Comment Re:Compression / dedupe? (Score 1) 239
...way off base...
Well played.
Romanian Accused of Breaking Into NASA 169
alphadogg writes "Romanian authorities have arrested a 26-year old hacker who is accused of breaking into multiple NASA servers and causing $500,000 in damages to the U.S. space agency's systems. Robert Butyka, 26, was arrested on Tuesday in Western Romania following an investigation by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism. According to local reports, the hacker used the online moniker of 'Iceman.' He does not have a higher education or an occupation, a DIICOT spokeswoman said."
Pirate Party Invited To, Then Banned From Gaming Exhibition 115
esocid writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"Despite having booked and paid for their booth at Gamex, Sweden's largest gaming exhibition, the Pirate Party have been excluded from the action this week. The party, who say they were nagged for 2 to 3 months to book for the event, were this week informed they were too controversial and no longer welcome. ... [Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg] says that after the sales people from the exhibition pursued the party for months to participate, they decided to book and pay for a booth. ... 'I thought it was a bit strange, but in the afternoon, the pieces fell into place when the fair manager, Bear Wengse, phoned me and kindly, but firmly, announced that the Pirate Party was no longer welcome at the fair.' Wengse informed Troberg that the exhibition is a meeting place and not a venue for political conflict and the party's presence could cause problems, particularly since some of their work "could be perceived as criminal."'"
Civil Suit Filed, Involving the Time Zone Database 433
An anonymous reader writes "Arthur David Olson, the creator and maintainer of the timezone database used in about every unix/linux platform in use on the planet, just sent the message to the timezone mailing list: 'A civil suit was filed on September 30 in federal court in Boston; I'm a defendant; the case involves the time zone database. The ftp server at elsie.nci.nih.gov has been shut down. The mailing list will be shut down after this message. Electronic mail can be sent to me at @gmail.com. I hope there will be better news shortly.
--ado' A Google search does not yet reveal anything about this; does someone know what is going on?"
Facebook Forming a PAC 217
DougDot writes "According to a recent SFGate article, 'Social networking giant Facebook is expanding its political footprint, confirming that it has filed the necessary paperwork to open a political action committee in advance of the 2012 elections. The move is the latest in a series of maneuvers boosting the Palo Alto company's political profile in recent years, joining a steady rise in lobbying spending, several high-profile fundraisers and the failed statewide candidacy of one of its key officers for attorney general last year.' With 800 million users in its social network, and with very deep pockets, we could have a new, powerful Congress-influencing entity steering American politics."
NY Senators Want To Make Free Speech A Privilege 624
An anonymous reader writes "A group of four NY state senators have written a paper suggesting that free speech should be looked upon as a government granted privilege rather than a right. They're specifically concerned about cyberstalking and cyberbullying, and are introducing legislation to make both of those against the law. Among other troubling concepts, they argue that merely 'excluding' someone from a group is a form of cyberbullying."
Bethesda's 'Scrolls' Lawsuit Going Ahead 332
New submitter person46 writes "Bethesda's lawsuit against Mojang, developers of Minecraft, is going to court. As you may recall, Bethesda is claiming copyright infringement over the title of Mojang's upcoming CCG/board game Scrolls. Bethesda claims that the name and game concept are too similar to their well-known RPG franchise The Elder Scrolls. '[C]ourt documents show that Bethesda lawyers plan to use comments on Scrolls articles and videos from around the web to show how people will confuse Scrolls with The Elder Scrolls. He also added that they've captured screenshots of Scrolls' trailer as a way of showing how Mojang has copied Bethesda because both Skyrim and Scrolls contain mountains.' Mojang founder Notch had offered to settle the dispute with a friendly game of Quake 3, but apparently Bethesda wasn't up for that."
Senator Goes After 'Brazen' OnStar Privacy Shift 185
coondoggie writes "U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission to get the agency to investigate recent changes navigation and emergency services company OnStar made to its privacy practices. Schumer said, 'By tracking drivers even after they’ve cancelled their service, OnStar is attempting one of the most brazen invasions of privacy in recent memory. I urge OnStar to abandon this policy and for FTC to immediately launch a full investigation to determine whether the company’s actions constitute an unfair trade practice.'"
Comment $1279 per hour (Score 2) 59
Before anyone else asks what I was about to, the full title of the article is: $1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud
How does that compare to the cost-per-core-hour for other Amazon EC2 offerings? Is this a value meal deal or just a lot of burgers?
Making Facebook Self Healing 74
New submitter djeps writes "I used to achieve some degree of automated problem resolution with Nagios Event Handler scripts and RabbitMQ, but Facebook has done it on a far larger scale than my old days of sysadmin. Quoting: 'When your infrastructure is the size of Facebook's, there are always broken servers and pieces of software that have gone down or are generally misbehaving. In most cases, our systems are engineered such that these issues cause little or no impact to people using the site. But sometimes small outages can become bigger outages, causing errors or poor performance on the site. If a piece of broken software or hardware does impact the site, then it's important that we fix it or replace it as quickly as possible. ... We had to find an automated way to handle these sorts of issues so that the human engineers could focus on solving and preventing the larger, more complex outages. So, I started writing scripts when I had time to automate the fixes for various types of broken servers and pieces of software.'"
Maine School District Gives iPad To Every Kindergartner 478
An anonymous reader writes "'An Auburn, ME school district spent more than $200,000 to outfit every one of its 250 kindergartners with [iPads], along with sturdy cases to protect them. School officials say they are the first public school district in the country to give every kindergartner an iPad. Mrs. McCarthy says the tools give her 19 students more immediate feedback and individual attention than she ever could.' Will this improve low test scores, or be another case where spending more money does not produce a better educational outcome?"
$300M To Save 6 Milliseconds 524
whoever57 writes "A new transatlantic cable (the first in 10 years) is going to be laid at the cost of $300M. The reason? To shave 6ms off the time to transmit packets from London to New York. The Hibernian Express will reduce the current transmission time — roughly 65 milliseconds — by less than ten percent. However, investors believe the financial community will be lining up to pay premium rates to use the new cable. The article suggests that a one-millisecond advantage could be worth $100M per year to a large hedge fund."
EU Extends Music Copyright to 70 Years 536
MrSteveSD writes "The copyright on sound recordings by the Beatles, Rolling Stones and other famous bands was due to expire in the next few years. However, the EU Council has now scuttled any such hopes. The copyright term has been extended from 50 to 70 years with aging rockers expressing their delight."
Ask Slashdot: Passively Cooled Hardware For Game Emulation? 229
akutz writes "I recently sold a 2011 Mac mini on Craigslist because after using it to rip my Blu-ray collection, I tried to use it as an emulation station connected to my TV. However, emulators like Dolphin, BSNES, etc. would cause the Mac mini's fans to spin up like turbine engines — much too loud for my liking. I ask, therefore: What hardware would you recommend for building a passively cooled mini-system that will serve as a media center's emulation station?"
Nike to Unveil Self Lacing Shoes?
281
xTK-421x writes "Looks like Nike is announcing tonight (8:30PM PST) that they've finally been able to create the self lacing shoes from Back to the Future 2. TechCrunch reported on receiving an invitation to a Nike event taking place in Los Angeles today, where Nike would announce the release of the Air Mags, the self-lacing shoes that first made their appearance in Back to the Future II."
