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Submission + - Canadian Cannabis Car (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by sykobabul
sykobabul writes: The CBC is reporting:

"An electric car made of hemp is being developed by a group of Canadian companies in collaboration with an Alberta Crown corporation.

The Kestrel will be prototyped and tested later in August by Calgary-based Motive Industries Inc., a vehicle development firm focused on advanced materials and technologies, the company announced."

Leave it to us Canadians to come up with all sorts of uses for cannabis.
Entertainment

Submission + - Netflix Drops $1B For Streaming Content (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
kdawson
kdawson writes: "The NY Times is reporting that Netflix will pay almost $1B to add on-demand titles to its stable (press release). 'Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix, said he was essentially taking the "huge pile of money" that Netflix paid in postage for DVDs by mail — about $600 million this year — "and starting to pay it to the studios and networks." Wall Street analysts estimated that Netflix would pay about $900 million over the course of five years to Epix, a fledgling competitor to HBO that holds the rights to the film output of Paramount, Lions Gate and MGM. ... It was the second film deal for Netflix this summer, coming a month after a pact with Relativity Media...'"

Submission + - National Security Letters challenged, man ungagged (democracynow.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For six years, the FBI has barred a New York man from revealing that the agency had ordered him to hand over personal information about clients of his ISP. Finally allowed to speak, Nick Merrill joins us in his first broadcast interview to talk about how he challenged the FBI’s use of national security letters. We also speak with Connecticut librarian George Christian. He and three other librarians also sued the US government after receiving a national security letter demanding information about library patrons. One of the clients of his ISP at the time was the Democracy Now! daily TV/radio program, hosted by Amy Goodman, who reports on this.

Submission + - Pre-Crime: Music Festival Pre-Sues Bootleggers (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apparently, if you even have been *thinking* about bootlegging the Mile High Music Festival this coming weekend in Denver you've already been sued. No joke. Event producer AEG has already filed trademark infringement claims against 100 John Does and 100 Jane Does in anticipation that they're going to bootleg the event. Since none of the sued parties have actually done anything yet, no one's showing up in court to protest the lawsuit either, so it moves forward... meaning that AEG can use it to get all sorts of law enforcement officials (US Marshalls, local and state police and even off-duty officers) to go seize bootleg material.

Submission + - Netflix deal expands instant watch catalog (sfgate.com) 1

Submitted by SloppyElvis
SloppyElvis writes: Netflix Inc. has announced a deal, reportedly worth $1 billion, to bulk up its increasingly popular Internet streaming service with Hollywood blockbusters such as "Star Trek," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "The Godfather."

"What's exciting here is it really reaffirms that the Internet is a serious delivery channel," said analyst Colin Dixon, a senior partner for the research firm the Diffusion Group. Netflix has really been the catalyzing force on the market and it has illustrated very graphically that consumers are very comfortable consuming quality content directly from the Internet and in some respects, it's their preferred medium."

Read more: here
Security

Submission + - ATM hack gives cash on demand (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Windows CE-based ATMs can easily be made to dole out cash, according to security researcher Barnaby Jack. Exploiting bugs in two different ATM machines at Black Hat, the researcher from IOActive was able to get them to spit out money on demand and record sensitive data from the cards of people who used them. Jack believes a large number of ATMs have remote management tools that can be accessed over a telephone. After experimenting with two machines he purchased, Jack developed a way of bypassing the remote authentication system and installing a homemade rootkit, named Scrooge,"
Star Wars Prequels

Submission + - LucasFilm Ltd. protects lightsaber design (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by uvajed_ekil
uvajed_ekil writes: From the article:
""Star Wars" creator George Lucas wants to force a laser company to stop making a new, high-powered product he says looks too much like the famous lightsaber from his classic sci-fi series."

The laser does look vaguely like a lightsaber, or at least the hilt of the Jedi weapon. Nevermind that it is not a lightsaber, is not intended as a weapon, can not be used like a lightsaber, and is not marketed as one. LucasFilm Ltd. has insisted that it be pulled from the market anyway. Is this a legitimate demand to protect intellectual property and a somewhat novel design, given that LucasFilm does not sell a working lightsaber, and has no apparent intentions to develop one?

Submission + - MechWarrior 4 bittorrent Infected with Trojan 4

Submitted by societyofrobots
societyofrobots writes: Yesterday I saw on the MekTek site that users were reporting the MechWarrior 4 game was infected with a virus and causing 'data loss'. MekTek theorized it was a false alarm.

Today Norton AV started detecting various instances/names of this trojan in various locations on my laptop:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2004-080910-5958-99

Scanning MW4Mercs.exe revealed the same trojan, verifying the bittorrent is in fact infected with a trojan. uTorrent detected over 7000 people downloading the game within the first 3 days, so thats quite a lot of infections . . .
Intel

Submission + - Dell Alienware 6-Core Rig Breaks 4.3GHz, Stock (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Dell recently afforded their Alienware division the inside track on Intel's benchmark crushing Core i7-980X Gulftown 6-core processor and the resources to get it validated for delivery to market quickly. HotHardware spent some quality time with the new Alienware Area-51, helping it break its first sweat, and overclocking it to a snappy 4.3GHz right out of the box. There's little argument that Intel's new Gulftown six-core CPU is the fastest chip on the desktop currently and at a solid 1GHz over its stock speed, this system tears up benchmarks pretty well. Dell ships the system at its rated 3.3GHz stock speed but there are simple toggle presets in the system BIOS that allow it to overclock up to 4GHz and higher."
Censorship

Submission + - China hits back at Google (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
sopssa
sopssa writes: "After Google yesterday started redirecting google.cn users to their uncensored Hong Kong based google.com.hk servers, Chinese government has now hit back at Google by restricting access to Google's Hong Kong servers. 'On Tuesday, according to The New York Times, mainland China users could not see uncensored Hong Kong–based content after the government either disabled certain searches or blocked links to results.' China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the country, has also been approached by the Chinese government to cancel a contract with Google about having google.cn on their mobile home page for search. China Unicom, the second largest carrier in China, has also either postponed or killed the launch of Android based mobile phones in the country."

Submission + - Google warns Australia over 'Net filters (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Tyler Too
Tyler Too writes: A day after redirecting google.cn to Hong Kong servers, Google has come out in opposition to Australia's Internet filtering system. 'Google is unlikely to come right out and compare Australia to China, but the implication is obvious—and has been made explicit by other groups. Reporters Without Borders said recently that Australia would "be joining an Internet censors' club that includes such countries as China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia."'

Submission + - UK Anti-Piracy Lawyers Threaten US P2P Forum 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: TorrentFreak is reporting that ACS:Law is threatening to sue Slyck.com, one of the Internet’s oldest file-sharing forums, because they don’t like what members have written about them.
Government

Bill To Ban All Salt In Restaurant Cooking 794

Posted by timothy from the too-stupid-to-live-as-long-as-possible dept.
lord_rotorooter writes "Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced a bill that would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them. The measure (if passed) would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of food for all restaurants or bakeries. While the use of too much salt can contribute to health problems, the complete banning of salt would have negative impacts on food chemistry. Not only does salt enhance flavor, it controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese."
Biotech

Submission + - Scientists Say Boys are Turning into Girls 1

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "The Guardian reports that Denmark has unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, sunscreen lotion and moisturizing cream with a picture emerging of ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminizing male children all over the developed world. Research at Rotterdam's Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes. "The amounts that two-year-olds absorb from the [preservative] parabens propylparaben and butylparaben can constitute a risk for oestrogen-like disruptions of the endocrine system," says the report. "This contribution originates predominantly from cosmetic products such as oil-based creams, moisturising creams, lotions and sunscreen." The contamination may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex of babies. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to be nature's way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict. But the proportion of females is rising, so much so that some 250,000 babies who statistically should have been boys have ended up as girls in Japan and the United States alone. "Both the public and wildlife are inadequately protected from harm, as regulation is based on looking at exposure to each substance in isolation, and yet it is now proven beyond doubt that hormone disrupting chemicals can act together to cause effects even when each by itself would not," says Gwynne Lyons, director of Chem Trust."

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