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Censorship

Submission + - David Cameron 'orders new curbs on internet porn'

Submitted by fustakrakich
fustakrakich writes:

The new measures will mean that in future anyone buying a new computer or signing up with a new internet service provider (ISP) will be asked, when they log on for the first time, whether they have children. If the answer is "yes", the parent will be taken through the process of installing anti-pornography filters, as well as a series of questions on how stringent they wish the restrictions to be, according to a newspaper.

If the answer is "no", all male customers over 18 will be immediately tagged as pedophiles.

China

Submission + - Delicious kiwi fruit is at risk of becoming endangered from disease (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by canada_dry
canada_dry writes: A disease that affects kiwi fruit has been spreading across New Zealand and Italy (the top producers of the hairy and nutritious fruit). This relatively new disease "psa-v" was first detected 20 years ago however it has become significantly more virulent in the last 5 years and is now appearing in almost every kiwi crop. Recent studies (May 2011 http://www.kvh.org.nz/vdb/document/163) indicate there is concern about the future of the fruit. It seems that the current treatments of chemicals and antibiotics has been unsuccessful. Indications are that the disease originates from China (http://www.ruralnewsgroup.co.nz/rural-news/rural-general-news/china-likely-source-of-psa-v?ml=1). More information is available on the kiwi growers website: http://www.kvh.org.nz/

Submission + - Star Citizen takes the crowdfunding crown, reboots the Space Sim genre? (robertsspaceindustries.com)

Submitted by Zocalo
Zocalo writes: Star Citizen, Chris Robert's attempt to reboot the Space Sim genre, hit a major funding milestone earlier today, exceeding the previous record of $4,163,208 secured by the game Project Eternity and more than doubling the initial funding target set by the producer of the Wing Commander series. With Stretch Goals now being passed every few hours bringing new features to the planned game, and David Brabham annoucing a new installment of the classic Elite using a similar funding model at Kickstarter could this be a wake up call for the big game publishers to take another look at the genre?

There's still two days left of Star Citizen funding as well, so if you feel like being a part you can chip in either at the main RSI site or on Kickstarter.

Submission + - Anonymous attacks Israeli websites in response to IDF operation in Gaza

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "On Thursday, Anonymous reported that it took down close to 40 Israeli government and security establishment websites, although the single website that they presented as having been attacked belonged to a security and cleaning services company. The report came after Likud MK Danny Danon announced earlier in the week that his website had been taken down by a group calling itself TeaM KuWaiT HaCkErS. Danon's website had been hosting an online petition calling for the Israeli government to cut off the supply of electricity going from Israel to Gaza. "

Submission + - Greek vacation becomes a nightmare - Appeal denied facing upto 20 yr in jail (helpivanmartin.org)

Submitted by
jerryhopper
jerryhopper writes: "Since September 9, two Czech gamedevelopers visited Greece on vacation. During that vacation they were arrested and charged with espionage. After being imprisoned for 70 days in inhumane conditions, their appeal was denied. Although the appeal denial was made at 25 October — the news reached the parents of the detainees only yesterday (16 nov). Due to Greek strikes in the judicial system, there isnt much progress in the case. Although the two detainees try to keep sane and survive with dignity, sleeping in a drafty cell with 25 inmates is' nt a easy task. They now no longer tell us that it’s alright, that they are holding it together. After this judicial decision we have heard from Martin and Ivan something
that no parent wants to hear. During the phone call they basically told us one thing: “Mom, dad, please save us.”"
Security

Submission + - FreeBSD machines recently compromised (freebsd.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following recent compromises of the Linux kernel.org and Sourceforge, the
FreeBSD Project is now reporting that several machines have been broken
into. After a brief outage, ftp.FreeBSD.org and other services appear to be
back. The project announcement states that some deprecated services
(e.g., cvsup) may be removed rather than restored. Users are advised to
check for packages downloaded between certain dates and replace them,
although not because known trojans have been found, but rather because the
project has not yet been able to confirm that they could not exist.

Apparently initial access was via a stolen SSH key, but fortunately their
clusters were partitioned so that the effects were limited. The announcement
contains more detailed information — and we are left wondering, would
proprietary companies that get broken into so forthcoming? Should they be?
Linux

Submission + - Valve's Big Picture Could Be A Linux Game Console (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by Penurious Penguin
Penurious Penguin writes: Via LXer, a hopeful article at The Verge persuasively suggests that through Valve, Linux could soon become a formidable contender in the gaming arena, capable of holding its own against such giants as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii. With 50 million users, a growing Linux team, a caboodle of interesting experiments ("Steam Box" hardware baselines, etc.) and a strong conviction that more-open platforms are the way, Valve may actually see it through.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft accuses webkit of breaking standards and becoming the next IE 6 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: In a bizaare, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using webkit stagnated open standards and innovation on the web. Microsoft is espcially concerned in the mobile market where many mobile sites only work with Android or IOS with -webkit specific extensions on its call to action in their Windows Phone Developer Blog. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which are being written as -webkit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market Webkit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliancy and not use the proprietary (yet opensource) webkit. Is webkit in both Android, Chrome, and iOS really that proprietary is it all hot air from someone who fell from grace?
Politics

Submission + - GOP Brief Attacks Current Copyright Law (theamericanconservative.com)

Submitted by cervesaebraciator
cervesaebraciator writes: Regardless of how one feels about the GOP generally, it is always heartening to see current copyright and IP law questioned on a national stage. A Republican study committee, chaired by Ohio Representative Jim Jordan released a brief today entitled Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it . Among other things, the brief attacks current copyright law as hampering scientific inquiry, penalizing journalism, and retarding the potential of the internet to allow the dispersion of knowledge through e-readers. In the briefs words, "Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets – rather it destroys entire markets." Four potential policy solutions are proposed: statutory damage reform, expansion of fair use, punishing false copyright claims, and limiting copyright terms. There may yet be hope for a national debate on the current oppressive copyright system, if just a fool's hope.
IT

Submission + - US Justice Department sues eBay for anti-competitive hiring practices (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Associated Press (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/justice-dept-sues-ebay-for-allegedly-agreeing-with-intuit-not-to-hire-each-others-employees/2012/11/16/4352fa4e-303a-11e2-af17-67abba0676e2_story.html) is reporting that the US Justice Department is suing eBay for allegedly agreeing with Intuit not to hire each other’s employees.

According to the article, "eBay’s agreement with Intuit hurt employees by lowering the salaries and benefits they might have received and deprived them of better job opportunities at the other company,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Joseph Wayland, who is in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. The division “has consistently taken the position that these kinds of agreements are per se (on their face) unlawful under antitrust laws.”

Submission + - Book Review: Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition (oreilly.com)

Submitted by
kfogel
kfogel writes: "I'd like to submit a book review of "Version Control with Git" (2nd Edition, 2012, O'Reilly Media), by Jon Loeliger and Matthew McCullough. The review is mostly written, but http://slashdot.org/faq/submissions.shtml says to contact you (via this submissions form) for longer pieces like book reviews. So I am contacting you :-).

Please let me know if you'd consider running a review of this book. I'm happy to send the content of the review, of course; I'm just not sure what the best mechanism is, since it sounds like this form isn't it. Let me know.

Best,
-Karl Fogel (kfogel@red-bean.com)"
Power

Submission + - Old Electric-Car Batteries Put into Service for Home Energy Storage

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Josie Garthwaite writes that old electric car batteries degraded below acceptable performance levels for autos still have enough life to serve the grid for at least ten years with a prototype announced by GM and ABB lashing five Chevy Volt battery packs together in an array with a capacity of 10 kilowatt-hours — enough to provide electricity for three to five average houses for two hours. "In a car, you want immediate power, and you want a lot of it," says Alexandra Goodson. "We're discharging for two hours instead of immediately accelerating. It's not nearly as demanding on the system." Deployed on the grid, community energy storage devices could help utilities integrate highly variable renewables like solar and wind into the power supply, while absorbing spikes in demand from electric-car charging. "Wind, it's a nightmare for grid operators to manage," says Britta Gross, director of global energy systems and infrastructure commercialization for GM. "It's up, down, it doesn't blow for three days. It's very labor-intensive to manage." The batteries would allow for storage of power during inexpensive periods for use during expensive peak demand, or help make up for gaps in solar, wind or other renewable power generation. One final advantage of re-using electric car batteries is that the battery—the most expensive part of an electric car—remains an asset beyond its useful life in the vehicle. "If there is a market in stationary power for spent batteries, consumers could recognize this as an increased resale value at end of life, however small," says Kevin See."
Databases

Submission + - Cheap GPU Accelerated Database System Competes With Top TPC-H Scores (nvidia.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Alenka is an open source SQL-lite database system that leverages CUDA to offload all of the query processing to NVIDIA GPUs. Newly published results show that an $800 desktop system (with an NVIDIA GTX580, and 1 120GB SSD) outperforms the top10 ranked $55,000 HP server with 2 Quad Core (3Ghz) Xeons, 144GB of RAM, and 12 60GB SSDs running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 in one query, and offers comparable performance in another.

To achieve these results, the author (Anton) recently updated the code with a new version that includes a faster implementation of database JOIN. The code leverages the Thrust library for fast SORT, SELECT, and SET parallel algorithms. It also uses the CUDPP library to implement a parallel hash JOIN.

While the codebase is not a complete implementation of SQL, it can execute several queries from TPC-H (an industry standard data-warehousing benchmark). For Query 1 (SELECT, GROUP-BY) Alenka processes a 100GB dataset in 9.5 seconds, compared to 42.3 seconds on the HP system. For Query 3 (JOIN, GROUP-BY, SORT), Alenka takes 5.3 seconds, compared to 4.3 seconds for the HP system.

It will be interesting to see if Alenka can offer similar results for the entire TPC-H benchmark suite, or if other database implementations can be accelerated by GPUs.

The source code for the Alenka system is available on github.
IOS

Submission + - iOS 6 Streaming Bug Sends Data Usage Skyrocketing (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "iOS 6, by all appearances, has a streaming problem. This is separate from the network issues that led Verizon to state that it wouldn't bill people for overages that were caused by spotty Wi-Fi connectivity. The issue has been detailed at PRX.org with information on how the team saw a huge spike in bandwidth usage after the release of iOS 6, and then carefully tested the behavior of devices and its own app to narrow the possible cause. In one case, the playback of a single 30MB episode caused the transfer of over 100MB of data. It is believed that the issue was solved with the release of iOS 6.0.1, but anecdotal evidence from readers points to continued incidents of high data usage, even after updating. If you own an iPhone 5 or upgraded to iOS 6 on an older device, it is strongly recommend to check your usage over the past two months, update to iOS 6.0.1, and girding up for a lengthy discussion with your carrier if it turns out your data use went through the roof."

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