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Submission + - Main U.S. Weather Satellite Fails Days Before Hurricane Season (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by Rebecka
Rebecka writes: Just as the 2013 hurricane season is about to begin, one of the U.S.' main weather satellites failed this week. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, also known as GOES-13, reportedly ceased to operate as of Tuesday, making it impossible to predict weather patterns on the East Coast.

Submission + - SF Preps for Costly 'Summer of Larry Ellison Love'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: An invite to an exclusive premiere of The Wind Gods — a PBS-featured movie about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's victory in the 33rd America's Cup that was produced by Ellison's son — is a reminder that if you're going to San Francisco, you're gonna meet some yachting people there. Defending champion Oracle Team USA (with afterguard Ellison) will square off against challengers Artemis Racing (Sweden) and Emirates Team New Zealand this summer in the 34th America's Cup in San Francisco. The verdict's still out on whether it'll be a Summer-of-Larry-Ellison-Love, as the city faces a possible $23.3 million hit for Cup-related expenses. Get your tickets and help reduce the deficit, kids!

Submission + - Google And Adobe Beautify Fonts On Linux, iOS (pcworld.com)

Submitted by alancronin
alancronin writes: Users of Android, Chrome OS, Linux, and iOS devices may not realize it, but FreeType open source software is used to render fonts on more than a billion such devices. Not only that, but the FreeType project this week got a significant update from none other than Adobe and Google. Specifically, Google and Adobe on Wednesday released into beta the Adobe CFF engine, an advanced Compact Font Format (CFF) rasterizer that “paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences,” as Google put it in an online announcement on the Google Open Source Blog. The new rasterizer is now included in FreeType version 2.4.12. Though it's currently off by default, the technology is “vastly superior” to the old CFF engine and will replace it in the next FreeType release, the project says.

Submission + - Bruce Schneier: Why Collecting More Data Doesn't Increase Safety (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by Jeremiah Cornelius
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: Bruce Schneier, security expert (and rational voice in the wilderness), explains in an editorial on CNN, why "Connecting the Dots" is a "Hindsight Bias". In heeding calls to increase the amount of surveillance data gathered and shared, agencies like the FBI have impaired their ability to discover actual threats, while guaranteeing erosion of personal and civil freedom. "Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through. The television show 'Person of Interest' is fiction, not fact."

Submission + - Extended TeX: past, present, and future (latex-community.org) 1

Submitted by Hamburg
Hamburg writes: Frank Mittelbach, member of the LaTeX Project and LaTeX3 developer, reviews significant issues of TeX raised already 20 years ago. Today he evaluates which issues are solved, and which still remain open and why.
Examples issues are managing consecutive hyphens, rivers of vertical spaces and identical words across lines, grid-based design, weighed hyphenation points, and overcoming the the mouth/stomach separation. Modern engines such as pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX are considered in regard to solutions of important problems in typesetting.

Comment A Career Highlight (Score 1) 172

by ellbee (#35140172) Attached to: Computer Industry Mourns DEC Founder Ken Olsen

DEC was ten great years of my life. Ken built a company from nothing into something huge, then ran it into the ground. Technological highlights like networking (including a mobile pre-cursor to WiFi), StrongARM, and Alpha; marketing tragedies like "Unix is snake oil" and an unswerving allegiance to VMS. Let's not remember him for funding the VAX 9000.

Ken built an international engineering-driven culture of people that firmly believed in "doing right for the customer" and would go out of their way to get it done. You could pick up the phone and dial strangers for help and more often than not they would come through without politics or me-first posturing - an attitude that came straight from the top. I really miss it.

The architecture lives on at http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
Open Source

Submission + - Soundminder Android Trojan Hears Credit Cards (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Blacklaw
Blacklaw writes: A team of security researchers has created a proof-of-concept Trojan for Android handsets that is capable of listening out for credit card numbers — typed or spoken — and relaying them back to the application's creator.
Once installed, Soundminder sits in the background and waits for a call to be placed — hence the access to the 'Phone calls' category. When triggered by a call, the application listens out for the user entering credit card information or a PIN and silently records the information, performing the necessary analysis to turn it from a sound recording into a number.
Microsoft

Submission + - OSI, FSF Collaborate Against Patent Threat To FOSS (thinq.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Blacklaw
Blacklaw writes: The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundations — two organisations fighting for the same cause, but traditionally in very different ways — have joined forces in an attempt to prevent Novell patents falling into Microsoft's hands.
Novell, which ended months of speculation by announcing its acquisition by Attachmate in November of last year, made $450 million by selling 882 patents to a consortium known as CPTN — a group of technology companies including Apple, EMC, and Oracle, headed up by Microsoft — a move which the pair claim "represents a serious threat to the growing use of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) throughout business, government, academia, and non-profit organizations worldwide."
Privacy

Submission + - Federal Judge: N.S.A.'s Wiretapping is illegal (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdl4
mdl4 writes: WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.
Government

Submission + - Senate Votes to Replace Aviation Radar With GPS (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by plover
plover writes: The U.S. Senate today passed by a 93-0 margin a bill that would implement the FAA's NextGen plan to replace aviation radar with GPS units. It will help pay for the upgrade by increasing aviation fuel taxes on private aircraft. It will require two inspections per year on foreign repair stations that work on U.S. planes. And it will ban pilots from using personal electronics in the cockpit. This just needs to be reconciled with the House version and is expected to soon become law. This was discussed on Slashdot a few years ago.
Hardware

Submission + - Hidden RFID Tags Could Mean End Of Bar-Codes (gizmag.com)

Submitted by ElectricSteve
ElectricSteve writes: Researchers from Rice University working in collaboration with a team led by Gyou-jin Cho at Sunchon National University in Korea, developed the new technology which is based on a carbon-nanotube-infused ink for ink-jet printers first developed in the Rice lab of James Tour. The ink is used to make thin-film transistors, a key element in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be printed on paper or plastic.

Submission + - $99 Moby Tablet as textbook alternative (engadget.com) 1

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Marvell's Moby tablet will be an "always-on, high performance multimedia tablet" capable of full Flash support and 1080p HD playback and supporting WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio, GPS and both Android and Windows Mobile platforms for maximum flexibility.

Marvell's Moby tablet could eliminate the need for students to buy and carry bound textbooks and an array of other tools.

Actual size and weight vary by configuration, but Marvell's ultra thin and light Moby tablet is expected to hold a full year's worth of books but weigh less than half of one typical textbook.

Read it all at :

http://armdevices.net/2010/03/18/marvell-announces-99-moby-tablet-to-revolutionize-education/

and

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/marvell-drives-education-revolution-with-99-all-in-one-moby-tablet-designed-for-the-worlds-students-88376967.html

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