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Government

Submission + - Utah Cop Tases Man for Speeding

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's a disturbing trend lately. People are getting tased by cops for just about every infraction imaginable. We're all familiar with most of them, as they have made their way to YouTube, but a recent incident in Utah is especially disturbing. Not only was the man tased for a trivial "crime" (speeding), but the officer in question also refused to read him his rights as he was arresting him, despite being asked repeatedly to do so. From the article:

The victim of police brutality was a motorist named Jared Massey. Mr. Massey was pulled over on a Utah highway for allegedly speeding. When Mr. Massey asked the officer why he was being pulled over, and then to help him understand why he was accused of speeding before he signed the ticket, the officer ordered him to exit the vehicle. Mr. Massey was then asked to turn around and put his hands behind his back. Mr. Massey began walking back towards the car, obviously confused as to why he was being ordered to put his hands behind his back, and less than 10 seconds later was tased.
A video of the incident is available, from the records of the police vehicle.
Google

Submission + - Google purges thousands of suspected malware sites (itnews.com.au) 1

Submitted by
Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: "In response to a concerted effort by cyber criminals to infect the computers of Google users with malware and make them unwitting partners in crime, Google has apparently purged tens of thousands of malicious Web pages from its index. Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, noted that many search results on Google led to malicious Web pages that expose visitors to exploits that can compromise vulnerable systems. Sunbelt published a list of search terms that returned malicious pages, the result of search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns by cyber criminals to get their pages prominently ranked in Google — Sunbelt refers to this as "SEO poisoning."

Let's hope Google has done its research and hasn't purged legitimate sites."
Music

Submission + - EMI may cut funding to IFPI, RIAA (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Teen Bainwolf
Teen Bainwolf writes: Big Four record label EMI is reportedly considering a big cut in its funding for the IFPI and RIAA. Each of the labels reportedly contributed over $130 million per year to fund industry trade groups, and EMI apparently believes that money could be better spent elsewhere. 'One of the chief activities of the RIAA is coordinating the Big Four labels' legal campaign, and those thousands of lawsuits have done nothing but generate ill will from record fans, while costing the labels millions of dollars and doing little (if anything) to actually reduce the amount of file-sharing going on. In fact, the RIAA freely admits that the legal campaign is a real money pit, and EMI's new ownership may be very leery of continuing to pour money down that particular rat hole.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Activision wants PS3 for $199 (zdnet.com)

Submitted by CaligarisDesk
CaligarisDesk writes: Activision CEO believes that the price for the mass appeal of the PS3 should be $199.

"The Wii at its price point is now setting a standard and an expectation, and people say, well, the Wii is less complex technically. I don't think that really matters as much to the consumer," Kotick told the Reuters Media Summit in New York on Tuesday.
Google

Submission + - Google Launches "My Location" in Mobile Ma (google.com)

Submitted by wbates
wbates writes: Google today announced the release of version 2.0 of Google Maps for mobile, its innovative and widely used mobile mapping and local search application. New in v2.0 is a beta version of Google's "My Location" technology, which uses cell tower ID information to provide users with their approximate location, helping them determine where they are, what's around them, and how to get there.
Space

Submission + - First Evidence of Another Universe? 2

Submitted by blamanj
blamanj writes: Three months ago, astronomers announced the discovery of a large hole at the edge of our universe. Now, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton thinks she knows what that means. (Subscription req'd at New Scientist site, there's also an overview here.) According to string theory, there are many universes besides our own. Her team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of gravitational interactions, they can be observed, and they're willing to make a prediction. The recently discovered void is in the northern hemisphere. They contend another one will be found in the southern hemisphere.
Windows

Submission + - More evidence that XP is Vista's main competitor (computerworld.com) 3

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is "considerably faster" than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista: 'Vista's biggest competition isn't Apple or Novell or Red Hat; it's Microsoft itself, it's XP, [Forrester Research analyst Benjamin Gray] said. So enamored of XP are businesses that Microsoft may feel obligated to extend the operating system's mainstream support past its current April 2009 expiration date. ... He attributed the lowered expectations to a lack of detailed information about Vista in 2006; too-high prices for PCs with 2GB of memory, which is essentially the minimum needed for Vista, according to company managers; and a larger-than-expected number of incompatible applications.'"
Linux Business

Submission + - Torvalds on where Linux is headed in 2008

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: In this new interview, Linus Torvalds is excited about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualisation despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

From the article: "To get some perspective on what lies ahead in 2008, we caught up with Linus Torvalds via email. His responses touched on the Linux development process, upcoming features, and whether he's concerned about potential patent litigation."

Torvalds on Linux biggest strength: "When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can't fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity's sense of the market. It doesn't matter how competent Microsoft — or any individual company — is, it's going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn't even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility. And it stems directly from the fact that anybody who is interested can participate in the development, and no single entity ends up being in control of where it all goes.
Patents

Submission + - IBM files DVD SPAM patent application 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mark Wilson of Gizmodo.com reports that IBM is applying for a patent for DVDs that contain or download "on demand" commercials that cannot be skipped. Consumers would be able to purchase these DVDs at a lower price than regular DVDs and pay extra to enjoy their purchase ad-free without having to buy a second DVD. Perhaps this is part of the massive shift in advertising that IBM predicts.
It's funny. Laugh.

Journal Journal: MS Explorer Hits an Iceburg!

Journal by Bushido Hacks
A shipwreck is no laughing matter, unless an ironic twist of fate is involved. The shipwreck on November 23rd in the Southern Ocean had the good fortune that everyone aboard the MS Explorer was safely evacuated and in good spirits.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Japan's Apollo-era like "Earth-rise" photo

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Kaguya spacecraft, also called Selene, has replicated the famous Apollo-era "Earth-rise" photograph with modern high-definition imaging. The new Earth-rise image shows our blue world floating in the blackness of space. Released today, it is a still shot taken from video made by the craft's high-definition television (HDTV) for space. A second image, taken from a different location in the lunar orbit, has been dubbed Earth-set. In the Earth-set image, Earth appears upside-down; visible are Australia and Asia. A region near the moon's south pole is seen in the foreground. The footage was taken Nov. 7 using equipment provided by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK).
Biotech

Submission + - Ham Radio Operator Finds Cure For Cancer (latimes.com) 5

Submitted by
CirReal
CirReal writes: "John Kanzius, K3TUP, himself suffering from cancer with nine months to live, used nanotechnology and a radio transmitter to kill cancer cells. "Kanzius did not have a medical background, not even a bachelor's degree, but he knew radios. He had built and fixed them since he was a child, collecting transmitters, transceivers, antennas and amplifiers, earning an amateur radio operator license. Kanzius knew how to send radio wave signals around the world. If he could transmit them into cancer cells, he wondered, could he then direct the radio waves to destroy tumors, while leaving healthy cells intact?" Reseachers "recently killed 100% of cancer cells grown in the livers of rabbits, using Kanzius' method.""
Security

Public Invited to Try Their Luck Against Old Cipher Tech 95

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the squeamish-ossifrage dept.
Stony Stevenson writes to tell us that in celebration of the opening of the National Museum of Computing, members of the public are being challenged to take on a rebuilt version of Colossus, the world's first programmable digital computer. The Cipher Challenge will take two groups of amateur code breakers and pit them against one of the original Lorenz cipher machine used by the German High Command during World War II. "The encrypted teleprinter message will be transmitted by radio from colleagues in Paderborn, Germany, and intercepted at Bletchley Park by the two code-breaking groups, one using modern PCs and the other using the newly rebuilt Colossus Mark II."
Operating Systems

MIT Releases the Source of MULTICS, Father of UNIX 276

Posted by Zonk from the linux's-dad's-dad dept.
mlauzon writes "Extraordinary news for computer scientists and the Open Source community was announced over the weekend, as the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened. Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a 'simplified' successor to MULTICS. The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000. From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from an official MIT site (it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler). Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational computer system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the software should be considered to be an outstanding source for computer research and scientists. It is not yet known if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS."

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