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Games

Submission + - In Isk We Trust: The Eve Online IskBank Exposed. (evenews24.com)

Submitted by
riverni
riverni writes: "First in a series of articles uncovering the lucrative "black-market" existing in the Eve Online, a sci-fi themed single server MMORPG. The overall scale of the operation is breathtaking. While there exist legal ways to exchange real work currency for in-game currency, the black market, primarly driven by botters (users who utilize automated macroes to perform rewardable tasks in game), the article reports on how Iskbank.com made approximately $290,000 in sales for the 10-1/2-month period. These figures do not include any sales made through their sister site, Eveisk.ru and yes, those are US Dollars"
Movies

Submission + - Planned Lovecraft movie scrapped over R-rating (newyorker.com)

Submitted by
RogueyWon
RogueyWon writes: "The New Yorker is reporting that a planned adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's seminal sci-fi horror novella "At the Mountains of Madness" has been canned by Universal over concerns that it would receive an "R" rating. Director Guillermo del Toro had planned a dark, high budget epic that would have defied the usual "schlock" horror conventions. Lovecraft fans will either be condemning Universal's timidity, or breathing a sigh of relief, depending upon the extent of their faith in Hollywood."
Software

Submission + - Stopping The Horror of 'Reply All'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The WSJ's Elizabeth Bernstein reports that Reply All is still the button everyone loves to hate. 'This shouldn't still be happening,' Bernstein says of those heart-stopping moments (YouTube) when one realizes that he or she's hit 'reply all' and fired off a rant for all to see. 'After almost two decades of constant, grinding email use, we should all be too tech-savvy to keep making the same mortifying mistake, too careful to keep putting our relationships and careers on the line because of sloppiness.' Vendors have made some attempts to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot and perhaps even starting a Reply All email storm. Outlook allows users to elect to get a warning if they try to email to more than 50 people. Gmail offers an Undo Send button, which can be enabled by setting a delay in your out-bound emails, from 5-30 seconds, after which you're SOL. And AOL is considering showing faces, rather than just names, in the To field in a new email product. 'I wonder if the Reply All problem would occur if you saw 100 faces in the email,' AOL's Bill Wetherell says.
Idle

Submission + - Ex-Microsoft CTO writes $625 cookbook (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
carusoj
carusoj writes: "Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's first CTO, made his mark in the tech world. Now he's cemented his place in the world of cooking and food science with the publication of a groundbreaking six-volume, 2,438-page cookbook. Some of the techniques in Myhrvold's "Modernist Cuisine" are intimidating, to put it mildly, calling for such daunting ingredients as liquid nitrogen and equipment such as centrifuges and rotor-stator homogenizers. But Myhrvold and his co-authors insist that the majority of recipes can be made in a conventional home kitchen — with a few recommended, inexpensive extras such as a digital gram scale and water bath for sous vide cooking."
AI

Submission + - Harvard prof/AI expert wins "Nobel in Computing" (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Leslie Valiant, a versatile computer scientist at Harvard University whose work has impacted everything from artificial intelligence to distributed computing, has been named the winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award. The annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize in Computing," recognizes Valiant for his broad contributions to computational learning theory and computer science. The award comes with a $250,000 prize funded by Google and Intel.
Security

Submission + - AV Industry Fails to Cover the Basics (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: NSS Labs released two test reports of endpoint protection products which reveal new shortcomings in these widely deployed products. They cover multi-vector attacks (malware delivered from the web, email, network file sharing and USB flash drives), memory-only attacks, and anti-evasion techniques. Products missed between 10% and 60% of the evasions typically used by cybercriminals. Less than a third of the tested vendors had protection for memory-only malware, leaving a significant evasion gap in their products.
Facebook

Submission + - US Politician Sues Facebook After Losing Election (ispyce.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Majed Moughni lost Michigan’s Republican primary against incumbent Rep. John Dingell, who just so happens to be the longest-serving member of Congress. Even so, Moughni blames just one entity for his loss: Facebook. And now the attorney is suing the social networking site—not for money, but for an injunction that would halt premature account closing. Moughni, who came in fourth in the August primary, wants to know why Facebook shut down his page, cutting him off from his 1,600 friends, in June."
Math

Submission + - P=NP again? (optimization-online.org)

Submitted by rgbecker
rgbecker writes: Another proof that P=NP this time via a polynomial optimization approach to integer factorization. Submitted to a reputable journal, but perhaps it is just another maybe.
Businesses

Submission + - Father of Microsoft FrontPage Takes Home Oscar

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Remember Microsoft FrontPage? The product was the brainchild of Charles Ferguson, who took home the Best Documentary Academy Award Sunday for Inside Job, a scathing analysis of the players in the global financial crisis of 2008. In his previous tech life, Ferguson was chairman of Vermeer, the company behind the FrontPage web publishing software, which he sold to Microsoft for $133 million in 1996. The hefty payday didn't stop Ferguson from later calling Microsoft a "predatory bully" and urging its breakup in his 1999 book High St@kes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars.
Security

Submission + - 20 Years of Innovative Windows Malware (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard takes a look at the past 20 years of innovative Windows malware — an evolution that provides insights into the kinds of attacks to come. From macro viruses, to interstitial infections, to spray attacks, to industrial espionage, 'there's been a clear succession, with the means, methods, and goals changing definitively over time,' Leonhard writes, outlining the rise of Windows malware as a succession of ingenious breakthroughs to nefarious ends."
Databases

Submission + - US House crimps consumer safety database money (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: In a move that reeks of party politics and lobbyist influence, the US House this week made moves to gut the funding of an online database that was to become a repository for consumer safety information three weeks before it was to debut. The database is required as part of the over-arching Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed in 2008 that was supposed to put some teeth in the Consumer Product Safety Commission overseeing the database. Once in the public domain, consumers will be able to search the product safety complaints of thousands of consumer products.

Submission + - Cyanobacterium Produces Diesel Directly (dailytech.com) 1

Submitted by olsmeister
olsmeister writes: A Massachusetts based company has developed a form of cyanobacteria that can take water, sunlight, and CO2, and turn it into diesel fuel. Not only that, but they claim they can do it efficiently and at $30 per barrel. They say they can be operating commercially in 2 years.
Government

Submission + - Comcast-NBC Deal Accidentally Protects Internet (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "Details of the conditions that the Department of Justice required to approve Comcast's purchase of NBC have emerged today. Blogger Kevin Fogarty looks at the details — Comcast is forbidden from blocking Netflix over its pipes, and must sell NBC shows via iTunes and other similar services — and concludes that Internet access for everybody, including business users, has been protected, more or less by accident."

Submission + - Betty Boop and Indefinite Copyright (cartoonbrew.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: US Court of Appeals officially recognizes that under the current regime, characters like Betty Boopy "would essentially never enter the public domain".

"Apparently the Fleischer estate has lost a court battle for the rights to Betty Boop, a character created by Grim Natwick at Max Fleischer’s studio in 1930."

"The Fleischer Studio tried to sue Avela Inc. over its licensing of public domain Betty Boop poster images (for handbags and T-shirts). The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (based in San Francisco) ruled against the Fleischers, saying in their decision, “If we ruled that AVELA’s depictions of Betty Boop infringed Fleischer’s trademarks, the Betty Boop character would essentially never enter the public domain.”"

"So where does that leave Ms. Boop? No longer represented by the heirs of Max Fleischer and King Features Syndicate? Does this make Harvey Comics – or by extention, its current owner Classic Media – the owner of the property? Or is the character now in public domain."

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