Submission + - Was hacked by hackers
Anonymous Coward writes: "Saudi Arabian hackers attacked www.zone-h.org which it self is a security page for the IT industry abroad the world. Check out the defacement yourself."
Submission + - Microsoft and Google to fight it out in planes
An anonymous reader writes: The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the latest battleground between Microsoft and Google is in the skies
Google, Microsoft take to the skies over Sydney
The tech giants have separately announced they have hired planes to fly over certain parts of Sydney on Australia Day, photographing what lies beneath.
The Microsoft-sponsored campaign, orchestrated by the National Australia Day Council (NADC), is dubbed "Look Up and Smile". It hopes to gather hundreds of Sydneysiders at Centennial Park to create a huge map of Australia.
LookUpAndSmile
Google's plane flyover on the other hand is aimed at drawing more attention to its Google Maps service, by updating it with new, higher resolution images of parts of Sydney.
Google Flyover
Google, Microsoft take to the skies over Sydney
The tech giants have separately announced they have hired planes to fly over certain parts of Sydney on Australia Day, photographing what lies beneath.
The Microsoft-sponsored campaign, orchestrated by the National Australia Day Council (NADC), is dubbed "Look Up and Smile". It hopes to gather hundreds of Sydneysiders at Centennial Park to create a huge map of Australia.
LookUpAndSmile
Google's plane flyover on the other hand is aimed at drawing more attention to its Google Maps service, by updating it with new, higher resolution images of parts of Sydney.
Google Flyover
Submission + - Aerial Dogfight: Google vs. Microsoft
femto writes: This Friday, Australia Day, it will be Google vs. Microsoft in a dogfight over Sydney, Australia. Google will be flying a plane, taking aerial photographs at 600 metres. The resulting photographs will be the basis for a trial of the most detailed Google Map pictures to date. Microsoft's simultaneous effort, using a satellite and aeroplanes, is part of a competition. There is no word yet on whether these images will find their way into Microsoft Virtual Earth Both companies are encouraging people to get out on the street, put on a show and be photographed.
Journal Journal: Worst. President. Evar....now with Holocaust Denial! 2
Looks like the peanut farmer has taken up Holocaust denial as a hobby:
Jimmy Carter Speaks on WWII & the "So-Called" Holocaust (Video)
Submission + - US Online Gambling Ban Loop Hole
Mikey Trent writes: Online poker gaming fans have now found a loop hole within the recently passed Online Gambling Ban Bill. From article, "Americans who want to play online poker are doing so through a loop hole that employs Canadian based servers. The loop hole masks American based ip addresses with Canadian ones as to evade the self imposed US ban by the various online poker sites".
Submission + - Google lost german toplevel domain google.de
Korkman writes: It seems Google has just lost one of it's major toplevel domains, google.de, to some german webhoster which was obviously well prepared for the traffic hit. See "http://www.google.de/", and, if already recovered, "http://www.goneo.de/" for the webhoster. Google.com stopped immediately redirecting german visitors to google.de. Anyone here to guess how much economic damage this will deal?
Submission + - Wikipedia links no longer help your Page Rank
Mrs. Grundy writes: "Wikipedia has started automatically adding rel="NOFOLOW" to all external links in an effort to combat link spam. Since wikipedia pages are hip-deep in high page rank they attract the unsavory sort of character hoping to gain a little love from Google on their coattails. By making pages NOFOLOW they essentially deny conferring any page rank points from google and hopefully reduce the incentive to spam the pages with offtopic links. This topic has come up before and the community voted to remove the NOFOLLOW business in 2005. Will this move actually reduce link spam or is even the potential clickthrough valuable enough without the boost in Google's ranking? And how does the value of ranking sites based on links change as more and more popular sites start tagging (eh...labeling) their links NOFOLLOW?"
Submission + - Scientists find "Altruistic" brain center
Submission + - Making a Real Living Out of a Second Life Career
blackbearnh writes: "The virtual community known as Second Life has been getting a lot of press lately, as the hyperbolic real estate market has made some residents into real life millionaires. The Christian Science Monitor set out to find some Second Lifers making a good living doing something other than land speculation. It wasn't hard to find. From the article:
Blaze Columbia is, by any measure, doing well with his line of designer clothing. He's on track to generate more than $100,000 in annual profits, barely a year after launching his business. And that's in addition to a first career as a professional photographer. There's just one big difference between the clothing that this Missouri resident produces and that of any other top-of-the-line dress or business suit: His don't exist — at least not in the physical world.
The article also considers the real life problems that Second Life may face as virtual money is used for real world vices. From the article:
Some SL businesses already may be operating outside current law. Casino gambling and sports betting are pervasive in SL. The fact that bets are made in lindens, not dollars, won't shield gamblers from possible prosecution under federal laws banning Internet gambling, says Jaclyn Lesch, a spokeswoman for the US Justice Department. "Regardless of how one pays for the bet, it is still a bet if it involves something of value. While not a credit card or cash, [virtual currencies] would still be a 'thing of value' especially considering the fact that they are later redeemed for cash.
Truth in advertising: The submitter is also the author of the article."
Blaze Columbia is, by any measure, doing well with his line of designer clothing. He's on track to generate more than $100,000 in annual profits, barely a year after launching his business. And that's in addition to a first career as a professional photographer. There's just one big difference between the clothing that this Missouri resident produces and that of any other top-of-the-line dress or business suit: His don't exist — at least not in the physical world.
The article also considers the real life problems that Second Life may face as virtual money is used for real world vices. From the article:
Some SL businesses already may be operating outside current law. Casino gambling and sports betting are pervasive in SL. The fact that bets are made in lindens, not dollars, won't shield gamblers from possible prosecution under federal laws banning Internet gambling, says Jaclyn Lesch, a spokeswoman for the US Justice Department. "Regardless of how one pays for the bet, it is still a bet if it involves something of value. While not a credit card or cash, [virtual currencies] would still be a 'thing of value' especially considering the fact that they are later redeemed for cash.
Truth in advertising: The submitter is also the author of the article."
Feed New Agency Seeks to Promote Indie Music Labels (nytimes.com)
Merlin, a new agency that seeks to represent the world’s independent music sector, has agreed to a deal that will allow music from Merlin clients to be sold from Web sites like MySpace.
Submission + - Pyramid Stones Were Poured, not Quarried
brian0918 writes: "Times Online is reporting that French and American researchers have discovered that the stones on the higher levels of the great pyramids of Egypt were built with concrete. From the article: 'Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.' They found 'traces of a rapid chemical reaction which did not allow natural crystalisation. The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts that they were cast like concrete.'"
Submission + - Travelers get assigned "terror scores"
punkish writes: "WASHINGTON (AP) — Without notifying the public, federal agents have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans, computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.
The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. The government intends to keep the scores on file for 40 years."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/11/30/traveler.scre ening.ap/index.html
Submission + - Increase in Carbon Dioxide Emissions Accelerating
brian0918 writes: "The Discovery Channel reports that despite recent efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions, the rate of increase in emissions has more than doubled since the 1990s. From the article: 'The new data shows there were 7.9 billion tons of carbon emitted in 2005, and that the 1 percent per year carbon dioxide concentration increase rate of the 1990s has already jumped to 2.5 percent per year.' This news comes as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether or not the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide emissions."
Submission + - Customs can search your computer without cause
macheath writes: Due to a sentence by the Ninth Circuit on a child pornography case, US Customs and Border Patrol agents can now search and seize your computer, data carriers and other electronic without cause.
This is stirring up quite a bit of unrest in the business community, as it is now impossible to safeguard confidentiality of data files on laptops, leading to fears on economic spying. The company that I work for has released a document detailing measures to take when travelling to and from the US. Personally, I would tend to avoid or limit travelling to the and/or doing business in the US.
Check out this Associated Content article for more information.
This is stirring up quite a bit of unrest in the business community, as it is now impossible to safeguard confidentiality of data files on laptops, leading to fears on economic spying. The company that I work for has released a document detailing measures to take when travelling to and from the US. Personally, I would tend to avoid or limit travelling to the and/or doing business in the US.
Check out this Associated Content article for more information.
Submission + - Mad Genius' Idea Results in Incredible Translator
silentounce writes: "Meaningful Machines has developed a computer based translation system with the highest BLEU(BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) score yet recorded for a machine. Jaime Carbonell, MM's chief science officer and a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, has spearheaded the development of the system built on the idea of an Israeli inventor named Eli Abir. Unlike most other computer translation systems, the MM system does not rely on parallel text. Wired.com offers an interesting article about the system's development.
From the article:
'Abir, according to Klein, had a new machine-translation idea they wanted Carbonell to evaluate. Klein had been one of the first people to take the garrulous Abir seriously when he began hitting up investors for a previous invention in 2000, often in jeans and a T-shirt, claiming credentials as "the worst student in the history of the Israeli school system." Abir, who is bilingual in Hebrew and English, also said he could solve several of the world's thorniest computer science problems, based in part on knowledge gained from three days of playing SimCity.'"
From the article:
'Abir, according to Klein, had a new machine-translation idea they wanted Carbonell to evaluate. Klein had been one of the first people to take the garrulous Abir seriously when he began hitting up investors for a previous invention in 2000, often in jeans and a T-shirt, claiming credentials as "the worst student in the history of the Israeli school system." Abir, who is bilingual in Hebrew and English, also said he could solve several of the world's thorniest computer science problems, based in part on knowledge gained from three days of playing SimCity.'"
