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Submission + - Hosted E-mail is Protected by the Fourth Amendment (freedom-to-tinker.com) 1

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: As reported on the EFF website, today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the contents of the messages in an email inbox hosted on a provider's servers are protected by the Fourth Amendment, even though the messages are accessible to an email provider.
As the court puts it, "[t]he government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber's emails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause."
Crime

Thief Returns Stolen Laptop Contents On USB Stick 352

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-been-a-pleasure-being-your-victim dept.
While it's true that Sweden is responsible for unleashing IKEA and ABBA on humanity, not everything they produce is terrible. Their thieves are some of the most considerate in the world. An unnamed professor at Umeå University received a USB stick with all his data after his laptop was stolen. From the article: "The professor, who teaches at Umeå University in northern Sweden, was devastated when ten years of work stored on his laptop was stolen. But to his surprise, a week after the theft, the entire contents of his laptop were posted to him on a USB stick. 'I am very happy,' the unnamed professor told the local Västerbottens-Kuriren newspaper. 'This story makes me feel hope for humanity.'"
Space

Submission + - Non-profit manned space rocket launching in a week (copenhagensuborbitals.com) 2

Submitted by Plammox
Plammox writes: Well not really manned in the first go, as this is the first test of the boosters and space craft in combination with the sea launch platform they built. The catch? All of this is a non-profit project based on voluntary labour and sponsors. How will they get the launch platform out in the middle of the Baltic sea to perform the test? With the founder's home built submarine pushing it, of course. Enjoy the pictures.
Medicine

Submission + - Look-Alike Tubes Are Killing Hospital Patients (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that in hospitals around the country nurses connect and disconnect interchangeable clear plastic tubing sticking out of patients' bodies to deliver or extract medicine, nutrition, fluids, gases or blood — sometimes with deadly consequences. Tubes intended to inflate blood-pressure cuffs have been connected to intravenous lines leading to deadly air embolisms., intravenous fluids have been connected to tubes intended to deliver oxygen leading to suffocation, and in 2006 a nurse at in Wisconsin mistakenly put a spinal anesthetic into a vein, killing 16-year-old who was giving birth. "Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake," says Nancy Pratt, a vocal advocate for changing the system. Critics say the tubing problem, which has gone on for decades, is an example of how the FDA fails to protect the public. "FDA could fix this tubing problem tomorrow, but because the agency is so worried about making industry happy, people continue to die," says Dr. Robert Smith."

Comment Re:GNAA RULEZ! (Score 2, Informative) 223

by miquels (#32623790) Attached to: Italian MEP Wants To Eliminate Anonymity On the Internet

As far as I can see the directive would require ISPs to record what sites I visit, not what I do on them. Isn’t this what they already do?

No, ISPs do not record what sites you visit. At least none that I know of (and I work in the industry). Why would they ? It would be outrageously expensive, for no gain.

Isn’t that information already available following a warrant anyway?

Well no, as ISPs do not record what sites you visit. They can put a tap on your line after a warrant though (Lawful Intercept), but that is for one user specifically, and nothing is recorded- a copy of the data that passes over the line is just sent in real-time to the justice department.
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
BSD

DragonFly 2.4 Released 73

Posted by kdawson from the four-wings dept.
electrostaticcarrot writes "DragonFly — that fourth major BSD — has had its 2.4 release. The 'most invasive change' is the addition and usage of a DevFS for /dev; building on this, drives are now also recognized by serial number (along with /etc/devtab for aliases) as listed in /dev/serno. This is also the first release with a x86-64 ISO, stable but with limited pkgsrc support. Other larger changes include a ported and feature-extended (with full hotplug and port multiplier support) AHCI driver (and SILI driver based on it) originally taken from OpenBSD, major NFS changes, and HAMMER updates. A pkgsrc GIT mirror has also been set up and put in use to make future pkgsrc updates quicker and smoother. Here are two of the mirrors."
Internet Explorer

Reports of IE Hijacking NXDOMAINs, Routing To Bing 230

Posted by kdawson from the if-I-want-bing-I-will-type-bing dept.
Jaeden Stormes writes "We just started getting word of a new browser hijack from our sales force. 'Some site called Bing?' they said. Sure enough, since the patches last night, their IE6 and IE7 installations are now routing all NXDOMAINs to Bing. Try it out — put in something like www.DoNotHijackMe.com." We've had mixed results here confirming this: one report that up-to-date IE8 behaves as described. Others tried installing all offered updates to systems running IE6 and IE7 and got no hijacking.
Update: 08/11 23:24 GMT by KD : Readers are reporting that it's not Bing that comes up for a nonexistent domain, it's the user's default search engine (noting that at least one Microsoft update in the past changed the default to Bing). There may be nothing new here.

Comment Re:Well ... (Score 1) 420

by miquels (#28352879) Attached to: A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany

... let's see, If it were a child pornography site, then yes, I would agree with censorship.

Really ? I'd rather that the police just go and find the bastards that run the site, shut it down, and throw them in jail.

Blacklisting is just a "if we can't see it, it isn't there, great we're done" policy, which probably increases the very thing you're trying to prevent.

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