VidMan writes, "The Gotuit.com free online video player now works for Linux users with the recent Flash 9 beta release. When the Gotuit site was released in late July, one of the key questions from Slashdot users was when the site would be available for Linux. The site is an online video destination for music videos, news, weather, and sports that uses the Flash media player to deliver video."

Gigapixel writes to point us to what is claimed to be the largest digital photo on the Net, at 8.6 Gigapixel. It is a composite photo of the "Parete Gaudenziana," a fresco painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari, dated 1513. This fresco is in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the convent of Varallo Sesia, diocese of Novara and Province of Vercelli, Italy. The site uses Flash to let you explore the fresco over a zoom range of more than 180 to 1. The photo is made up of 1145 images, each 12.2 Mpixel and 16 bits per color channel. Read on for more technical specs of the photo.

Down8 writes, "Jeff Han, an NYU researcher, has recently shown off his 'interface free' touch screen technology at the TEDTalks in Monterey. Some sweet innovation that I hope makes it to the mainstream soon." The photo manipulation interface is reminiscent of "Minority Report."

DIRECT Launcher writes, "A grass-roots effort, based around a group of engineers, managers, and others involved in the US space program, is proposing an alternative launch vehicle for NASA to adopt for the new Lunar Exploration program. The new vehicle offers serious performance and cost savings totaling $35 billion over the next twenty years. The proposal was presented to NASA last week. The concept would make possible future Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions after Shuttle has retired, allow for all the remaining ISS elements to be launched after all, free up cash to fund the JIMO mission again, and also allow NASA to return to the moon three years early."

stefanb writes, "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of the Wikipedia, has been awarded for the first time. Alexander Ratushnyak managed to improve the compression factor to 5.86 and will receive a 3,416-Euro award. Being able to compress knowledge well is believed to be related to acting intelligently." The Usenet announcement notes that at Ratushnyak's request, part of the prize will go to Przemyslaw Skibinski of the University of Wroclaw Institute of Computer Science, for his early contributions to the PAQ compression algorithm.

Coryoth writes, "In a report commissioned by the UK government, respected economist Sir Nicholas Stern concludes that mitigating global warming could cost around 1% of global GDP if spent immediately, but ignoring the problem could cost between 5% and 20% of global GDP. The 700-page study represents the first major report on climate change from an economist rather than a scientist. The report calls for the introduction of green taxes and carbon trading schemes as soon as possible, and calls on the international community to sign a new pact on greenhouse emissions by next year rather than in 2010/11. At the very least the UK government is taking the report seriously; both major parties are proposing new green taxes. Stern points out, however, that any action will only be effective if truly global."

B0bReader writes, "Simply sign up to something called jajah (a VOIP service that connects real telephones) using your friend's number (mobiles included), then log in and dial your own number. Your friend's phone will ring and after they hear a brief 'Jajah is connecting your call' they will be calling you and incur all charges. As an added bonus you will quite probably receive your friend's latest voice-mail message as your own (at least on Irish networks), which you may or may not wish to hear. There is even a Jajah Firefox extension — which at the time of writing is the Firefox featured add-on — so you can do it right from your browser. This is about the best example of a bad idea, with terrible implementation, that I have seen all day. And with the wonderful publicity the Firefox page offers it should reach a wide audience in no time."

arcanumas writes to tell us that Greek authorities have raided the house of Antonis Tsipropoulos, administrator of the blog aggregation site Blogme.gr. His hard drive was seized and he was arrested. The impetus was a satiric website, not named in the stories, that apparently offended a Greek public figure (also unnamed). The site in question was not hosted by Tsipropoulos but was merely linked to by his RSS fed. From the first article: "The developing story coincides with the Internet Governance Forum being hosted in Athens this week, to be attended by Internet luminaries, entrepreneurs, and activists like Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Joi Ito and featuring panels on Openness and Freedom of Expression."

An anonymous reader writes, "I just tried a Google Image Search in IE7 for the first time. Whenever I click on an image, my browser tells me in big bold letters, "This is a reported phishing website." Try it yourself: make sure automatic phishing detection is turned on and do an (adorable) image search; click on one of the result thumbnails. MSN Live Image Search has no such issues. Insert Microsoft evil conspiracy theory here." I get this behavior under IE7, Win XP Pro, SP2, Parallels, Mac OS X.

A number of readers wrote in about a U.S. federal investigation into the Venezulean ownership of Sequoia Voting Systems, which makes voting machines used in 17 states and the District of Columbia. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States wonders whether the anti-U.S. government of Hugo Chávez could be trying to influence the U.S. midterm elections. From the article: "Government officials familiar with the Smartmatic inquiry said they doubted that even if the Chávez government was some kind of secret partner in the company, it would try to influence elections in the United States. But some of them speculated that the purchase of Sequoia could help Smartmatic sell its products in Latin America and other developing countries, where safeguards against fraud are weaker."

An anonymous reader writes, "Netcraft has discovered that the social networking site MySpace appears to have been compromised by phishers who have presented a spoof login form on the main site. This modified login form submits the victim's username and password to a remote server hosted in France." From the article: "The hackers have engineered a fake login form on MySpace's own web site. Netcraft has notified MySpace of the issue, although it currently remains live. Because the fraudulent login page is hosted on MySpace's own servers and does not exhibit any signs of external content, such as cross-site scripting or open redirects, it is convincing and even security-conscious users are at risk of becoming victims. The attack is launched from a profile page, where the username is login_home_index_html, and uses specially-crafted HTML in order to hide the genuine MySpace content from the page and instead display its own login form." This Washington Post story from a few months back explains what's in it for the phishers.

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo is running a story about a study that concludes that testosterone levels are falling across all age groups among American men. It says 'The testosterone-fueled American male may be losing his punch'" I leave it to you all to draw your conclusions about this, but I still wonder what my hours of laptop-fu does to me.

justelite writes "Is it possible to let a first sketch become an object, to design directly onto space? The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialize free hand sketches."

jweatherley writes "The BBC reports that a UK think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, has called for the legalization of format shifting. In a report commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, they state that copyright laws are out of date, and that people should have a 'private right to copy' which would allow them to legally copy their own CDs and DVDs on to home computers, laptops and phones. The report goes on to say that: 'it is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government.' The report also argues that there is no evidence the current 50-year copyright term is insufficient. The UK music industry is campaigning to extend the copyright term in sound recordings to 95 years."

Rockgod quotes a Mercury News article saying "If a recent patent filing is any indication, Apple Computer may abandon the iconic wheel that has become virtually synonymous with its popular iPod music players. The company had previously explored replacing the click wheel with a virtual one as part of a touch-sensitive display. But now Apple appears to be looking at a third option: a touch-sensitive frame surrounding the display. Rather than click a physical button or press a virtual one on the screen, users would touch an area on the frame to operate their iPod."