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Submission + - Passerby Arrested For Cracking Joke (villagevoice.com)

Submitted by cobracommand0
cobracommand0 writes: We all know that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor, but who knew it could land you a "move directly to jail without passing go" roll in the game of life? New York City's War on Bikes results in some collateral damage as a sarcastic passerby gets the attention of an alpha male cop, who promptly calls in the cavalry and arrests him for "harassment, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest."
Google

Google Fiber Comes To Kansas City 162

Posted by samzenpus from the we-have-a-winner dept.
tekgoblin writes "Remember the campaign Google announced a long while back to bring fiber to your front door? Well, it looks like they are making some actual progress now and launching part of the network in Kansas City, Kansas. The city of Topeka had actually temporarily renamed itself Google, Kansas, the capital city of fiber optics, in a move to get Google to lay fiber there. It seems to have worked, because a deal has just been signed to roll out fiber in the city, which should be available to everyone in the area by 2012."
Firefox

Submission + - Mozilla To Release Firefox 4 Next Month 1

Submitted by Neil
Neil writes: Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version.

Submission + - 2011: The year of SVG on the web (acmesquares.com)

Submitted by Carnivorous Vulgaris
Carnivorous Vulgaris writes:

After a decade of development, the open graphics format SVG is finally ready for the web. 2011 will see the launch of IE 9, and Firefox 4, meaning that all major browsers will support SVG, as first-class HTML citizens.
SVG will be usable directly in the IMG element, CSS backgrounds, and inline with HTML5. Almost everywhere you can use PNG today.

In August this year, google stealthily began indexing SVG, and began crawling the links inside shortly after that. You had better brush up your SVG skills, because although canvas is getting all the press lately, it is SVG that has the power to deliver a stylish and resolution independent web.

You'll know SVG has really arrived, when you see SVGblock for Firefox and chrome.
Youtube

Submission + - YouTube considered a TV station in Italy

Submitted by orzetto
orzetto writes: Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that YouTube and similar websites based on user-generated content will be considered TV stations (Google translation) in Italian law, and will be subject to the same obligations. Among these, a small tax (500 €), the obligation to publish corrections within 48 hours upon request of people who consider themselves slandered by published content, and the obligation not to broadcast content inappropriate for children in certain time slots. The main change, though, is that YouTube and similar sites will be legally responsible of all published content as long as they have any form (even if automated) of editorial control.

The main reason is likely that, being a TV, YouTube has now to assume editorial responsibility for all published content, which facilitates the ongoing € 500M lawsuit of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi against YouTube because of content copyrighted by Berlusconi's TV networks that some users uploaded on YouTube. Berlusconi's Spanish TV, TeleCinco, was previously defeated in court exactly on the grounds that YouTube is not a content provider.

Submission + - What happens when you steal a hackers computer... (defcon.org) 1

Submitted by Agent__Smith
Agent__Smith writes: This is a presentation from DEFCON 18 in Las Vegas. Apparently some looser kicked in the door to Zoz Brooks appartment and stole his computer. Unfortunately for said looser, it was a MAC and as the thief had no MAC OS disks to wipe the system, he used it without modification. Zoz is a professor at MIT and as he travels and lectures all over the world, he had software installed so that he could log into the machine remotely. 4 months or so after the theft, the system showed up on the interweb, and Zoz began several months of detective work to get his system back. In so doing, he realized that the looser was using his system to fill out documents for government programs (now had his name address soc sec number etc...) and that he apparently has an affinity for Brazilian women with large rear ends. And as such was using the system to put pictures of himself (sans clothing) trying to hook up. (now we know what he looks like) It gets even better when this idiot uses the intact keychain to store all of his passwords (banking, facebook, ebay etc...) It is a hilarious story and well worth a listen. From the defcon.org website, you can hear the entire presentation, complete with slides of the things that Zoz found on this guy. I have to say that this was easily the funniest presentation of Defcon 18.

Submission + - 3D Pong w/ motion control (cornell.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We are students at Cornell Univ and we built a motion-based pong game on the Altera DE2 FPGA platform for Bruce Land's ECE5760 class:

POTION is a motion-controlled game system that allows two players to battle head-to-head or one player to compete against AI for ultimate ping pong glory. For the two-player setup, two video feeds from consumer digital cameras are each fed into a pair of slave DE2 boards. These inputs are primarily used to detect objects held in players' hands to represent paddles. Additionally, each of the slave DE2 boards drives a VGA display output to a separate monitor, in which the camera feed of the opposing player is shown in a picture-in-picture embedded within the game graphics. The game software runs on a third DE2 board that acts as a master, which is connected to the two slave boards and controls graphics as well as arbitrates game state. The single player case requires only a single camera, monitor, and DE2 slave.

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/ece576/FinalProjects/f2010/ssc88_yl477/ssc88_yl477/index.html

Is the full link
Google

Submission + - Google Plans "Searchless" Search (internetevolution.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: Google has a vision for the future of search where instead of explicitly entering keywords, Google serves you results automatically based on what it "knows" about you and where you are in the world at any given moment. Creepy, fascinating or both?
Google

Submission + - Google Loses Street View Suit , Forced to Pay $1

Submitted by Translation Error
Translation Error writes: Two and a half years ago, the Borings sued Google for invading their privacy by driving onto their private driveway and taking pictures of their house to display on Google Street View. Now, the case has finally come to a close with the judge ruling in favor of the Borings and awarding them the princely sum of $1. While the judge found the Borings to be in the right, she awarded them only nominal damages, as the fact that they had already made images of their home available on a real estate site and didn't bother to seal the lawsuit to minimize publicity indicated the Borings neither valued their privacy nor had it affected in any great way by Google's actions.

Submission + - Twitter solves its data formatting challenge (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Eschewing popular choices such as XML, CSV and JSON, Twitter has opted to format the back-end storage of its user and systems data with a relatively unknown format pioneered by Google, called Protocol Buffers. With the company storing 12TB of this data each day for later use, the decision of which format to use was a crucial one. The company is planning for the time when it will have to house "a trillion Tweets"."
Space

Submission + - Brooklyn Father, Son Launch Homemade Spacecraft (wpix.com)

Submitted by Adair
Adair writes: A father and son team from Brooklyn successfully launched a homemade spacecraft nearly 19 miles (around 100,000 feet) above the Earth's surface. The craft was a 19-inch helium-filled weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam capsule that housed an HD video camera and an iPhone. The camera recorded video of its ascent into the stratosphere, its apogee where the balloon reached its breaking point, and its descent back to earth. They rigged a parachute to the capsule to aid in its return to Earth, and the iPhone broadcast its GPS coordinates so they could track it down. The craft landed a mere 30 miles from its launch point in Newburgh, NY, due to a quick ascent and two differing wind patterns. The pair spent 8 months researching and test-flying the craft before launching it in August. Columbia University Professor of Astronomy Marcel Aguera said, "They were very good but also very lucky."

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