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Earth

"Dramatic Decline" Warning For Plants and Animals 694

Posted by samzenpus
from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Worldwide levels of the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming have hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans, federal scientists said. Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station in Hawaii, which sets the global benchmark. More than half of plants and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved by 2080 if current trends continue."
DRM

DRM In HTML5 — Better Than the Alternative? 268

Posted by Soulskill
from the dissenting-opinion dept.
Underholdning writes "DRM is coming to HTML5. The W3C published a working draft yesterday of the framework that will support the use of DRM-protected media. Ars Technica's Peter Bright reports on it with an article claiming that DRM in HTML5 is a victory for the open web, not a defeat. Bright argues that if HTML5 does not support DRM, then content providers will move their content away from open standards and implement it with native apps — abandoning the web in the process. Quoting: 'Keeping it out of W3C might have been a moral victory, but its practical implications would sit between slim and none. It doesn't matter if browsers implement "W3C EME" or "non-W3C EME" if the technology and its capabilities are identical. ... Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely. Want to send DRM-protected video to an iPhone? "There's an app for that." Native applications on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 can all implement DRM, with some platforms, such as Android and Windows 8, even offering various APIs and features to assist this.'"

Comment: Proprietary codec (Score 1) 77

by Dr.Dubious DDQ (#43629233) Attached to: Epic and Mozilla Bring HTML5 OpenGL Demo To the Browser

Apparently this is another proprietary codec. Brendan Eich considers this unimportant because "consumers" won't get sued for using the browser, but it leaves people who want to participate (by encoding their own material) my have the same limitations that h.264 users do - no participating unless you pay the Intellectual Property Poll-Tax.

It sounds like they're still in "discussions" about the licensing of the codec itself. Unfortunately I'm not too confident that Mozilla is concerned much about that these days - they seem to be starting to fall into the same "consume-only" mindset that Microsoft, Apple, and Google seem to these days...

Comment: Re:Predators are so cheap, everyone can have one! (Score 1) 159

"Perfect enforcement of laws"?

No.

What I think most people are worried about are false-positives. I don't want my front door destroyed, my friendly dog shot to death, and my reputation smeared because some doofus with a drone mistakenly ended up identifying the infrared signature of my heated fish tank as a "growing operation" inside the house, for example.

Comment: Re:Just means they will make their money another w (Score 1, Troll) 274

by Dr.Dubious DDQ (#43483099) Attached to: Google Forbids Advertising On Glass
"They will have access to search and activity data combined with a feed that shows people's whereabouts and habits. This marketing data will be worth way more than any direct advertising."

Bingo. Hence the "no resale, renting, lending, letting other people touch, etc." provisions in their "agreement" - this device appears to be intended to "train" users to be happy sending all of their information to Google, but this requires Google to be able to always "know" who is using which device at all times in order for the data to be fully useful to them (for "personalization", of course.)

In other words, this is like Facebook(tm), but even more so (and you have to pay $1500 for the honor of feeding Google's files on your behavior, which helps the illusion that THEY are giving YOU something, and not vice-versa.)

Facebook

Facebook Launches "Home" For Android 138

Posted by timothy
from the hold-you-you're-making-me-quasi dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook has announced "Home" for Android smartphones (and, eventually, tablets). It's something less than a full Facebook mobile operating system, as some expected before the company's presentation, and more like an app update. Facebook also announced the Facebook Home Program, which will work with several carriers and device makers to pre-load Home onto select devices, including ones built by Samsung, Sony, ZTE, and Lenovo. The first "Home" phone will be the HTC First, a $99.99 phone that will ship April 12 from AT&T. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told analysts and journalists assembled for his presentation that Home was designed to reorient the phone and the Facebook mobile experience around people, not apps: "On one level, Home is the next mobile version of Facebook. On the other, it's a change in the relationship with the next generation of computing devices." Home essentially is a custom start screen for your Android phone, replacing the home screen with one centered on Facebook. While users can access other Android apps on the phone, the focus is on those apps that run on the Facebook platform. Home can also be enabled as a lock screen." Reader RougeFemme points out that France Telecom/Orange will be the first carrier in Europe.
Crime

New CFAA Could Subject Teens To Jail For Reading Online News 230

Posted by timothy
from the literal-reading-for-literally-reading dept.
redletterdave writes "Anyone under 18 found reading the news online could hypothetically face jail time according to the latest draft of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is said to be 'rushed' to Congress during its 'cyber week' in the middle of April. According to the new proposal floated by the House Judiciary Committee, the CFAA would be amended to treat any violation of a website's Terms of Service – or an employer's Terms of Use policy – as a criminal act. Applied to the world of online publications, this could be a dangerous notion: For example, many news websites' Terms of Use warn against any users under a certain age to use their site. In fact, NPR and the Hearst Corporation's entire family of publications, which includes Popular Mechanics, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, all disallow readers under 18 from using their 'services.' According to the DOJ, this would mean anyone under 18 found accessing these sites — even just to read or comment on a story — could face criminal charges."
GUI

Wayland/Weston Gets Forked As Northfield/Norwood 252

Posted by timothy
from the same-number-syllables dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Weeks after Canonical announced Mir, Wayland's display server protocol and Weston compositor have been forked. A contributor to Wayland found differing views with the project over desktop eye candy and other technical decisions to the X11 successor, which resulted in forming the Northfield and Norwood projects. The developer, Scott Moreau, has been outted from the project but has provided a lengthy explanation why the fork was needed to advance the Linux desktop."

Comment: The Dissenting Opinion (Score 1) 648

by Dr.Dubious DDQ (#43214061) Attached to: Supreme Court Upholds First Sale Doctrine
If I'm interpreting the beginning of the dissent correctly (starting on page 42...) the excuse for dissenting is more or less "Congress is copyright-maximalist, so we should be, too." (They quote a portion of copyright law that apparently DOES seem to explicitly say that importation of foreign-made copies is a special case).

I'm not going to wade through the entire 74 pages of opinion right now, but at a glance this does sort of look like "judicial activism" - nice to see such a thing happening in a "pro-human" manner more than "pro-corporate" for once, but it suggests we really need to be hitting Congress a lot harder to try to get this mess corrected.

Comment: Re:Low Hanging Fruit (Score 1) 349

by Dr.Dubious DDQ (#42927893) Attached to: SSH Password Gropers Are Now Trying High Ports
Am I mistaken, or does REJECT give the same response as you'd get trying to connect to a TCP port with nothing listening to it (making it appear as though sshd wasn't even running, without alerting the connecting side that the port is "filtered")? I always assumed that the problem with DROP was that packets just disappear from the sender's side's point of view, which seems to not deter most of these scripts from continuing to try. (On the other hand, DROP has the benefit of cutting down on outgoing traffic a bit, but I'm under the impression this is mainly a benefit in Denial-Of-Service situations or extremely constrained bandwidth rather than annoying but not overwhelming brute-force password-guessing attempts.)
Books

Amazon Patents 'Maintaining Scarcity' of Goods 240

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the moldy-bits dept.
theodp writes "Back in Biblical times, creating abundance was considered innovative. That was then. Last Tuesday, GeekWire reports, the USPTO awarded Amazon.com a broad patent on reselling and lending 'used' digital goods for an invention that Amazon boasts can be used to 'maintain scarcity' of digital objects, including audio files, eBooks, movies, apps, and pretty much anything else."

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