TuringTest writes "A commission of the Spanish Congress has rejected a law that allowed the closure of web sites that provide unauthorized downloads. The government couldn't reach enough support from its allies, not because they opposed the law in principle, but because of the way it was redacted and the lack of negotiation. Recently the Spanish Senate rejected a law on net neutrality. Also the Wikileaks cables disclosed pressure from the USA on the Spanish government to pass a law to reduce Internet sharing of music and media, which is legal in Spain."

cylonlover writes "NASA's light-aircraft partner, CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency), is running a competition to design a low-cost, quiet, short take-off personal aircraft, that requires little, if any, fossil fuel. It envisions the resulting Suburban Air Vehicles taking off and landing at small neighborhood 'pocket airports.' At last week's Future of Electric Vehicles conference, CAFE president Dr. Brien Seeley outlined just how those airports would work."

Psychophrenes writes "A new episode in French internet legislation — French ministers have passed a bill (original in French) allowing the government to add any website to a black list, which access providers will have to enforce. This black list will be defined by the government only, without requiring the intervention of the legal system. Although originally intended against pedo-pornographic websites, this bill is already outdated, as was Hadopi in its time, and instead paves the way for a global censorship of the 'French internet.'"

wiredog writes "The Atlantic reports the news that the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has a new section of their website dedicated to documenting COBOL's history. An exhibit will open at the museum this spring."

Zitchas writes "Following the news of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon module on-board, and its arrival on orbit, we now have the news that is has successfully re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific. As their website proudly claims, this is the first time a private corporation has recovered a spacecraft they orbited, joining the ranks of a few space nations and the EU space agency. A great step forward for space travel. Hopefully everything continues to go well for them."

Flixie writes "Swedish newspaper dagens Nyheter reports: '...[S]everal key figures behind the website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational or religious documents have resigned in protest against the controversial leader Julian Assange only to launch a new service for the so-called whistleblowers. The goal: to leak sensitive information to the public."

kaptink writes "The self proclaimed hacker that waged a DDoS attack on Wikileaks has been arrested and has had all his equipment seized. What is interesting is that local police conducted the raid and not a federal authority such as the FBI. The Jester (th3j35t3r) who has a reputation for attacking websites he disagrees with is said to be trying to raise $10,000 in expected lawyers fees. If anyone is going to be alight in the whole Wikileaks debacle, its going to be the lawyers. Personally I think anyone who spells their nick with numbers in an effort to look 'leet' deserves to have their computer confiscated."

DMandPenfold writes "Sarah Palin, who is widely tipped as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012, has said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda." So that means we should spend billions of dollars and not catch him? Good plan.

wiredmikey writes "The Internet's leading architects have considered the rapid growth and fragmentation of core routing tables one of the most significant threats to the long-term stability and scalability of the Internet. In April 2010, about 15% of the world's Internet traffic was hijacked by a set of servers owned by China Telecom. In the technical world, this is typically called a prefix hijack, and it happened due to a couple of wrong tweaks made at China Telecom. Whether this was intentional or not is unknown, but such routing accidents are all too common online. While BGP is the de-facto protocol for inter-domain routing on the Internet, actual routing occurs without checking whether the originator of the route is authorized to do so. The global routing system itself is made up of autonomous systems (AS) which are simply loosely interconnected routing domains. Each autonomous system decides, unilaterally, and even arbitrarily, to trust everything it hears from any other AS, to use that information without validation, and to further transmit that information to its other peers..."

An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN. The project is called P2P-DNS and according to the project's wiki, this is how the project is described: 'P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.'"

An anonymous reader writes "This might very well be the nerdiest site we'll ever encounter... Linux Radio is an online radio station broadcasting the Linux kernel! Each time someone visit the site, a random source file is selected and read loudly by a virtual speaker materialized through the open source speech synthesizer eSpeak. Will it prove useful to anyone is probably a difficult question to answer, but the excitement provided is worth experiencing at least once. However, this concept proves once more the advantages of open source over proprietary software making such achievements impossible : whoever in his right mind would want to listen to binary files loudly?"

geek4 writes "A Dutch company has launched what it calls 'the world's simplest phone,' targeting users who are sick of new-generation models. Only capable of making and receiving calls, John's Phone is dubbed the world's simplest mobile phone, specifically designed for anti-smartphones users. It does not provide any hi-tech features. No apps. No Internet. No camera. No text messaging. All you have to do — in fact, all you can do — is call, talk and hang up."

Jamie handed us Satan's Data Connection. You see, sane and rational human being, the USB logo is actually in the shape of a trident, and the obvious action to Evangelical Christians in Brazil is to ban its use. Hopefully they don't mispronounce SCSI and find themselves lusting after their PCs.

olsmeister writes "For 18 minutes this past April, 15% of the world's internet traffic was routed through servers in China. This includes traffic from both .gov and .mil US TLDs." The crazy thing is that this happened months ago, and nobody noticed. Hope you're encrypting your super-secret stuff.

There won't be any cheating in professor Wafaa Bilal's class anymore. The New York University photography professor is having a camera surgically implanted in the back of his head. The camera will take a still picture every minute for one year, and the best shots will be put on display at a new museum in Qatar. Visitors can also watch a live stream of images from the camera which has some NYU administrators and faculty worried about student privacy. "Obviously you don't want students to be under the burden of constant surveillance; it's not a good teaching environment," said Fred Ritchin, associate chairman of the department.