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Submission + - Red Hat Prevails Against Patent Troll Acacia (marketwatch.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced that today a jury in federal court in Marshall, Texas, returned a verdict in favor of Red Hat, Inc. and Novell, Inc. in a case alleging patent infringement brought by IP Innovation LLC, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation and Technology Licensing Corporation. The patents at issue were found to be invalid and worthless.

Comment Fight not over yet (Score 4, Informative) 308

by Xanni (#26998051) Attached to: Australian Internet Censorship Plan Torpedoed

While it is true that a mandatory filtering proposal is likely to require legislation to implement (especially without the support of the Internet Industry Association and a voluntary code of conduct), it is not clear that any future legislation is dead in the water just yet.

http://www.efa.org.au/2009/02/26/xenophon-opposes-mandatory-isp-filtering-but-fight-not-over-yet/
Government

Submission + - Icelandian calls White House, labelled a terrorist (go.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 16-year-old boy in Iceland called a secret government phone number, which he thought was Bush's private number, and posed as the president of Iceland. After passing some impromptu security questions, such as President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson's birth date (which he answered with Wikipedia), Bush's secretary told him to expect a call back. Instead, police surrounded his house and interrogated him on where he got the number, threatening to put him on a no-fly list if he didn't tell. He claims he can't remember where he got the number, but says "I must have gotten it from a friend when I was about 11 or 12."
Education

Submission + - The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "BusinessWeek reports that higher education is increasingly a tale of two worlds, with elite schools getting richer and buying up all the talent. Thanks to endowments like the one that netted Harvard $5.7B in investment gains just last year, the Ivy Plus colleges — which account for less than 1% of students — have been able to lift their spending into the stratosphere, including extravagances like $272,000-a-bed-dorms and even a $4M student-horse-housing rehab. 'People used to look at every penny,' says a Yale Dean. 'The mind-set is different now.' Meanwhile, reports BW, public colleges and universities struggle to educate 75% of the country's students in an era when most states are devoting a dwindling share of their budgets to higher ed."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Google Quietly Adds HTTPS Support to GMail 4

Journal by jdray

This may be old news, but I just noticed myself and thought I'd report it. I've been using the "New Version" of GMail for a couple of weeks (I hardly notice the difference from the "Old Version"), and happened to notice today that the inbox URL still used "http://", even after all the complaints that they didn't maintain "https://" after login. I decided a quick test was in order, and added the all-important "s" to the protocol indicator. It worked fine. After clicking around some, openin
Security

Submission + - Penn student at center of worldwide hacking invest (philly.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When a suspicious computer server crash at the University of Pennsylvania last year denied service to 4,000 students, faculty and staff, technicians called the FBI — triggering a case that would take agents around the world and lead to the arrest of a brilliant but brash Penn junior. Ryan Goldstein, a 20-year-old bioengineering major, conspired with a New Zealand hacker known as AKILL to use Penn's computer system as a staging ground for a 50,000-computer attack against several online chat networks, authorities said. The FBI and Secret Service are expected to announce indictments today against Goldstein, a Florida man, and three others. Police recently executed related raids in New Zealand, Florida, California and Pennsylvania. The latest came Tuesday near Philadelphia. An FBI agent from the region is in New Zealand this week, and more arrests are possible. "We've been executing search warrants all over the world in this case," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Levy. View article for more.
The Military

Submission + - Wired: How Tech Almost Lost the War 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq? Wired says so. Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies. But the Pentagon got their network theory all wrong, with too few nodes and a closed architecture. Besides, a more efficient killing machine is the last thing you want in an insurgency like Iraq.
Government

Submission + - Kevin Rudd wins Australian Election (abc.net.au)

Submitted by
gunny01
gunny01 writes: "Kevin Rudd, the head of the Australian Labor Party, has defeated the Liberal Party incumbent John Howard in Saturday's federal election, with a 5.8% swing. This ends Howard's eleven year term in office, and it also appears at this stage that he has lost his seat. If this turns out to be correct, Peter Costello will be the Opposition leader in the new government.

Rudd, among other things, has promised to scrap the current governments unpopular industrial relations reforms and give Australians access to access to 100Mbs broadband and free laptops to every senior school student."
Encryption

Submission + - First use of RIPA to demand encryption keys (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by kylehase
kylehase writes: The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is being used for the first time to force an animal activist to reveal encryption keys for encrypted files she claims to have no knowledge of. According to the article, she could face up to two years if she doesn't comply.
The Internet

Submission + - The online search for Steve Fossett: worth it? (wired.com)

Submitted by Jeian
Jeian writes: Wired.com wonders — was the Mechanical Turk search for Steve Fossett effective? As one "Turker" put it, "I don't see any downsides to it, so long as people don't pester the professional search-and-rescue teams with poor leads." Unfortunately, Maj. Cynthia Ryan of the Civil Air Patrol says that's exactly what happened: "The crowdsourcing thing added a level of complexity that we didn't need, because 99.9999 percent of the people who were doing it didn't have the faintest idea what they're looking for."
Biotech

Submission + - Ham Radio Operator Finds Cure For Cancer (latimes.com) 5

Submitted by
CirReal
CirReal writes: "John Kanzius, K3TUP, himself suffering from cancer with nine months to live, used nanotechnology and a radio transmitter to kill cancer cells. "Kanzius did not have a medical background, not even a bachelor's degree, but he knew radios. He had built and fixed them since he was a child, collecting transmitters, transceivers, antennas and amplifiers, earning an amateur radio operator license. Kanzius knew how to send radio wave signals around the world. If he could transmit them into cancer cells, he wondered, could he then direct the radio waves to destroy tumors, while leaving healthy cells intact?" Reseachers "recently killed 100% of cancer cells grown in the livers of rabbits, using Kanzius' method.""
Social Networks

Submission + - Facebook under Fire over Breastfeeding Photos (breastfeeding123.com) 4

Submitted by
NewsCloud
NewsCloud writes: "Facebook continues to struggle with when to enforce its own terms of service. While the 78,240 group members who want Facebook to shut down the F*** Islam group are still frustrated, those concerned with photos of breastfeeding mothers can rest more easily. The site has recently come under fire for removing pictures of breastfeeding mothers, and banning users on the grounds that they'd uploaded "obscene content" to their profiles. Says Facebook, "Photos containing an exposed breast do violate our Terms and are removed." In response, more than 33,431 concerned Facebook users have created the "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!" group. Apparently, scantily clad college co-eds, fine and dandy."
Democrats

Submission + - Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else (news.com) 1

Submitted by
Brian Knotts
Brian Knotts writes: "News.com reports that congressional Democrats have introduced a bill creating a new corporate welfare program, which would force colleges into subscribing to music services, or else lose $100 billion of federal financial aid programs.

Unsurprisingly, the MPAA is on board with the bill.



"We very much support the language in the bill, which requires universities to provide evidence that they have a plan for implementing a technology to address illegal file sharing," said Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the MPAA.
"
Google

Submission + - WSJ spreads FUD on open source and Google Phone (wsj.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ben Worthen at the Wall Street Journal shows a laughable grasp of what "open source" means: 'Here's the first thing that will happen when a phone with Google's operating system hits the market: Information-technology departments will ban employees from connecting phones that run Google's operating system to their computers or the corporate network. The reason is that Google's operating system is open, meaning anyone can write software for it. That includes bad guys, who will doubtlessly develop viruses and other malicious code for these phones, which unsuspecting Google phones owners will download. Employees could spread the malicious code to the rest of the company when they synch their phones to their computers or use it to check email. The way to combat this is to develop anti-virus and anti-malware software for phones and to develop security procedures similar to those that have evolved for PCs over the last several years. But that's going to take time and money — neither of which the average IT department has. So until then, expect Google phones to be persona non grata at companies.'
Supercomputing

Submission + - Aussies advance on silicon-based quantum computer

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Australian researchers have taken another step towards creating a silicon-based quantum computer, according to a ZDNet report.

By embedding phosphorus atoms in pure silicon, the Centre for Quantum Computing hopes to build transistors on the scale of a single atom — helping to extend Moore's Law well into the future. The organisation has used silicon to create a single quantum bit, or "qubit", which earned them a nomination for this year's Australian Museum Eureka Science Prize.

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