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The Courts

LANCOR v. OLPC Case Continues In Nigerian Court 281

Posted by timothy
from the get-your-passport-and-account-numbers dept.
drewmoney writes "According to an article on Groklaw: It's begun in a Nigerian court. LANCOR has actually done it. Guess what the Nigerian keyboard makers want from the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization trying to make the world a better place? $20 million dollars in 'damages,' and an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria."
Software

Stix Scientific Fonts Reach Beta Release 159

Posted by Zonk
from the make-sure-to-!-after-the-word-science dept.
starseeker writes "At long last, the STIX project has posted a Beta release of their scientific fonts. The mission of the STIX project has been the 'preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats.' The result is a font set containing thousands of characters, and hopefully a font set that will become a staple for scientific publishing. Among other uses, it has long been hoped that this would make the wide scale use of MathML in browsers possible. Despite rather long delays the project has persisted and is now showing concrete results."
Power

A New Way To Make Water, And Fuel Cells 107

Posted by Zonk
from the it's-in-the-drinking-water dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "You probably know that it is easy to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water. After all, this chemical reaction is known for more than two centuries. But now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have discovered a new way to make water. As states the UIUC report, 'not only can they make water from unlikely starting materials, such as alcohols, their work could also lead to better catalysts and less expensive fuel cells.' But be warned: don't read the technical paper itself. It could win an obfuscated contest — if such a contest existed for scientific papers." Yet another advance in fuel cell technology; we discussed a different one just the other day.
Internet Explorer

AntiVirus Products fail to find Simple IE malware-> 4

Submitted by
SkiifGeek
SkiifGeek writes "Didier Stevens recently took a closer look at some Internet Explorer malware that he had uncovered and found that most antivirus products that it was tested against (courtesy of VirusTotals) failed to identify the malware through one of the most basic and straight forward obfuscation techniques — the null-byte. With enough null-bytes between each character of code, it is possible to fool all antivirus products (though additional software will trap it), yet Internet Explorer was quite happy to render the code.

Whose responsibility is it to fix this behaviour? Both the antivirus / antimalware companies and Microsoft's IE team have something to answer for."
Link to Original Source
United States

Font Freedom Day->

Submitted by
TrumpetPower!
TrumpetPower! writes "On September 29, 1988, the Library of Congress Copyright Office issued a notice of policy decision (4 Mbyte coralized PDF) in the Federal Register “to inform the public that the Copyright Office has decided that digitized representations of typeface designs are not registrable under the Copyright Act because they do not constitute original works of authorship.” In observance of Font Freedom day, go ahead and share some of your favorite fonts with your friends — and do so entirely guilt-free!"
Link to Original Source
Java

Is Java ready for Safety Critical Applications?-> 4

Submitted by
dautelle
dautelle writes "Last week, I was invited at the Space 2007 conference to introduce Javolution (open source Java library) to rocket scientists. Here is the paper presented. This might seem like good news for the Java platform. But is Java ready for use in safety critical applications? Or in other words would you trust your life to a Java program?"
Link to Original Source
Businesses

Chinese Seek to Buy Seagate, US Disk Drive Maker->

Submitted by marksmithurbana
marksmithurbana writes "A Chinese technology company has expressed interest in buying a maker of computer disk drives in the United States, raising concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China."
Link to Original Source
Biotech

How caloric restriction makes you live longer->

Submitted by
prescribedgod
prescribedgod writes "Caloric restriction seems to have the ability to extend your life,though the mechanism that causes it has been elusive. Initial studies worked with holocaust survivors who seemed to live 30% longer than people who hadn't suffered prolonged famine. Now researchers have discovered the means by which your cells are cleaned and your life extended."
Link to Original Source
Space

Gamma Ray Anomaly Could Test String Theory 128

Posted by kdawson
from the finally-experimental-data dept.
exploder writes "String theory is notorious for its lack of testable predictions. But if the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope team's interpretation is correct, then a delay in the arrival of higher-energy gamma rays could point to a breakdown of relativity theory. A type of 'quantum lensing effect' is postulated to cause the delay, which is approximately four minutes over a half-billion year journey." Ars's writeup is a little more fleshed-out than the Scientific American blog posting.

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are. -- Oscar Wilde