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Submission + - German court invalidates Microsoft FAT patent (techworld.com) 1

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: Microsoft storage patent that was used to get a sales ban on products from Google-owned Motorola Mobility in Germany has been invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court.

Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patent, which concerns a "common name space for long and short filenames" was invalidated on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Federal Patent Court said in an email Friday. She could not give the exact reasons for the court's decision before the written judicial decision is released, which will take a few weeks.

Submission + - Linus Torvalds No Longer Ranked in the Top 100 Linux Kernel developers (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: The Linux Foundation's Who Writes Linux report is now out and after 22 yrs leading Linux, Linux creator Linus Torvalds this year has fallen out of the list of top 100 developers in terms of code contributions.

Torvalds currently ranks 101st on the latest "Who Writes Linux" report for number of patches generated from the Linux 3.3 to the Linux 3.10 kernel releases. Topping the list is Linux kernel developer H Hartley Sweeten with 2.3 percent of changes. Sweeten is followed by kernel developer Mark Brown, who contributed 1.5 percent of changes.

Submission + - Our Solar System: Rare Species in Cosmic Zoo (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Pulling from 20 years of research since the first discoveries of planets beyond our solar system, scientists have concluded that Earth and its sibling worlds comprise what appears to be a relatively rare breed in a diverse cosmic zoo that includes a huge variety of planet sizes, orbits and parent stars. The most common systems contain one or more planets one to three times bigger than Earth, all orbiting much closer to their parent stars than Earth circles the sun, says astronomer Andrew Howard, with the University of Hawaii.

Submission + - Passthoughts, not Passwords: Authentication via Brainwaves (darkreading.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: A new study by researchers from the U.C. Berkeley School of Information examined the brainwave signals of individuals performing specific actions to see if they can be consistently matched to the right individual. To measure the subjects' brainwaves, the team utilized the NeuroSky Mindset, a Bluetooth headset that records Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. In the end, the team was able to match the brainwave signals with 99% accuracy. "We are not trying to trace back from a brainwave signal to a specific person," explains Prof. John Chuang, who led the team. "That would be a much more difficult problem. Rather, our task is to determine if a presented brainwave signal matches the brainwave signals previously submitted by the user when they were setting up their pass-thought."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - The Pirate Bay's Oldest Torrent is "Revolution OS" (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement."

Submission + - Does the Higgs Boson Reveal Our Universe's Doomsday? (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls boring. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,” Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., told Discovery News. "This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe.""
Linux

Submission + - Valve Releases Steam For Linux Client, Celebrates With Week-Long Sale

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Valve on Thursday announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. You can download the client now for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. In typical Steam fashion, the company is celebrating the big day with a sale: over 50 Linux titles are now 50 percent to 75 percent off until 10:00AM PST on Wednesday, February 21. This means you have just under a week to take advantage, and should be plenty of time for Valve to set a new record in Steam for Linux downloads.

Submission + - NZBMatrix has closed. (nzbmatrix.com)

Submitted by timm5
timm5 writes: A sad day. Website quotes the below:

The End...

It is with our regret to announce that NZBMATRIX has closed.

We have had to make this decision due to a very large takedown request from a company called Wiggin LLC. These represent the following: Federation Against Copyright Theft Limited ("FACT"), Paramount Home Entertainment International Limited; Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Limited; The Walt Disney Company Limited; Twentieth Century Fox Film Company Limited; Universal Pictures (UK) Limited; Warner Bros. Entertainment UK Limited.

As everyone is aware we are DMCA/Takedown notice compliant, and always have been.
Once this notice is completed we are left with an impossible task of policing our indexing bots. Even then it won't stop there, there will be follow-up notices etc.

Coupled with this is problems with payment providers, we have been through pretty much everyone out there, in the end they all pull out.
There are massive server/bandwidth costs to pay, with the payments in-stability this is a very hard task.

NZBMATRIX has never been the subject of any legal issues or threats.

Also the Usenet Indexing scene is going through some changes, with content being removed from pretty much every provider its making the existence of an indexer irrelevant if the content does not even exists anymore.

So it's time for us to bow out...
Science

Submission + - Higgs Boson: Cern Scientists May Have Discovered 'God Particle' (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at the European Council for Nuclear Research (Cern) have discovered a subatomic particle which could be the Higgs Boson, the elusive "God particle" that gives mass to all other particles in the universe.

The search for the Higgs Boson has been going on for decades at a cost of billions of pounds. Scientists have now announced they have seen the best evidence yet that it exists.
Businesses

Submission + - MS will remove OEM 'crapware' for $99 (zdnet.com)

Submitted by
walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: "Microsoft even offers up numbers to show how detrimental this OEM-installed crapware is to your system. Microsoft claims that Signature systems start up 39 percent faster, go into sleep mode 23 percent faster, and resume from sleep a whopping 51 percent faster compared to their crapware-ladened counterparts. (A "Signature" system is one without crapware). But now, Microsoft will offer customers the opportunity to give their Windows 7 PC the Signature treatment by bringing it to a Microsoft Store and paying $99, according to the Wall Street Journal."
Linux

Submission + - RIP Compiz (techrepublic.com)

Submitted by dweezil-n0xad
dweezil-n0xad writes: This is not 100% confirmed, but the news that Fedora is dropping Compiz from release 17 can only mean one thing — Compiz is dead. Gentoo, openSUSE, GNOME, and a list of others had already dropped Compiz, leaving only one distribution holding onto the compositing software — Ubuntu. That’s right, the little desktop that could still uses Compiz as its compositor. There are also plenty of outstanding bug reports whose issues, it seems, will forever be unresolved. This all clangs out a death knell for the compositor that really brought something to the Linux desktop that no other had.
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox devs mull dumping Java to stop BEAST attac (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: In a demonstration last Friday, it took less than two minutes for researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo to wield the exploit to recover an encrypted authentication cookie used to access a PayPal user account. The researchers settled on a Java applet as their means to bypass SOP, leading Firefox developers to discuss blocking the framework in a future version of the browser.
“I recommend that we blocklist all versions of the Java Plugin,” Firefox developer Brian Smith wrote on Tuesday in a discussion on Mozilla's online bug forum. “My understanding is that Oracle may or may not be aware of the details of the same-origin exploit. As of now, we have no ETA for a fix for the Java plugin.”
Network

Submission + - Large ISPs Profit From BitTorrent Traffic (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
kijitah
kijitah writes: "Ernesto at TorrentFreak writes: 'A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research discovered some BitTorrent trends worth sharing. During a 2-year period the researchers monitored an unprecedented sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. Aside from showing that BitTorrent users download more and more data, the report also finds that large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic.'

Check out the presentation slides or paper!"

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