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Media

Submission + - Journalist attempts to hack, gets caught (valleywag.com)

Submitted by
wawannem
wawannem writes: "I know that fark is not likely considered the serious news institution that slashdot is... In fact, I've heard of it referred to as slashdot's immature, mentally handicapped, younger stepbrother. Whatever it is, it appears that it drew some attention from a Fox news affiliate. Enough attention that it seems a reporter may have tried to hack into their servers.
FTA — Curtis believes that Phillips, or someone working with Phillips, sent him and several other Fark employees deceptive emails in an attempt to get them to download a trojan, a form of computer virus. The Trojan was designed to capture their passwords and give the author access to Fark's servers. In one case, it succeeded, giving a hacker passwords to a file server and one Fark employee's email account; he tried, but failed, to break into Fark's Web servers and email.
The article goes into some other speculation about the reporter's intentions, but I would imagine that the title of journalist should not exempt him from punishment in this case."
The Courts

Submission + - Tanya Andersen Brings Class Action Against RIAA

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Ever since the RIAA's litigation campaign began in 2003, many people have been suggesting a class action against the RIAA. Tanya Andersen, in Oregon, has taken them up on it. The RIAA's case against this disabled single mother, Atlantic v. Andersen, has received attention in the past, for her counterclaims against the RIAA including claims under Oregon's RICO statute, the RIAA's hounding of her young daughter for a face to face deposition, the RIAA's eventual dropping of the case "with prejudice", and her lawsuit against the RIAA for malicious prosecution, captioned Andersen v. Atlantic. Now she's turned that lawsuit into a class action. The amended complaint seeking class action status (pdf) sues for negligence, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, federal and state RICO, abuse of process, malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trespass, invasion of privacy, libel and slander, deceptive business practices, misuse of copyright law, and civil conspiracy."
NASA

Submission + - Blogger finds Y2K bug in NASA global warming study 11

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to the article at http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+ NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II.
Space

Submission + - "Life" found in inorganic interstellar dus (pressesc.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Alien
Anonymous Alien writes: "Physicists have found evidence that inorganic dust with life-like qualities exists in interstellar space, according to new research published in New Journal of Physics that hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks and also offer a possible new explanation for the origin of life on Earth."
United States

Submission + - Pirate Party US announse Utah registration drive (pirate-party.us) 1

Submitted by
neuron2neuron
neuron2neuron writes: "The Pirate Party of the United States announces it is now accepting statements of support in the State of Utah. These statements are the first step in the registration of the Pirate Party as a political body in the State of Utah.

This registration is part of the continuing growth experienced by Pirate Parties all over the world. We feel that Utah is an ideal state to begin registration of the Pirate Party as a political body, says Andrew Norton, spokesperson for the Pirate Party of the US. Utah has a strong history of political diversity, and technological progress.

http://www.pirate-party.us/node/370"
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia Top 50 Visualization (chrisharrison.net) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new visualization displays ten months of visit frequency data for Wikipedia's top 50 articles; August 2006 to May 2007. Many trends are apparent. For example, peaks of interest surrounding the Wii's launch, Saddam Hussein's execution, and the release of the movie 300 are clearly visible. Also of note is the startling number of people visiting Wikipedia's sex/porn-related articles. The author explains: "Search engines are increasingly featuring Wikipedia in their search results. This is causing people to surf onto Wikipedia not only for informational purposes, but also entertainment and news. This unique effect allows Wikipedia to be used like the internet's "pulse." By examining Wikipedia's most visited articles, one can see what topics the internet population is interested in." Medium and high resolution PNGs of the visualization are provided.
Graphics

Submission + - Algorithm That Seemlesly Patches Holes in Images (cmu.edu)

Submitted by
Beetle B.
Beetle B. writes: "From the site:

'What can you do with a million images? In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user. Unlike existing image completion methods, our algorithm can generate a diverse set of image completions and we allow users to select among them. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over existing image completion approaches.'

English translation: The algorithm replaces arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner."
Google

Submission + - Google Filters Torrents From Search Results (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by HiddenL
HiddenL writes: According to TorrentFreak.com:

Google has been filtering its search results for years. That's proven very useful for the Chinese government, and of course content owner representatives like the MPAA and RIAA. According to Google, the filtering of torrents from the search results is a response to the DMCA complaints they receive. The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.
A search for other BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy and Torrentreactor comes up with the same message (note. the sites are still indexed but some results are removed).
Apparently "Do No Evil" includes mass filtering of legitimate content.
Privacy

Submission + - Privacy winning search engine war (pressesc.com)

Submitted by
amigoro
amigoro writes: "Privacy is emerging as the real winner of the Internet search engine war as companies aggressively compete with one another by offering stronger protections for user records, a report published today by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) concluded. The report notes that until recently, most of the major Internet search engines kept detailed and potentially personally identifiable records of their customers' searches for as indefinitely. But today the companies are trying to outdo each other in privacy protection by announcing steps to delete old user data, strip the personally identifiable information out of stored search records, and, in one case, give users the option to have all of their search records deleted."
Math

Submission + - An Optical Solution For an NP-Complete problem? (opticsexpress.org)

Submitted by 6
6 writes: Tobias Haist and Wolfgang Osten have proposed a novel idea for solving the traveling salesman problem...

We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.
Space

Submission + - Black hole seen swallowing star (and belching)

Submitted by
mcgrew (sm62704)
mcgrew (sm62704) writes: "New Sceintest reports that the Swift satellite has detected GRB 070610. From the article:

A black hole has been spotted belching out a burst of gamma rays after gulping down part of a nearby star, something never seen before. Such violent burps may actually be the most common type of explosive "gamma-ray burst" in the universe.

Astronomers led by Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech in Pasadena, US, traced the burst to a star system in our own galaxy, where a black hole and a star slightly less massive than the Sun are orbiting each other.

Observing this black hole outburst from nearby would be a risky prospect. "If you were as close to the black hole as the [companion] star, things wouldn't be pretty," Kasliwal told New Scientist. "I don't think you'd want to be near it."
Raise shields, Mr. Sulu!"
Toys

Submission + - How to turn a Mini Maglite into a powerful laser (lifehacker.com) 3

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "Using the laser from a DVD burner, this instructional video shows you how to create a hand-held laser that is powerful enough to light a match and pop a balloon. There's some soldering involved and the Maglite's bulb housing needs to be drilled out to fit the new laser diode, but with some basic skill, most people could do this. Just plain cool."
Movies

Submission + - Netflix Gets Hacked (tvsquad.com)

Submitted by
Dragontologist
Dragontologist writes: "In an interestingly round-about way, a few hackers have posted publicly about how to get around the $17/month fee for Netflix streaming video. It's not particularly easy, you only get 17 hours of video a month, and you can't copy it onto your iPod (not without another hack, anyway), but it's free (assuming you don't mind the whole illegal thing). All I want to know is, who would think to exploit Windows Media Player?"

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