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Wikipedia

Submission + - Wikipedia to dump GoDaddy over SOPA. (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by
jampola
jampola writes: "So it's not only imgur (amongst many others) who are giving GoDaddy the flick, it also appears Jimmy Wales, Co-Founder of Wikimedia will also be making the change — [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=prev&oldid=467377954/[\url] — Whilst unsure to what effect Wikimedia utilizes the services of GoDaddy, I imagine this could very well be another public blow for GoDaddy in the wrong direction over their descision to support the SOPA."
Encryption

OpenPGP Implemented In JavaScript 167

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the what-won't-someone-do-next dept.
angry tapir writes with this excerpt from Tech World: "Researchers from German security firm Recurity Labs have released a JavaScript implementation of the OpenPGP specification that allows users to encrypt and decrypt webmail messages. Called GPG4Browsers, the tool functions as an extension for Google Chrome and now is capable of working with GMail." A quick gander at the source leaves me with the impression that it should be more or less portable to other browsers. It's also built using a lot of off-the-shelf Javascript libraries. (Who knew Javascript had a bignum library and a number of cipher implementations?)
Communications

The CIA's Social Mining Department 110

Posted by Soulskill from the digesting-aggregated-opinions dept.
bsquizzato writes "The Associated Press is running a story about the CIA's Open Source Center: 'a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians,"' who work out of 'an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building' scouring social networks and other online media to keep up with the world's current events and opinions on American actions. This should come as no surprise, but it's quite interesting that President Obama is briefed daily on the latest hot topic tweets and Facebook posts."
Facebook

Submission + - Fcaebook files for a patent to track it's users on (uspto.gov)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: United States Patent Application# 20110231240

Communicating Information in a Social Network System about Activities from Another Domain:

In one embodiment, a method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain. The method includes maintaining a profile for each of one or more users of the social networking system, each profile identifying a connection to one or more other users of the social networking system and including information about the user. The method additionally includes receiving one or more communications from a third-party website having a different domain than the social network system, each message communicating an action taken by a user of the social networking system on the third-party website. The method additionally includes logging the actions taken on the third-party website in the social networking system, each logged action including information about the action. The method further includes correlating the logged actions with one or more advertisements presented to the one or more users on the third-party website as well as correlating the logged actions with a user of the social networking system.

USPTO: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20110231240.PGNR.&OS=dn/20110231240&RS=DN/20110231240

Comment i have to admit (Score 1) 341

by brezel (#37433276) Attached to: The (Big) Problem With RIM

that i never understood their business model in the first place. what does RIM aside from undesirable vendor lock-in provide, that cannot be achieved with normal means such as imaps and smtp with ssl/tls? i (like many other people) have been using encrypted email services for decades.
Software

Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware 397

Posted by Soulskill from the do-not-want dept.
MrSeb writes "At Download.com, page designs have been repeatedly tweaked over the years to push its updater software (now called TechTracker), TrialPay offers, and the site's mailing list. Bothersome, perhaps, but certainly not inexcusable. They've got to make money off the site somehow, after all, and banner ads don't always do the job. Now, things have taken a turn for the worse: Cnet has begun wrapping downloads in its own proprietary installer. Not only will this cause the reputation of free, legitimate software to be tarred by Cnet's bloatware toolbars, homepage changes, and new default search engines — but Cnet is even claiming that their installer wrapping is 'for the users.'"
Games

Submission + - Stop Complaining About Fees In MMORPGs! (gamergaia.com)

Submitted by Calidreth
Calidreth writes: Time and time again I will see people become somewhat interested in an MMORPG, only for them to turn the other way once they hear of a monthly service fee. Now not all MMORPGs these days have a monthly fee. Many of them, like the highly acclaimed Maple Story and Runescape, are all free to play and download (though they do charge for in-game items). Nevertheless, people cannot seem to wrap their heads around why they should pay for a game after they have already paid for it once. At one time I thought the same way.
Databases

Making Sense of the NoSQL Standouts 152

Posted by timothy from the matching-this-to-this-to-this dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an overview of the more compelling NoSQL data stores on offer today in hopes of helping IT pros get started experimenting with these powerful tools. From Cassandra, to MongoDB, to Neo4J, each appears geared for a particular set of application types, providing DBAs with a wealth of opportunity for experimentation, and a measure of confusion in finding the right tool for their environment. 'There are great advantages to this Babelization if the needs of your project fit the abilities of one of the new databases. If they line up well, the performance boosts can be incredible because the project developers aren't striving to build one Dreadnought to solve every problem,' Wayner writes. 'The experimentation is also fun because the designers don't feel compelled to make sure their data store is a drop-in replacement that speaks SQL like a native.'"
Space

Submission + - Mind controls body in extreme experiments (harvard.edu)

Submitted by
GillBates0
GillBates0 writes: "I chanced upon this interesting study by Harvard Professor Dr. Herbert Benson, a prominent cardiologist, founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of several publications and books. Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains in Sikkim, India, who could, by practicing a form of meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. The researchers were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. "It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result," Benson exclaims. To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation. Benson believes that such a capability could be useful for space travel. Travelers might use meditation to ease stress and oxygen consumption on long flights to other planets. In his research, Dr. Benson concludes that mind and body are one system, in which meditation can play a significant role in reducing stress responses."
Privacy

Submission + - Last.fm catastrophic database failure (www.last.fm)

Submitted by
hessian
hessian writes: "All, the main database that serves the scrobbles is down. Unfortunately, our failover nodes also went AWOL. Basically, that worse case scenario that could never happened seems to have happened :("

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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