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Education

Submission + - The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "BusinessWeek reports that higher education is increasingly a tale of two worlds, with elite schools getting richer and buying up all the talent. Thanks to endowments like the one that netted Harvard $5.7B in investment gains just last year, the Ivy Plus colleges — which account for less than 1% of students — have been able to lift their spending into the stratosphere, including extravagances like $272,000-a-bed-dorms and even a $4M student-horse-housing rehab. 'People used to look at every penny,' says a Yale Dean. 'The mind-set is different now.' Meanwhile, reports BW, public colleges and universities struggle to educate 75% of the country's students in an era when most states are devoting a dwindling share of their budgets to higher ed."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Google Quietly Adds HTTPS Support to GMail 4

Journal by jdray

This may be old news, but I just noticed myself and thought I'd report it. I've been using the "New Version" of GMail for a couple of weeks (I hardly notice the difference from the "Old Version"), and happened to notice today that the inbox URL still used "http://", even after all the complaints that they didn't maintain "https://" after login. I decided a quick test was in order, and added the all-important "s" to the protocol indicator. It worked fine. After clicking around some, openin
Biotech

Submission + - Tree Frogs Inspire Reusable Superglue [pics] (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
grrlscientist
grrlscientist writes: "Do you like to sneakily unwrap your gifts before Christmas to learn what they are? Well, scientists are helping you do this by developing a new reusable adhesive superglue!

From the story: The reason that conventional tape cannot be reused is because the adhesive forms permanent cracks when peeled from a surface. While these tiny cracks allow tape to be removed, they also render it useless. But a team of scientists, led by Abhijit Majumder at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, discovered that the adhesive on the toe pads of tree frogs and crickets contain microscopic channels that prevent cracking when they are peeled from a surface."
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Playstation: The Rumblepack returns

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sony made a surprise announcement late on Wednesday, saying that it will introduce an new PS3 controller with rumble feature in spring of next year. Called Dualshock 3, the new controller will re-introduce the vibration functionality to the Playstation controller — a feature that had disappeared with the introduction of the Playstation 3 and the motion sensitive "Sixaxis" controller. It looks like that the new controller was made possible largely because Sony and Immersion resolved their patent dispute earlier this year. Back then, the two companies said that they had "entered into a new business agreement to explore the inclusion of Immersion technology in Playstation format products." Judging from today's announcement, the agreement apparently is bearing fruit.
The Media

Submission + - NBC drops the other shoe (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by stekylsha
stekylsha writes: NBC has managed to figure out this internut thing after all. In a brilliant move, reminicent of Napoleon and his attack on Russia, NBC has decided to sell their award winning shows themselves which "NBC executives say they expect to become a viable competitor to iTunes." From the article:

"The NBC service, called NBC Direct, will begin a testing period in October with plans to be operational in November. The service will allow customers to download full episodes of NBC shows for seven days on Windows-based PCs. The file will expire after the seven days."

One must wonder why this business model hasn't been tried before.
Censorship

Submission + - MediaDefender and the Streisand Effect (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Foldarn
Foldarn writes: It looks like MediaDefender, in an effort to quell the explosion of negative publicity, has instead done the opposite (also known as the Streisand Effect) and made it even more widespread. The folks over at Ars Technica have an article about a few popular BitTorrent sites MegaNova and IsoHunt that are being demanded to remove the ever incriminating emails. What's more, Ars is reporting that it appears that MediaDefender, in response to IsoHunt's decline to remove, may be behind a massive denial of service attack against IsoHunt.
Music

Submission + - Real dumps Gracenote music service

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to Valleywag, the Silicon Valley rumor site, "Gracenote runs the service that automatically fills in song names, musicians, and album names when you rip a CD to your PC's hard drive. Without it, we'd be stuck spending years entering CD track data manually. But the company is no longer without competition — and it just lost a big client to a rival. Gracenote has been discreetly dropped by RealNetworks. A tipster alerts us that RealPlayer and Rhaposdy are now using All Media Guide's identification service, Lasso. Real joins a growing list of AMG adopters, including Sony and Apple. It's no surprise that the music services, facing thin margins, are shopping around."
Privacy

Submission + - All Danish citizens under surveillance (information.dk)

Submitted by Snaller
Snaller writes: Unfortunately I can find no English news sites reporting this, so i guess it may never go beyond your eyes (or ours), but at least one American (I'm assuming) will have read it then:

During this weekend the real big brother put his foot down on the country of Denmark, in Europe, in the name of fighting terrorism the government has ordered all Internet providers and telcos to log: who you call on your phone, who calls you, the addresses of the calling parties and for cell phones where you are when you make/receive the call. Times of messages you send and receive on your phone. Internet providers must log who a user connects to via his computer, this includes the users IP address, the destination IP address, what port numbers are used on the sending end, and port numbers used at the receiving end, and the duration of the communication. They must log the identity of the user initiating the communication and the precise geographic location of the user. In addition to this they must log the email address of people the user sends email to, and the email address used to send from, and the time of the email transmission. By law these loggings must be carried out for every single citizen who uses the Internet or the phone system, and these logs must be kept for one year, to be made available to the police if it is found relevant for an investigation. A judge needs sign of on it, however apparently the secret Danish police does not need that — they can simply demand to see it.

Some Danes are pragmatically pointing out that there is a bit of a hole in the law since libraries are currently not included, hotels are confused since they are included but not sure if they need to write down the names of all of their guests who try to use the Internet or just that the hotel computer was used, while others are outraged at what they consider a gross violation of their privacy, but apparently, and unfortunately, many seem to accept it when the blonde minister of justice opinions that only people who plan on doing crime could object to these measures.

This is the full text of the law (in Danish) http://147.29.40.91/DELFIN/HTML/B2006/0098805.htm

And a couple of articles about the subject (alas, in Danish)

Newspaper Information
News paper Arbejderen
Newspaper Politiken and here
Newspaper Jyllands Posten
And The Danish Library Agency
The Courts

Submission + - Has RIAA Abandoned "Making Available"?

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA's standard complaint (pdf) was thrown out last month by a federal judge in California as so much "conclusory" "boilerplate" "speculation" in Interscope v. Rodriguez. Interestingly, the RIAA's amended complaint (pdf), filed six (6) days later, abandoned altogether the RIAA's "making available" argument, which it first formulated in defending the dismissal motion in Elektra v. Barker. This raises a number of questions, including (a) whether the RIAA is going to stick to this new form of complaint in future cases, (b) whether it is going to get into a different kind of trouble for some of its new allegations, such as its contention that the investigator "detected an individual" (contradicting the testimony of the RIAA's own expert witness) and the allegation that the defendant should be held liable because he or she is "the individual responsible for that IP address at that date and time", a phrase which would appear to be meaningless in a copyright infringement context, and (c) what tack defendants' lawyers should take (this was one lawyer's suggestion)."
The Courts

Submission + - Has RIAA Abandoned "Making Available" Clai

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA's standard complaint (pdf) was thrown out last month by a federal judge in California as so much "conclusory" "boilerplate" "speculation" in Interscope v. Rodriguez. Interestingly, the RIAA's amended complaint (pdf), filed six (6) days later, abandoned altogether the RIAA's "making available" argument, which it first formulated in defending the dismissal motion in Elektra v. Barker. This raises a number of questions, including (a) whether the RIAA is going to stick to this new form of complaint in future cases, (b) whether it is going to get into a different kind of trouble for some of its new allegations, such as its contention that the investigator "detected an individual" (contradicting the testimony of the RIAA's own expert witness) and the allegation that the defendant should be held liable because he or she is "the individual responsible for that IP address at that date and time", a phrase which would appear to be meaningless in a copyright infringement context, and (c) what tack defendants' lawyers should take (this was one lawyer's suggestion)."
Databases

Submission + - Music Metadata - Is FOS not making the grade? (real.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: After downloading version 11 beta this weekend, I noticed that RealPlayer has changed its metadata supplier from Gracenote to All Media Guide (the allmusic.com people). A quick check revealed that Rhapsody has done the same. Gracenote has certainly had its share of controversy over the years, but what could have made Real drop its long term supplier of music recognition? And why wouldn't Real pick a open source solution like freedb or Musicbrainz? What is the state of of music metadata and tagging technologies? Are the open source solutions just not ready for prime-time, or are commercial solutions still the only way to go for majors like Real?
Databases

Submission + - Real Dumps Gracenote in RealPlayer and Rhapsody 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I am a heavy user of RealPlayer and upon recently installing the most recent version of RealPlayer was surprised to find that it no longer uses Gracenote for tagging. They appear to have adopted a commercial metadata service from All Media Guide. Further checking with Rhapsody shows it has also uses the same AMG service. Gracenote has had more than its share of controversy over the years, including lawsuits against its customers such as Roxio and Musicmatch. The new service from AMG seems to be working fine, but I wonder — What could have driven the world's second most pervasive media player to dump its long-term music identification supplier? Any answers from the Slashdot community would be appreciated.
Businesses

Submission + - UK internet banking fails first slashdotting (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by crush
crush writes: Customer panic due to the instability in the mortgage market in the UK demonstrated inadequate server capacity at the UK's fifth largest mortage lender according to the Guardian UK "[...] websites at Northern Rock and many other banks crashed as savers tried to access their accounts. Police had to be called to a branch in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, when a couple barricaded the manager in her office when she refused to let them withdraw their £1m savings." Financial institutions have reduced costs by replacing physical locations and staff with web and other online services, but have they adequately designed those services to cope with Slashdot-like loads?

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