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Crime

Submission + - Mississippi Makes Caller ID Spoofing Illegal (wdam.com)

Submitted by marklyon
marklyon writes: HB 872, recently signed into law by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, makes Caller ID spoofing illegal. Alterations to the caller's name, telephone number, or name and telephone number that is shown to a recipient of a call or otherwise presented to the network. The law applies to PSTN, wireless and VOIP calls. Penalties for each violation can be up to $1,000 and one year in jail. Blocking of caller identification information is still permitted.
Education

Submission + - Free Educational games about PC hardware?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am currently volunteering OS in a developing nation, and one of my subjects is "Computer Hardware Concepts". I am finding this one of the most difficult topics to teach. Primarily because it's hard to get the students excited about concepts which are far too abstract for them right now (it's an introductory course). The students are late high-school/early college aged, anything too easy and they get bored but anything that gets too technical and it whooshes over their heads. I am looking for any sort of free / OSS games about computer hardware, the internals of a PC and so on, problem is, I'm not finding anything. Do such games exist?
The Internet

Submission + - Digital Hate Up 20% Over 2009

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that the number of hate and terrorist-abetting Web sites grew 20% last year up from 10,000 in 2009 to 11,500 in 2010 but the "numbers are probably, at the end of the day, multiples of that" says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The real growth is in social networks while longtime Web sites like Stormfront, which bills itself as a leading site of the “White Nationalist Community,” have become the old-line media of online racism. "The spike is not in traditional Web sites in the United States," says Cooper. "It's more global and almost all in the social-networking area." Excerpts from the annual report, "Digital Terrorism and Hate 2010," are available online (PDF) although the full report is only distributed as a CD-ROM, mainly to law enforcement agencies and non-profit groups, instead of online because it includes terrorist tutorials, like video clips of bomb-making instructions. “We don’t want to help the bad guys,” says Cooper. “The goal is to get the collective genius of the Internet to help combat this problem.""
Books

Submission + - Japanese develop world's fastest book scanner (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IEEE Spectrum reports that Tokyo University researchers have developed a superfast book scanner that uses lasers and a high-speed camera to achieve a capture rate of 200 pages per minute. You just quickly flip the book pages in front of the system and it digitizes the pages, building a 3D model of each and reconstructing it as a normal flat page. The prototype is large and bulky, but if this thing could be made smaller, one day we could scan a book or magazine in seconds using a smartphone.
Wikipedia

Submission + - Wikipedia's Assault on Patent Encumbered Codecs (videoonwikipedia.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles (good, encyclopedia style videos only!). Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to "strike a blow for freedom" against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open html5 video implementations.

Submission + - SF Mayor Newsom Testifies in Terry Childs "Rogue (sfgate.com)

Submitted by marklyon
marklyon writes: Terry Childs, the jailed San Francisco FiberWAN Admin, is back in court today. Mayor Gavin Newsom testified that the FiberWAN and other city services continued to operate following Child's July 2008 arrest and refusal to divulge the passwords to city-owned network equipment. "The only thing that went down," Newsom said, "was our balance sheet, because of the costs associated with this."
Technology

Submission + - Toyota hasn't ruled out electronics problems (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by oxide7
oxide7 writes: Toyota Motor Co. has not ruled out an electronic malfunction as a cause of unintended acceleration in its vehicles which has led to a major global recall. Toyota U.S. sales chief James Lentz said in a congressional hearing today that the company has commissioned an independent study by an outside consultancy, Exponent, on the issue of its electronic throttle and that it had not discovered any electronics issues so far.

He said, however that the initial Exponent report was preliminary and that a full report at a later date would be released publicly. He said a full report would be release publicly.

Submission + - Top cell phones rated high in radiation (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: An environmental activist group has found that four recent, well-reviewed cell phones are pushing the edge of radiofrequency radiation safety limits set by the Federal Communications Commission: Motorola Droid, Blackberry Bold 9700, LG Chocolate Touch and HTC Nexus One by Google. The FCC says that any cell phone that falls within its limits is safe, but the activist group also points out that many a phone maker makes it insanely hard for a consumer to find the emission data.

Submission + - Unplug your Mac mic and camera in lieu of tin foil (willholloway.net) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This post details how to disable your intel iMac microphone and camera by unplugging them. Until Apple installs a hardware switch that allows us to turn our microphones on or off when we see fit, the only way to make sure that no one is listening or watching us on a compromised OS X system is to physically disconnect iSight. The process is very simple, and reversible. It is the only way to make sure that you have not bugged your own computer room.
Google

Submission + - YouTube to stop supporting IE6 from 13 march (digitizor.com)

Submitted by kai_hiwatari
kai_hiwatari writes: Users visiting YouTube on IE6 (or some other old browsers), will will now see an interstitial warning them that support for their browser will be dropped by 13 March. It also gives a links to some browsers that the user can use. The interstitial will appear every two weeks to remind any users still on older browsers to upgrade to the most recent version of their browser. While users on these old browsers will still be able to watch the video, Google says that some new functions that they will be rolling out will not be supported in these browsers.
Google

Submission + - Chinese Hacker Behind Google Hacks Identified (ft.com)

Submitted by Knee Socks
Knee Socks writes: A few days ago, the US government traced the online attack on Google and other companies back to two Chinese schools. Now US analysts say they have identified the author of the code that exploited a security loophole in IE8. Interestingly enough, the hacker, who works as a freelance security consultant, did not launch the attacks himself and has said he would have preferred his code "not be used in such offensive efforts." As things go in China, however, the government had unique access to his work, which analysts say makes it much harder for China to deny allegations of involvement with the attacks.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Massively Confusing Over Abbreviated Online Gaming

Submitted by
Jade Buddah
Jade Buddah writes: "GWN's Spanner Spencer writes, "Perhaps, as a lifelong and dedicated gamer, I shouldn't have let this particular boat sail quite so far before I decided it was time to visit the horizon. But fathoming an understanding of MMORPGs has become something of a recent obsession for me. I want to join that exclusive online club of 15 million gamers, but as yet, my application seems to be sorely lacking in experience points. So I invite you, dear reader, to accompany me on a free-roaming quest to uncover the secrets of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or as I prefer to think of them (at least this early on in my education) Massively Confusing Over Abbreviated Online Games."

The article makes for an interesting read, especially if you're one of the many gamers yet to get into MMORPGs."

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