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Space

Submission + - French Threat to ID Secret US Satellites (beskerming.com)

Submitted by
SkiifGeek
SkiifGeek writes: "Space.com has reported that the French have identified numerous objects in orbit that do not appear in the ephemeris data reported by the US Space Surveillance Network. Since the US has claimed that if it doesn't appear in the ephemeris data, then it doesn't exist, and the French claim that at least some of the objects have solar arrays, it seems that the French have found secret US satellites.

While the French don't plan to release the information publicly, they are planning to use it as leverage to get the US to suppress reporting of sensitive French satellites in their published ephemeris.

The Graves surveillance radar (the French system) and a comparable German system may form the basis of a pan-European Space Surveillance network — another system that the Europeans don't want to rely on the US for."
Nintendo

Submission + - Aussie and NZ fans fed up with Nintendo (aussie-nintendo.com)

Submitted by hinki
hinki writes: Interesting report made by a reader from Aussie Nintendo regarding the release schedule of Nintendo games in Australia.

From the article:
In an email to A-N, Davies said, "I have recently penned a formal report relating to the common delays of Nintendo's Wii software releases, specifically in the regions of Australia and New Zealand. After listening to your most recent Podcast, I can tell you too are concerned about this issue. Consumers around our regions are getting bullied and manipulated into unfair and borderline illegal region locking that prevents Wii owners from importing the much earlier released US versions of software."

I for one am sick and tired of waiting up to 6 or so months for an english game to come to Australia! It's good that we can import DS games, but we can't import Wii games as our console is region locked. The thing is, the console can support NTSC games (e.g. before the last Wii update, you could use the GameCube freeloader to play NTSC games on the Wii). So it's ridiculous that we have to wait so long for games.
Would be interesting to compare the release schedule of Nintendo Australia with the release schedule of Xbox and PlayStation in Australian compared to US/Europe.
Windows

Submission + - Creative Labs' Vista driver team feeling stressed? (creativelabs.com) 2

Submitted by
regular_gonzalez
regular_gonzalez writes: "While the X-Fi's issues under Vista have been widely reported, that doesn't prevent a flood of complaints pouring into the Creative Labs website, posted for all to see. What is more surprising is the employees' responses. A sampling:

# The drivers will be released when we are good and ready and happy with them
# Bitching like a 5 year old won't magically solve all our problems on the drivers.
# Call us hopeless and whatever else all you like, noone else is going to fix these drivers but us, demoralizing us won't bring it faster
# There are already reasonably working drivers supplied with the card, legally our responsibility stops there, think yourselves lucky we even bother updating the drivers at all.
# Anymore of these derogatory posts and we might well just flush the whole XFi/Vista64 saga to the toilet and move on.
Is Creative Labs obliged to treat even the most obnoxious of whiners with a certain level of respect, or is it refreshing to have a company actually state opinions that normally would be kept to themselves?"
Privacy

Submission + - Man Arrested for Refusing to Show Receipt at Circu (michaelrighi.com)

Submitted by
NMerriam
NMerriam writes: "Michael Righi was arrested in Ohio over the weekend for refusing to show his receipt when leaving Circuit City. When the manger and "loss prevention" employee physically prevented the vehicle he was a passenger in from leaving the parking lot, he called the police, who arrived, searched his bag and found he hadn't stolen anything. The officer then asked for Michael's driver's license, which he declined to provide since he wasn't operating a motor vehicle. The officer then arrested him, and upon finding out Michael was legally right about not having to provide a license, went ahead and charged him with "obstructing official business" anyways."
The Courts

Submission + - DVD Copyright Warnings Misstate Copyright Law

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "An excellent article by Maura Corbett reminds us that the copyright warnings on major studio dvd's misstate copyright law, ignoring "fair use" under the Copyright Act. She cites as an example the fact that warnings on many Universal DVDs state, in part, that "any unauthorized exhibition, distribution or copying of this film or any part thereof (including soundtrack) is an infringement of the relevant copyright and will subject the infringer to severe civil and criminal penalties" and reminds us that this statement "is simply untrue — the federal copyright statutes specifically allow unauthorized reproduction for criticism, commentary and other purposes." An example of what Ms. Corbett is referring to is the holding of the United States Supreme Court in SONY v. Universal (the Betamax case), which specifically held that a consumer's copying of entire television programs, for personal use, was a "fair use". This is but one of the many fair uses that is ignored by the motion picture industry's misleading warnings."
Graphics

Submission + - Content-aware image resizing (youtube.com) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect-ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. Watch the demonstration. A pdf paper can be found here.
Movies

Submission + - Google Throws Lead Paint on Movie Download Market 6

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As promised Google shut down its video store Wednesday — and its DRM made sure all movie files purchased from the store ceased to funtion. This has sparked a firestorm of negative commentary from the Digerati who see it as pure theft. Cory Doctorow called it "...a giant, flaming middle finger, sent by Google and the studios to the customers who were trusting (as in dumb) enough to buy DRM videos". John Dvorak called it "old bait-and-switch tactics" where vendors make promises, but build-in the ability to reneg on those promises if they choose to do so later. Both Dvorak and Doctorow call for the judicial system to step in, but MP3 Newswire says that the abuse to consumer trust will do more damage to the paid download market than anything the courts could inflict. "As a consumer, if you purchase a digital movie file online only to have it unexpectedly repossessed you will probably think twice before ever buying any such download again. If you do consider it again it certainly won't be for the same price as before. Experience made these downloads worth far less to you. So what are feature film downloads that can be revoked at any time worth in the market place? To some Google Video customers the value of a movie download dropped all the way down to zero."
HP

Submission + - Journalists sue HP for invasion of privacy

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Four journalists and one of their family members are suing Hewlett-Packard for obtaining their personal phone records.

The journalists filed lawsuits in California this week. They claim that HP invaded their privacy. HP acknowledged in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing last year that it investigated journalists in order to find out who, inside the company, had been leaking information to the press.

The reporters' own publications have reported that HP representatives said they were disappointed the reporters did not take a settlement and decided to sue instead. The company said it plans to defend itself against the lawsuits.
The Courts

Submission + - Tanya Andersen Brings Class Action Against RIAA

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Ever since the RIAA's litigation campaign began in 2003, many people have been suggesting a class action against the RIAA. Tanya Andersen, in Oregon, has taken them up on it. The RIAA's case against this disabled single mother, Atlantic v. Andersen, has received attention in the past, for her counterclaims against the RIAA including claims under Oregon's RICO statute, the RIAA's hounding of her young daughter for a face to face deposition, the RIAA's eventual dropping of the case "with prejudice", and her lawsuit against the RIAA for malicious prosecution, captioned Andersen v. Atlantic. Now she's turned that lawsuit into a class action. The amended complaint seeking class action status (pdf) sues for negligence, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, federal and state RICO, abuse of process, malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trespass, invasion of privacy, libel and slander, deceptive business practices, misuse of copyright law, and civil conspiracy."
Announcements

Submission + - Speed of Light "Exceeded"

Submitted by konohitowa
konohitowa writes: Two German scientists claim to have performed an experiment in which microwave photons exceeded the speed of light. From the story: "The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons — energetic packets of light — travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart." Having seen claims such as these in the past, it will be interesting to see what mistake this particular pair made. And yes, I'm definitely assuming they're misinterpreting their results.
Businesses

Submission + - Diebold rebrands what noone wants.

Submitted by Irvu
Irvu writes: Diebold has apparently failed in their bid to sell their tainted elections systems unit. Unable to find a buyer the CEO of Diebold promised that the system will be run more "openly and independently." To prove that they are serious, they renamed it. Diebold Election Systems is now Premiere Election Solutions. They still sell GEMS, AccuVote OS and the ever-unpopular AccuVote-TSX which performed so disastrously in California's Top-to-Bottom Review under the same names. Apparently their rebranding effort only goes so far.
Announcements

Submission + - See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia (virgil.gr)

Submitted by
Decius6i5
Decius6i5 writes: "Caltech grad student Virgil Griffith has launched a search tool that uncovers whitewashing and other self-interested editing of Wikipedia. Users can generate lists of every edit to Wikipedia which has been made from a particular IP address range. The tool has already uncovered a number of interesting edits, such as one from the corporate offices of Diebold which removed large sections of content critical of their electronic voting machines. A Wired story provides more detail and Threat Level is running a contest to see who can come up with the most interesting Wikipedia spin job. I'll bet Slashdot readers know of some interesting IP address ranges to check."

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