Comment And so it begins (Score 1) 275
What crazy antics are AT&T going to throw out to try and stop this one?
Comment Wikileaks (Score 5, Informative) 245
It's a good thing it's already been archived on WikiLeaks http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Yahoo_compliance_guide_for_law_enforcement%2C_23_Dec_2008
Comment Re:Could be a half-decent toy, if priced well (Score 1) 112
Compared to the costs of getting all the components for the OpenEEG and piecing everything together, it's probably a better choice for most people to go with the Emotiv set. Besides, if you're not happy with an OpenEEG you only have yourself to be unhappy with, if you're bored with the Emotiv you can always send it back and demand a refund.
Comment RIP (Score 1) 1
You will be remembered for your contributions to the security community :)
Submission + - Founder of Milw0rm exploits website is dead (blogspot.com) 1
msuiche writes: Matt Suiche writes
Milw0rm was well-know as an exploits database. We can read on Blacksecurity blog: I've just received information that str0ke @ milw0rm has passed away due to cardiac arrest early this morning at 9:23 AM.[..]RIP str0ke 1974-04-29 — 2009-11-03 09:23
Milw0rm was well-know as an exploits database. We can read on Blacksecurity blog: I've just received information that str0ke @ milw0rm has passed away due to cardiac arrest early this morning at 9:23 AM.[..]RIP str0ke 1974-04-29 — 2009-11-03 09:23
Submission + - Linux torrents get a mention in landmark court cas (computerworld.com.au) 1
swandives writes: The Federal Court of Australia has heard how peer-to-peer software, BitTorrent, is used to distribute Linux-based operating systems. Downloading GNU Linux software was cited as one of the legal uses of BitTorrent during the landmark court case between internet service provider, iiNet, and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). iiNet CEO, Michael Malone, took the stand for his third successive day of cross examination in the civil case. AFACT barrister, Tony Bannon SC, questioned Malone about the amount of BitTorrent traffic Linux downloads were likely to account for.
Submission + - Twitter movement stops Mexican government (bbc.co.uk)
KamuZ writes: The Mexican government wanted to tax 3% to the Internet for the fiscal year 2010 but a movement in twitter called "#Internet Necesario" (Internet needed) started discussing about it in a polite way to inform the politicians and people why is wrong to tax it. They got media coverage and finally the Mexican Senate asked them to go to discuss the tax. Here is an automated English translation
Comment Hilarious (Score 2, Interesting) 133
I bought the app and said "Marijuana" in English, which promptly spit back out at me in Spanish, "illegales" . I'm pretty sure that translates back into English as , "Illegal".
Submission + - Telco sues city for plan to roll out own broadband (maximumpc.com)
Syngularity writes: MaximumPC is featuring an article about one broadband provider's decision to sue the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system. TDS Telecommunications had earlier denied the city's request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuring legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.
Submission + - Intergalactic Race Shows that Einstein Still Rules
Ponca City, We love you writes: "The NY Times reports that after a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, a race between gamma rays ranging from 31 billion electron volts to 10,000 electron volts, a factor of more than a million, in a burst from an exploding star have arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other in a detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope confirming Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving. Some theorists had suggested that space on very small scales has a granular structure that would speed some light waves faster than others — in short, that relativity could break down on the smallest scales. Until now such quantum gravity theories have been untestable because ordinarily you would have to see details as small as the so-called Planck length, which is vastly smaller than an atom — to test these theories in order to discern the bumpiness of space. The spread in travel time of 0.9 second, if attributed to quantum effects rather than the dynamics of the explosion itself, suggested that any quantum effects in which the slowing of light is proportional to its energy do not show up until you get down to sizes about eight-tenths of the Planck length. "This measurement eliminates any approach to a new theory of gravity that predicts a strong energy dependent change in the speed of light," says Peter Michelson of Stanford. “"To one part in 100 million billion, these two photons traveled at the same speed. Einstein still rules.""
Submission + - Speech-to-Speech Translator Developed for iPhone
Ponca City, We love you writes: "Dr. Dobbs reports that Alex Waibel, professor of computer science and language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation. "Jibbigo's software runs on the iPhone itself, so it doesn't need to be connected to the Web to access a distant server," says Waibel. Waibel is an leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces, creating the first real-time, speech-to-speech translator for English, German and Japanese. "Automated speech translation is an expensive proposition that has been supported primarily by large government grants," says Waibel. "But our sponsors are impatient to see this technology become more widely available and we, as researchers, are eager to find new revenues that will help us extend this technology to more of the 6,000 languages now spoken worldwide.""
Scientists Write Memories Directly Into Fly Brains 137
TheClockworkSoul writes "Researchers at the University of Oxford have devised a way to write memories onto the brains of flies, revealing which brain cells are involved in making bad memories. The researchers said that in flies, just 12 brain cells were responsible for what is known as 'associative learning.' They modified these neurons by adding receptors for ATP, so that the cells activate in the presence of the chemical, but since ATP isn't usually found floating around a fly's brain, the flies generally behave just like any other fly. Most interestingly, however, is that the scientists then injected ATP into the flies' brains, in a form that was locked inside a light-sensitive chemical cage. When they shined a laser on the fly brains, the ATP was released, and the 'associative learning' cells were activated. The laser flash was paired with an odor, effectively giving the fly a memory of a bad experience with the odor that it never actually had, such that it then avoided the odor in later experiments. The researchers describe their findings in the journal Cell."
Comment Re:slow data (Score 4, Interesting) 551
I was in San Francisco this past weekend, and my network services were severed sharply compared to the connection I get here in Austin TX. I was unable to get emails or use the internet and every other time I tried to make a phone call, I kept getting "Call Failed".
The problem was so bad that when I was in SFO, I tweeted something to the tune of "My POS iPhone never works when I need it to", to which an ATT Rep (apparently ATT has people scouring Twitter for angry ATT customers) responded with http://twitter.com/ATTJason/status/3676354487 .
When ATT loses its contract with Apple, I'm dropping their POS network for a more reliable carrier with a better network and more helpful customer support. (Ever had an ATT rep call you a horses ass on the phone? They did to me back in June, to which they ended up giving me 2 months of free service to apologize)
Nearby, Recent Interplanetary Collision Inferred 88
The Bad Astronomer writes about a new discovery by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which detected signs of an interplanetary smashup only 100 light-years from here, and only a few thousand years ago. There's a NASA-produced animation of the collision between a Mercury-sized planet and a moon-sized impactor. The collision's aftermath was detected by the presence of what are essentially glass shards in orbit around the star. Here's NASA's writeup.
Fair Use Defense Dismissed In SONY V. Tenenbaum 517
Several readers sent us updates from the Boston courtroom where, mere hours before the start of trial, a federal judge ruled out fair use as a defense. Wired writes that "the outcome is already shaping up to resemble the only other file sharing trial," in which the RIAA got a $1.92M judgement against Jammie Thomas-Rassert. The defendant, Joel Tenenbaum, has already essentially admitted to sharing music files, and the entire defense put together by Harvard Prof. Charles Nesson and his students turned on the question of fair use. The judge wrote that the proposed defense would be "so broad it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created." Jury selection is complete and opening arguments will begin tomorrow morning. Here is the Twitter feed organized by Prof. Nesson's law students.
