First time accepted submitter so.dan writes "Canadian copyright guru Michael Geist reports that the 'File sharing lawsuits involving the movie the Hurt Locker [that] have been big news in the United States for months... are coming to Canada as the Federal Court of Canada has paved the way for the identification of subscribers at Bell Canada, Cogeco, and Videotron who are alleged to have copied the movie.' This is the first I've ever heard of MAFIAA lawsuits beginning to succeed in Canada. The move seems to target larger ISPs. Are subscribers of smaller ISPs — who must lease their lines from the larger ones such as Bell — relatively protected from such invasions of privacy due to some sort of technical difficulty in determining the names of subscribers? (Please excuse my technical ignorance)."

Trailrunner7 writes "GlobalSign has found evidence that its main Web server was compromised recently, but has not discovered any indications that its certificate authority infrastructure was hacked, contrary to claims by the attacker responsible for the DigiNotar CA hack."

First time accepted submitter IICV writes "Ethan Siegel of Starts with a Bang has done some research on how and why the James Webb Space Telescope's price tag ballooned. Quoting: 'Something wasn't adding up. How could the telescope be more than three-quarters complete after $3.5 billion, but require more than double that amount to finish it? Also, how did the launch date get bumped by three years, to 2018? And how did 6.5 billion become a disastrous $8.7 billion so quickly? So I did a little digging around, and perhaps a little investigative reporting as well, and got ahold of a Webb Project Scientist who's also a member of the Webb Science Working Group.'" Whether or not you buy the argument that the money's well-spent (at $5 billion or $8 billion, or either side of these), even the work in progress is beautiful.

sighted writes "The twin lunar Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral this morning. GRAIL-A is scheduled to reach the moon on New Year's Eve 2011, while GRAIL-B will arrive New Year's Day 2012. The two solar-powered spacecraft will fly in tandem orbits around the moon to measure its gravity field. Lunar explorers hope the mission will answer longstanding questions about the moon 'from crust to core.'"

An anonymous reader writes "I have a roommate that insists on using BitTorrent without taking any kind of precautions. He has an affinity for downloading material that is extremely popular and high-risk. He's received a warning from a well-known media giant in the past about his file sharing, but hasn't been sued. We've recently begun living in an apartment together (with one other person) and share our Internet connection and IP address. If his p2p activity leads to someone attempting to take legal action, could I be held liable? How would our accusers differentiate between our computers if we all share the same IP address? Would they just sue the lot of us?" Some lawyers would certainly like to get a look at everything on the other side of the connection. Has anyone out there faced legal problems as a result of someone else's use of your connection?

astroengine writes "The Kepler space telescope has spotted an extra-solar planet with a very odd orbit. Sometimes Kepler-19b slows down by five minutes during its 9-day orbit. Other times it speeds up by five minutes. Johannes Kelper's laws of orbital dynamics never said a celestial body can arbitrarily speed up and slow down; another planetary body must therefore be gravitationally acting on Kepler-19b. Enter Kepler-19c, a world that hasn't been observed, but its gravitational effects have. This is an unprecedented discovery, one that could potentially be used in multi-planetary star systems to discover more 'phantom' worlds that would have otherwise gone unnoticed."

E IS mC(Square) writes "Back on November 28, 2010, somebody started a thread on Apple's support forums about someone spending more than $50 of his iTunes Store credit on iPhone apps. That discussion thread has since swelled to more than 45 pages, with nearly 700 posts. 'Someone — or some group of someones — seems to be able to spend iTunes gift card credit without permission, buying apps that users don't want. And whoever's doing the hacking seems pretty good at it: Hundreds of users have seen their iTunes credit stolen, and the hack shows no signs of slowing, ten months after it was first reported.' Apple has refunded certain accounts, but not in all cases. Apple suggests that the hack stems from weak, easily guessable passwords, and/or phishing attacks where customers are fooled into entering their passwords into hackers' forms."

An anonymous reader writes "Two Australian security researchers, Stephen Glass and Matt Robert, have published a paper that details flaws in the encryption implementation (PDF) in the APCO Project 25 digital radio standard, used by emergency services and police departments world-wide. The paper details flaws in the DES-OFB and ADP encryption that enable the encryption key to be recovered by traditional brute force key searching. Also detailed is a DoS attack that makes use of unauthenticated radio inhibit mechanism. The research is part of the OP25 project, which uses GNUradio to implement a P25 stack using software defined radio. With this solution in place, the researchers were able to do detailed analysis of the traffic coming from various radio systems and to transmit and receive to P25 radios in their lab."

We hear all the time that household energy consumption is rising, both in the U.S. and around the world. That's been true in the big picture for several decades at least, but reader captainkoloth, with his first accepted submission, points to an Associated Press article with some encouraging news on this front: the rate of growth in U.S. household energy use, and household energy use itself, is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years. Take it for what you will, but that conclusion is drawn by the Electric Power Research Institute, "a nonprofit group funded by the utility industry."

psychonaut writes "Long-term readers of Slashdot may be familiar with The Linux Counter, which attempts to measure (through surveys and statistics) the number of people using GNU/Linux operating systems. The project started in 1993 and shot to fame six years later, largely as a result of three Slashdot articles (two of which brought the Counter to its knees). After four years of stagnation, project founder Harald Tveit Alvestrand has handed over the reins to a new maintainer, Alexander Mieland. Over the past few months, Mieland has completely redeveloped the project, with a modernized design and support facilities (including a bug tracker, mailing list, RSS feed, and Twitter account). The New Linux Counter is now up and running, with all the data for active users from the old counter. The old site will continue to operate for a time but will soon be shut down and requests redirected to the new site."

DeviceGuru writes with this interesting snippet on a modern approach to GUI design: "Netflix uses WebKit, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 to build user interfaces that are delivered to millions of game consoles, Blu-ray players, Internet-connected TVs, and devices such as the Roku player and D-Link Boxee Box. Matt McCarthy and Kim Trott, device UI engineering managers at Netflix, have just published 50 presentation slides from their recent talk at OSCON 2011 in which they explained how Netflix develops its WebKit-based user interfaces."

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will remember that on Sept. 1, a federal judge overturned a $1.3 billion judgment and approved SAP's request that Oracle accept a lower award of $272 million. Now, according to court documents filed this week, former SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow will plead guilty to criminal charges of copyright infringement for downloading software from Oracle's servers. Sentencing will take place at a hearing on Sept. 14."

First time accepted submitter AmyVernon writes with a small hack that "is supposed to boost signal strength by at least 2 to 4 bars," and which requires little more than a can of beer (or Orangina). She writes: "What you need: scissors, a utility knife, some adhesive putty and an empty beer can. The brand doesn't matter for the router, but I suppose it would be cooler looking if it were Asahi or Stella Artois than if it were Budweiser." Perhaps this will be added one day to my favorite (and very extensive!) list of low-budget Wi-Fi amplifying rigs.

mask.of.sanity writes "An Australian blogger who blew the lid on emerging domain-name fraud campaigns has received death threats from the scammers. His blog and domain parking company are still being hit with a large distributed denial of service attack that has the death threats embedded as HTML links within its logs. Australia's government CERT team and the U.S. Secret Service (blog servers were hosted on U.S. soil) are pursuing the botnet's command and control servers. Ten days later, the victim is still being attacked and is fighting a cat-and-mouse game as IP address ranges change."

CWmike writes "At long last Adobe Flash has come to an iPad or iPhone, writes Jonny Evans. Adobe appeared at Europe's NAB equivalent, IBC, this week to introduce Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 and Adobe Flash Access 3.0. Adobe's solution repackages content in real-time, changing the protocol to suit the target device, HTTP Dynamic Streaming or HLS, for example. This should mean that iOS devices will get much of the advantages of Flash video support, without the processor degradation and battery life cost of the format in use on other devices. 'With Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers now have a single, simple workflow for delivering content using the same stream to Flash-enabled devices or to the Apple iPhone and iPad,' Adobe says."

An anonymous reader writes "The price of a pair of hearing aids in the U.S. ranges from $3,000 to $8,000. To the average American household, this is equivalent to 2-3 months of income! While the price itself seems exorbitant, what is even more grotesque is its continuous pace of growth: in the last decade the price of an average Behind the Ear hearing aid has more than doubled. To the present day, price points are not receding — even though most of its digital components have become increasingly commoditized. Is this a hearing aid price bubble?"

brindafella links to a series of articles published yesterday in the journal Science "on Australopithecus sediba, explaining that skeletons found in the Malapa cave in the World Heritage listed 'Cradle of Civilisation' push back to 1.97 million years the oldest known tool-using, ape-like pre-humans." As is typical, the full Science articles are paywalled, but the abstracts are interesting. (If you're a university student — or, in some cases, an alumni club member — you may have full journal access and not even realize it.) NPR has a nice article on the find as well.

An anonymous reader writes "Germany has decided to close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 and embark on an energy turnaround that focuses on large increases in sustainable energy production. What will it take in terms of investments, and will it mean cost hikes for German consumers? Will it really mean more jobs in the 'green energy' sector? Quoting: 'Total investment over the next decade for such an energy turnaround is estimated to be roughly €200 billion (or almost $290 billion). ... At the moment, more than 20 new coal-fired power plants are being planned or already under construction; together, they would achieve a total output of 10 gigawatts and could, in terms of power supply, replace nuclear power plants that are still operational. But coal-fired power plants do not fit into the concept of the sustainable energy turnaround that the government has put forward.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Last week the Department of Justice filed an antitrust complaint to stop the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile USA. Now, AT&T has responded, arguing that the merger would benefit consumers by increasing competition and freeing up spectrum. 'That means increased output, higher quality service, fewer dropped calls,and lower prices to consumers than without the merger,' they say. Meanwhile, House Republicans have sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Attorney General Eric Holder asking for an explanation of 'what went into the decision to challenge the merger and whether the agencies considered the impact on jobs and economic growth.' A hearing is scheduled for Sept. 21."

An anonymous reader writes "In a widely circulated American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made things difficult for sustaining a centralized revolutionary movement in Egypt. But, he adds, the shutdown actually encouraged the development of smaller revolutionary uprisings at local levels where the face-to-face interaction between activists was more intense and the mobilization of inactive lukewarm dissidents was easier. In other words, closing down the internet made the revolution more diffuse and more difficult for the authorities to contain." As long as we're on the subject, reader lecheiron points out news of research into predicting revolutions by feeding millions of news articles into a supercomputer and using word analysis to chart national sentiment. So far it's pretty good at predicting things that have already happened, but we should probably wait until it finds something new before contacting Hari Seldon.