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Submission + - Hoosiers Lose Right to Resist Illegal Police Entry (alternet.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: People have no right to resist if police officers illegally enter their home, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in a decision that overturns centuries of common law.

The court issued its 3-2 ruling on Thursday, contending that allowing residents to resist officers who enter their homes without any right would increase the risk of violent confrontation. If police enter a home illegally, the courts are the proper place to protest it, Justice Steven David said.

Submission + - Cellphones to be chipped for alerts (boston.com) 1

Submitted by oDDmON oUT
oDDmON oUT writes: "After more than five years of planning, a national emergency alert system that will send messages to cellphones during disasters is set to be launched in New York City and Washington by the end of year. A special chip is required to allow a phone to receive the messages, and soon all new phones will have the technology. The plan was approved by Congress in 2006.

Officials close to the program said “These are really focused on the highest levels of alerts, and those that require urgent action,’’

There will be at least three levels of messages ... users will be able to opt out of receiving all but the presidential alerts."

But will they be color coded?
Facebook

Submission + - Judge issues gag order for Twitter (reuters.com)

Submitted by the simurgh
the simurgh writes: A British judge has banned Twitter users from identifying a brain-damaged woman in one of the first attempts to prevent the messaging website from revealing sensitive information.

The ruling follows the publication on Twitter on Sunday of a list of celebrities alleged to have tried to cover up sexual indiscretions by obtaining court gag orders.

The injunction, dated May 12 and seen by Reuters on Friday, includes Twitter and Facebook in the list of media prohibited from disclosing the information.

It was issued in the Court of Protection in the case of a mother who wants to withdraw life support from her brain-damaged daughter. It prevents the identification of the woman and those caring for her.
Apple

Submission + - Apple's iPhone 4, App Store set world records (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by DJRumpy
DJRumpy writes: Apple's success with the iPhone 4 and the App Store has earned the company several impressive records in the 2011 Gamer's Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Given analyst estimates of 1.5 million iPhone 4 units sold on launch day, Apple has earned the title of "Fastest-Selling Portable Gaming System" for its popular smartphone, as certified by Guinness World Records, The LA Times reports.

By comparison, Sony's PlayStation Portable sold just 200,000 units on its launch date in 2005, while the Nintendo DS sold 500,000 units in its first week of availability in November 2004.
Robotics

Submission + - Small drone to fly across USA by 2015 (suasnews.com)

Submitted by
garymortimer
garymortimer writes: "Heres a young man with a big hairy audacious goal, to fly a model aircraft across America and learn the tricks of the trade on the way.

Its often said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Trent who has his own vodcast, http://www.mygeekshow.com/ has laid out steps for the next five years that he hopes will give him the knowledge required to fly 3000 miles.

His method of trying something, recording it and then asking for help from the wider sUAS community has so far payed dividends for him. Over 11 episodes of his vodcast his airframe design and launching device have come on leaps and bounds.

With his can do attitude and community behind him we think his task might be complete within five years.

Good luck to him, his infectious enthusiasm is obvious"
Censorship

Submission + - Thailand 'Cyber Scouts' Censor Web (yahoo.com)

Submitted by societyofrobots
societyofrobots writes: Since the military coup of 2006, Thailand's media freedoms have continually been downgraded. A growing tactic among the ruling elite is to accuse the political opposition of insulting the king, allowing for censorship and political imprisonment of those who dare speak out. In 2010, web censorship began to reach the scales of China and Iran. Now, Thailand has formed a group of volunteers called Cyber-Scouts to patrol the web looking for comments deemed to insult the monarchy. AFP also has a video.

Submission + - Confessions of a computer repairman (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes: "What really happens to your PC when it's handed over to computer repair cowboys? We reveal the horror stories from computer repair shops — the dodgy technicians that install pirated software, steal personal photos, lie about hardware upgrades, upsell to the unsavvy, or simply steal your PC to sell on. Plus, we tell you how to avoid such dodgy fixers and find a trustworthy repairman."
Games

Submission + - Surge in PlayStation 3 trade-ins due to PSN Outage (next-gen.biz)

Submitted by
iamhassi
iamhassi writes: ""The ongoing PlayStation Network outage is beginning to have an effect on the high street, Edge can reveal.

Our sources indicate a growing trend of PS3 consoles being traded in for cash or Xbox 360s, slumping sales of PSN points cards and a shift in the ratio of multiplatform game sales and pre-orders away from PS3.

“In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades,” says one source, a store manager at a major UK retailer speaking on condition of anonymity. “However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”""
Patents

Submission + - Open Sourceing and Patents

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A programming buddy and I have cooked up an experimental graphics algorithm (a "2D image processing algorithm" to be precise) that we believe could prove quite useful to people working in a number of different fields if we were to open source it under a GPL license. But there is a small hitch. While we R&D'd every line of the algorithm from zero, putting in 100s of hours of exhausting trial & error and experimentation over a number of months to get it working correctly, we don't know what its "patent compliance status" is. Neither one of us is particularly skilled at reading and understanding what are often highly technical and obscurely worded image processing patents. And there are thousands of them scattered across many different patent databases, filed under all sorts of titkes — i.e. we don't even know WHERE TO START LOOKING to check if our algo overlaps with one or more existing imaging patents.

If we were to open source our graphics algorithm without knowing for certain whether it violates some other person's — or worse — some large, well endowed and potentially "agressively protective" commercial entity's image processing patents, can this bounce back to harm us? i.e. could we get sued for "loss of business" or similar because our "crafted-from-zero" open source graphics algo happens, by chance, to overlap with some 5 or 10 year old patent that we didn't see, didn't understand fully, or didn't realize existed in the first place because its filed under some obscure field (e.g. 'Method for detecting x type edges in y type CMOS images — or — Method for recognizing and removing z type pixel artifacts from x-y-z type medical MR images')?

If you were in our shoes, i.e. strongly wanting to open source a neat 2D graphics algorithm so other people can benefit from it, but uncertain what its patents status is, how would you proceed?
Math

Submission + - Wiki-style project makes maths breakthrough (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "The "Polymath" project which works by encouraging mathematicians to collaborate through a wiki-style interface has proved its worth on its first project — a task in combinatorics called the "DHJ theorem" and in just six weeks a new proof has been discovered and submitted for publication. For geeks everywhere the good news is that even "amateurs" were seen to make useful contributions."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Keeping a Cellphone system going in a war (aljazeera.net)

Submitted by dogsbreath
dogsbreath writes: An Al Jazeera article provides fascinating insight about how engineers for one of the Libyan cell providers in the rebel held East have kept the system going in the middle of a civil insurrection. Administering a now free cellular system in a war zone brings new meaning to the term BOFH as the engineers deal with bandwidth hogs and prioritize international traffic.

A technical decision to keep a copy of the user database (the HLR) in Benghazi was crucial to keeping peoples phones on line. There are reasons besides earthquakes and Tsunamis to keep your data backed up in geographically diverse locations.

The report expands and corrects the WSJ article covered on slashdot before.
Education

Submission + - University considers cutting Computer Science (geekwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Due to Washington State budget concerns, Western Washington University is considering cutting their Computer Science Department. News comes even as local news reports hiring boom in the tech sector. The WWU administration seems completely out of touch with the current state of the department.
This story has gotten a lot of attention and support from local industry and the University of Washington professors. The WWU administration should be embarrassed to even consider axing such a successful and important department.
OS X

Submission + - Unicode Control Characters May Camouflage Malware (h-online.com)

Submitted by modus_operandi
modus_operandi writes: (via FARK.com): Clever malware authors have come up with a way to disguise malicious executable files as innocuous data types by writing the file name backwards. On May 11, analysts at Norman ASA (anti-virus software vendor based in Sweden) published details of the exploit in "The RTLO unicode hole — sequence manipulation as an attack vector". The trick is accomplished by using Unicode control characters such as 0x202E (right-to-left override) and 0x202B (right-to-left embedding). Although the payload is likely to be targeted at users of Microsoft Windows operating systems (which rely on filename extensions to determine whether a binary is executable) the exploit also works on any operating system which handles Unicode correctly. That means Linux and UNIX-based operating systems, including Mac OS X, will also be fooled into displaying a deceptive filename. Luckily, it is not possible to set chmod +x as a default in your umask! Could this technique be used in other, heretofore unsuspected, social engineering attacks?

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