early days of computer gaming, yet still entertaining. They describe it thus: 'Its greatest strength, to my mind, is throwing out the old-school traditions of difficulty. It does certainly get tricky, requiring the platformer standbys of carefully timed jumps and learning enemy patterns — there's something of a Metroid vibe to it. But you don't get punished for failing to meet one of its challenges — you're just plunged a few feet back to most recent checkpoint, and carry on. Lives are not finite, but the small mound of green pixels that mark your corpses are a maudlin testament to your ineptitude. However, death is useful — I ritually found myself sending in a suicide spaceman, taking out an enemy or a mine so that the path was clear for my next go. ... However, it doesn't leave people who pride themselves on their gaming skill, and demand their games to be hard, out in the cold. At the end of each level, your score alters dramatically depending on how many times you died.'"
The Internet

Finalists Chosen In Apps For America 2 Contest 64

Posted by kdawson from the you-paid-for-the-data-might-as-well-mash-it-up dept.
Andurin writes "Sunlight Labs has announced three finalists for its $25,000 Apps for America 2 competition. Forty-seven apps were submitted, each relying on Data.gov and providing a useful spin on government data. This We Know compiles federal information on a local level; govpulse is a searchable version of the Federal Register; and DataMasher allows simple mashups of government data sets. Voting is now open to determine the winner in the contest."
Cellphones

Open Source GSM Network At Dutch Hacker Convention 141

Posted by timothy from the working-sort-of-within-the-system dept.
solevita writes "Harald Welte, who's been interviewed previously by Slashdot, has written on his blog about operating an Open Source GSM network at the recent HAR2009 conference. Photographs and a description of the setup, run under license of the Dutch regulatory authority, are provided; essentially the setup consisted of a pair of BTS' (Base Transceiver Stations) running at 100mW transmit power each and tied to a tree. In turn these provided access to the Base Station Controller (BSC), in this case a Linux server in a tent running OpenBSC. The system authenticated users with a token sent via SMS; in total 391 users subscribed to the service and were able to use their phones as if they were on any other network. Independent researchers are increasingly examining GSM networks and equipment, Welte's work proves that GSM is in the realm of the hackers now and that this realm of mobile networking could be set for a few surprises in the future."
Transportation

Production of Boeing 787 Dreamliner Delayed Again 334

Posted by timothy from the was-just-a-dream dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Boeing has discovered microscopic wrinkles in the skin of the 787's fuselage and has ordered Italian supplier Alenia Aeronautica to halt production of fuselage sections at a factory in Italy. 'In two areas on the fuselage, the structure doesn't have the long-term strength that we want,' says Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter. To repair the wrinkles, additional layers of carbon composite material are being added to a 787 at the South Carolina factory and twenty-two other planes must also be patched. Production of the 787 has been fraught with problems with ill-fitting parts, casting doubt on Boeing's strategy of relying on overseas suppliers to build big sections of the aircraft before assembling them at its facilities near Seattle. The 787, built for fuel efficiency from lightweight carbon composite parts, is a priority for Boeing as it struggles with dwindling orders amid the global recession. Customers had been expecting the first of the new jets in the first quarter of 2010 — nearly two years earlier than they will be delivered. The delays have cost Boeing credibility and billions of dollars in anticipated expenses and penalties. Orders for 72 planes have been canceled already this year, although Boeing still has confirmed orders for over 800 aircraft."
Education

Study Catches Birds Splitting Into Separate Species 153

Posted by kdawson from the it's-not-me-it's-you dept.
webdoodle writes "A new study finds that a change in a single gene has sent two closely related bird populations on their way to becoming two distinct species. The study, published in the August issue of the American Naturalist, is one of only a few to investigate the specific genetic changes that drive two populations toward speciation."
Moon

NASA's LRO Captures High-Res Pics of Apollo Landing Sites 197

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the easy-to-photograph-a-sound-stage dept.
The Bad Astronomer is one of many readers who wrote to tell us about NASA's release of high-res photos showing the Apollo landing sites. The photos were taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and show the traces of earlier visits to the Moon. "The satellite reached lunar orbit June 23 and captured the Apollo sites between July 11 and 15. Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution."
Graphics

Choosing Better-Quality JPEG Images With Software? 291

Posted by timothy from the on-the-tip-of-my-script dept.
kpoole55 writes "I've been googling for an answer to a question and I'm not making much progress. The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images. There are many programs, free and costly, CLI or GUI oriented, for finding visually similar images — but I'm looking for a next step in the process. It's known that saving the same source image in JPEG format at different quality levels produces different images, the one at the lower quality having more JPEG artifacts. I've been trying to find a method to compare two visually similar JPEG images and select the one with the fewest JPEG artifacts (or the one with the most JPEG artifacts, either will serve.) I also suspect that this is going to be one of those 'Well, of course, how else would you do it? It's so simple.' moments."
The Internet

Comcast To Bring IPv6 To Residential US In 2010 281

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-ips-to-rate-limit dept.
darthcamaro writes "We all know that IPv4 address space is almost gone — but we also know that no major US carrier has yet migrated its consumer base, either. Comcast is now upping the ante a bit and has now said that they are seriously gearing up for IPv6 residential broadband deployment soon. 'Comcast plans to enter into broadband IPv6 technical trials later this year and into 2010,' Barry Tishgart, VP of Internet Services for Comcast said. 'Planning for general deployment is underway.'"

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