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Apple

Submission + - Smokescreen: a javascript-based Flash player (smokescreen.us)

Submitted by Tumbleweed
Tumbleweed writes: How to make Steve Jobs your mortal enemy: Smokescreen, a 175kB, 8,000-line javascript-based Flash player. To be open-sourced "in the near future". From Simon's blog: "It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG." Badass! (Via Simon Willison's blog)

Comment slasdot me, please! (Score 1) 135

by Eric Coleman (#22380614) Attached to: Semantic Web Getting Real
In the registration process for getting an API key there is the following question and choices:

How many people do you anticipate will use your application?
1-10 (Just me and mine.)
10-100 (Intranet, protected access.)
100-1,000 (Slashdot me, please!)
1,000-10,000+ (Everyone, I hope.)

I'm sure there is some sort of semantic joke in their somewhere but I can't find it.
Google

Submission + - Google shareholders reject censorship proposal

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "At the annual shareholder meeting, Google put forth for voting a proposal for the company not to engage in self-censorship, resist by all legal means the demands to censor information, inform the user in case their information was provided to the government, and generally not to store sensitive user data in the countries with below average free speech policies. As this proposal, if passed, would effectively mean the end of Google's China operations, the shareholders rejected the document at the recommendation of the Board of Directors."
Privacy

Submission + - NSA installs secret room for illegal surveillance

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/20 07/05/kleininterview
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006 /05/70944
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006 /04/70619

Though the media is rife with general allegations, I haven't seen much out there about this in particular.

The first link is an interview with the whistleblower:
"Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, sits quietly at the center of a high-profile legal storm hitting the nation's largest telecommunications companies for allegedly helping the government spy on American citizens' phone and internet communications without court approval."

From the third article:
"AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants."
Space

Submission + - NASA unveils Hubble's successor

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA has unveiled a model of a space telescope intended to replace the ageing Hubble telescope with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). A full-scale model is being displayed outside the NASA museum in Washington DC. The $4.5bn (£2.27bn) telescope will be shaded from sunlight by a shield, enabling it to stay cold, increasing its sensitivity to infrared radiation, take up a position some 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth, and will measure 24m (80ft) long by 12m (40ft) high, and incorporate a hexagonal mirror 6.5m (21.3ft) in diameter, almost three times the size of Hubble's.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Attacks IBM Over ODF

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has severely criticised IBM, saying Big Blue is pushing the OpenDocument Format standard to the detriment of Microsoft's Open XML standard. Darren Strange, senior product manager for Microsoft Office 2007, said: "The difference in view is that [IBM] are espousing 'one standard fits all', which is hard for us. IBM seems keen for ODF to be the only standard for everyone. The issue is about choice — there's room in the world for more than one open standard. And it's all XML — technically speaking, we speak the same language."
Biotech

Submission + - Creationists Launch Peer-Reviewed Journal

Submitted by oostevo
oostevo writes: CNet is reporting that the Institute for Creation Research has started to solicit papers for the International Journal for Creation Research, which is, in effect, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, where all papers must support the idea of a young-earth. Says the call for papers, the IJCR is "a professional peer-reviewed online technical journal ... for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific research from the perspective of a recent Creation and a global Flood within a biblical framework." It also states that papers "must be from a young-earth perspective and aim to assist the development of the Creation Model of Origins."

Their call for papers can be found here, their instructions for authors can be found here, and their review "process" is here (all PDFs).
Media

The Unauthorized State-Owned Chinese Disneyland 746

Posted by CowboyNeal from the just-like-the-real-thing dept.
rmnoon writes "Apparently Japanese TV and bloggers have just discovered Disney's theme park in China, where young children can be part of the Magic Kingdom and interact with their favorite characters (like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the Seven Dwarfs). The park's slogan is 'Because Disneyland is Too Far,' and there's even an Epcot-like dome. The only problem? Disney didn't build it, and they didn't authorize it. What's more? It's state-owned!"

Feed Fired Reporters Start Their Own News Website (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
A group of eight former employees of the Santa Barbara News-Press who claim they were illegally fired for supporting efforts to unionize the newsroom have decided to keep on reporting via a website they set up for themselves. They're covering all sorts of local news, including school relocation plans and property taxes. They claim that this is only until they get their jobs back -- but if the conditions at their old newspaper job were so bad, it makes you wonder why they don't just go ahead and make this new project a full-time effort and do things right. If the Santa Barbara News-Press really is treating its employees as badly as is being made out in reports about the labor dispute, why not create some competition and bring on the best employees from the newspaper to show the management of that paper what happens when you treat employees poorly?
PHP

Submission + - Current state of PHP security, with MOPB recap

Submitted by
cail
cail writes: "J. Forristal over at SPI Dynamics just completed an article on The current state of PHP security (w/ MOPB full review). The article first looks at the overall outcome of the Month of PHP Bugs (MOPB), showing statistics such as 12% of the MOPB bugs have not been fixed to date (deduced by reviewing all PHP CVS commits), and going over which bugs PHP users should be worried about. The article then switches gears and figures out that a plague of phpinfo.php pages on the Internet may be due to default Gallery installations and overzealous hosting providers. Then the article launches into an overview of some PHP configure.sh options and php.ini settings which users can use to make PHP proactively more secure. The article finishes up with some thoughts on source code scanners (and the Coverity open source scan project) and long-term programming advice, all relating back to PHP's history with a little bit of PHP trivia thrown in for kicks."

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