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The Almighty Buck

Image Lifted From Twitter Leads to $1.2M Payout For Haitian Photog 242

Posted by timothy from the always-look-for-the-cc-label dept.
magic maverick writes "A U.S. federal jury has ordered Agence France-Presse and Getty Images to pay $1.2 million to a Daniel Morel, Haitian photographer, for their unauthorized use of photographs, from the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The images, posted to Twitter, were taken by an editor at AFP and then provided to Getty. A number of other organizations had already settled out of court with the photographer."

Submission + - MySQL analysis with AnalyzeMySQL (xenji.com)

Submitted by Mario Mueller
Mario Mueller writes: I recently joined the scalability team at trivago and my first job was to get into the actual MySQL schema to discover which parts can be improved regarding performance and space consumption.

trivago's database consists of about 230 tables, many of them having a history of more than four years, some of them up to 7 years. A few of them do have some historic flaws, like having a signed bigint as primary key (because nobody could imagine what space will be needed in a few years), others do have indexes that are not longer used, etc. There are many tasks to do until you get to know the database scheme very well.

I wrote a tool to support me on my tasks. Read on, if you are interested in getting more information about it.

Submission + - The mechanical joke maker (humansinvent.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "There is a more artful side to this form of vintage hacking, however, as can be seen by the extraordinary and strange work of Falmouth based automata maker, Paul Spooner. Over the years, Spooner has made some true oddities, including the cat who drinks poisoned milk, dies, comes back alive and does it all over again; the women who swallows the day and leaves the night behind; and the man who produces a pipe from his head."

Submission + - Discovering and Using Helium (scienceray.com)

Submitted by qutubjeer
qutubjeer writes: Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, just after hydrogen. While we know its use in balloons, certain inflatable ads, blimps, and scuba gear, helium has several natural properties—inertness, the lowest boiling point of any known substance—that make it an important element used outside the realm of inflatable product replicas. However, despite its abundance throughout the universe, there is a finite amount of it on our planet, and researchers predict a public shortage of helium within the next few years.

Submission + - Google Uses Reputation to Detect Malicious Downloads (darkreading.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: Using data about Web sites, IP addresses and domains, researchers find that they can detect 99 percent of malicious executables downloaded by users, outperforming antivirus and URL-reputation services. The system, known as Content-Agnostic Malware Protection or CAMP, triages up to 70 percent of executable files on a user's system, sending attributes of the remaining files that are not known to be benign or malicious to an online service for analysis, according to a paper (pdf) presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in February. While the system uses a blacklist and whitelist on the user's computer to initially detect known good or bad files, the CAMP service utilizes a number of other characteristics, including the download URL, the Internet address of the server providing the download, the referrer URL, and any certificates attached to the download.

Submission + - Romanian software and hardware developers, challenged at Raspberry Hack (hackathon.ro)

Submitted by Oana _C
Oana _C writes: Hackathon.ro, a community which gathers the Romanian programmers through regular hackathons held in Bucharest, announces a new event dedicated to technology enthusiasts. They are invited to compete at Raspberry Hack, a 24-hour marathon of hardware and software development on the smallest computer in the world, Raspberry Pi. The competition will take place on April 20-21 in Bucharest and will include prizes totalising 3,500 Euros.
Participants will develop hardware and software projects, within whatever theme they choose. The only condition is to use a Raspberry Pi for developing their project.
Raspberry Hack is the third competition in a series of events organised by Hackathon.ro to stimulate and support the activity of the main communities of programmers and hardware developers in Romania. The first hackathon took place in June 2012 and was dedicated to all open source fans. In October 2012, a new event took place. Over 200 programmers competed at Hackover, the second edition, in order to develop Mobile, Cloud Computing, Web Dev aplications. The value of the prizes awarded within these competitions has amounted to over 5,500 Euro until now.
The Hackathon.ro community was set up aiming to bring together the programmer communities in Romania, to stimulate the communication and cooperation between them and to encourage programmers to make the most of their creativity and skills. Software competition will be organised by Hackathon.ro at least two times a year.
Besides hackathons, the community intends to run other activities dedicated to programming and technology enthusiasts, such as workshops and trainings or start ups for great ideas.
You can find more details on http://www.hackathon.ro/en and on facebook.com/hackathon.ro

Submission + - Closing the gap to improve the capacity of existing fiber optic networks (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: A team of researchers working through Australia’s Centre for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) has developed data encoding technology that increases the efficiency of existing fiber optic cable networks. The researchers claim their invention, which packs the data channels closer together, increases the data capacity of optical networks to the point that all of the world’s internet traffic could be transmitted via a single fiber.

Submission + - Arkansas crude OIL spill .. (commondreams.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A week after crude oil inundated an Arkansas neighborhood, on-site observers describe a Walking-Dead-like scene, reeking and empty but for men in Hazmat suits, where Exxon has imposed something like martial law — taking over every task from wildlife and environmental officials, enforcing a no-fly zone overseen only by an Exxon official, telling residents panicked about their sick kids and plummeting property values nothing at all, virtually banning media coverage of the damage and, today, threatening to arrest an InsideClimate News reporter for criminal trespass when she entered their Command Headquarters looking for information. Her evidently big mistake: Walking up to a table with a sign that said "Public Affairs."

Submission + - Why are We Still Talking about LucasArts' Old Adventure Games?

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The gutting of LucasArts was a tragic loss for the video game industry, but for many of us, it was more than that. By most accounts the last truly great LucasArts game was released almost 15 years ago, and yet, many in the industry still hold these titles as the benchmark. But why is that? Why is it that we still consider these games among our pinnacle achievements as an industry? Why do developers still namedrop Monkey Island in pitch meetings when discussing their proposed game's story? Why do we all continue to mentally associate the word "LucasArts" as the splash screen we see before a graphical adventure game, even though the company hadn't released one in over a decade? Gamasutra has collected a good majority of the answers. Following these responses, as a special treat, Lucasfilm Games veteran David Fox attempts to answer that question with his own insider perspective.
GNU is Not Unix

Video Freeside Internet Services: Doing Well With Purely Free Software (Video) Screenshot-sm 53

Posted by Roblimo from the making-a-good-living-by-giving-software-away dept.
While attending ITEXPO West in Austin, TX, Slashdot editor Timothy Lord met Ivan Kohler, the "President, Founder and Head Geek" of a company called Freeside Internet Services that is 100% open source (no dual-licensing) and makes its living supporting software Ivan says is used to manage some of the very unsexy backend tasks that ISPs and VoIP providers need to do, like track usage and send bills to customers. Freeside uses the AGPL license, which Ivan calls "a GPL variant for web applications" that, he says, "prevents people from taking our software, modifying it, and selling it in a hosted capacity as proprietary software."
EU

Microsoft Ready To Address EU Antitrust Concerns 176

Posted by Soulskill from the twisting-their-arm dept.
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a Reuters report: "Software giant Microsoft is ready to introduce measures that would address the European Union's antitrust concerns about users' ability to chose between different browsers, European Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said on Saturday. EU antitrust regulators are investigating whether Microsoft blocks computer makers from installing rival web browsers on its upcoming Windows 8 operating system, following complaints from several companies. Almunia is in charge of antitrust enforcement at the European Commission. 'In my personal talks with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer he has given me assurances that they will comply immediately regardless of the conclusion of the anti trust probe,' Almunia said at an economic conference in northern Italy, adding that he considered the matter a 'very, very serious issue.'"

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