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Social Networks

Submission + - OpenSocialNetwork: Social Network Of Open Source (opensocialnetwork.es)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OpenSocialNetwork is a project established at SourceForge to create a social network of open source between all users and developers. Want compete with other social networks popular and has important features as have several social networks (e.g. Professional, Family, Friends, etc...) Currently are looking for developers and habitual users of social networks to complete the features of the project.
Programming

Submission + - (how) do you print your code? 2

Submitted by
Thunder Rabbit
Thunder Rabbit writes: "When trying to grok the flow of code, I can't always do it just on the screen. When I come across a closing bracket, it may be several hundred lines below its opener. Even if they are correctly commented, it's hard for me to get the overview into my brain.

At my office, though I can print the code in syntax driven glorious full color, it comes out on individual sheets of letter paper (landscape, with minimized margins).

I long for the fanfold paper we had in university. It was black and white, but it was all contiguous; I could draw lines along the left margin connecting opening and closing brackets, and immediately get a better sense of the program's flow. And (goodness forbid) a bug caused by a missing or superfluous bracket? I could find that problem in a trice.

Nowadays I print my pages, then use tape to string them all together to get my fanfold fix.

What about you? How do you print your code?"
Handhelds

Submission + - Wearing a computer at work 1

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "The European Union has funded an ambitious project related to wearable technology. This project, named WearIT@work will end in one year and was funded with 14.3 million euros of EU money, even if the total project cost is expected to exceed 23 million euros. For mobile workers, the goal is to replace traditional interfaces, such as screen, keyboard or computer unit, by speech control or gesture control, without modifying the applications. This wearable system is currently being tested in four different fields including aircraft maintenance, emergency response, car production and healthcare. But read more for additional references and pictures showing emergency rescuers and doctors using some of these wearable computers to ease their work."
PHP

Submission + - How to convince a coworker to use getters/setters 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've just started a new job as a PHP programmer at a small startup. Two other programmers work at the company. One is a recent hire like me, and the other has worked there for several years, entirely in isolation, writing what he believes to be top-notch PHP code. The problem is this was his first professional coding gig and his code is kludgy, buggy, quirky and smacks of a lot of bad habits. He doesn't use getters and setters. He modifies the values in the $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST superglobals. He makes excessive use of objectionable features of PHP such as the @ error suppression construct and the global keyword. He suppresses all warnings and notices. He uses __autoload() and other magical functions. But he wrote 99% of the code, and as convoluted as it is, it works and runs the business successfully. He feels threatened by us newcomers when we try to suggest he should do things differently. How can we (the newcomers) convince him to practice good encapsulation by using getters & setters for a start?
Security

Submission + - New Zealand Nabs Cyber Crime Kingpin (techluver.com)

Submitted by
Tech.Luver
Tech.Luver writes: "Police nabbed the suspected teenage kingpin of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts, officials said. "Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police arrested the 18-year-old in the North Island city of Hamilton, said Martin Kleintjes, head of the police electronic crime center. The arrest was part of international probe into the criminal use of "botnets," in which hackers gain control of third-party computers through malicious software and then use them as remote-controlled robots to crash online systems, accept spam and steal users' personal information. ( http://techluver.com/2007/11/29/new-zealand-nabs-cyber-crime-kingpin/ )"
Power

Submission + - Ethanol Under Siege

Submitted by
Reservoir Hill
Reservoir Hill writes: "Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both Main Street and Wall Street, with promises of greater US energy independence, fewer greenhouse gases and help for the farm economy. But the Wall Street Journal reports that critics now blame ethanol for pushing up food prices and dispute how much it really helps reduce the need for oil while environmentalists say additional ethanol production could strain water supplies and impair water quality and the EPA says that "ozone levels generally increase with increased ethanol use." President Bush gave ethanol a boost in his State of the Union speech in 2005 by calling for "strong funding" of renewable energy. Energy legislation that summer required oil companies to blend a total of 7.5 billion gallons of "renewable" fuels into the nation's fuel supply by 2012. Now the ethanol lobby is pushing for the Senate version of pending energy legislation, which includes a requirement that gasoline blenders use 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022 but formidable opponents such as the livestock, packaged-food and oil industries also have lawmakers' ears and what once looked like a slam-dunk could now languish in pending energy legislation that might not pass for weeks, if ever."
Censorship

Submission + - Egyptian Blogger Silenced by YouTube

Submitted by
Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: "A Egyptian human rights activist has been muzzled after YouTube and Yahoo! shut down accounts belonging to the award-winning blogger. Cairo-based Wael Abbas regularly writes and posts video about police brutality, torture and sexual harassment in Egypt. One of the videos — of an Egyptian bus driver being sodomized with a stick by a police officer — was used as evidence to convict two officers of brutality, a rare occurrence in a country where human-rights groups say torture is rampant. YouTube said the decision to remove Abbas' videos had nothing to do with the Egyptian government, but was rather an internal decision."
Government

Submission + - Swiss DMCA quietly adopted (boingboing.net)

Submitted by roady
roady writes: We have seen a lot of talk about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers, not even the Swiss people. The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50'000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law can be read here.
The Courts

Submission + - Oregon AG Seeks to investigate RIAA tactics

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Turning the tables on the RIAA's attempt to subpoena information from the University of Oregon about the identities of the university students, the Attorney General has now filed additional papers requesting permission from the Court to conduct immediate discovery into the RIAA's 'data mining' techniques, such as the use of unlicensed investigators, the turning over of subpoenaed information to collection agencies, the obtaining of personal information from computers. The AG pointed out (pdf) that "Because Plaintiffs routinely obtain ex parte discovery in their John Doe infringement suits.....their factual assertions supporting their good cause argument are never challenged by an adverse party and their investigative methods remain free of scrutiny. They often settle their cases quickly before defendants obtain legal representation and begin to conduct discovery...... and have dropped cases, such as their case against Tanya Andersen, in which their methods and practices have been challenged through counterclaims...... While the University is not a party to the case, Plaintiffs' subpoena affects the university's rights and obligations. Plaintiffs may be spying on students who use the University's computer system and may be accessing much more than IP addresses." As one commentator succinctly put it, "They'll be going bananas in RIAA land" after reading this filing."
Security

Submission + - Surveillance cameras find atomic chemist's killer (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by GlobalEcho
GlobalEcho writes: When a chemist was murdered in Chicago last week, police had few leads, until they reviewed the tape on nearby surveillance cameras. Cameras have been reviled for intruding on the privacy of the public, but it would seem there is a case to be made for having at least a few of them around, perhaps just enough of them (as here) to catch the stupid criminals (which is most of them).
Security

Submission + - Russian Hackers Hijack Search Results (techluver.com)

Submitted by
TechLuver
TechLuver writes: "A huge campaign to poison web searches and trick people into visiting malicious websites has been thwarted. "The booby-trapped websites came up in search results for search terms such as "Christmas gifts" and "hospice". Windows users falling for the trick risked having their machine hijacked and personal information plundered. The criminals poisoned search results using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information. While computer security researchers have seen small-scale attempts to subvert search results before now, the sheer scale of this attack dwarfed all others. "This was fairly epic," said Alex Eckelberry, head of Sunbelt Software — one of the firms that uncovered the attack. ( http://techluver.com/2007/11/29/russian-hackers-hijack-search-results-in-coordinated-web-attack/ )"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - TPB files charges against media companies (thepiratebay.org)

Submitted by
PurpleZebra
PurpleZebra writes: "Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers. While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level. The companies that are being reported are the following: * Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB * Emi Music Sweden AB * Universal Music Group Sweden AB * Universal Pictures Nordic AB * Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB * Atari Nordic AB * Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd * Ubisoft Sweden AB * Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB * Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB"
Censorship

Submission + - Canada bans complaining about speech restrictions

Submitted by Anon E. Mouse
Anon E. Mouse writes: Calling Speech Restrictors "Enemies of Free Speech" Can Now Lead to Legal Liability in Canada:

Richard Warman, a lawyer who worked as an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, often filed complaints against "hate speech" sites — complaints that were generally upheld under Canadian speech restrictions.
Paul Fromm, a defender of various Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, has been publicly condemning Warman for, among other things, being "an enemy of free speech."
Warman sued, claiming that these condemnations are defamatory.

Friday, the Ontario Superior Court held for Warman — chiefly on the grounds that because Warman's claims were accepted by the legal system, they couldn't accurately be called an attack on free speech.

Snippets of the opinion may be found at the legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy.

Eugene Volokh writes:

It seems to me that Fromm was simply expressing opinions that the court disapproved of — that people who try to restrict "hate speech" are "enem[ies] of free speech," that people who are punished for hate speech are "dissidents," that people who for ideological reasons use the law to restrict speech they disagree with are ideologues who want only to deny freedom of speech to those with whom they disagree. Who is an "enemy of free speech" obviously turns on the speaker's view of free speech, and the view that he expects his audience to share, or that he wants to persuade his audience to share. Who deserves to be labeled with the generally positive term "dissident" depends on what dissent the speaker believes to be legitimate and morally proper.

Yet the Canadian justice system not only allows the suppression of certain viewpoints, and excludes them from free speech restrictions. With this case, it also tries to deny critics the right to label the speech they support "free speech," and the dissenters they like "dissidents."

The court is insisting that Canadians' speech not only follows the government-approved ideology on the topic of race, ethnicity, and religion (an ideology that I agree with, but that I don't think should be legally coerced). It is also insisting that Canadians' speech follows the government-approved ideology and terminology on the topic of free speech itself.

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