snydeq writes "Recent silence regarding the future of OpenSolaris under Oracle's hand has InfoWorld blogger Savio Rodrigues questioning the relative importance of open code. 'Source code availability is a central factor in establishing trust in the open source community, as knowledge that the source is available can often allay fears about the future of a particular open source project or product. And yet, this trust can often be overstated,' Rodrigues writes. Members of the OpenSolaris community have been agitating for Oracle to clarify its plans for OpenSolaris in the wake of its acquisition of Sun, with some suggesting a fork as a way of severing ties. But, as Rodrigues points out, 'The community around an open source project or product can certainly be vibrant without having the resources to support a fork. In fact, this is true for many open source communities, which count numerous members, very few of whom would be qualified to develop the open source project further should a fork occur. Worse, even fewer would be interested in doing so.'"

theodp writes "Microsoft's Kin mobile phone project came under fire as Consumer Reports and others pointed out that a promotional video looked like an inappropriate endorsement of 'sexting,' prompting a quick edit and an apologetic tweet. 'The video,' observed Consumer Reports, 'includes a downright creepy sequence [beginning around 0:33] in which a young man is shown putting a Kin under his shirt and apparently snapping a picture of one of his naked breasts. The breast is then shown on the phone's screen, just before the guy apparently sends it to someone. Next we see the face of a young woman, seemingly the recipient, with an amused expression...'"

mjgraves writes "Over the past week a number of IP-PBX systems have been suffering SIP attacks from hosts in the Amazon EC2 cloud. At least a dozen known attacks have been reported to Amazon, which has been surprisingly quiet about the matter. The issue has been well documented by one of the attack victims on his blog. The matter was also discussed on the April 16th issue of the VoIP Users Conference (podcast available at the link; EC2 segment begins around 3:30). Amazon appears to have gone silent on the matter even as the attacks are ongoing. This is completely irresponsible behavior from a such a hosting company, which should be acting to take down the attacker in their midst."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Micah Kellner, the New York State assemblyman who last year submitted a bill to provide a tax credit to open source developers, has now proposed the 'Open New York Act,' a law that would make it mandatory for state agencies to put almost all of their public records on the Internet. According to Kellner's office, the law would 'revolutionize the relationship between New Yorkers and their state government, requiring all state agencies to make their records available through a central website — where the data can be used by activists, entrepreneurs, and others to create a host of applications useful in everyday life.' The Open Government Foundation, Citizens Union, and New York Public Interest Research Group all support the bill."

Krebsonsecurity.com has a writeup on the decision of UK anti-fraud activist site bobbear.co.uk to retire from the fray. The 66-year-old fraud fighter said he was getting too old for the work, which takes him about 15 hours a day. "We had so many messages of thanks, and congratulations on the site, but it is so stressful and takes so much out of you, and there is always the worry of litigation hanging over your head." "The owner and curator of bobbear.co.uk, a site that specializes in exposing Internet fraud scams and phantom online companies, announced Saturday that he will be shuttering the site at the end of April. Bobbear and its companion site bobbear.com are creations of [the pseudonomous] Bob Harrison, a 66-year-old UK resident who for the last four years has tirelessly chronicled and exposed a myriad of fraud and scam Web sites. The sites, which are well-indexed by Google and other search engines and receive about 2,000 hits per day, often are among the first results returned in a search for the names of fly-by-night corporations advertised in spam and aimed at swindling the unsuspecting or duping the unwitting." Any ideas on who might want to take over the domains and carry on the work would be appreciated by the Internet community at large.

An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks backgrounder on Kernel Shared Memory in the 2.6.32 Linux kernel. KSM allows the hypervisor to increase the number of concurrent virtual machines by consolidating identical memory pages. The article covers the ideas behind KSM (such as storage de-duplication), its implementation, and how you manage it.

WrongSizeGlass writes "The AP is reporting that the US Army Corps of Engineers has uncovered what appears to be the fourth major disposal area for World War I-era munitions and chemical weapons in the nation's capital. Digging was suspended at a construction site after 'workers pulled smoking glassware from the pit — preliminary tests show the glassware was contaminated with the toxic chemical arsenic trichloride. ... Workers also discovered a jar about three-quarters full of a dark liquid that turned out to be the chemical agent mustard.' Someone needs to remind our government of the meaning of NIMBY."

ColdWetDog writes, "OK, we've all whined about the fact that we are now firmly entrenched in the 21st Century and no flying cars. So it is gratifying to see that our good friends at DARPA are finally going to do something about it." The project is called Transformer TX. "The Government's envisioned concept consists of a robust ground vehicle that is capable of configuring into a VTOL air vehicle with a maximum payload capability of approximately 1,000 lbs. ... Technologies of interest may include: hybrid electric drive, advanced batteries, adaptive wing structures, ducted fan propulsion systems, advanced lightweight heavy fuel engines, lightweight materials, advanced sensors, and flight controls for stable transition from vertical to horizontal flight. ... Like all DARPA projects Transformer TX is unlikely to succeed at all. Even if US Marine rifle companies one day do ride to war in handy four-man sky jeeps rather than cumbersome choppers or Humvees, that doesn't necessarily mean flying cars for all any more than Harriers or Ospreys did."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that a new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, look standard, but their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information, and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place. The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15-percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 pm and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store. Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan. That alarms some privacy advocates. Companies can 'offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,' said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. 'There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.'"

alphadogg writes "Michael Abbott, the head of Palm's software and services team, will leave the company at the end of next week, according to a regulatory filing Palm made on Friday to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. He submitted his resignation on Monday and will leave the company on April 23, Palm said. The resignation came as reports surface that the struggling handset maker is seeking a buyer. Last month Palm reported disappointing results for the quarter that ended Feb. 26. Its Pre and Pixi smartphone lines, which run the WebOS operating system, are up against a growing number of smartphones using Google's Android platform as well as Apple's popular iPhone."

isometric writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra: "IA Labs is accusing Nintendo of infringing on two separate IA Labs patents through technology used in the Nintendo Wii, Wii Fit, Wii Fit Plus, the Wii Balance Board, Wii Remote, Wii Wheel, Wii MotionPlus, Wii Nunchuck and Wii Zapper. ... The patents in question are 'Computer interactive isometric exercise system and method for operatively interconnecting the exercise system to a computer system for use as a peripheral' and 'Force measurement system for an isometric exercise device.' The claim said that IA Labs had been in contact with Nintendo during 2007-2008, discussing possible overlaps of IA Labs and Nintendo patents. Emails between IA Labs and Nintendo showed that IA Labs wanted to license its technology to Nintendo. IA Labs was also in talks with Nintendo about a product called Sqweeze, a controller for Wii and PC that's meant to increase physical activity when gaming."

funchords writes "As a settlement to the class-action lawsuits over Comcast's blocking of users' Internet traffic, Comcast stands to pay 'up to' $16.00 to every subscriber who makes a claim at their settlement website and declares, under penalty of perjury, that their online activity was for a lawful purpose consistent with applicable copyright and other laws. Robb Topolski, the veteran networking engineer who kicked off the case when he discovered the blocking back in 2007, says that the proposed settlement doesn't make sense, especially after the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled this month that the US Federal Communications Commission didn't have the authority to enforce its Net neutrality principles on Comcast. 'You paid about $50 a month for the service, and the amount that Comcast stands to return is up to about 50c per month for each month that it blocked traffic,' he wrote. 'If that tiny amount of money is compensation, then there is no penalty to Comcast for interfering with its customers, for failing to disclose it, for repeatedly lying about it, and for taking so long to stop it.' The Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in late 2007, each independently confirmed Topolski's reports that Comcast was blocking BitTorrent and some other traffic without telling its customers. Comcast first denied interfering with traffic, then finally said it throttled some applications only during times of peak congestion. However, studies from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany eventually proved that Comcast slowed BitTorrent traffic around the clock."

An anonymous reader writes "The joint comment filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) requests anti-infringement software on all home computers, pervasive copyright filtering, border searches, forced US intellectual property policies on foreign nations and a joint departmental agency to combat infringement during major releases." The MPAA would also like to have its rent paid a bit by Congress, with a ban on what seems to me like a useful tool (for those in as well as outside the film industry), the recently-discussed futures market for box-office receipts.

An anonymous reader writes "Matthew Gregan is working on bringing David Schleef's DSP accelerated port of Theora to Firefox Mobile. He writes on his blog: 'The C64x+ DSP is often found in systems built upon TI's OMAP3 SoC, such as the Palm Pre, Motorola Droid, and Nokia N900. Last year, Mozilla funded a port, named Leonora, of Xiph's Theora video codec to the TI C64x+ DSP. David Schleef conducted the port impressively quickly and published his results. The intention of this project was to provide a high-quality set of royalty-free media codecs for a common mobile computing platform. The initial focus is Firefox Mobile on the N900, so I am working on integrating David's work into Firefox. To experiment with other facilities Firefox could use to accelerate video playback, and test integration, I've been hacking on a branch of a stand-alone Ogg Theora and Vorbis player originally written by Chris Double called plogg.'"

suraj.sun writes with a story from LiveScience about just how much attention you can devote to each of the tasks on hand that scream for it: "The brain is set up to manage two tasks, but not more, a new study suggests. That's because, when faced with two tasks, a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) divides so that half of the region focuses on one task and the other half on the other task. This division of labor allows a person to keep track of two tasks pretty readily, but if you throw in a third, things get a bit muddled. 'What really the results show is that we can readily divide tasking. We can cook, and at the same time talk on the phone, and switch back and forth between these two activities,' said study researcher Etienne Koechlin of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France. 'However, we cannot multitask with more than two tasks.'"