hey0you0guy writes "China has launched its first lunar orbiter, on a planned year-long exploration mission to the Moon. Analysts say it is a key step towards China's aim of putting a man on the Moon by 2020, in the latest stage of an Asian space race with Japan and India. Earlier this month, a Japanese lunar probe entered orbit around the Moon. India is planning a lunar mission for April next year."

Rik702 writes "Wolframscience.com have announced that an undergraduate from Birmingham, UK has proved Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine is universal." You can read a pdf of the proof as well as some related coverage.

SkiifGeek writes "Winner of Melbourne University's Chancellor's Prize for Excellence, Dr John Papandriopoulos could soon find himself the focus of a number of networking companies and government agencies interested in wringing more performance from existing network infrastructure. Dr John developed a set of algorithms (US and Aussie patents pending) that reduce the impact of cross talk on data streams sharing the same physical copper line, taking less than a year to achieve the breakthrough. It is claimed that the algorithms can produce up to 200x improvement over existing copper broadband performance (quoted as being between one and 25 mbit/sec), with up to 200 mbit/sec apparently being deliverable. If the mathematical theories are within even an order of magnitude of the actual gains achieved, Dr John's work is likely to have widespread implications for future bandwidth availability across the globe."

bbc writes "Project Gutenberg has volunteered to host all it legally can of the IMSLP's catalog. The Canadian provider of free public domain music recently caved to legal threats from an Austrian sheet music seller. On the Book People mailing list, Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart wrote: 'Project Gutenberg has volunteered to keep as much of the IMSL Project online as is legally possible, including a few of the items that were demanded to be withdrawn, as well as, when legal, to provide a backup of the entire site, for when the legalities have finally been worked out.'"

BlueMerle writes with news that Verizon is offering 20 Mbps symmetrical service for current FiOS customers in NY, CT, and NJ. It will cost $65 a month. Cable companies aren't in a position to match this capability.

walterbyrd writes "Pamala Jones, at groklaw, totally rips apart the Novell/Deal patent protection deal. From the article: 'Justin Steinman reveals that to market their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server against Red Hat they ask, "Do you want the Linux that works with Windows? Or the one that doesn't?" It's just appalling. Let me ask you developers who are kernel guys a question: When you contributed code to the kernel, was it your intent that it be used against Red Hat? How about the rest of you developers? Is that all right with you, that your code is being marketed by Novell like that? I also have questions about antitrust issues, with Microsoft being Novell's partner in such deals and sales pitches. Nothing speaks louder about Microsoft's true determination never to be actually interoperable than this conference.'"

Who will defend the defenders? writes "Ars Technica has posted the first installment in their analysis of the leaked MediaDefender emails and found some very interesting things. Apparently, the New York Attorney General's office is working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets. It also discusses how some of the emails show MediaDefender trying to spy on their competitors, sanitize their own Wikipedia entry, deal with the hackers targeting their systems, and to quash the MiiVi story even while they were rebuilding it as Viide. Oh yes, they definitely read "techie, geek web sites where everybody already hates us" like Slashdot, too."

shaitand writes "When looking for a remote support application that penetrates firewalls and can be initiated by my clients with a couple of clicks, I came across Showmypc.com. It was a standalone executable but looked like it would work and best of all it was open source. The only thing I didn't like was the interface, so I went to check out the Sourceforge page. I noticed a substantial problem: CVS is empty and the source on the download page is for the 2.6 version. The version of the executable is 3.53. I mailed the developers that they needed to distribute their modified SSH client and VNC source to be in compliance with the GPL license. They said they didn't modify those programs and ignored my request for the current source code. So I ask again, if this is a GPL'ed application; where is the source?"

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that an inquiry into the Virginia Tech shooting in April of this year has revealed no connection whatsoever to videogames. The shooter's lack of interest in violent gaming was widely reported among game news sites at that time in the year, despite the exploration of the idea on cable television news. The official report, filed with the governor of the state, lays that 'motive' to rest. From the article: "The report, which includes a mental health history of the shooter, Seung Hui Cho, notes that during his childhood he had 'played videogames like Sonic the Hedgehog,' yet 'none of the videogames were war games or had violent themes.' This flies in the face of statements made on Fox TV news by Jack Thompson in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, which laid the blame for the incident firmly at the door of videogames."

Luke writes "This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own."

koro666 writes "In his latest blog post, Mark Russinovich analyzes the network slowdown experienced by some users when playing multimedia content. 'Tests of MMCSS during Vista development showed that... heavy network traffic can cause enough long-running DPCs to prevent playback threads from keeping up with their media streaming requirements, resulting in glitching. MMCSS' glitch-resistant mechanisms were therefore extended to include throttling of network activity. It does so by issuing a command to the NDIS device driver... [to] pass along, at most 10 packets per millisecond (10,000 packets per second)... [T]he networking team is actively working with the MMCSS team on a fix that allows for not so dramatically penalizing network traffic, while still delivering a glitch-resistant experience.'"

Verunks writes "In honor of the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, NASA will launch Luke Skywalker's original Jedi lightsaber into space along with the crew of the space shuttle Discovery. The launch is slated for October."

JonathanF writes "If you were hoping judges would see reason and realize that just using a program that could violate copyright law is about as illegal as leaving your back door unlocked, think again. An Arizona district judge has ruled that a couple who hosted files in KaZaA is liable for over $40K in damages just because they 'made available' songs that could have been pirated by someone, somewhere. There's legal precedent, but how long do we have before the BitTorrent crew is sued?" The New York case testing the same theory is still pending.

SkiifGeek writes "After news at the end of last year that mobile phones could be remotely eavesdropped, and there being a long history of remote eavesdropping possible on normal telephones, it was only a matter of time until VoIP devices were found to be eavesdropable (whether intentionally or not). In the last week there have been several exploit code releases, and it seems that some vendors who chose to write their own SIP networking stacks are at risk of their devices being easily eavesdropped on."

Blackbeard writes "A new study from pro-business think tank Institute for Policy Innovation claims that music piracy accounts for $12.5 billion in lost output to the US economy. That includes 71,060 lost jobs and $422 million in lost tax revenues... if the figures are accurate. Ars Technica's write-up points out a number of flaws in the IPI's reasoning. 'The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads = lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase.' There's more: 'The IPI study also assesses the increased demand for music if piracy didn't exist and assumes the market would remain as "intensely competitive" as it is today. The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive, and that much of what is available isn't very good.'"