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Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Apple's SproutCore, OSS Javascript-based Web Apps (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF
99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes: AppleInsider published an article about Apple's new SproutCore Web application development framework, utilizing Javascript and some nifty HTML 5 to create a "cocoa-inspired" way to create powerful Web applications. Apparently Apple built upon the OSS SproutIt framework developed for an online e-mail manager called 'Mailroom'.

Apple used this framework to build their new Web application suite (replacing .Mac) called MobileMe. Since SproutCore applications rely upon JavaScript, it seems Apple had good reason to focus on Squirrelfish for faster JavaScript interpretation in Webkit. Apple, reportedly, hosted a session last Friday at WWDC introducing SpoutCore to developers, but obviously NDAs prevent developers from revealing the details of that presentation. Perhaps Apple is getting serious about Web applications and services or perhaps they're just worried about the Web becoming even more proprietary as Silverlight and Flash battle it out to make the Web application market built upon one proprietary format or another. Either way, this is a potential alternative, which should make the OSS crowd happy.
Communications

Submission + - DoJ Requires Verizon to Divest for Merger (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "The Department of Justice will require Verizon to sell off portions of Unicel's mobile network in order to complete its $2.7 billion acquisition of the company. The DoJ will require Verizon to sell off Unicel's mobile phone infrastructure in six geographic areas in Vermont, New York state and Washington state, including Burlington, Vermont, the agency said. The acquisition, as proposed, would have "substantially lessened competition to the detriment of consumers of mobile wireless telecommunications services in those areas, potentially resulting in higher prices, lower quality and reduced network investments," the DoJ said . The ruling comes less than a week after Verizon announced its acquisition of Alltel for $28 billion."
Privacy

Submission + - What happened to steganography software? 1

Submitted by Matthai
Matthai writes: I was looking for some good steganography tools, and it seems many websites hosting this software have just dead links or development of steganography tools never got finished.

So my question is — do you know for any good and free steganography software for Linux, Windows or Mac platform available today?
Censorship

Submission + - HardOCP bans IPs for mere mention of Adblock 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: HardOCP is a place for hardware enthusiasts to gather and exchange computer wisdom, populated with over 100,000 users and six million posts. However, mere mention of Adblock in any context on HardOCP's extensive forums is rewarded with a permanent IP ban. The Editor-in-Chief Kyle Bennett has taken a hardline stance on a site that includes subforums specifically dedicated to software discussion and even has monetary subscription forums as well. Everyone knows many sites only exist because of funding from advertising, but is this really a rewarding stance for an administrator to take?
Censorship

Submission + - Industry Canada Edits Minister's Wikipedia Article (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Lucky
Lucky writes: Michael Geist reports that the head of Industry Canada, Jim Prentice, has had his Wikipedia anonymously amended multiple times over the past week with regular attempts to remove any copyright criticism. The IP address of most of the anonymous edits trace back to Industry Canada. Industry Canada is in part responsible for Canada's copyright laws. Jim Prentice has repeatedly tried to introduce copyright reform in Canada to bring it in line with American-style copyright, public and industry backlash has delayed him each time.
The Internet

Submission + - Open Source Cloud Infrastructure - EC2 compatible (ostatic.com)

Submitted by ruphus13
ruphus13 writes: UC Santa Barbara's Computer Science department has released Eucalyptus — "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". From the article, "It turns out that [Professor] Rich and a group he works with have recently released an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. The system is called Eucalyptus, and it's available for you to use." in addition, "[Professor Rich] Wolski adds: "The goal of the project is to promote open-source community development of cloud computing services and features as well as to foster cloud computing research in the computer science and computational science research communities." " The interesting point to note is that the software is interface compatible with EC2 and uses the EC2 tools directly, so you can develop on your own hardware clusters. The software is available for download now from UCSB's Computer Science Department
The Courts

Submission + - Judge to RIAA: No more "ex parte" (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In Arista v. Does 1-33, a new RIAA case in Manhattan targeting 33 Columbia University students, the judge has refused to sign off on the RIAA's "ex parte" discovery application seeking the identity of the students. Instead, in a brief handwritten order (PDF) 'endorsed' on an adjournment request submitted by the RIAA, Judge Colleen McMahon ordered the RIAA to 'Please notify chambers when you have served defendants. Case on suspense until then.' Putting a case on 'suspense' means the case is on hold, and in this context means that nothing will happen unless and until the RIAA gives the defendants prior notice. The judge underlined the word 'when', apparently signalling that she does not even want to hear about 'if'. Perhaps judges refusing to sign off on RIAA 'ex parte' applications is starting to catch on. By the way, if the name 'Colleen McMahon' rings a bell, it might be because she was the judge presiding over the Patti Santangelo case."
Government

Submission + - City of Vienna back to Windows 2

Submitted by
bkingaut
bkingaut writes: "Slashdot readers might remember the story about the City of Vienna choosing Linux back in 2005. Now they decided to migrate back to Windows and even worse: to Windows Vista! The migration of 720 computers used in kindergartens will cost about 8 million Euros. The alleged reason for all this is a language test application for the kids that only works with MS Internet Explorer and won't be made compatible (by the producer) with firefox before 2009. Read the full story (in german) here."
The Military

Submission + - US accused of holding terror suspects on prison sh (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by 0111000001100100
0111000001100100 writes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights/print

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Does anyone else feel like the US government is pulling the wool over the sheeple's eyes?
Security

Submission + - Leaning Tower of Pisa Secure for 300 More Years

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Medieval architects only got as far as the third floor of the tower of Pisa before it began to lean in 1178 and by 1990 it had tilted more than four meters off its true vertical, with conservationists estimating that the entire 14,500-ton structure would collapse "some time between 2030 and 2040." Now the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been stabilized and declared safe for at least another three centuries after it was anchored to cables and lead counterweights while 70 tons of soil was removed from the north side — away from the lean — and cement was injected into the ground to relieve the pressure. The tilt has now returned to where it was in the early 19th century and architects say there was never any intention to straighten the 56m tower, only to stop it sinking further. Nicholas Shrady, author "Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa" says that the tower was destined to tilt from the outset because of the decision to build the tower "on what is essentially a former bog" and that the tower has previously come close to collapsing in 1838, 1934, and 1995. Although Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped cannon balls from the tower in a gravity experiment, Shrady says the myth is the "result of the overripe imagination of Galileo's secretary and first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Venezuela Appeals OOXML Decision (groklaw.net)

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "The appeals just won't stop, now Venezuela has appealed the OOXML decision, as well, which leaves us with four official appeals and a letter of protest. Of course, they have to decide whether the appeals 'conform to directives' in the next 30 days, so we can probably expect even more twists and turns. One wonders if this is the ISO's idea of consensus, or if the ISO needs to make sure standards are satisfactory before approving them, rather than after."
Censorship

Submission + - Paper's legal threats shut down community forums

Submitted by
Linker3000
Linker3000 writes: "When the Irish local newspaper "Mayo Echo" published an article (readable online as a set of PDFs through the link) referring to gays as "perverts", it sparked lively debate in the forums at castlebar.ie , one of the region's most active online communities, but things took a turn for the worse when the paper's editor objected to some of the comments and contacted the site's editors. Under threat of legal action, the site's editors bowed to pressure and all material referring to the Mayo Echo was removed and an apology published, but then the newspaper's editor decided to not accept the apology and is maintaining his threat of legal action.

In light of this, the entire castlebar.ie site has been shut down and replaced with a one page commentary [Coral Cache] on the situation, stating: "...The view of the moderators was that it is no longer possible to have a reasonably robust discussion where opinions are expressed such as people stating that they do not like the slant of a particular article or newspaper as in this case without opening themselves up to legal action. The bulletin boards were effectively the heart of the site generating the bulk of over 3.8 million hits to Castlebar.ie last month for example.

Castlebar.ie has therefore ceased operating as a direct result of this ongoing threat of legal action and the possibility that under the current Irish legal system the same thing could happen at any stage. It is no longer possible to run a voluntary website such as Castlebar.ie on a server based in Ireland regardless of where the moderators actually live..."

Regrettably it's not possible to see any of the allegedly offending forum material (unless someone wants to unearth cached copies!?), but according to one moderator, although some of the reaction to the newspaper's article were 'passionate' — on both sides of the argument — all material specifically referred to in the newspaper's correspondence was removed upon request.

Is shutting down the entire site a wise precaution or totally unnecessary and extreme? And how does the editor of the Mayo Echo — a member of the estate that champions 'freedom of the press' — justify the threat of legal action against public commentary on one of their published articles, especially since the site's editors more than complied with the takedown request irrespective of whether they were obliged to or not?"
Security

Submission + - Obama uses Linux (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "ZDNet's website posted an article about Obama's search for a security expert to plug in the holes that allowed a hacker to redirect his site (Linux/Apache, hosted by godaddy) to Hillary Clinton's (Windows/IIS hosted by rackspace)."
Databases

Submission + - MagLev: Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB Wows RailsConf (infoq.com)

Submitted by
murphee
murphee writes: "InfoQ reports: Gemstone demoed their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM to an ecstatic audience. Gemstone's Smalltalk VM allows OODBs of up to 17 PetaBytes, with none of the old ActiveRecord nonsense: the data is persisted transparently. The Gemstone OODB also takes care of any distribution, allowing the Ruby VM and data to scale across many servers (Cheerio, memcached!). There's also an earlier quite technical interview with Gemstone's Bob Walker and Avi Bryant about MagLev."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Pringles can designer dies, buried in Pringles can

Submitted by n3hat
n3hat writes: From the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles potato crisps that he asked his family to bury him in one. His children honored his request. Part of his remains was buried in a Pringles can — along with a regular urn containing the rest — in his grave at Arlington Memorial Gardens in Springfield Township.

Dr. Baur, a retired organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble, died May 4 at 89. He developed many products, including frying oils and a freeze-dried ice cream, for P&G. But the Pringles can was his proudest accomplishment, his daughter said. He received a patent for the package as well as the method of packaging Pringles in 1970.

Here's the full obit.

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