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Submission + - Google challenges Facebook over user address books (reuters.com)

Submitted by jcombel
jcombel writes: When you sign in to Facebook, you had the option of importing your email contacts, to "friend" them all on the social network. Importing the other way — easily copying your Facebook contacts to Gmail — required jumping through considerable copy/paste hoops or third-party scripts. Google said enough is enough, and they're no longer helping sites that don't allow two-way contact merging. The stated intention is standing their ground to budge other sites into allowing users have control of where their data goes — but will this just lead to more sites putting up "data walls"?
Education

Submission + - In Praise of Procrastination 1

Submitted by
Ponca City
Ponca City writes: "Every year, millions of Americans pay needless penalties because they don’t file their taxes on time, forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never get around to signing up for a retirement plan, and risk blindness from glaucoma because they don’t use their eyedrops regularly. Now James Surowiecki writes that procrastination is a basic human impulse, a peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time — in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting," the ability to make rational choices when they’re thinking about the future, but, where as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Game theorist Thomas Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves a collection of competing selves, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control where one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals while philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” So before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed and that it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic, a weakness of will that allows us to act against our own benefit, and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which."
Idle

Submission + - Disguised Asian Male Caught At Canadian Airport (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A young male of Asian appearance was caught in disguise during a flight from Hong Kong to Canada. The disguise consisted of a molded silicone face and neck mask, hat, glasses and cardigan. An intelligence alert (PDF) from Canada Border Services Agency contains photos of the man with and without the disguise as well as further details of the incident. Suspicions were raised at the start of the flight when the subject was noted as having an elderly appearance that didn't match his hands of youthful appearance. Later in the flight the subject entered an aircraft washroom to remove the disguise and was caught emerging as an early 20's Asian male. This disguise is more elaborate than those used by the suspected perpetrators of the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai, January 2010. Will the continued introduction of biometric passport security deprecate the use of disguises or will disguises simply become more sophisticated?
Microsoft

Submission + - 50% of Kinect Purchases From New Xbox Owners? (industrygamers.com)

Submitted by donniebaseball23
donniebaseball23 writes: After Microsoft raised their Kinect forecast from 3 million to 5 million units, more and more retailers have reported being sold out of the motion camera. The blockbuster launch is likely to help Microsoft sell Xbox 360 consoles this holiday, notes M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon, who also hinted at a future price cut. "Kinect will move new Xbox 360 consoles, but I believe at least half will be sold into the installed base," he told IndustryGamers. "Here's an interesting scenario: a tactically deployed Xbox 360 price cut could give Kinect the capability to accelerate penetration to the point where Microsoft could gain a large mainstream user base while still leveraging a very active hardcore base."
Games

Submission + - Don't get naked while playing Xbox Kinect (gamepron.com) 1

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: The latest gaming blockbuster from Harmonix, the Kinect-enabled Dance Central hit shelves this week and already it’s taking the world by storm.

I was trying out the Kinect Dance Central game and I was getting hot so I took off my clothes. I had no idea that the game was going to take A BUNCH OF PICTURES OF ME
Movies

Submission + - Roku Now Licensing its Media Player Design (deviceguru.com) 2

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Roku has begun licensing its A/V media streaming set-top-box hardware and software technology to third-party device makers. Netgear, Roku's first licensee, will soon offer a Netgear-branded version of the recently size- and cost-reduced Roku XDS box through Best Buy, Fry's, and Radio Shack stores. Although Roku's licensing move follows closely on the heels Google's October rollout of the Google TV platform, the $60 to $100 Roku XD player design's low-cost, low-power, compact design, and sheer ease-of-use make it a compelling alternative to Google TV, assuming Google's platform results in priced like Logitech's $300 Review. As a small example, the Roku player most likely uses an inexpensive, power-stingy MIPS-based NXP processor in contrast to the Review's more power-thirsty, expensive, and spacious Atom processor.
Apple

Submission + - iPhone 4 screens break 82% more than 3GS (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hardware warranty company SquareTrade has found a worrying issue with the iPhone 4. It’s screen is nowhere near as tough as the phone it replaces, the iPhone 3GS.

Over a four month period SquareTrade has handled accidents for more than 20,000 iPhone 4 handsets it covers with a warranty. Compared to the 3GS for the same period in its lifetime the company saw damaged screen problems up 82%. The overall accident rate that resulted in phone damages was also up by 68% compared to the 3GS.
Space

Submission + - Recently Discovered Habitable World May Not Exist (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Two weeks ago, U.S.-based astronomers announced the discovery of the first Goldilocks planet circling another star: just the right size and just the right temperature to harbor alien life. But yesterday at an exoplanet meeting in Turin, Italy, Switzerland-based astronomers announced that they could find no trace of the prized planet in their observations of the same planetary system.
Cellphones

Submission + - Microsoft's WP7 Gamble -- Are Apps All That? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Microsoft's design and strategy for Windows Phone 7 is about as different from the iPhone and Android phones as it gets. In an app-happy world, Windows Phone 7 is app-light. And rather than luring you in with all the amazing things you can do on your phone, Microsoft lauds the ability of Windows Phone 7 phones to have you spend less time using your phone, not more. It's a big gamble — and it just might pay off, argues Preston Gralla.
Firefox

Submission + - Trojan Forces Firefox to Secretly Store Passwords (h-online.com) 1

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: A trojan recently analysed by Webroot is said to rely on retrieving web page passwords from a browser's password storage, rather than logging a user's keyboard inputs. To make sure it will find all the interesting passwords in Firefox, the malware, called PWS-Nslog, makes some changes to jog the browser's memory. A few manipulations in a JavaScript file prompt Firefox to store log-in information automatically and without requesting the user's consent.

The malware will, for instance, simply comment out Firefox's confirmation request in the nsLoginManagerPrompter.js file and add a line with automatic storage instructions. The H's associates at heise Security were able to reproduce the effect of the manipulations – manipulations which the malware author probably borrowed from a work around that has been in circulation since 2009.

The manipulation works on all platforms on which the Trojan has the rights to modify the nsLoginManagerPrompter.js file. In tests this worked on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04.

H-online: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Trojan-forces-Firefox-to-secretly-store-passwords-1106100.html
Google

Submission + - Oracle's newest move to undermine Android (infoworld.com)

Submitted by GMGruman
GMGruman writes: Oracle's decision to shift focus from the Harmony Java open source project to OpenJDK seems innocuous enough — but InfoWorld's Josh Fruhlinger explains it's part of an effort to derail Google's mobile Android OS by gutting the open source project that Android has been driven by. IBM has signed on, apparently in return for getting the Java Community Process reactivated, leaving Google in a bind.

Submission + - State of the internet : 2010 (youtube.com)

Submitted by
AbeW
AbeW writes: "How is the internet doing in 2010?
These interviews, recorded at the IGF2010 conference in Vilnius, bring you a round-up of current challenges and business opportunities.

In these 7 minutes we cover topics ranging from technical stability to internet censorship, to reach a surprising conclusion...
To paraphrase ICANN's Peter Dengate-Thrush : While everyone is rushing ahead, meeting these challenges to build a better, reliable and useful internet ... we risk a growing digital divide.
Try figuring out how to get cheap broadband to a whole region, whilst at the same time coping with this intricate web of current internet affairs."

Comment Dear editors, (Score 0, Offtopic) 379

by HamSammy (#33803986) Attached to: Canadian Spammer Fined Over $1 Billion

wtf man

Come on, let's at least be professional! It's no wonder that some members and former members of this site bemoan its quality, as well as the quality of its stories. ONE BEELYUN DOLLARS?! Isn't decent English a reasonable expectation from a professional source? It's not even a good joke.

To anyone who meta-moderates and bumps these stories, I thought we we're better than repeating in-jokes.

Also, there's a typo.

Also, I think the billion dollar fine is a bit much. As it's been said before, other lawsuits concerning much graver, more depraved actions and situations come nowhere near this fine, yet they deserve to be at the very least the same. The fine is also not even going to be paid, not in full at least, simply because the defendant does not have the means to pay it. So for all intents and purposes, the fine doesn't even really matter. He should have gotten a reasonable punishment he deserved, and the victims of his actions should be able to see justice served, and in this case, the justice is the full payout of everything legitimately owed to them.
Crime

Submission + - What's the state of the art of anonymous browsing? 7

Submitted by enter your name
enter your name writes: Most techies have a basic idea of how to stay anonymous when surfing websites. But what should you do when your life may depend on being able to hide your identity and location from the website operators? My mundane sysadmin job has taken a very strange turn recently (which I will not go into, for obvious reasons) and I need to be really, really sure that I can never be identified by the server or content owners of certain websites. I thought I knew what I was doing, using anonymous http proxy websites, google cache, etc. But recently a popup ad appeared on a site and the ad was customized for my exact city. Cookies? Or maybe my browser is somehow telling more than I think it is? And what about embedded content that comes from a different server? Not all anonymous http proxies I've seen can deliver all the content on today's complex websites. So you get either broken web content or links that are not safe to click on.

I'd really like to hear what Slashdot users think are the best practices for anonymous web browsing.

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