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The Internet

Submission + - Internet Radio May Stream North to Canada

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With U.S. copyright royalties threatening to kill Internet radio in the U.S., Michael Geist explains why webcasters considering a move to Canada will find that the legal framework for Internet radio trades costs for complexity. There are two main areas of concern from a Canadian perspective — broadcast regulation and copyright fees. The broadcast side is surprisingly regulation-free, but there are at least three Canadian copyright collectives lining up to collect from Internet radio stations.
Data Storage

Submission + - Starfish: GoogleFS for the Masses

Submitted by HighlyAvailable
HighlyAvailable writes: The recent studies published by Google and others indicate that hard drives are not as reliable as we thought they were. A possible solution would be for small and large companies to move to commodity PC clusters running parallel distributed fault tolerant storage systems. Google has such a system but hasn't released it for public consumption. An announcement was made on the FUSE mailing list last night mentioning the release of a GoogleFS-like file system for Linux and Mac OS X called Starfish. It is targeted at replacing NFS and Samba, includes source code, and they mention releasing it as open source in the near future.
Math

Submission + - No such thing as a constant constant?

Submitted by
Matthew Sparkes
Matthew Sparkes writes: "Feynman called alpha, "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number". One puzzle is whether this constant of nature has always had the same value. A signal from the early universe could answer that. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have suggested measuring the 21-cm line from about 400,000 years after the big bang, when neutral hydrogen formed, to about 150 million years later when the first stars flared up, to see if alpha has changed in that time."
Music

Submission + - Store says DRM causes 3 of 4 support calls

Submitted by Carter
Carter writes: Ars Technica reports that Musicload, one of Europe's largest movie stores, says that 75% of its customer support problems are caused by DRM. Users have frequent problems using the music that they have purchased, which has led Musicload to try selling independent label music with DRM. The results? Artists choosing to abandon DRM have seen 40% growth in sales. Good to see someone in the business both "gets it" and is willing to do something about it.
Democrats

Submission + - YouTube 1984/Hillary Ad Stirs Controversy

Submitted by
fistfullast33l
fistfullast33l writes: "A supposedly viral video mashup of the 1984 Apple ad and Hillary Clinton has gotten the political world talking about how much of an effect these types of videos will have on the 2008 presidential race. The video, whose author is analyzed at techPresident.com, features the famous Super Bowl ad that was remade recently to feature the iPod (look closely at the woman with the hammer — she's wearing an iPod). It also features Obama's campaign logo on the woman's shirt and Hillary Clinton speaking as "Big Brother." The debate rages as to whether the ad was made by the Obama campaign or another political operative to cause trouble, or whether it was made by grassroots supporters of the campaign. The author emailed techPresident

"The idea was simple and so was the execution. Make a bold statement about the Democratic primary race by culture jacking a famous commercial and replacing as few images as possible. For some people it doesn't register, but for people familiar with the ad and the race it has obviously struck a chord."
More analysis is offered at MyDD, a well known progressive blog that has a pretty good list of links talking about the ad."
Music

Submission + - CRB moves to destroy Internet Music radio in USA

Submitted by
knorthern knight
knorthern knight writes: "...and the rest of the world is probably next as the RIAA pressures politicians worldwide to "harmonize their policies" with the US. The United States Copyright Royalty Board has basically accepted the big business position, and raised internet radio royalty rates to punitive, indeed destructive levels. Some details are at Broadcast Law Blog. The implications are discussed in more detail at the Save Internet Radio website. To summarize, nobody but the biggies can afford it. Note that these royalties are *IN ADDITION TO* ASCAP/SESAC/BMI royalties that terrestrial radio stations pay. Terrestrial radio will *NOT* have to pay these additional royalties, unless they stream their feeds over the internet."
Security

Submission + - Hacker Defeats Hardware-based Rootkit Detection

Submitted by
Manequintet
Manequintet writes: "Joanna Rutkowska's latest bit of rootkit-related research shatters the myth that hardware-based (PCI cards or FireWire bus) RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to do forensics. At this year's Black Hat Federal conference, she demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU. The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said."
Space

Submission + - Building the Interplanetary Internet

Submitted by
sighted
sighted writes: "Internet pioneer Vint Cerf is leading a NASA effort to create a permanent network link to Mars within the next two years. As Cerf outlined in a recent talk, the "InterPlaNet" protocol is designed to handle the delay caused by interplanetary distances. For example, it can take a signal up to 20 minutes to travel between the Earth and Mars, depending on the distance between the two planets."
Announcements

Submission + - Fran Allen becomes first woman to win Turing award

Submitted by
shoemortgage
shoemortgage writes: "The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Frances E. Allen the recipient of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. This award marks the first time that a woman has received this honour."
Announcements

Submission + - Call from 'anywhere'... from anywhere!

Submitted by Butcher
Butcher writes: Network World talks about a new service called Whooptones which lets you add backgrounds to your phone calls — backgrounds that let you create the illusion that you're somewhere else. Just think — now you can cover up your Saturday night at home reading Slashdot with a call to your friends — just activate the party background and scream into the phone "SORRY, CAN'T HANG WITH YOU TONIGHT!" That's it — you're done, they think you're cool, and you can go back to Slashdot! (I know, unrealistic example because Slashdot on a Saturday night is already cool.)

There's even more. Whooptones also lets you 'inject' sounds by pressing the buttons on your phone — sounds that you select from the library or create yourself. How about greeting the customer care rep after your 25 minutes on hold with chain gun fire.

Some other cool features: it works with any phone (cell, fixed), voice recognition for dialing contacts, click-to-call, and ability to create your own private sounds as well as publish some for others.
Media

Submission + - Killer's alleged step-mom writes to Gabe of PA

Submitted by Shambhu
Shambhu writes: In this Penny Arcade post (scroll down) Gabe displays an email received from someone claiming to be the step-mother of one of the teenage killers of a homeless man that got so much press recently. The letter was in response to Gabe's earlier rant about the media blaming video games for violent crime which included a link to this CNN article. It doesn't make for very pleasant reading, and while I don't know how or when the authenticity will be confirmed, the letter confirms what most people expected: that these kids were not 'normal' in most senses of the term.

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