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Submission + - Sinclair ZX Spectrum 30th Anniversary (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
sebt
sebt writes: "ZX Spectrum, the microcomputer launched in 1982 by Sinclair Research (Cambridge, UK) turns 30 today. The launch of the machine is seen by many today as the inspiration for a generation of eager young programmers, software and game designers in the UK. The events surrounding its launch, notably Sinclair's well-known rivalry with Acorn, later helped to inspire the design of the ARM architecture and most recently the Raspberry PI (based on ARM), in an effort to reboot the idea of enthusiastic kid programmers first captured by the Spectrum and Acorn's BBC micro. Happy birthday Spec!"

Submission + - Open Source Cross Platform Video Editing

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My wife and I will be traveling soon and we want to video editing on the go. It would be ideal if we could have an external hard drive with the footage and project files that can be plugged into a mac or pc.

Are their any good solutions available? Ideally it would run on the big 3, but Mac and Linux minimum.
Privacy

Submission + - TSA Tests Automated ID Authentication (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Last year, a Nigerian man boarded a plane from N.Y. to L.A. using an invalid ID and a boarding pass issued to another person. A week later he was caught again with 10 expired boarding passes. In response to this and similar events, the Transportation Security Administration has begun testing a new system at Washington's Dulles International Airport that verifies an air traveler's identity by matching photo IDs to boarding passes and ensures that boarding passes are authentic. The test will soon be expanded to Houston and Puerto Rico."

Submission + - University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department (forbes.com) 2

Submitted by DustyShadow
DustyShadow writes: The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments. Students at UF have already organized protests, and have created a website dedicated to saving the CS department. Several distinguished computer scientists have written to the president of UF to express their concerns, in very blunt terms. Prof. Zvi Galil, Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech, is “amazed, shocked, and angered.” Prof. S.N. Maheshwari, former Dean of Engineering at IIT Delhi, calls this move “outrageously wrong.” Computer scientist Carl de Boor, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and winner of the 2003 National Medal of Science, asked the UF president “What were you thinking?”
Windows

Submission + - Linux Desktop: Business Desktop BAD, Consumer Desktop TERRIBLE 2

Submitted by mourngrym1969
mourngrym1969 writes: Not a scoop, but a discussion. I hate Windows, but like everyone else, use it every day. Tried (again, time number six over the last 15 years), to run linux exclusively for both work and home use. I even allowed myself the installation of VMWare Workstation and was willing to run some essentials in Windows 7 VM through Unity. But after two weeks, I am booted over to Windows again. Why? Drivers, printing, TV on my PC, NETFLIX, Visio, Adobe software (not flash), VMWare Workstation Stability, NVidia Drivers, Multimonitor support (rotation), composite desktop, etc, etc, etc... Why have we not been able to get our act together and get a usable linux desktop (working 'well' on one monitor is not sufficient)?
Piracy

Submission + - French elections could Affect HADOPI, ACTA

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: France has had a lasting impact on world politics over the past few years, and the same is true when talking about the internet and piracy. From having a position in the development and support of ACTA, to implementation of HADOPI, to imposing an internet tax to pay for music; France has been at the forefront of anti-piracy legislation. This week, it has been announced that current President and anti-piracy advocate Nickolas Sarskoy is unlikely to win the next election. His leading opponent is a man named Francois Hollande. Hollande has in the past opposed both ACTA and HADOPI (France's 3 strikes law). Hollande believes that ACTA, "originally intended to combat counterfeiting trade was gradually diverted from its objective, in the utmost discretion and without any democratic process." At the same time Hollande is also strongly against piracy. "Piracy, has been costly", Hollande said, "but I do not think that law enforcement alone is the answer to the problem". Will internet issues be of concern to the voters in France. It certainly is to the rest of us internet users.
Earth

Submission + - Exclusive: UK has vast shale gas reserves, geologists say (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by fishmike
fishmike writes: Britain may have enough offshore shale gas to catapult it into the top ranks of global producers, energy experts now believe, and while production costs are still very high, new U.S. technology should eventually make reserves commercially viable.

UK offshore reserves of shale gas could exceed one thousand trillion cubic feet (tcf), compared to current rates of UK gas consumption of 3.5 tcf a year, or five times the latest estimate of onshore shale gas of 200 trillion cubic feet.
Government

Submission + - Iran military says copying U.S. drone (reuters.com)

Submitted by skipkent
skipkent writes: Iran's military has started to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone captured last year after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported on Sunday.

General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported.
Education

Submission + - 'Minority Report' Interfaces Come to University Research (chronicle.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Colleges libraries are installing giant interactive video walls to let students and scholars look at medical and other scholarly images up close, zoom in and out using gestures. Also they're hoping to get students to get their heads out of their laptop screens to collaborate on projects on the big shared walls. Will Big-Screen Research be the future?
AI

Submission + - The Artificial Life of the App Store (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: How does the Apple App Store actually work? What is the best strategy to employ if you want to get some users and makes some money? There are some pointers on how it all works from an unusual source — artificial life.
A pair of researchers Soo Ling Lim and Peter Bentley from University College London, set up an artificial life simulation of the app store's ecosystem. They created app developers with strategies such as — innovate, copy other apps, create useless variations on a basic app or try and optimize the app you have. What they found, among other things, was that the CopyCat strategy was on average the best. When they allow the strategies to compete and developer agents to swap then the use of the CopyCat fell to only 10%. The reason — more than 10% CopyCats resulted in nothing new to copy!
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Mac Flashback attack began with Wordpress blogs (eweek.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: Alexander Gostev, head of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky, says that “tens of thousands of sites powered by WordPress were compromised. How this happened is unclear. The main theories are that bloggers were using a vulnerable version of WordPress or they had installed the ToolsPack plug-in.”
Google

Submission + - Apple and Google face salary fixing lawsuit (macworld.com.au)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel have been accused of maintaining an agreement not to poach each other's staff, thus restricting increases in salary and restricting career development.

California District Judge Lucy Koh has found that the plaintiffs have adequately demonstrated antitrust injury. Sparked by a request from the late Steve Jobs, from 2005 to 2007 the defendants had a 'no cold-call' policy of staff recruitment amongst themselves.

Jobs is also alleged to have threatened Palm with litigation for not entering into a 'no cold-call' agreement with Apple.
Google

Submission + - SOPA, Copyright and Eddie Van Halen's Guitar (imgur.com) 2

Submitted by
bnyrbl
bnyrbl writes: "I recently posted an entry for an online contest to win a guitar by covering the Van Halen song "Tattoo", and youtube has "Matched 3rd Party Content" using some algorithm to match it against the original. It's showing the content as being owned by Universal Music Publishing Group. Thing is, there's not one byte of data from the original track in my cover version. I'm obviously not really happy about the possibility of having it taken down and missing out on a chance to win the guitar, but I'm not a copyright lawyer either.

My questions to slashdot are: 1) has this happened to anyone else where they didn't even include one sample of an original work in their upload, 2) does anyone know the secret sauce Google/Youtube is using to match the content so this hassle could possibly be avoided, and 3) does anyone else feel as I do that this "shoot first and ask questions later" approach to protecting content owners goes too far? I get that Youtube isn't a public utility and they can manage their site any way they see fit, but the phrase "Content Owned by UMPG" .. am I wrong in covering a song and posting my performance? I see a lot of cover versions (millions) all over Youtube that have been happily sitting there for years without being taken down. Does the industry "allow" cover versions as owners of the original Van Halen composition, or do I actually have rights too because I'm the one performing it?

This is what I saw minutes after uploading the track: http://i.imgur.com/8M3fd.jpg

And this is the video in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8v9d7yk2kM

Am I breaking any laws or infringing any other person by creating and posting a cover version?"
Crime

Submission + - Can the Internet Breed Killers?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Andrew Keen writes that Anders Behring Breivik may or may not be found to be clinically insane for his meticulously planned mass murder of 77 people in Oslo on July 22, 2011 but beneath or beside his madness, there's something about Breivik that captures the increasingly delusional, violent and narcissistic nature of our digital culture and although it would be crass to blame something as tragic as the mass murder on social media, it would be equally irresponsible to ignore any connection at all between Breivik's troubled personality and the broader culture forces in our electronically networked world. First, there's his self-evidently narcissistic personality which has enabled him to stand in an Oslo court this week and unselfconsciously boast about what he called "the most sophisticated and spectacular political attack in Europe since World War II." Narcissism, of course, wasn't invented by the Internet and it would be absurd to establish a causal connection between self-love and mass murder. However today's digital media culture — which shatters the 20th century mass audience into billions of 21st century authors and enables them all to broadcast their most intimate thoughts to the world — seems to be making narcissism the default mode of contemporary existence. Most troubling of all is Breivik's obsession with the multiplayer role-playing World of Warcraft, a violent online game that he played "full-time" between 2006 and 2007. Indeed, one of the few times that he smiled this week was when the image of his World of Warcraft character, Justicar Andersnordic, was displayed in court. "Breivik's obsession with violent online games, his narcissism, his reliance on Wikipedia and Facebook are warnings about how digital media can corrupt our grasp of reality," concludes Keen. "Breivik may be a worst case scenario, but I fear that there will be more young men like him in future if virtual reality becomes our only reality.""
Google

Submission + - Billionaires and polymaths to unveil a plan to mine asteroids. (wsj.com)

Submitted by dumuzi
dumuzi writes: A team including Larry Page, Ram Shriram and Eric Schmidt (Google), James Cameron (Director), Charles Simonyi (Microsoft executive and astronaut), Ross Perot Jr. (son of Ross Perot), Chris Lewicki (NASA Mars mission manager), and Peter Diamandis (X-Prize) from a new company called Planatary Resources are expected to announce plans on April 24th to mine asteroids. A study by NASA released April 2nd claims a robotic mission could capture a 500 ton asteroid and bring it to orbit the moon for $2.6 billion. The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteriod was 20% gold. But with many raw materials on Earth expected to run out in 50-60 years perhaps now is the right time to invest in this project.
Software

Submission + - GPL Use Declining Faster Than Ever (itworld.com) 3

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: An analysis of software licenses shows usage of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining at an accelerating rate. In their place, developers are choosing permissive licenses such as BSD, MIT, and ASL. One theory for the decline is that GPL usage was primarily driven by vendor-led projects, and with the shift to community-led projects, permissive licenses are becoming more common.
Media

Submission + - Director of "Elephants Dream" releasing new Blender-animated film, "Tube" (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by
TheSilentNumber
TheSilentNumber writes: "Bassam Kurdali's free culture 3D animation, "Tube" is nearing the final stages of production. Tube is a collaborative effort between 56 artists from 22 countries...some of which are at war. After directing the first of the Blender Institute's "Open Movie Projects", Elephants Dream, Bassam wanted to prove the viability of free cultural works and usability of free software like Blender and PiTiVi for independent filmmakers. Just a few days after launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the project, the goal has been met, which means we should see the final release in 7 months!"
The Military

Submission + - US Journalists Targeted by Pentagon Propaganda Contractors (usatoday.com)

Submitted by Jeremiah Cornelius
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: While conducting investigative reporting on civilian contractors in the Pentagon's "InfoOps" Internet propaganda operations, two reporters found themselves the subject of a highly targeted, professional media manipulation effort. Reporter Tom Vanden Brook and Editor Ray Locker found that Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names. Some postings merely copied Vanden Brook's and Locker's previous reporting. Others accused them of being sponsored by the Taliban. "I find it creepy and cowardly that somebody would hide behind my name and presumably make up other names in an attempt to undermine my credibility," Vanden Brook said. If these websites were created using federal funds, it could violate federal law prohibiting the production of propaganda for domestic consumption.
Google

Submission + - Google's Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking (wired.com)

Submitted by infomodity
infomodity writes: What started as a Stanford project (Stanford Clean Slate) to design an Internet with decades of hindsight as a guide is now being put into practice by Google using OpenFlow. SDN, or Software Defined Networking, is a way of decoupling data and control planes, allowing an open software community to thrive in what is historically a proprietary, ASIC based networking space. With routing and switching control planes becoming open, what will the networks of tomorrow look like?

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