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Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox to introduce click-to-play option to protect against dangerous plugins (sophos.com)

Submitted by chuckfirment
chuckfirment writes: For those of us familiar with NoScript, blocking unwanted content is nothing new. However, this upcoming Firefox change may bring added security to the masses.

From the article: "Jared Wein of Mozilla blogged last month about a new feature he was developing for Firefox 14 called "click-to-play". The idea is to block the default loading of plugins like Java and Flash when surfing to reduce the memory footprint and provide protection against exploitation of plugin vulnerabilities."
Games

Submission + - Blizzard: Diablo 3 on Linux Possible, But Demand Must Be There (ausgamers.com)

Submitted by
trawg
trawg writes: "As the release draws closer, Diablo 3 game director Jay Wilson from Blizzard has been working hard to keep the community updated. On a press trip to Australia last week, Jay answered a wide range of questions in this video interview (transcript provided) on topics such as PvP, patch releases, game difficulty, and the potential for D1 or D2 being re-released in HD form. He also touches on the subject of a Linux release of the game: '... I don’t think that it would be outrageous, but I think that we’d have to see that there’d be a demand for it. And then we’d have to see that that demand would be worth the time we take away from the other things that we could do.' So it sounds unlikely in the short term, but there's a glimmer of hope for the future."
Hardware

Submission + - Auto Makers Announce Electric Car Charging Standard (motorward.com)

Submitted by Overly Critical Guy
Overly Critical Guy writes: Auto makers are launching a universal EV charger that charges an electric vehicle in 15 to 20 minutes. The standard, called Combined Charging System, has been approved by the Society of Automative Engineers and ACEA, the European association of vehicle manufacturers, as the standard for fast-charging electric vehicles.
Android

Submission + - Android takes over 51% market share in the US (examiner.com)

Submitted by somebodee
somebodee writes: From the article:
"
ComScore released new data today, suggesting that Android has finally taken over half of the US smartphone market. This comes from a 3.7% market share increase from the previous quarter, ending in December, 2011. Similarly, iOS's market share grew by 1.1% to 30.7%. RIM and Microsoft's market share both dropped, with RIM having the sharpest decline. RIM's market share fell by 3.7%, placing it at 12.3% of the total US market. Microsoft's smartphone market share fell by .8% to 3.9% total, and Nokia's market share for Symbian remained steady at 1.4% of the total market."
News

Submission + - Murdoch declared unfit to head a corporation (afr.com)

Submitted by
Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: "Murdoch ‘unfit’ to run major corp: MPs

Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to lead a major global corporation and his son James showed “wilful ignorance” about the extent of telephone hacking at the former News of the World, a British parliamentary report has found.

The report, which is described as devastating, accuses News Corp of "huge failings of corporate governance" and that throughout its instinct had been "to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators". The report also accuses James Murdoch’s predecessor, Les Hinton, News of the World’s veteran in-house lawyer Tom Crone and former News of the World editor Colin Myler of deliberately misleading Parliament.

“Everybody in the world knows who is responsible for the wrong-doing at News Corporation: Rupert Murdoch,’ Mr Watson said. “More than any individual alive he is to blame, morally the deeds are his. He paid the piper and called the tune. It is his company, his culture, his people, his business, his failures, his crimes, the price of profits and his power.”

This is not just a British story, there are possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."

Submission + - Google releases key part of Street View pipeline (blogspot.com)

Submitted by drom
drom writes: Google released a key part of their Street View pipeline as open source today: Ceres Solver. It's a large-scale nonlinear least squares minimizer. What does that mean? It's a way to fit a model (like expected position of a car) to data (like GPS positions or accelerometers). The library is completely general and works for many problems. It offers state of the art performance for bundle adjustment problems typical in 3D reconstruction, among others.
NASA

Submission + - Thinking of mining an asteroid: Who owns them? (video) (tech-stew.com)

Submitted by
techfun89
techfun89 writes: "According to Planetary Resources co-founder Eric Anderson, a US company has the right to an asteroid and its resources. He also says that its a goal of the US government to enable and promote such commercial activities in space.

This is the United States view on asteroids, but there is a 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty that may say otherwise.

"Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means," states Article 2 of the treaty.

"The UN treaty in essence forbids private ownership of celestial property. According to the treaty, you could not arrive on the Moon or an asteroid and claim it for ownership, at least as a country," according to an attorney Michael Gold for Bigelow Aerospace."
Android

Submission + - Accountability - Not Code Quality- Makes iOS Safer Than Android (threatpost.com) 1

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "Threatpost is reporting on a new study of mobile malware that finds accountability, not superior technology, has kept Apple's iOS ecosystem free of viruses, even as the competing Android platform strains under the wait of repeated malicious code outbreaks.
Dan Guido of the firm Trail of Bits and Michael Arpaia of iSEC Partners told attendees at the SOURCE Boston Conference on Thursday about an empirical analysis of existing malicious programs for the Android and iOS platforms shows that Google is losing the mobile security contest badly — every piece of malicious code the two identified was for the company's Android OS, while Apple's iOS remained free of malware, despite owning 30% of the mobile smart phone market in the U.S. Apple's special sauce? Policies that demand accountability from iOS developers, and stricter controls on what applications can do once they are installed on Apple devices."
Science

Submission + - 'Huge' water resource exists under Africa (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by gambit3
gambit3 writes: Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater. They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface.
Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water.
Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated.
News

Submission + - Hacked Frogger Arcade Lets Users Dodge NYC Traffic In Real-Time (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "'5th Ave Frogger,' created and developed by Tyler DeAngelo, tracks real-time cars and traffic on 5th Avenue in New York City, and by hacking into the old arcade game, players on the massive avenue can navigate their virtual frogs across the road right in front of them.To make the game work, DeAngelo needed to find a way to transmit traffic into a virtual game in real-time. In the end, DeAngelo installed a web camera with a bird's eye view of 5th Avenue and wrote code that could track the real-time positions of the cars, but he also found a way to segment the foreground so the computer could tell the difference between stationary objects in the picture (ex: street, buildings) from the moving objects (cars). By transmitting the car information into pixel data and live streaming it in real-time, the positions of the cars could be mapped into car graphics in the virtual arcade game, driving down the road in real-time."
Science

Submission + - Eating meat helped early humans reproduce (latimes.com) 1

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child's brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. "Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened," said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. "This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution."

She notes, however, that the results say nothing about what humans today should or should not eat.

Submission + - World's sixth launch of nuclear ICBM led by a woman (rediff.com)

Submitted by
TeriMaKiChooth
TeriMaKiChooth writes: "Yesterday, India became the sixth country after the five nuclear powers to successfully launch a 5000 km nuclear capable Intercontinental ballistic missile.
It made major news headline. However few people outside India noticed that it was headed by a woman. Very few women in the world have been successful in the field of ballistic missile technology.
Here is her wikipedia entry — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessy_Thomas"
Science

Submission + - Studies Suggest Massive Increase in Scientific Fraud (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus writes: Scientific fraud has always been with us. But as stated or suggested by some scientists, journal editors, and a few studies, the amount of scientific “cheating” has far outpaced the expansion of science itself. According to some, the financial incentives to “cut corners” have never been greater, resulting in record numbers of retractions from prestigious journals.

From the article: “For example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent.”

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