danzona - Slashdot User

Military's Satellite Meteor Data Sharing May Soon Resume 35

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 11, 2009 @07:42PM from the so-we'll-know-what's-about-to-hit-us dept.

jbdigriz writes "Leonard David has a followup piece to his original story, referenced here on June 22nd ('US Military Blocks Data On Incoming Meteors'). Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Rego explains his decision to suspend the meteor data sharing program due to 'loopholes' in the informal arrangement. He and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher hold out some hope that the program will resume on a more secure basis at some unspecified but not too distant point."

How To Teach Programming To Kids, Via XBox 124

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 11, 2009 @05:37PM from the if-it's-fun-it's-educational dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Wilson reviews Kodu, the new XBox game that he calls 'Logo on Steroids.' The game allows you to build a world and program every object in it with an in-house graphical language, making the game a primitive example of 'reactive state machines' in a 'multi-agent concurrent system.' It sounds like what we call 'application specific integrated circuits' in engineering, where every line of code runs in parallel."

Downloading Copyrighted Material Legal In Spain 323

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 10, 2009 @12:33PM from the presumed-innocent dept.

Sqwuzzy notes a judge's ruling in Spain that makes that country one of the most lenient in the world as respects sharing copyrighted material over P2P networks. "The entertainment industries in Spain must be progressively tearing their hair out in recent months as they experience setback after setback. ... After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a '3-strikes' regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn't breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise." This ruling occurred in a pre-trial hearing; the case will still go to trial.

More First-Light Data From Herschel Space Telescope 21

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 10, 2009 @12:14PM from the staring-at-gas dept.

davecl writes "First-light images and spectra have now been released for all three of the instruments on Herschel. (The first images came out a couple of weeks back.) The news is covered on the BBC, on the ESA website, on the Herschel mission blog, and elsewhere. The data all looks fantastic, and is especially impressive since the satellite was only launched about 7 weeks ago. I work on the SPIRE instrument and help maintain the blog; but even I am astounded by the amount of information in the SPIRE images."

Researcher Discovers ATM Hack, Gets Silenced 229

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 10, 2009 @11:00AM from the wait-wait-not-yet dept.

Al writes "A researcher working for networking company Juniper has been forced to cancel a Black Hat presentation that would have revealed a way to hack into ATMs. The presentation focused on exploiting vulnerabilities in devices running the Windows CE operating system, including some ATMs. The decision to cancel was made to give the vendor concerned time to patch the problem, although the company was notified 8 months ago. The article mentions a growing trend in ATM hacking: In November 2008 thieves stole nearly $9 million from more than 130 cash machines in 49 cities worldwide. And earlier this year, the second biggest maker of ATMs, Diebold, warned customers in an advisory that certain cash machines in Eastern Europe had been loaded with malicious software capable of stealing financial information and the secret PINs from customers performing ATM transactions."

Comment Re:Bedtime Story (Score 2, Informative) 123

by danzona on Thursday July 09, 2009 @04:30PM (#28641767) Attached to: US Seeks Volunteers To Review Broadband Grant Applications

You are not that far off. From TFA:
Volunteer reviewers will be required to have some connection to the broadband industry, although the volunteers will have to comply with rules from NTIA parent agency the U.S. Department of Commerce on conflicts of interest and confidentiality, the NTIA document said. Reviewers must have "significant expertise and experience" in either designing and building broadband networks, educating or training consumers about broadband, or working in programs to increase demand for broadband, the NTIA document said.

Submission + - Microsoft Releases Silverlight 3 Early 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09, 2009 @04:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft released Silverlight 3 RTW today at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx amidst zero fanfare, which presumably will come tomorrow (the announced release date). For those out of touch, Silverlight is Microsoft's bid to overthrow Adobe's Flash, and uses a lightweight .NET framework with cross-browser and (arguably) cross-platform support.

The latest version makes some fairly dramatic improvements to the framework, adds a slew of new controls, out-of-the-browser-to-desktop ability, as well as GPU-accelerated video graphics and pixel shader support.

Comcast DNS Redirection Launched In Trial Markets 362

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 09, 2009 @02:40PM from the looks-like-you-want-xxy-porn dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has finally launched its DNS Redirector service in trial markets (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington state), and has submitted a working draft of the technology to the IETF for review. Comcast customers can opt-out from the service by providing their account username and cable modem MAC address. Customers in trial areas using 'old' Comcast DNS servers, or non-Comcast DNS servers, should not be affected by this. This deployment comes after many previous ISPs, like DSLExtreme, were forced to pull the plug on such efforts as a result of customer disapproval/retaliation. Some may remember when VeriSign tried this back in 2003, where it also failed."

Murdoch Paper Reporters Eavesdropped On Celebrities' Voicemail 186

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 09, 2009 @01:58PM from the have-a-whole-room-in-the-at&t-building-too dept.

Michael_Curator writes "Executives at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.-owned papers (including current Tory spokesman Andy Coulson) allowed reporters to hack into phone conversations of celebrities and then paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover it up. How did famously technologically-challenged reporters manage the feat without BT catching on? Voicemail." The New York Times says a preliminary investigation's been ordered, but the BBC's coverage indicates that a large-scale inquiry is unlikely.

Experimental Fees Settle Royalty War For Internet Radio 270

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @09:57PM from the pay-the-man dept.

S-100 writes "SoundExchange has reached an agreement for royalty rates with a consortium of Internet radio broadcasters. The parties are ecstatic that the issue is finally resolved, and that the new rates are below the previous 'death to Internet radio' levels that had previously been imposed by the CARB. According to NewsFactor, Pandora founder Tim Westergren proclaims that 'the royalty crisis is over!', and other large broadcasters are equally pleased. One unheard-from group is less likely to be pleased: small Internet radio broadcasters. Buried in the details are a new minimum royalty payment: $25,000 per year. So say goodbye to all of the small Internet radio stations that you have been listening to, as they will no longer afford to operate legally."

US Offering $45M For Huge Wind Energy Test Bed 91

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @07:21PM from the blow-baby-blow dept.

coondoggie writes "On a day when one of the largest wind farm plans bit the dust, the US Department of Energy is offering up a five-year, $45 million grant to design and build a large dynamometer facility for testing 5 to 15 MW rated wind turbines and equipment. The DOE says such a facility is needed as the US has fallen behind other countries in the race to build ever-larger wind turbines for energy production. According to the DOE, the average size of wind turbines installed in the United States in 2007 increased to roughly 1.65 MW. Additionally, turbines already developed range in the 2.5 MW to 3.5 MW capacity sizes; with plans being developed for even greater power ratings. The larger wind turbines have outpaced the availability of US-based testing facilities, the DOE stated."

Submission + - Kindle Spying (philosecurity.org)

Submitted by

Sherri Davidoff

on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @03:02PM

Sherri Davidoff writes: "Josh Wright recently purchased a new Kindle. Surprisingly, when he downloaded one of his books onto the new Kindle, it offered to open it to the page where he had left off on his old Kindle. In other words, Amazon tracked not just the books he was reading, but specifically which sections of the book he was looking at. 'Amazon is able to determine what pages I've read and which I've skipped,' Josh said. 'They can determine the pages I've re-read (such as the hacking U3 drives section in my Kindle copy of Hacking Exposed), which could potentially be used against me as evidence in a court of law, for example. They could even monitor how much time I spend reading, and when (useful information for an employer who might want to know when their employees are slacking off and not working). I'd like to find out what Amazon's privacy policy is about this data, and what they are retaining long-term. Do they record only the last page read for each of my books, purging this information after a period of time, or is it more nefarious?'"

Submission + - AntiTrust Target: Google (cnn.com)

Submitted by furby076 on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @11:43AM

furby076 writes: Chris Anderson at CNN writes an article about Google possibly being the US governments next target with regards to anti-trust laws. The person leading this offensive is Christine Varney who is responsible for anti-trust cases in President Obama's administration. Christine is concerned that Google has obtained a little too much clout and can influence what information is presented to the consumer — essentially pushing their agenda. Google's response, in the past few weeks, has been "emphasizing how easy it is for consumers to switch to other search engines and how small it is compared to other companies that have been in a similar position in the past, such as Microsoft, AT&T and IBM."

Submission + - Why Did UK Anti-Piracy Group FACT Get Computers Fr (techdirt.com)

Submitted by

Coco Lambucca

on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @10:45AM

Coco Lambucca writes: "Why Did UK Anti-Piracy Group FACT Get Computers From A Criminal Investigation... And Keep Them? It seems troubling enough that private industry reps were allowed to be so closely involved in a criminal investigation where they have clear bias, but it gets worse. The police seized various computers and equipment as part of arresting the Vickerman's, and then allowed FACT employees to inspect the computers and the information found on them — which, again seems to be granting way too much access to a private group. Then things got even more bizarre: the police gave a bunch of the equipment to FACT to allow FACT to continue to examine the equipment."

Jammie Thomas Moves To Strike RIAA $1.92M Verdict 392

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @01:56AM from the in-excruciating-detail dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Jammie Thomas-Rasset has made a motion for a new trial, seeking to vacate the $1.92 million judgment entered against her for infringement of 24 MP3 files, in Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset. Her attorneys' brief (PDF) argues, among other things, that the 'monstrous' sized verdict violates the Due Process Clause, consistent with 100 years of SCOTUS jurisprudence, since it is grossly disproportionate to any actual damages sustained. It further argues that, since the RIAA elected to offer no evidence of actual damages, either as an alternative to statutory damages, or to buttress the fairness of a statutory damages award, the verdict, if it is to be reduced, must be reduced to zero."

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