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Submission + - Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by
AndyAndyAndyAndy
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes: " Fortune has a very interesting article today about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans.

'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.'

A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company yesterday.

The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps.

The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."
Censorship

Submission + - Wikileaks sparked Arab revolution, says MI6 (rawstory.com)

Submitted by
EnergyScholar
EnergyScholar writes: "Former British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove credits Wikileaks with helping spark revolution in Middle East, in an off the record speech someone serreptitiously videotaped. In previous stories about the Middle East revolution there were several conversation threads in which people asked whether there was evidence that Wikileaks had helped spark the Middle East revolutions. This is my first story posted to Slashdot, but it's safe to say it won't be my last on this topic. Interested readers should follow the phrase "disruptive compliance" for information about the origins of Wikileaks. "What sort of Hacktivist applications shall we write?" Indeed!"
Science

Submission + - Fact free science is on the move. Beware! (nytimes.com) 6

Submitted by G3ckoG33k
G3ckoG33k writes: Fact free science is not a joke, it is very much on the move and it is quite possibly the most dangerous movement in centuries, for the entire mankind. One can say it began as counter-movement to Karl Popper's ground-breaking proposals in the early 20th century, which insisted that statements purporting to describe the reality should be made falsifiable. A few decades later some critics of Popper said that statements need peer acceptance, which then makes also natural science a social phenomenon. Even later, in 1996, professor Alan Sokal submitted a famous article ridiculing the entire anti-science movement. Now New York Times has an article describing the latest chilling acts of the social relativistic postmodern loons. It is a chilling read, and they may be swinging both the political left and right. Have they been successful in transforming the world yet? How would we know?
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook offers easy commenting alternative (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Spice Consumer
Spice Consumer writes: Facebook has just unvield a "...new system (that) lets website owners replace their current commenting system with Facebook’s simply by dropping in a few lines of Javascript." How widely adopted this new system becomes could greatly affect Facebook's already entrenched position on the web and further compromise individual user's privacy.
Facebook

Submission + - Google AdSense adverts banned on Facebook (geek.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "There are many advertising companies on the Internet all wanting to offer developers and website owners the opportunity to generate revenue from ads on their sites and services. By far and away the largest and most well-known is Google AdSense, which Google counts as its biggest revenue stream.

Until recently AdSense was allowed on Facebook, meaning any developer wanting to support a Facebook app with adverts could use Google. However, that is no longer the case, and AdSense has been effectively banned from the social network.

In order to be listed as an advertising provider on Facebook, companies has to sign up for the Facebook Platform Terms of Advertising Providers and agree to Facebook’s policies. The deadline for getting on to that list was February 28, and as of today AdSense is not on the list."
Beer

Submission + - Aussie Brewery Creates Space Beer (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "An Australian brewing company has created the world's first beer that can be consumed in space. 4-Pines Brewing Company teamed up with Saber Astronautics Australia, tirelessly testing different brews on zero-G flights last year. They have now finalized the winning formula, calling the beer "Vostok" — after the spacecraft flown by Yuri Gagarin in 1961. The beverage is a strong-tasting stout with reduced carbonation to avoid the dreaded microgravity "wet burp.""
BSD

Submission + - How "clean" do GPL-BSD translations have to be?

Submitted by
antifoidulus
antifoidulus writes: "There is a (relatively) simple library that I would like to convert from C++ to C, and then incorporate into a BSD licensed project I am working on.

Am I allowed to look at the GPL code, convert it, then release the result as BSD? Or do I have to go more "clean room" and totally re-implement the algorithm without looking at the GPL code.

Yes I know the standard "get a lawyer" answer, but I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this."
Digital

Submission + - How should culture and knowledge be produced in th (fcforum.net)

Submitted by
flemmingbjerke
flemmingbjerke writes: "In Barcelona 2010, FCforum was established in order to formulate a charter for rights to creativity in the digital age. Now FCforum has launched a howto for sustainable models of creativity in the digital age.

"The production of culture should not be simply seen as synonymous with generating profit, and the new sustainable economic models should not be detrimental to the free circulation of knowledge. The real challenge lies in grasping that there is such a thing as culture without money, even though it is possible to make money from culture. "
"It is our responsibility, as civil society, to oppose practices that plunder this common heritage and to block its future development.""
Security

Submission + - Russia's Top ePayment Firm Is Top Rogue AV Player (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Brian Krebs has posted a deep dive through more than a year worth of emails leaked from ChronoPay, Russia's largest online credit card processor. The story uses the documents to show how ChronoPay has worked to corner the market for processing rogue anti-virus or "scareware," and the evidence indicates that ChronoPay executives created scareware companies from the ground up, paying for everything form their domain name registration to virtual hosting, to setting up the front companies and associated bank accounts and the 1-800 support lines for entire scareware operations that typically netted the company millions in revenue for each scam.
Media

Submission + - Posting AC - a thing of the past? (indystar.com) 1

Submitted by c0lo
c0lo writes: A Marion County judge has ruled, for the first time in Indiana, that news media outlets can be ordered by the court to reveal identifying information about posters to their online forums.
If you think that this will affect only posting on /. or the like, think again: according to TFA, under threat seems to be no less than the right of the media outlets to protect the identity of their sources.
Security

Submission + - vendor-sec hacked, and gone (openwall.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It appears that the machine hosting the vendor-sec mailing list used by vendors to disclose security issues in advance has been was broken-in. After the public announcement of the break-in, the hacker penetrated the host again, and destroyed it. The feature of such kind of list is to be decided.
Google

Submission + - Why is Google so bad at information security? (securecomputing.net.au)

Submitted by natecochrane
natecochrane writes: Despite a Mensa-level median IQ of its engineers, Google lacks the cultural commitment to information security and its ambivalence to such issues threatens cloud adoption, writes SC Magazine's Australian editor in chief. Whether it's Android malware or Gmail failures, Google's hands-off approach to security has to be turned around, he argues. It needs to cross the security Rubicon Microsoft forded 10 years ago before it adopted Trustworthy Computing to remain relevant to a web-dependent society.
Facebook

Submission + - FB Resumes Plan to Disclose User Address & Pho (epic.org)

Submitted by FtDFtM
FtDFtM writes: Facebook indicated in a letter to Rep. Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Barton (R-TX) that it will go forward with a proposal to provide users' addresses and mobile phone numbers to third-party application developers. The Congressman earlier expressed concern about the proposal. Facebook also wrote that it may disclose the home addresses and mobile numbers of minors who use the social networking service. Facebook suspended the plan after EPIC and others objected. EPIC and several consumer organizations have complaints pending at the Federal Trade Commission concerning Facebook's earlier changes to users' privacy settings."

Facebook's rational is:
"The framework is predicated on the assumption that, because users will not typically authorize applications that request access to too much information — indeed, our data show that, on average, each additional category of information an application requests results in a 3% reduction in user click-through rates — applications will not typically ask for more information than they need to operate

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