788877
submission
daemonburrito writes:
The BBC reports that the six largest ISPs in the UK have agreed to a deal with the trade group British Phonographic Industry, assisted by government arbitration. Under the reported terms of the deal, the ISPs will begin mailing notices to subscribers identified by the BPI, and aim for a "significant reduction" in music sharing. Hundreds of thousands of notices are expected.
742635
submission
daemonburrito writes:
When AVG's Linkscanner debuted, it presented its own unique user-agent when it 'pre-scanned' links. Now, according to El Reg, the software was changed over the weekend to report a valid IE6 User-Agent, indistinguishable from human traffic.
When asked about the cost to webmasters for the extra traffic, and of concerns about making their logs useless, AVG research chief Roger Thompson replied: '[...] if you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs.'
While this may seem reminiscent of the FasterFox problems, a major difference is that FasterFox will honor a robots.txt directive.
736901
submission
daemonburrito writes:
Trevor Paglin, the photographer/co-author of "Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights" and "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me", has an exhibit of 189 photos of secret US satellites showing in Berkeley. Story in Wired.
36732
submission
daemonburrito writes:
A group of physicists has demonstrated a cooling technique which may soon allow the study of gravity waves, a look into the boundary between quantum and classical physics, quantum-state engineering in macroscopic systems, "observation of non-classical correlations between macroscopic objects", and last but not least, "new means for integrated quantum (mechanical) information processing."
For the lay, from NewScientist :
"This week, three teams of physicists have perfected a way of doing this (Nature, vol 444, p 67). Their technique is to bombard a mirror of roughly 10^14 atoms with photons in a way that damps out thermal vibrations, cooling it to 135 millikelvin."
For others: The juicier abstract as published in Nature, and the paper as published on arXiv.org.