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Input Devices

The Most Painful Toy Hack 8

Posted by samzenpus from the mind-is-a-terrible-thing-to-tase dept.
wintersynth writes "We hacked a toy brainwave reader to electrocute people if their brainwave frequency got too high (by concentrating). We took outputs off of the 5 level LED indicator, put the outputs through a transistor/resistor/relay circuit to give 2 levels of high voltage through an electric shock circuit right into the user's arm."
Image

Using Classical Music As a Form of Social Control 721

Posted by samzenpus from the feeling-of-dread-in-f-minor dept.
cyberfringe writes "Classical music is being used increasingly in Great Britain as a tool for social control and a deterrent to bad behavior. One school district subjects badly behaving children to hours of Mozart in special detention. Unsurprisingly, some of these youth now find classical music unbearable. Recorded classical music is blared through speakers at bus stops, outside stores, train stations and elsewhere to drive away loitering youth. Apparently it works. Detentions are down, graffiti is reduced, and naughty youth flee because they find classical music repugnant."
United States

US Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition 630

Posted by kdawson from the haunting-fear-that-someone-somewhere-is-having-a-good-time dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'"
Censorship

IOC Orders Blogger To Take Down Video 389

Posted by kdawson from the cone-of-ownership-descends dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The International Olympic Committee has ordered a blogger to remove a video from his website showing the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. The IOC asserts that it owns all the rights to all images taken at the games, and only licensed broadcasters can use them. However, the blogger, Stephen Pate, points to a Canadian law that allows copyrighted images to be used in newsworthy cases."

Comment The story from Google... (Score 4, Informative) 140

by chrisd (#31065334) Attached to: Google Mystery Domain Reroutes 3% of Net Surfers
Hey, the fellows in netops asked me to clarify for you folks here's the story:

1e100.net is a Google-owned domain name used to identify the servers in our network. Following standard industry practice, we make sure each IP address has a corresponding hostname. Starting in October 2009, we started using a single domain name to identify our servers across all Google products, rather than use different product domains such as youtube.com, blogger.com, and google.com. We did this for two reasons: first, to keep things simpler, and second, to proactively improve security by protecting against potential threats such as cross-site scripting attacks. Most typical Internet users will never see 1e100.net, but we picked we picked a Googley name for it just in case (1e100 is scientific notation for 1 googol).

So there you go!

Comment Lots of comments on LWN.net's coverage (Score 5, Informative) 354

by chrisd (#31014662) Attached to: Android and the Linux Kernel Community
If you head over to LWN, we've already gone back and forth on this a bit. http://lwn.net/Articles/372419/. The short form is that if they don't like how we use the kernel, we're unlikely to be accepted upstream. It's all still released as source code to the world, but the mainline is not interested in most of what we've with to the kernel.
Image

"Tube Map" Created For the Milky Way 142

Posted by samzenpus from the non-stop-service-to-the-Perseus-Arm dept.
astroengine writes "Assuming you had an interstellar spaceship, how would you navigate around the galaxy? For starters, you'd probably need a map. But there's billions of stars out there — how complex would that map need to be? Actually, Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow from Harvard, has come up with a fun solution. He created the 'Milky Way Transit Authority (MWTA),' a simple transit system in the style of the iconic London Underground 'Tube Map.' (Travel Tip: Don't spend too much time loitering around the station at Carina, there's some demolition work underway.)"
Java

Sun's Project Darkstar Game Server Platform No More 82

Posted by timothy from the dropped-off-the-moving-truck dept.
sproketboy writes "Project Darkstar, an open source software platform from Sun labs that simplifies the development of horizontally scalable servers for online games, is being discontinued as of the Oracle acquisition. This project, mentioned a couple of years back on Slashdot, was a unique concept for building an application server specific to on-line gaming. Sadly they were so close at version 0.9.11 (which is still very stable). Hopefully the open source community can get involved and help continue work on this project."
Piracy

App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.
Businesses

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
Wii

Wii Hardware Upgrade Won't Happen Soon 325

Posted by Soulskill from the can't-show-ugly-mario-in-hd dept.
As high-definition graphics become more and more entrenched in this generation of game consoles, Nintendo has had to deal with constant speculation about a new version of the Wii that would increase its capabilities. Today, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime bluntly denied that a hardware revision was imminent, saying, "We are confident the Wii home entertainment console has a very long life in front of it." He added, "In terms of what the future holds, we've gone on record to say that the next step for Nintendo in home consoles will not be to simply make it HD, but to add more and more capability, and we'll do that when we've totally tapped out all of the experiences for the existing Wii. And we're nowhere near doing that yet."
Idle

Submission + - Lego Router (WRT54GL) (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The successor to the Lego computer is the Lego router, a case for the Linksys WRT54GL made entirely out of LEGO bricks. Check out the blog for all the details on how it was built, and to download the plans to make your own!
Apache

Submission + - Apache may stop 1.3, 2.0 series releases (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by Dan Jones
Dan Jones writes: The Apache Software Foundation may stop releasing new versions of the older 1.3 and 2.0 series of its flagship Web server product with most development now focused on the 2.2 series. Nothing is final yet, but messages to the Apache httpd developer mailing list recommend the formal deprecation of the 1.3.x branch, with most citing a lack of development activity. The Apache HTTP server project is one of the most successful and popular open source projects and has become an integral part of the technology stack for thousands of Web and SaaS applications. The first generation of Apache was released in 1995 and the 2.0 series began in 2002. Apache httpd 2.2 began in 2005 with the latest release (October 2009) being 2.2.14. However, the most recent releases of the 1.3 and 2.0 series servers was back in January 2008. With the combined total of active 1.3 and 2.0 series Apache Web servers well into the millions, any decision to end-of-life either product will be watched closely.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - 'Spider-Man 4' Scrapped, Franchise Reboot Planned (imdb.com) 3

Submitted by derGoldstein
derGoldstein writes: Yesterday it was asked What SciFi Should Get the Reboot Treatment Next?. If you consider SpiderMan as "proper SciFi", then it would appear that's the answer. According to IMDB, "Sony Pictures decided today to reboot the Spider-Man franchise after Sam Raimi pulled out of Spider-Man 4 because he felt he couldn't make its summer release date and keep the film's creative integrity. This means that Raimi and the cast including star Tobey Maguire are out. There will be no Spider-Man 4. Instead, the studio will focus on a reboot script by Jamie Vanderbilt with a new director and a new cast."

Submission + - When open source developers refuse to fix a bug (google.com) 1

Submitted by xrayted_za
xrayted_za writes: There has been an issue raised in Chromium in September 2008 (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147). It is that if you have multiple tabs open and you close down the browser it just shuts down with no warning. The issue has been marked as won't fix as the team does not want to interrupt the workflow with modal dialog boxes and anyway when you reopen Chromium it allows you to reopen the closed tabs. As has been pointed out multiple times it is not always possible to recover where you are by reopening the pages and that it also does not work in incognito mode. The problem is that the keyboard shortcuts for close tab (ctrl-w) and close window (ctrl-q) are right next to each other and can easily be mis-pressed.

Now the team has implemented a warning dialog when closing the browser when there are downloads pending so they have seen the need to interrupt the workflow at certain points. Also as has been pointed out, it could be implemented with an opt out option that is opted out by default and only if people want to be warned about closing multiple tabs then they will need to enable this feature.

One gets the feeling that the team do not want to add this feature, not because there is no need for it, but because if they do implement it they would be admitting they made an incorrect decision in the first place. How can you change the minds of these people?

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