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Biotech

+ - Homeland Security Faulted for BioWatch Biological Defense System->

Submitted by Mansing
Mansing writes "Eleven years after the attacks in the US, the citizens need to evaluate if they are indeed safer for all the "security precautions" put into place. The existing system's repeated false alarms have triggered tense, high-stakes deliberations over whether to order mass evacuations, distribute emergency medicines or shut down major venues. Is this just more money funneled to US companies, or is this really keeping the US safer? Is the same type of "security precautions" being instituted in Spain and the UK? Or is this preying on fear a uniquely US phenomenon?"
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The Internet

+ - EU Parliament Debates their own DMCA 2

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes "Right now, what is lacking across Europe, is a standard law to handle notice-and-take down's of illegal sites like the US' DMCA. Right now illegal content across Europe is subject to non-standard take down letters, some of which include no mention of what was allegedly infringed, nor in which jurisdiction in Europe it's infringed, or who to contact in your jurisdiction to challenge the claim, or even which company it is that is being represented by the law firm that gets in touch with he project. They need a system so that the notices would have to include information that makes them verifiable as correct. EU is holding a public consultation discussing notice-and-take down laws, which can be found here."
DRM

+ - Japan: Police arrest "anti DRM" journalists...->

Submitted by Modellismo
Modellismo writes "Last week 4 journalists from SANSAI BOOKS have been arrested for selling, through the company website, a copy of a magazine published last year (with a free cover mounted disc) focused on how to backup/rip DVDs. They violated Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Law that recently has been revised to make illegal the sale of any DRM circumvention device or software.

It's interesting to note that Japanese cyber Police could arrest the Amazon Japan CEO too as the online giant is selling a lot of magazines, books and software packages for DVD copy and ripping: exactly what put in trouble Sansai Books staff.

Will Japanese Cyber Police raid Amazon Japan offices like they have done with Sansai Books?!"
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Open Source

+ - Linux 3.5 released

Submitted by diegocg
diegocg writes "Linux 3.5 has been released. New features include support for metadata checksums in Ext4, userspace probes for performance profiling with systemtap/perf, a simple sandboxing mechanism that can filter syscalls, a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), support for android-style opportunistic suspend, btrfs I/O failure statistics, and SCSI over Firewire and USB. Here's the full changelog."

+ - Ask Slashdot: Stepping down from an office server to NAS-only

Submitted by rawket.scientist
rawket.scientist writes "I'm a full time lawyer and part time nerd doing most of the IT support for my small (~10 person) firm. We make heavy use of our old Windows Server 2003 machine for networked storage, and we use it as a DNS server (by choice, not necessity), but we don't use it for our e-mail, web hosting, productivity or software licensing. No Sharepoint, no Exchange, etc. Now old faithful is giving signs of giving out, and I'm seriously considering replacing it with a NAS device like the Synology DS1512+ or Dell PowerVault NX200. Am I penny-wise but pound foolish here? And is it overambitious for someone who's only dabbled in networking 101 to think of setting up a satisfactory, secure VPN or FTP server on one of these? We've had outside consultants and support in the past, but I always get the first "why is it doing this" call, and I like to have the answer, especially if I was the one who recommended the hardware."
Earth

+ - Formation of an Ox Bow lake as seen by the Google Earth Time Machine-> 1

Submitted by djl4570
djl4570 writes "An excellent study in the gradual change of geographic features as a river meander becomes an ox bow lake when the river current cuts through the meander. The same Google Earth feature can be used to view changes in urban and suburban geography. The historical data is a work in progress. The region I looked at only has images going back to 1993. Other regions will have a different mix and depth of data."
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Science

+ - M-Carbon: 50yro mystery solved-> 1

Submitted by slew
slew writes "Unlike its more famous carbon cousins: diamonds and fullerenes, you've probably never heard of M-Carbon, but this form of compressed graphite which is as hard as diamonds has baffled researcher for half a century. Over the past few years, many theoretical computations have suggested at least a dozen different crystal structures for this phase of carbon, but new experiments showed that only one crystal structure fits the data: M-carbon."
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Google

+ - Google has Built the Largest URL Database for Pirated Content->

Submitted by
SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes "Google’s black-list database, which by the way, also gives users that are not so tech-savvy access to millions of direct links containing even movies or images of games. Although Google indexes vast percentages of the whole web, now it isn't that hard for someone to find a way of downloading pirated music and other samples of this kind""
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Twitter

+ - Analyzing Tweets To Identify Psychopaths->

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes "Researchers presenting at Defcon next week have developed a psychopathy prediction model for Twitter. It analyzes linguistic tells to rate users' levels of narcissism, machiavellianism and other similarities to Patrick Bateman. “The FBI could use this to flag potential wrongdoers, but I think it’s much more compelling for psychologists to use to understand large communities of people,” says Chris Sumner of the Online Privacy Foundation

Some of the Twitter clues: Curse words. Angry responses to other people, including swearing and use of the word “hate.” Using the word “we.” Using periods. Using filler words such as “blah” and “I mean” and “um.”

So, um, yeah."
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Android

+ - Don't super-size my smartphone!-> 8

Submitted by Steve Max
Steve Max writes "Editor Paul Ockenden wonders, "Has anyone else noticed what’s been happening to top-end smartphones recently? They’ve started to get big – really big. But do people really want that at the expense of carrying around such a huge, heavy lump of tech in their pocket?". The trend for bigger and bigger screens is clear, but is it what consumers want? Is it what you want?"
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