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Data Storage

Submission + - Coppola loses all his data 4

Submitted by Colin Smith
Colin Smith writes: This is really an object lesson in backup methodology.

Film director Francis Ford Coppola has appealed for the return of his computer backup device following a robbery at his house in Argentina on Wednesday. He told Argentine broadcaster Todo Noticias he had lost 15 years' worth of data, including writing and photographs of his family.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm

Once you have backed everything up... Take it somewhere else!
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - "God" Immune From Earthly Laws

Submitted by
Mick Ohrberg
Mick Ohrberg writes: "Dem. Nebraska State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha filed a lawsuit against "God", saying "He" is responsible for "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants.". "God", in a response, says that the court has no jurisdiction, and that "He" cannot be held responsible for the action of man, since "He" "...created man and woman with free will and next to the promise of immortal life, free will is ["His"] greatest gift [...]". The response filing had St. Michael the Archangel listed as a witness."
Privacy

Submission + - Do Not Call listings to expire in 2008. (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "Yahoo! News report that the cherished dinner hour void of telemarketers could vanish next year for millions of people when phone numbers begin dropping off the national/United States (U.S.)'s Do Not Call list. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which oversees the list, says there is a simple fix. But some lawmakers think it is a hassle to expect people to re-register their phone numbers every five years. Numbers placed on the registry, begun in June 2003, are valid for five years. For the millions of people who signed onto the list in its early days, their numbers will automatically drop off beginning next June if they do not enroll again... Seen on Blue's News."

Microsoft No Longer a 'Laughingstock' of Security? 282

Posted by Zonk from the set-the-bar-high-guys dept.
Toreo asesino writes "In a Q&A with Scott Charney, the vice president of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, Charney suggests that security in Microsoft products has moved on from being the 'laughing stock' of the IT industry to something more respectable. He largely attributes this to the new Security Development Lifecycle implemented in development practices nearly six years ago. 'The challenge is really quite often in dealing with unrealistic expectations. We still have vulnerabilities in our code, and we'll never reduce them to zero. So sometimes we will have a vulnerability and people say to me, "So the [Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)] is a failure right?" No it isn't. It was our aspirational goal that the SDL will get rid of every bug.'"
NASA

Submission + - Antarctic ice sheet melt accelerating 1

Submitted by OriginalArlen
OriginalArlen writes: The rapidly diminishing extent of Arctic sea-ice has been widely covered here and elsewhere. Now NASA scientists using satellite data have published a paper in 'Science' demonstrating increased melting around the margins (mostly) of the Antarctic ice sheet. This is potentially much more serious, as the margins act as barriers, preventing the much larger land-borne ice-sheets sliding off the continent into the sea — causing a catastrophic 4-6m rise in sea-levels.
Music

Submission + - RIAA v. the People: Four Years Later (askstudent.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This week, we will mark the fourth year anniversary of the RIAA's legal campaign against music piracy where the RIAA has threatened, settled or filed lawsuits against more than 20,000 of its own customers. Inspite of all this, P2P is as popular as ever. RIAA might be winning legal battles, but it is losing the war on music piracy
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Fails to Gain Approval for OOXML (consortiuminfo.org)

Submitted by
Andy Updegrove
Andy Updegrove writes: "Microsoft's bid to gain approval for its OOXML specification in the first round of global voting has failed. I now have official confirmation of that fact, and expect to have final numbers soon. In the meantime, Microsoft has just issued a press release, putting the best spin it can on the results. That release is titled "Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process."The release focuses on the degree of participation (51 National Bodies), and level of "support" (74% of all qualified votes, without differentiating between P and O countries).It also refers to this level of support at "this preliminary stage of the process," and compares it "favorably" to the number of countries participating in the votes to consider ODF and PDF, but without mentioning percentage levels of support, which would include Observer as well as Participating member votes.The drama will now switch to the long run up to the February 25 — 29 Ballot Resolution Meeting, and to how much Microsoft will be willing to change in OOXML in order to convert a sufficient number of no votes to yeses, in order to finally gain approval, if it can, for its beleaguered specification."
Security

Submission + - Best Rootkit Eliminator?

Submitted by
BeanBagKing
BeanBagKing writes: "I've never worried much about rootkits, but now I'm starting to see the light. The question is, whats the best? I've read several reviews, but all of them are months, if not years, old. Blacklight is no longer free, one called RAIDE has been released that's supposed to "revolutionize" rootkit detection. Several of these, such as Rootkit Unhooker, seem to crash Vista every time they're launched. Larger companies (Kaspersky, Symantec, McAfee, etc.) don't focus on this, but with Sony attaching rootkits to everything from games to music to fingerprint readers, this seems like something we should concern ourselves with. What can I put on my Vista machine to detect, eliminate, and optimally, prevent rootkits?"
Sun Microsystems

Sun Says OpenSolaris Will Challenge Linux 405

Posted by kdawson from the color-us-skeptical dept.
E5Rebel writes "Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open source versions of its Solaris operating system. The company hopes to achieve for Solaris the kind of widespread uptake already enjoyed by Java. This means challenging Linux. 'There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,' according to Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun, who was chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and creator of the Debian Linux distribution. Isn't it all a bit late?"
United States

Submission + - Government won't allow green car sales (msn.com)

Submitted by
Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: "Auto industry blogger Lawrence Ulrich notes that Honda is now making a "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle" (or PZEV for short) version of the 2008 Accord, an all-new vehicle that is redesigned to meet California emission standards. He notes "So, just how green is a PZEV machine? Well, if you just cut your lawn with a gas mower, congratulations, you just put out more pollution in one hour than these cars do in 2,000 miles of driving." But the irony is that it's actually illegal for automakers to sell these green cars outside of the special states they were designed for! Apparently, anybody selling one of these ultra-green vehicles out of the correctly-designated venue — which means either California, or seven northeast-states with similar pollution laws — "could be subject to civil fines of up to $27,500. Volvo sent its dealers a memo alerting them to this fact, noting that its greenest S40 and V50 models were only for the special states.""
Censorship

Submission + - How China's firewall hurts China's tech industry (gigaom.com)

Submitted by
wjamesau
wjamesau writes: "Everyone knows China's Great Firewall sucks because it's censorship, but I don't think much attention has been given about how it sucks because it hurts the tech industry — theirs and ours. Case in point : while in Beijing recently, I wrote about a Chinese Internet start-up for GigaOM, only to find out GigaOM (like Scobleizer) is blocked by the firewall. I had to sneak the story out of the country through an e-mail attachment like it was top secret documents, when it was a mostly positive report on a Chinese company. It would be great publicity for them — but since no in China can access it directly, few there will read it."
Education

Submission + - Scientist must pay to read his own CC'd paper (cam.ac.uk)

Submitted by
Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: "Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge University, was lost for words when he found Oxford University Press's website demanded $48 from him to access his own scientific paper, in which he holds copyright and which he released under a Creative Commons licence. As he writes, the journal in question was "selling my intellectual property, without my permission, against the terms of the licence (no commercial use)." In the light of this kind of copyright abuse and of the PRISM Coalition, a new FUD group set up by scientific publishers to discredit open access, isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - More damaging compounds found in HFCS drinks (newswise.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Chi-Tang Ho, Ph.D., conducted chemical tests among 11 different carbonated soft drinks containing HFCS. He found 'astonishingly high' levels of reactive carbonyls in those beverages. These undesirable and highly-reactive compounds associated with "unbound" fructose and glucose molecules are believed to cause tissue damage, says Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. By contrast, reactive carbonyls are not present in table sugar, whose fructose and glucose components are "bound" and chemically stable, the researcher notes.

More here: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/532433/
Space

Submission + - Spelunking the caves of Mars

Submitted by OriginalArlen
OriginalArlen writes: After earlier images caught glimpses of mysterious cave openings on flanks of the Martian volcano Arsia Montes, the MRO's superb HiRISE camera has now captured amazing close-up images of this cave / "skylight" on Arsia Montest. How big is the cavern below? What does it look like inside? Somehow I doubt we'll get data from inside in my lifetime, so let the wild-eyed speculation begin!

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