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Communications

The FCC May Decide Not To Regulate Broadband 279

Posted by kdawson from the outgunned-and-outmaneuvered dept.
This morning the Washington Post reported that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is leaning toward letting the telecomms have their way — not asserting greater authority to regulate the Internet by reclassifying broadband as a Title II service. The blogs are atwitter (HuffPo, StopTheCap) that not voting to apply Title II regulation to Internet carriers is tantamount to giving up on net neutrality — which has been a centerpiece of the Obama administration's tech policy. The Post paraphrases its sources, who are reading the chairman's mind, that Genachowski believes "the current regulatory framework would lead to constant legal challenges to the FCC's authority every time it attempted to pursue a broadband policy." The FCC will say only that the chairman has made no decision yet.
Real Time Strategy (Games)

StarCraft II To Be Released On July 27 220

Posted by Soulskill from the guess-it's-ready dept.
Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first game in a series of three, will be released on July 27. The game will contain the Terran campaign (29 missions), the full multiplayer experience, and "several challenge-mode mini-games," with "focused goals designed to ease players into the basics of multiplayer strategies." It will launch alongside the revamped Battle.net, which we've previously discussed. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said, "We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here. Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."
Privacy

Former Head of CIA Think Tank Talks Privacy, Technology 147

Posted by Soulskill from the she-knows-if-you've-been-bad-or-good dept.
blackbearnh writes "Carmen Medina, until recently, helped run the analysis side of the house at the CIA. She also ran the agency's think tank, the Center for the Study of Intelligence. A self-proclaimed heretic, she has a number of controversial views about how we gather intelligence and how technology is changing the game. She talked to O'Reilly Radar about this and other topics, including the possible ways that intelligence analysis could be crowdsourced, why government technology procurement is so broken, and how the public may need to readjust its views on what things such as privacy mean. Medina said, 'Government is viewed as inefficient and wasteful by American citizens. I would argue that one of the reasons why that view has grown is that they're comparing the inefficiency of government to how they relate to their bank or to their airline. Interestingly enough, for private industry to provide that level of service, there are a lot of legacy privacy barriers that are being broken. Private industry is doing all sorts of analysis of you as a consumer to provide you better service and to let them make more profit. But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that. And yet, if government, because of this dynamic, continues not to be able to adopt modern transactional practices, then it's going to fall further behind the satisfaction curve.'"

Comment Google doesn't need journaling? (Score 3, Interesting) 348

by Paradigm_Complex (#30770634) Attached to: Google Switching To EXT4 Filesystem
The main advantage of EXT3 over EXT2 is that, with journaling, if you ever need to fsck the data, it goes a LOT quicker. It's interesting to note that Google never felt it needed that functionality.

Additionally, I was under the impression that Google used massive numbers of commodity consumer-grade harddrives, as opposed to high-grade stuff which I presume is less likely to err. Couple this fact with the massive amount of data Google is working with and there has got to be a lot of filesystem errors, no?

Can anyone else with experience with big database stuff hint as to why Google would not need to fsck their data (often enough for EXT3 to be worthwhile)? Is it cheaper just to overwrite the data from some backup elsewhere at this scale? How do they know the backup is clean without fscking that?
Google

YouTube Revamp Imminent? 297

Posted by samzenpus from the how-about-3D dept.
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube's latest blog post indicated that some changes are on the way. Google has opened up a call to submit and vote on ideas. HTML 5 open video with Free formats has dominated the vote, maintaining over twice as many votes as the next-highest item almost since the vote opened up. You may vote here (Google login required). Perhaps we don't even need to since their blog post comes suspiciously soon after their revised merger with On2. Could these improvements be a completely overhauled YouTube 2.0?"

Submission + - Large Can. Bank Requires Passwords be Crackable (tdcanadatrust.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A large Canadian bank has recently changed its policy for logging into personal bank accounts through the Internet. They now require passwords to be no longer than 8 characters in length. If a customer already has an account with a password greater than 8 characters then they will no longer be allowed to log on. They will instead be transferred to a Web page telling them to contact customer service. I'm sure this will please their business contacts in the Chinese government.

Submission + - Antitrust case against RIAA reinstated (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In Starr v. SONY BMG Music Entertainment, an antitrust class action against the RIAA, the complaint — dismissed at the District Court level — has been reinstated by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In its 25-page opinion (PDF) , the Appeals court held the the following allegations to sufficiently allege antitrust violations: 'First, defendants agreed to launch MusicNet and pressplay, both of which charged unreasonably high prices and contained similar DRMs. Second, none of the defendants dramatically reduced their prices for Internet Music (as compared to CDs), despite the fact that all defendants experienced dramatic cost reductions in producing Internet Music. Third, when defendants began to sell Internet Music through entities they did not own or control, they maintained the same unreasonably high prices and DRMs as MusicNet itself. Fourth, defendants used [most favored nation clauses (MFNs)] in their licenses that had the effect of guaranteeing that the licensor who signed the MFN received terms no less favorable than terms offered to other licensors. For example, both EMI and UMG used MFN clauses in their licensing agreements with MusicNet. Fifth, defendants used the MFNs to enforce a wholesale price floor of about 70 cents per song. Sixth, all defendants refuse to do business with eMusic, the #2 Internet Music retailer. Seventh, in or about May 2005, all defendants raised wholesale prices from about $0.65 per song to $0.70 per song. This price increase was enforced by MFNs.'
Security

Gmail Moves To HTTPS By Default 275

Posted by timothy from the you-mean-I-gotta-log-in-again? dept.
clone53421 writes "Although Gmail has long supported HTTPS as an option, Gmail announced their decision yesterday to switch everyone to HTTPS by default: 'We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do.' I wonder if this has anything to do with the reports of Chinese users having their accounts hacked? 'Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves,' said David Drummond in that blog update. That does sound like it perhaps could be a result of insecure HTTP traffic being intercepted in transit between the users and Gmail's servers."
Cellphones

Nexus One Owners Report Spotty 3G Signals On T-Mobile 146

Posted by timothy from the can't-get-a-dial-tone dept.
rsk writes "One of the most popular questions on the Google Nexus One support forums is the 'Spotty 3G?' thread with almost 700 posts of users complaining about their 3G signal coverage fluctuating up, down, and between EDGE/3G with the phone just sitting on the desk or compared to other 3G devices on the T-Mobile network that don't offer the same unpredictable behavior. One workaround that seems to fix the issue is forcing the phone into '3G' or 'WCDMA Only' mode. This is a bit of a downer given that T-Mobile just finished their 3G upgrade to 7.2Mbps. Official word from Google is 'We are investigating this issue....'"
Google

Google.cn Attack Part of a Broad Spying Effort 515

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
CWmike writes "Google's decision Tuesday to risk walking away from China (Um, the world's largest Internet market) may have come as a shock, but security experts see it as the most public admission of a top IT problem for US companies: ongoing corporate espionage originating from China. It's a problem that the US lawmakers have complained about loudly. In the corporate world, online attacks that appear to come from China have been an ongoing problem for years, but big companies haven't said much about this, eager to remain in the good graces of the world's powerhouse economy. Google, by implying that Beijing had sponsored the attack, has placed itself in the center of an international controversy, exposing what appears to be a state-sponsored corporate espionage campaign that compromised more than 30 technology, financial and media companies, most of them global Fortune 500 enterprises. The US government is taking the attack seriously. Late Tuesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a statement asking the Chinese government to explain itself, saying that Google's allegations 'raise very serious concerns and questions.' She continued: 'The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.'"
Movies

Nintendo Wii To Get Netflix Streaming 213

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.
motang writes "Netflix and Nintendo is set to announce Netflix streaming service for the Wii soon. Subscribers who have the unlimited streaming service can watch non-HD version of the movies on their Wii with a special Netflix disc inserted." The thing I can't understand is why the PS3 and Wii have to require a disc. Both are capable of downloading applications and executing them. Why should I be required to dedicate my disc slot to stream a movie? Of course, my netflix queue is half-filled with Ken Burns documentaries, so if I lost the disc, I think that would just make the wife happier.
Google

Google Hacked, May Pull Out of China 687

Posted by kdawson from the now-you've-done-it dept.
D H NG writes "Following a sophisticated attack on Google infrastructure originating from China late last year, Google has decided to take 'a new approach' to China. In their investigation, Google found that more than 20 large companies had been infiltrated and dozens of Chinese human rights activists' Gmail accounts had been compromised. Google has decided to 'review the feasibility of [its] business operations in China,' no longer censoring results in Google.cn, and if necessary, to 'shut down Google.cn, and potentially [Google's] offices in China.'"
Security

Autonomous Intelligent Botnets Bouncing Back 152

Posted by CmdrTaco from the duck-and-cover dept.
coomaria writes "Thought that 2009 was the year botnets died? Well, think again: compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world every single day this year, and it's going to get worse if intelligent and autonomous botnets arrive in 2010 as predicted."
The Military

$26 of Software Defeats American Military 534

Posted by CmdrTaco from the cheap-at-twice-the-price dept.
reporter writes "A computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet can read and store the data transmitted on an unsecured channel by an unmanned drone. Drones are crucial to American military operations, for these aerial vehicles enable Washington to conduct war with a reduced number of soldiers. '... the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under US surveillance.'"

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