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Businesses

Pay What You Want — a Sustainable Business Model? 133

Posted by Soulskill from the blasphemy-and-heresy-and-ooo-cheap-shinies dept.
revealingheart writes "As 2010 comes to a close, it could be remembered as the year pay-what-you-want pricing reached the mainstream. Along with the two Humble Indie Bundles, YAWMA offer a game and music bundle, and Rock, Paper and Shotgun reports on the curiously named Bundle of Wrong, made to help fund a developer who contracted pneumonia. More examples include when Reddit briefly let their users donate an amount of their choosing for upgraded accounts when they were having financial difficulties; the Indie Music Cancer Drive launched Songs for the Cure for cancer research; and Mavaru launched an online store where users can buy albums for any amount. Can pay-what-you-want become a sustainable mainstream business model? Or is it destined to be a continued experiment for smaller groups?"
Cellphones

Nokia Trades Symbian For MeeGo In N-Series Smartphones 184

Posted by timothy from the unfortunate-name dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nokia announced that moving forward, MeeGo would be the default operating system in the N series of smartphones (original Reuters report). Symbian will still be used in low-end devices from Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The move to MeeGo is a demonstration of support for the open source mobile OS, but considering the handset user experience hasn't been rolled out and likely won't be rolled out in time for its vague June deadline outlined at MeeGo.com, could the decision be premature?"
Crime

Geologists Might Be Charged For Not Predicting Quake 375

Posted by timothy from the google-will-no-doubt-be-found-at-fault dept.
mmmscience writes "In 2009, a series of small earthquakes shook the region of L'Aquila, Italy. Seismologists investigated the tremors, but concluded that there was no direct indication of a big quake on the horizon. Less than a month later, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed more than 300 people. Now, the chief prosecutor of L'Aquila is looking to charge the scientists with gross negligent manslaughter for not predicting the quake."
Government

Submission + - WikiLeaks Founder Issues Plea for Help

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assagne has sent an email telling supporters that "WikiLeaks may be under attack." In a plea for help, Assagne has written that supporters should set up "Friends of WikiLeaks" groups in their area (by emailing friends@sunshinepress.org) and he's written that the site is in dire need of "IMMEDIATE" financial contributions. Assagne is reportedly being sought by the US federal government for State Department memos he allegedly plans to release, which officials say could jeopardize national security.
Cellphones

Openmoko Phone Not Dead After All 101

Posted by timothy from the tut-mir-leid dept.
In response to the report I posted a few days ago that the Openmoko FreeRunner phone had been discontinued, Pat Meier-Johnson writes on behalf of Openmoko to say that this isn't so. "Some bloggers have been misinterpreting a presentation by Openmoko CEO, Sean Moss-Pultz last week in Switzerland to think that the company is getting out of the phone business. That's not true. In fact, the Openmoko FreeRunner (their current model) is alive and well. (Also in Switzerland, Sean announced another project — not a phone — that they are calling 'Project B.' No details yet.) The next version of the phone, codenamed GTA03, has been suspended and there were some associated layoffs, but the GTA03 was in constant flux as a design. So the company is being prudent and focusing on the FreeRunner which has lots of open source community and most recently, embedded developer support." Glad to hear this, because the FreeRunner is an interesting phone.
The Courts

Submission + - SPAM: SAP Spends 'Millions' On Waste Management Suit

Submitted by
narramissic
narramissic writes: "According to a document filed in a Texas court, SAP has engaged 25 to 30 contract attorneys and spent millions of dollars to defend itself against a lawsuit brought last year by Waste Management over an allegedly failed ERP implementation. Included in that sum is a more than $1 million payment to an unnamed e-discovery software vendor. Not included is the cost of SAP's outside counsel, which has spent 'thousands of hours' reviewing documents and interviewing more than 100 SAP employees."
Link to Original Source
The Media

Submission + - Associated Press Sends Takedown Notice to Itself (boingboing.net)

Submitted by
Quothz
Quothz writes: "Associated Press affiliate WTNQ-FM in Tennessee received an unusual legal threat against its Youtube channel. You guessed it: the AP threatened its own affiliate if it doesn't stop posting news there for its listeners. It appears that the AP has a single executive assigned to battle Youtube, and "nobody told the AP executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the AP itself controls". Although the AP quickly changed its tune, this seems pretty indicative of the rabid-dog nature of IP enforcement today. On the balance of it, I'm surprised the RIAA hasn't managed to sue itself yet."
Security

Submission + - WebHostingTalk Data Breach: Lessons Learned

Submitted by
kstatefan40
kstatefan40 writes: "WebHostingTalk's data breach situation just keeps getting worse. First, over 50,000 user names and encrypted passwords were stolen from a backup server and the parent company iNET assured their clients that absolutely no credit card information was taken. Unfortunately for iNET, Tuesday of this week it was reported that nearly 10,000 credit card numbers were posted in plain text, including their corresponding CVV2 numbers, expiration date, and the full name of the owner of the card. The response from WHT has been all over the board and has really angered some of their clients. I wrote an analysis of what went wrong in WHT's response and lessons that can be learned from the incident."
Government

Submission + - Virginia Says Slashdot Users May Be Terrorists 6

Submitted by megamerican
megamerican writes: A leaked document from a Virginia Fusion Center titled 2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment lists Slashdot users and other websites alongside Al-Qaeda, HAMAS, "Lone-Wolf Extremists" and many others as potential terrorists. Slashdot and other websites have been labeled under the ominous sounding title of Anonymous:


A "loose coalition of Internet denizens", Anonymous consists largely of users from multiple internet sites such as 4chan, 711chan, 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Slashdot, IRC channels, and YouTube. Other social networking sites are also utilized to mobilize physical protests. Anonymous has no leader and is reliant on the collective power of individuals acting in such a way that benefits the movement.

According to the Report, cell phones, digital music players are signs that you may be a terrorist. It lists podcasting as a cause for concern citing a recent ban by Australia. Citizens for a legitimate government, where the document was leaked to has a write-up here.

Mandriva

Submission + - Mandriva: An open letter to Steve Ballmer

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An entry on the Mandriva Blog, written by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon, is suggesting that the Nigerian government, after ordering thousands of Classmate PCs with Mandriva Linux installed, has suddenly decided that they will instead install Windows replacing the pre-loaded Mandriva Linux installation on the low-cost computing devices intended for children in the developing world. The blog suggests that this was not a decision that the Nigerian government made on its own. Is this just speculation, or is there something much bigger going on here?
Software

Submission + - Nokia Buys Navteq for $8.1 Billion (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "Nokia, the world's biggest cellphone maker, said today that it had agreed to pay $8.1 billion for Navteq, the maker of digital mapping and navigational software based in Chicago, as it seeks to migrate satellite-based location services onto its range of phones.

Nokia's president and chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said that location-based services were a cornerstone of Nokia's Internet services strategy, which is part of an overall plan to expand beyond the production of cellphones into user services like photos, video, music and games.

Navteq data is used by Google Maps, Google Earth , numerous other online services, and many GPS products."

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