ywlke writes "A few hours ago, an internal Oracle memo was leaked to the osol-discuss mailing list at opensolaris.org. It details Oracle's plans for Solaris and OpenSolaris; namely that OpenSolaris, the distribution, is dead. Solaris Express has come back from the grave, and source code will still be CDDL, but won't be released to the public until some time after it is incorporated into a binary release. What happens to the community now is anybody's guess." The full text of the memo is available on the mailing list, as well as apparent confirmation from an Oracle employee. That said, no official announcement has yet been made.

ChrisPaget writes "I'm planning a pretty significant demonstration of GSM insecurity at Defcon next week, where I'll intercept and record cellular calls made by my attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphones is a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the law; this blog post is an attempt to reassure everyone that their privacy is being taken seriously despite the nature of the demo. I'm not just making it up either — the EFF have helped significantly with the details."

sciencehabit writes "Thanks to an anlaysis of fecal samples from four sets of Missouri-born female identical twins and their mothers, researchers have concluded that human guts harbor viruses as unique as the people they inhabit; the viral lineup differs even between identical twins. Even more surprising? These viruses may be doing good work inside of us."

theodp writes "Despite the whiff of danger, or perhaps because of it, the WSJ reports that the City Museum is one of St. Louis's most popular attractions. Housed in a 10-story brick building, the City Museum shows none of the restraint or quiet typical of most museums. It boasts a five-story jungle gym with two real-life jets kids can climb on, an enclosed Monster Slide that drops riders the length of three staircases, and a rooftop Ferris wheel. Sure, there are the occasional severed fingers and skull fractures, but museum founder Bob Cassilly contends that it is as safe as it can be without being a bore. 'They [lawyers] are taking the fun out of life,' says Cassilly, adding that 'when you have millions of people do something, something's going to happen no matter what you do.'"

Hugh Pickens notes a USA Today story reporting that two US senators have joined Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in telling Facebook to quit sharing more of its users' data than they signed up for. Politico.com ups USA Today's ante, saying that it was three more senators, not two more, who joined Schumer's call: Michael Bennet (D-CO), Mark Begich (D-AK), and Al Franken (D-MN). The senators are asking the FTC to look at Facebook's controversial new information-sharing policies, arguing that the massively popular social network overstepped its bounds when it began sharing user data with other websites. Sen. Schumer said he learned about the new rules from his daughter, who is in law school, but added that he's noticed no difference on his own Facebook page, which, he assured reporters, "is very boring." "I can attest to that," deadpanned Franken, who made his living as a comedian before entering the Senate, and whose Facebook followers outnumber Schumer's by ten to one.

Barence writes "If you're looking for reasons to upgrade to Photoshop CS5 when it arrives, a new demo video might just persuade you. Narrated by Bryan O'Neil-Hughes, a product manager on the Photoshop team, the video shows the new content-aware fill tool, which has the potential to revolutionise the way you clean up photos. If you're not happy with an item in your picture, select it, delete it, and Photoshop will analyse the surrounding area and plug the gap as if it never existed."