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"District 9" Best Sci-fi Movie of 09? 705

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lotta-hype-on-this-one dept.
Travis wrote in with a story that says much of what my friends have been saying to me all weekend: "Slashdot covered 'District 9' back in July. I was originally excited to see this movie for its exhibition of exoskeleton robot 'mechs' (see images and video at Hizook.com ). After watching the film this opening weekend, I can honestly say that it was an amazing science fiction movie! Everything was spot-on: the plot, the human elements, the alien elements, the technology, and the seamless blend of special effects with real camera capture. This film should vault Neill Blomkamp into sci-fi stardom, on par with George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame). This is certainly a must-see movie — easily the best movie of the year."
Privacy

Facebook Faces the Canadian Privacy Commissioner 140

Posted by timothy from the soory-aboot-that-yah dept.
dakohli writes "Canwest's Sarah Schmidt writes that Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its 'serious privacy gaps.' And if the Canadian Privacy Commissioner isn't happy with the Web Company's response, then she has two weeks to push it to the Canadian Federal Court in Ottawa. 'A spokeswoman for the commission said it's premature to say whether the feud will end up in court. This would be an international first for Facebook, which has grown to more than 200 million users since its launch in 2004.'"

Comment Re:Backwards Argument? (Score 1) 234

by FunkyMarcus (#28357625) Attached to: Senators To Examine Exclusive Handset Deals

One of the problems with Sprint and Verizon is that the radio has to be specifically designed for them

What about the radio needs to be carrier-specific? An EV-DO radio is an EV-DO radio.

The big US carriers are guilty of crippling, but it's got nothing to do with the air interface or the hardware. In the CDMA world, the same exact hardware is, more often than not, sold outside the US without crippled software. In fact, sometimes they're even sold as such inside the US, by smaller carriers that can't afford to heavily customize (cripple) the software.
Patents

Google Chrome's Inclusion of FFMpeg Vs. the LGPL 245

Posted by timothy from the to-make-one's-head-spin dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google has recently added FFMpeg to Chrome to better support HTML5's video element. FFMpeg is licensed under LGPL 2.1, which states that 'if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Library by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Library.' Google admits to having obtained a patent license for their use, but still claims they are not violating LGPL. Among the confused we find Håkon Wium Lie and Miguel de Icaza, who wonders what FSF might say. Google doesn't feel like asking FSF for clarification."
Handhelds

Linux Ported To Dingoo A320 51

Posted by Soulskill from the it-slices-it-dices dept.
Busshy writes "Linux has arrived on the Dingoo A320, a portable console that was recently released in Asia (bundled with emulators for 16-bit consoles) which looks like the bottom half of a DS Lite. It also has an XMB that closely resembles those that PSP and PS3 owners are used to. Homebrew Coders have already ported ScummVM and PRBoom (Doom Engine) to Dingoo Linux."
Security

3,800 Vulnerabilities Detected In FAA's Web Apps 88

Posted by kdawson from the fear-of-flying dept.
ausekilis sends us to DarkReading for the news that auditors have identified thousands of vulnerabilities in the FAA's Web-based air traffic control applications — 763 of them high-risk. Here is the report on the Department of Transportation site (PDF). "And the FAA's Air Traffic Organization, which heads up ATC operations, received more than 800 security incident alerts in fiscal 2008, but still had not fixed 17 percent of the flaws that caused them, 'including critical incidents in which hackers may have taken over control of ATO computers,' the report says. ... While the number of serious flaws in the FAA's apps appears to be staggering, Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, says the rate is actually in line with the average number of bugs his security firm finds in most Web applications. ... Auditors were able to hack their way through the Web apps to get to data on the Web application and ATC servers, including the FAA's Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure system, Juneau Aviation Weather System, and the Albuquerque Air Traffic Control Tower. They also were able to gain entry into an ATC system that monitors power, according to the report. Another vulnerability in the FAA's Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure leaves related applications open to malware injection."
Patents

Working Toward a Patent-Agnostic Open Source License 124

Posted by timothy from the balancing-interests dept.
Glyn Moody writes "Are there ever circumstances when software patents that require payment might be permitted by an open source license? That's the question posed by a new license that is being submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for review. The MPEG Working Group wants to release a reference implementation of the new MPEG eXtensible Middleware (MXM) standard as open source, but it also wants to be able to sell patent licenses. If it can't, it might not make the implementation open source; but if it does, it might undermine the fight against software patent proliferation."

Comment USENET news only, not web sites (Score 1) 572

by FunkyMarcus (#23736287) Attached to: Three ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn
N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access:

"We're going to stop offering our subscribers newsgroups," said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "Some of the early press on this indicated we were going to block certain Web sites. We're not going to do that."

That was a reference to a New York Times article with the headline: "Net Providers to Block Sites With Child Sex." It said "the providers will also cut off access to Web sites that traffic in child pornography."

5 Predictions for Apple in 2007 257

Posted by CowboyNeal from the gross-conjecture-and-speculation dept.
Michael writes "2006 is coming to a close, and all anyone can think about (in regards to Apple, at least) is the upcoming Apple phone, but what happens next? What are we going to be salivating over and speculating about after Macworld? What changes are in store for Apple in 2007? No one knows for sure, but it sure is fun to take a guess."

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