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Submission + - Facebook Adds Delete Account Option 1

Submitted by roseability
roseability writes: Facebook have quietly added the ability to delete you account. 'Deactivate Account', under Account Setting, has become 'Deactivate or Delete Account', and when checked it purports to permanently delete your account and all information you have shared. Facebook is actually willing to erase your data permanently? They must be counting on very few people doing so.

Submission + - Non-human sugar drugs causes inflammations

Submitted by wog777
wog777 writes: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that a kind of sugar molecule common to chimpanzees, gorillas and other mammals but not found in humans provokes a strong immune response in some people, likely worsening conditions in which chronic inflammation is a major issue.This non-human sialic acid sugar is an ingredient in some biotechnology drugs, and may be limiting or undermining their therapeutic effectiveness in some patients, the scientists report in a letter published in the advance online July 25 edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology. However, they also propose a simple modification to the drug-making process that could solve the problem.
Censorship

Submission + - Porn sites still exposed in China (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Could it be that Internet censorship in China has a pecking order? Politics & human rights are bad....but porn is okay? The porn sites that suddenly popped up in China two months ago are still accessible...leaving people wondering if it's a change in policy, a glitch....or maybe a test by the Internet police. The Chinese government isn't saying, but one internet analyst speculates "Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won't pay so much attention to political matters."
Open Source

Submission + - The Sad State of Open Source in Android tablets (projectgus.com)

Submitted by projectgus
projectgus writes: I went looking for an Android tablet whose manufacturers were complying with GPL, or supporting open source at all. I couldn't find a single one. Extremely discouraging, for an ostensibly open source operating system. From the article: "If you care about open source you may actually be better off buying an iPad..."
Space

Submission + - Two protons walk into a black hole. (newscientist.com)

Submitted by StygianBrood
StygianBrood writes: The idea of other universes hidden inside black holes is alive again. Following the article of Anil Ananthaswamy in 2770 issue of NewScientist: "In an analysis of the motion of particles entering a black hole, published in March, Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University in Bloomington showed that inside each black hole there could exist another universe (Physics Letters B, DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2010.03.029). "Maybe the huge black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies are bridges to different universes," Poplawski says. If that is correct — and it's a big "if" — there is nothing to rule out our universe itself being inside a black hole."
Medicine

Submission + - Scientists Find 2,700-year-old marijuana (grabi.co.cc)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly ``cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

Comment IFPI Norge (Score 0) 223

by Jake Dodgie (#31488660) Attached to: Pirate Bay Legal Action Dropped In Norway

Considering that a lot of the Pirate Bay listings are Porn I was impressed to see the International Federation of the Pornographic Industry Norway was taking a stand untill my brain re-registered the name correctly and I realised that are probably a bunch of old guys in beards muttering about all the illegal downloads of 78" vinyl.

Submission + - Kickass Apt. vs. Persistent Microwave Exposure (slashdot.org) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am considering buying a penthouse apartment in Manhattan that happens to be about twenty feet away from a pair of panel antennas belonging to a major cellular carrier. The antennas are on roughly the same plane as the apartment and point in its direction. I have sifted through a lot of information online about cell towers, most of which suggest that the radiation they emit is low-level and benign. Most of this information, however, seems to concern ground-level exposure at non-regular intervals. My question to Slashdot is: should the prospect of persistent exposure to microwave radiation from this pair of antennas sitting thirty feet from where I rest my head worry me? Am I just being a jackass? Can I, perhaps, line the walls of the place with a tight metal mesh and thereby deflect the radiation? My background is in computer engineering — I am not particularly knowledgeable about the physics of devices such as these. Help me make an enlightened decision.

Submission + - Using brains instead of brawn to thwart piracy (codemasters.com)

Submitted by TheHarvesteR
TheHarvesteR writes: Looking at the new devious scheme Ubi has set up for their AC2 release, I can't help to think how hard this will fail once it inevitably does

What's sad about it is that this will be pirated just like any other draconian DRM scheme before it... and the pirate version will be able to run offline while the legit version will continue to punish the honest consumers...

What they need to realize is that these mad schemes to thwart piracy, as they get increasingly more aggressive, hurt the company image and this will eventually have a more negative effect on sales than even piracy does... There's a clear catch 22 here... the harder your wall is to crack, the more people will be bent on cracking it... until inevitably one succeeds...

Up until now, I've only seen one DRM scheme that might work... I say 'work' not in the sense that the game it protects is unpirateable, but in the sense that it generates no inconvenience for legit players, and protects the game by being smart, not strong. It's the copy protection system found in the ArmA games from Bohemia Interactive... It's called FADE, and was created by CodeMasters and first used on Bohemia's original Operation Flashpoint... what happens is that, if the game's self checking mechanism is tripped by a cracking attempt, the system is activated... and what happens? (here is the genius part) nothing!!

so, what happens next is that mr. hacker, feeling good about his l33t hax0rz skills, goes ahead and posts his torrent for everyone to download... not knowing that FADE has been activated.

The torrent game is fully playable... until after a few weeks, when gameplay starts to degrade... not in a technical way, as crashes and hangs... but in a funnier way that will affect the player AND mr. hacker.. After a few weeks the player can't shoot straight anymore, can't walk in a straight line, and things start to get weird altogether until the game is completely unplayable... the gamer then, is frustrated by his downloaded copy, and the hacker's reputation is now tainted by a bad upload...

So what happened is that what mr. l33t hax0r managed to crack was but a standard copy protection, that was there only to set off FADE without his knowledge, and the hacker has no way of knowing he set it off because the game gives no indication that it's activated until it's already up and being downloaded by the thousands...

This gets even better when you realize that FADE never manifests itself in quite the same way every time... some players get black screens, some cannot shoot straight and some can't keep their characters standing up...

And what happens when your game is behaving weirdly? what's the first thing you do? you rush to the official forum to tell all about it, and let the community know you've got the 'unofficial' version of the game, and get bashed by the forum goers for your actions.

Of course, this is by no means infallible, but given that any successful cracking effort will inevitably take weeks to happen, because the effects of a bad crack won't show themselves until then, the legit game has months of safe time to get sold. And the pirate consumers are having such a hard time with their slowly malfunctioning copies that many are giving up on pirating and buying the game, now that they had a taste of it.

This is the most brilliant DRM system I've ever seen, and the reason it's so cool is because their creators decided to outsmart the hackers in their own game, using brain instead of brawn... and brains is something that seems to be missing in a big part of the industry these days.

Cheers
Games

Submission + - Punished by Steam for buying legal software

Submitted by
Luke O'Sullivan
Luke O'Sullivan writes: "Recently I went on holiday to Hong Kong (I live in Singapore) and picked up a copy of Left4Dead 2 for the PC. I got it back to Singapore only to find I couldn't install it because apparently it's region coded. So I contacted Steam with proof of purchase (a photo of the receipt and another of the installation key) to ask if I could exchange it for a key for my region and they refused, without explanation.

The game is cheaper in HK than Singapore, but only a little. And in any case, I didn't buy it because it was cheaper, I bought it because in Singapore it comes in a stupid non-standard A3 cardboard envelope rather than a standard DVD case. This was something else Steam just ignored when I raised it with them. I'm not a game retailer looking to buy hundred of copies in HK and profit on the price difference by re-selling them in Singapore, I'm an individual consumer who wanted to buy the product in a *standard* format which should have been available in his own territory but wasn't, hence the resulting mess. Which piece of market research suggested to these people that PC gamers in Singapore like their games to come in giant cardboard envelopes, for heaven's sakes? The x360 version is just a normal DVD case. Why oh why?

Now, furthermore, last year I ended up buying the original Left4Dead on holiday in Australia, again because I didn't want the same non-standard packaging the Singapore version of the original L4D for PC came in, and it worked fine. So was I really supposed to expect that wouldn't be the case this time? Historically, if you buy consumer PC software such as a video game, there has never been any reason to suspect it won't work so long as you meet the system spec. I bought L4D in Australia in 2008, and it worked fine in Singapore; so what reason did I have to think if I bought L4D2 in HK in 2009 it wouldn't work fine in Singapore as well?

Oh yes, the copy of L4D2 that I bought did say on the box that its for Hong Kong and Macau only, as Steam support pointed out to me. It said so *in tiny print on the back at the bottom*, which wouldn't be visible unless you read every word on the entire box before you bought it. I'm not questioning, ultimately, that as a business Valve/Steam have the right to introduce region coding if they so choose, whether to protect their pricing structure or because of censorship issues or both. Then, the choice lies with the consumer. Fine.

What I do question is how they have gone about doing it. Valve/Steam made the T&Cs about as unnoticeable as it was possible to make them while still actually having them on the box. Moreover, there was no reason for me to expect them to be there in the first place as these kinds of T&Cs have never been part of the PC gaming scene. Given the way piracy has eaten into the profits of PC gaming, anyone prepared to shell out hard cash should be treated with a lot more respect.

I'm not going to rant about how I'll never buy another game from Valve again, as they make some great titles. Nor am I going to rant about how 'Steam sucks', because actually in many ways its a great service. But I do think that in cases like this they could treat their legitimate paying customers an awful lot better, and its sad that the only recourse I have against them is to hope that I can shame them into doing the right thing by getting them some negative publicity on Slashdot."
Microsoft

Submission + - Using Outlook from orbit (office-watch.com)

Submitted by Pigskin-Referee
Pigskin-Referee writes: On the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station they use Microsoft Outlook 2003, but not quite in the same way that us earthbound Earthlings do.

The space shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth right now and the crew exchange emails with the ground a few times each day. Bandwidth is a constraint and you don’t want the busy crewmembers bothered with spam or unnecessary messages so NASA has a special system in place.

The crew use fairly standard laptops running Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host, but they don’t link to the server using any of the standard methods.

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