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Education

Submission + - Wikipedia's 2008 donation campaign kicks off (wikimedia.org) 1

Submitted by
David Gerard
David Gerard writes: "It's that time of year again: Wikipedia needs your money. The Wikimedia sites don't have ads — it all runs on donations. This year, the Wikimedia Foundation is hitting the theme that Wikipedia, the most popular Wikimedia site, is useful to you every day so deserves your support. The goal this time is six million dollars, which is approximately nothing to run a top 10 site (#8 on Alexa, #4 on ComScore). They're at almost $2 million so far. There's blog buttons and radio/podcast PSAs too. The site had its greatest traffic ever on election night, falling over for a short time under the strain."
Censorship

Submission + - Collaboration suspended on Wikipedia article (wikipedia.org) 2

Submitted by gkhan1
gkhan1 writes: A note on the talk page of the Wikipedia article Views of Lyndon LaRouche states that regular Wikipedia policies of collaboration and consensus has been suspended and the page is now protected. While page protection is common on Wikipedia, usually while articles are recieving heavy loads of vandalism, this case is unique in that the admin responsible of the protection has stated that it is supposed to last indefinitely and that all future editing on the article should go through an administrator first.

Is this acknowledgement that the collaborative and open Wikipedia-method does not work, and that a closed editorial-system is needed for some subjects? What implications does this have for the future of Wikipedia?
Google

Submission + - GMail hits 3 000 000 000 bytes of storage

Submitted by spxZA
spxZA writes: GMail hit 3 000 000 000 bytes (2861.022949 Mb) of storage in the last couple of months. Did anyone pick this up? If not, it is quite a milestone!
Biotech

Submission + - Warcraft virus used to study real world pandemic

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: A virus that swept through the virtual reality environment of World of Warcraft has been used to study the possible effects of a pandemic in the real world. An article in next month's issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal suggests that the spread of the Corrupted Blood virus in September 2005 mimicked the way a real infection would spread.

"By using these games as an untapped experimental framework we may be able to gain deeper insight into the incredible complexity of infectious disease epidemiology in social groups," said the report.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's open source license meets opposition (linux.com)

Submitted by seven7h
seven7h writes: Linux.com currently has an interesting story regarding Microsoft's new license, Permissive License (Which is similar to BSD), which it is currently trying to get certified by the OSI (Open Source Initiative). What I find interesting is not just that this has received alot of critisism and opposition, but that one of the key opponents is Chris DiBona, open source programs manager for Google, Inc. Microsofts strategies of creating open source like programs (ie Shared Source) has been called into question and whether the open source industry should become associated with Microsoft. This looks like it may be something to watch as it could allow Microsoft a foot in the door into Linux/Open Source, or define a line between Linux/Open Source and Microsoft.
Television

Submission + - Spanish TV channels vandalize Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) 1

Submitted by
strider2004
strider2004 writes: "As can be read in Barrapunto (spanish version of Slashdot), both public and private spanish TV channels, edited the articles about John Lennon and Elvis Presley and wrote some fake information about them, just to fill up their otherwise boring news. That was an "experiment" to check the reaction time of Wikipedia. Both articles were promptly corrected by other editors.

Will Antena 3 TV and Televisión Española set a house on fire just to check the reaction time of firemen and fill up their news? Did something like that happen in other countries or wikipedias?"
Security

Submission + - The Physical Hacks at DefCon (physorg.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "As we all know, DefCon is occurring in Vegas this weekend but Saturday held a room that focused on possibly the oldest form of hacking — lockpicking. That's right, as software security becomes better and better, the focus may instead shift towards simple hacking tips like looking over someone's shoulder for their password, faking employment or just picking the locks to gain access to the building where machines are left on overnight. This is nothing to sneeze at, "Medeco deadbolt locks relied on worldwide at embassies, banks and other tempting targets for thieves, spies or terrorists can be opened in seconds with a strip of metal and a thin screw driver, Marc Tobias of Security.org demonstrated for AFP ... Tobias says he refuses to publish details of 'defeating' the locks because they are used in places ranging from homes, banks and jewelers to the White House and the Pentagon. He asked AFP not to disclose how it is done." I'm sure all Slashdot readers are savvy enough to use firewall(s) but do you know and trust what locks 'physically' protect your data from hacks like these?"
Graphics

Submission + - New Milestone Demoscene Releases. (pouet.net) 4

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: With over 3000 visitors one of the biggest computer festivals, the Assembly 2007, just closed doors. The event saw the release of some of the best demoscene productions of this year. Among them the first good demos for the XBOX 360, but also for platforms as obscure as the Atari VCS2600 from 1976. The main demo competition was won by Lifeforce, one of the most acclaimed demoscene demos ever. Other releases can be found here.
Programming

Submission + - Hackers Extract Main Key to iPhone Unlocking (gizmodo.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After reverse-engineering Nucleus, the iPhone's radio/multimedia chip RTOS, the iPhone Dev Team has achieved the next big milestone to free the iPhone from the AT&T network: they have extracted the full content of the S-Gold2 chip's NOR memory. Bluntly put, these are the plans for the damn Death Star and "is the main key to achieve true unlocking." They are also calling for donations to help them keep their efforts.
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - iD and Valve violating GPL

Submitted by frooge
frooge writes: With the recent release of iD's catalog on Steam, it appears DOSBox is being used to run the old DOS games for greater compatibility. According to a post on the Halflife2.net forums, however, this distribution does not contain a copy of the GPL license that DOSBox is distributed under, which violates the license. According to the DOSBox developers, they were not notified that it was being used for this release.
The Internet

Submission + - The Pirate Bay About To Relaunch Suprnova.org 3

Submitted by kungfujesus
kungfujesus writes: The Pirate Bay crew has been working on this secret project for quite some time now. Back in April they wrote a cryptic post on their blog announcing that something was coming. In a response to this announcement TPB admin Brokep told TorrentFreak: "The past, the present and the future. It's all the same, but one thing's for sure, we will radiate for weeks", today it became clear that he was referring to the resurrection of Suprnova. Article Here
Biotech

Submission + - Chernobyl Mushrooms Feeding on Radiation

Submitted by cowtamer
cowtamer writes: According to a National Geographic Article certain fungi can use ionizing radiation to perform "radiosynthesis" using the pigment melanin (the same one in our skin that protects us from UV radiation). It is speculated that this might be useful on long space voyages where energy from the Sun is not readily available.
Networking

Submission + - SuprNova.org Transferred to The Pirate Bay (slyck.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Andrej Preston, ex-administrator of legendary BitTorrent SuprNova.org, has turned over the keys to The Pirate Bay.

"My deal with [The Pirate Bay] was that the role of SuprNova can't change much," he tells Slyck.com. "It needs to be community orientated, but I hope they make some updates the SuprNova was sooo missing. But what they will do, it's not my thing to decide anymore. But I know they will do [well] and will try to keep the community spirit running."

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