Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Law That Allows Summary Closing of Websites Passed->

Submitted by Sir Mal Fet
Sir Mal Fet writes "In a very polemic move by the Spanish parliament, the infamous 'Sinde' law, already discussed here, was passed on December 31st. Albeit modified from their original version, the law will allow the Spanish government to request ISPs to summary close a website due to copyright infringment (Original in Spanish, Google translation). If the ISP refuses, then it's passed to court where a judge can order the website closed. It seems it's one good, one bad over there. The law is in public consult until March, and No Les Votes, a Spanish organization that opposes the law, has already started a campaign to boicot it (Original in Spanish; Google translation)."
Link to Original Source

Air Force UAV Controls Infected with Virus->

Submitted by savuporo
savuporo writes "DefenseTech story "Air Force’s UAV ground control systems (GCS) at Creech Air Force Base, Nev., have been infected by a computer virus. The virus, that’s apparently recording drone operators’ keystrokes, was detected about two weeks ago. While it hasn’t prevented the service from flying UAV missions, it has proven to be difficult to remove — Air Force technicians are having to completely wipe the GCS’ internal hard drives to get rid of the virus. Service officials still aren’t 100 percent sure how it penetrated Creech’s firewalls nor do they know where it came from. It may be a run of the mill computer virus that somehow made its way into the base’s systems or it may be a sophisticated cyber espionage tool specifically targeting the U.S.’ drone program — no one knows yet."

No word on what OS or chipsets these systems were running, but its pretty safe to bet that it is not vxWorks or QNX or the like .."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:here we go again (Score 1) 482

by Captain Arr Morgan (#37498126) Attached to: The Great JavaScript Debate: Improve It Or Kill It
Seriously? It is that hard to understand that large scale well written programs can be accomplished in JS? I guess you click the 'Load HTML version' link on gmail (or equivalent)? And on a side note, I program not engineer. Maybe thats the problem,... everyone is trying to engineer with JS.

JavaScript decoder plays MP3s without Flash->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The introduction of HTML5 and super-fast JavaScript engines to the latest web browsers has brought with it a wealth of new functionality. The focus seems to have been put on the ability to play video in a browser without Flash, or making games. But a project born out of a Music Hackday in Berlin is just as exciting.

It’s called jsmad and is a pure JavaScript decoder that allows you to play MP3s in a browser without Flash. So, for example, a music artist could create a website and upload songs for visitors to listen to without need of any plug-ins. Alternatively, why not have an MP3 jukebox that can play songs off your hard drive or Dropbox folder just by loading a website?

You can try out the decoder by visiting the jsmad.org website where there is a sample song, on the same site you can browse for your own local file to play. Be warned, it only works in Firefox 4+ at the moment, but Chrome support is coming and already works in some cases. Eventually we could see it work across all modern browsers."
Link to Original Source
Programming

Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall! 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"

Have a taco. -- P.S. Beagle