An anonymous reader writes, "We are seeing more and more about high dynamic range (HDR) images, where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo. The next step is going to be monitors that can display the wider dynamic range these images offer, as well as being more true-to-life, as they come closer to matching the capabilities of the ol' Mark I eyeball. The guys who seem to be furthest along with this are a company called Brightside Technologies. Here is a detailed review of the Brightside tech." With a price tag of $49K for a 37" monitor (with a contrast ratio of 200K to 1), HDR isn't exactly ready for the living room yet.

Will Rodger writes, "Citizens Against Government Waste has said some highly critical things about open source software in the past. They've also pounced on supporters of the OpenDocument Format along the way. Alas, it seems their close ties to Jack Abramoff have drawn the (unfavorable) attention of Senate staff."

engtech writes, "There's been some hype about the Debian fork of FireFox called IceWeasel. Politics aside, this is a bad idea because it fragments the user base, divides the focus, and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare."

SoCal writes, "How much legal liability do parents have for what their kids do online? A lawsuit filed in Texas by a high-school assistant principal may give some answers. Some students she had disciplined set up a fake MySpace page in her name depicting her as a lesbian (which she happens not to be). In its coverage, Ars Technica notes that 'What sets this case apart from many other lawsuits filed over the content of blogs is that it doesn't target only the teenagers who created the site. It also argues that the parents were guilty of negligence by failing to supervise their children, and that they bear some of the responsibility for the defaming site.'" The article links the Media Law Resource Center's resource tracking more than 50 cases now in the courts nationwide, in which bloggers have been sued for libel and related claims.

mikesd81 writes, "Internet News is reporting that Sun held an in-world news conference in the online game Second Life. From the article: 'Tuesday, Sun became the first Fortune 500 company to hold an "in-world" press conference to show off its new pavilion in Second Life, the popular 3D online world. Sun said it plans to invest in the Sun Pavilion as a place for developers to try out code, share ideas, and receive training.' Sun hopes to reach millions of Java developers, as opposed to the 22,000 that show up at its JavaOne conference each year." Good luck with that goal of "millions" — the total population of SL is under 800,000. And, who knew that Sun has a Chief Gaming Officer? Good quote from him in the article. He said Second Life isn't a game, "It's an amazing platform for global communications."

1960's architecture writes, "At last some evidence that exploit code is hiding on servers used to cache website content. According to Techworld, Israeli outfit Finjan has come up with evidence that real exploits have hidden on cache servers used by large search engines, effectively extending their life for periods of weeks after the original website had been taken down. The exploits detailed are from 2003-2004, but the principle would still apply to any exploit website around today, and any cache servers used by any one of the three unnamed search engines. It's almost literally malware 'life after death.'"

Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"

gondaba writes "The One Laptop Per Child project is actively recruiting hackers to help crack the security model of the $100 laptop to avoid the obvious risks associated with what will effectively be the largest computing monoculture in history. From the article: 'The key design goal, Krstic explained, is to avoid irreversible damage to the machines. The laptops will force applications to run in a "walled garden" that isolates files from certain sensitive locations like the kernel. "If we discover vulnerabilities, the security model must hold up enough that even a machine that is unpatched won't be easily exploitable. This gives us a bit of diversity to avoid the monoculture trap," he added.'"

Feelyat writes "NASA is reporting that a small storm that formed on Jupiter last year has changed color from white to red. According to an article in Yahoo News, scientist Amy Simon-Miller speculates that the storm might have gained strength as it decreased in size, similar to how 'spinning ice skaters go faster when they move their arms closer.' She says that the storm has probably 'picked up red material from lower in the Jupiter atmosphere, most likely some form of sulfur which turns red as part of a chemical reaction ...' Well, we might be one planet down, but our Solar System can still surprise."

zumaya100k writes "In recent months, Slashdot has covered the rise of the Pirate Party and the battles in Europe over iPod interoperability. Canada's Hill Times has an insightful column from Michael Geist that links these developments as the growing importance of copyright as a political issue. He argues that copyright is now tracking the environment as a mainstream political issue." (Geist is talking about Canada here, but much the same can be said about the U.S. and other places.)

narramissic writes "Following last week's signing of a new temporary agreement to pass over airline passenger data to American authorities last week, European Union parliamentarians are gearing up for a fight over data privacy. Sylvia Kaufmann, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), commented that 'The fact that the CIA, an agency whose activities, torturing and kidnapping, this house is investigating in a special committee, will have access to passenger data is the real scandal, especially when one considers that the right of redress held by U.S. citizens is not extended to E.U. citizens.'"

eldavojohn writes "Physorg is running an interesting article on the most recent of Hubble's accomplishments. It has provided us evidence supporting that which Emmanuel Kant proposed over 200 years ago — that planets do indeed form from disks of gas and dust that surround stars. The trick, apparently, was observing many cases where a star's planet forms on the exact same circumstellar disk as the dust and gas. Hubble also aided the researchers in determining the weight of many extrasolar planets. Some had contended that these were not planets but rather brown dwarf stars — which is determined by measuring their weight." Update: 10/12 23:08 GMT by T : That's not the only theory Hubble's recent observation's have supported: read on below for a bit more.

kog777 writes "The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to claim the word as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails. EU trademark officials rejected Hormel Foods Corp.'s appeal, dealing the company another setback in its struggle to prevent software companies from using the word 'spam' in their products, a practice it argued was diluting its brand name. The European Office of Trade Marks and Designs, noting that the vast majority of the hits yielded by a Google search for the word made no reference to the food, said that 'the most evident meaning of the term SPAM for the consumers ... will certainly be unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail, rather than a designation for canned spicy ham.'"

arglesnaf asks: "I'm a consultant and spend a lot of time on public wireless networks at client sites (mostly hospitals / universities), coffee shops, and hotels. Quite often, the problem is that some person is running BitTorrent and eating 100% of the bandwidth. The result is that I can't get email during the day or play World of Warcraft in the hotel. I have considered sniffing and spoofing TCP resets to free up some bandwidth but need an automated way to handle new BitTorrent connections. Does anybody have any ideas on how to automate the sniff and reset strategy, or other ways to carve out a little bandwidth from hogs on public wireless?"

Josh Fink writes "A group of Dutch Scientists have recently released a study stating that they have found that changes in Earth's orbit around the sun are linked to mammal extinctions. From the article: '"Extinctions in rodent species occur in pulses which are spaced by intervals controlled by astronomical variations and their effects on climate change..." The cycles are associated with lower temperatures, changes in precipitation, habitats, vegetation and food availability which are the main factors influencing the extinction peaks, the study published in the journal Nature said.' So on top of worrying about global warming, it seems we should also worry about the physics that govern the orbit of Earth around the sun. Too bad we don't have a way of keeping the Earth in the same orbit/on the same axis of rotation."