shmG writes "The demise of the Google Nexus One phone is fairly straightforward: a lack of sales killed the product. While it will continue to sell through Vodafone in Europe, KT in Korea and a few others, the experiment of Google indicates that selling a phone direct to consumers online is dead. 'The bottom line is people like to look at phones in the store. Google has a lot to learn about phone sales, this is one lesson they learned.'"

natehoy writes "Apparently, monitoring for copyright violations is not in itself a copyright violation, lawyers for Elaine Scott decided. As a result, they have dropped the lawsuit against Scribd, who was being simultaneously sued for allowing copies of Scott's work to be published, and retaining an unlicensed copy of the work in their filtering software to try and prevent future copyright violations."

A 3-year-old Onion video titled "Martial Law Plans Revealed?" has swept across the internet recently, and taken the gullible along with it. The video has some preaching from the highest mountain top about the evils of a government turning fascist, and an equal number explaining until red in the face what The Onion is.

suraj.sun writes "The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark developer Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is 'designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hopefully) future hardware.' The latest release of Lightspark features better compatibility with YouTube videos, sound synchronization support and the ability to use fontconfig for font selection. Other changes include plug-in support for Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser and support for Firefox's out of process plug-in (OOPP) mode, which was added in version 3.6.4 of the browser."

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered the most massive stellar giant, R136a1 measured at 265 solar masses, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and data from the Hubble Space Telescope. It's in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small 'satellite' galaxy which orbits the Milky Way. Previously, the heaviest known stars were around 150 times the mass of the Sun, known as the 'Eddington Limit,' and this was believed to be close to the cosmic size limit because as stars get larger, the amount of energy created in their cores grows faster than the force of gravity which holds them together. 'Because of their proximity to the Eddington Limit they lose mass at a pretty high rate,' says Professor Paul Crowther, the chief researcher in the Sheffield team. Hyper-stars like R136a1 are believed to be formed from several young stars merging together, and are only found in the very heart of stellar clusters. R136a1 is believed to have a surface temperature of more than 40,000 degrees Celsius, and is 10 million times brighter than the Sun. Crowther adds that R136a1 is about as big as stars can get. 'Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Computer maker Dell is warning that some of its server motherboards have been delivered to customers carrying an unwanted extra: computer malware. It could be confirmation that the 'hardware trojans' long posited by some security experts are indeed a real threat."

bonhomme_de_neige writes "China renewed Google's internet license after it pledged to obey censorship laws and stop automatically switching mainland users to its unfiltered Hong Kong site, an official said. Google promised to 'obey Chinese law' and avoid linking to material deemed a threat to national security or social stability, said Zhang Feng, director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Telecoms Development Department, at a news conference." Update: 07/21 21:56 GMT by S : Changed headline to reflect that this is mainly just China trying to paint a better picture of the outcome. In a comment on the linked article, a Google representative said, "This piece suggests that Google has 'bowed' to censorship. That is not correct. We have been very clear about our committment [sic] to not censor our products for users in China. The products we have kept on Google.cn (Music, Translate, Product Search) do not require any censorship by Google. Other products, like web search, we are offering from Google.com.hk, and without censorship." If you go to google.cn, you can see the prominent link to the Hong Kong version of the site.

alphadogg writes "Is Snort, the 12-year-old open-source intrusion detection and prevention system, dead? The Open Information Security Foundation, a nonprofit group funded by the US Dept. of Homeland Security to come up with next-generation open source IDS/IPS, thinks so. But Snort's creator, Martin Roesch, begs to differ, and in fact, calls the OISF's first open source IDS/IPS code, Suricata 1.0 released this week, a cheap knock-off of Snort paid for with taxpayer dollars. The OISF was founded about a year and a half ago with $1 million in funding from a DHS cybersecurity research program, according to Matt Jonkman, president of OISF. He says OISF was founded to form an open source alternative and replacement to Snort, which he says is now considered dead since the research on what is supposed to be the next-generation version of Snort, Snort 3.0, has stalled."

Hugh Pickens writes "AFP reports that the US Senate has passed (by a 'unanimous consent' voice vote) a bill that prevents US federal courts from recognizing or enforcing a foreign judgment for defamation that is inconsistent with the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. If the bill becomes law it will shield US journalists, authors, and publishers from 'libel tourists' who file suit in countries where they expect to get the most favorable ruling. 'While we cannot legislate changes to foreign law that are chilling protected speech in our country, we can ensure that our courts do not become a tool to uphold foreign libel judgments that undermine American First Amendment or due process rights,' said Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy. Backers of the bill have cited England, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore as places where weak libel safeguards attract lawsuits that unfairly harm US journalists, writers, and publishers. The popular legislation is headed to the House of Representatives, which is expected to approve it. 'This bill is a needed first step to ensure that weak free-speech protections and abusive legal practices in foreign countries do not prevent Americans from fully exercising their constitutional right to speak and debate freely,' said Senator Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on Leahy's committee."

An anonymous reader tipped a post up on Americablog revealing that BP Photoshopped a fake photo of their crisis command center and posted it on their main site. The blogger commented, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center." While this story was just being picked up by the Washington Post, an Americablog reader spotted another doctored BP photo on their website, this time of a "top kill" working group. How many others?

apoc.famine writes "Driverless technology from the University of Parma's VisLab was deployed in a real-world test on Tuesday. Two driverless chase vehicles will attempt to follow two lead vehicles across multiple continents, from Italy to China, over the course of three months. The journey will cover over 8,000 miles, (~13,000 km) as the chase vehicles use lasers and cameras to navigate hazards along the way. The team expects to collect about 100 TB of data, which requires a hefty electronics and battery load — the scale is such that the cars can only run for about three hours before needing 8 hours to recharge the batteries. This journey is being billed as just a test, and far from a real-world application. The vehicles don't go more than about 35mph, and need a person behind the wheel to take over at a moment's notice. 'What we are trying to do is stress our systems and see if they can work in a real environment, with real weather, real traffic, and crazy people who cross the road in front of you and a vehicle that cuts you off,' said project leader Alberto Broggi. The goal is not to produce just road vehicles, but to improve the technology so it can be used in military and agricultural roles as well. The team hopes to have helped mature the technology within the next 10-20 years to the point that it can be used on the road."

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent post by seven members of their security team, Google lashed out against the current standards of responsible disclosure, and implicitly backed the recent actions of Tavis Ormandy (who is listed as one of the authors). The company said it believed 60 days should be an 'upper bound' for fixing critical vulnerabilities, and asked to to be held to the same standard by external researchers. In another, nearly simultaneous post to the Chromium blog, Google also announced they are raising the security reward for Chrome vulnerabilities to $3133.7, apparently in response to Mozilla's recent action."