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Submission + - Advent of Religious Search Engines (npr.org)

Submitted by
Beetle B.
Beetle B. writes: "Do Google search results contradict your religious views? Tired of getting pornographic results and worried you'll burn in Hell for it? Are you Christian? Try SeekFind — "a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible." Muslim? Look no further: I'm Halal. Jewish? Jewogle is for you. NPR ran a story on the general trend of search engines cropping up to cater to certain religious communities. I wonder how many other "filtered" search engines exist out there to cater to various groups (religious or otherwise) — not counting specialized searches (torrents, etc)."
Google

Submission + - CyanogenMod 6.0 Released In To The Wild 8

Submitted by Jeagoss
Jeagoss writes: CyanogenMod is the leading open source replacement ROM for Android based phones. With the 6.0 release, a targeted 8 models of phones have been hit with version 2.2 (Froyo) of Google's Android operating system for mobiles. Have a rooted phone? Been wanting a reason for rooting your phone? Head on over to http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ and check out the forums. I think you'll be quite surprised.
Google

Submission + - Oracle sues Google over Android (mercurynews.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Oracle said Thursday that it has filed a federal copyright lawsuit alleging that Google's popular Android operating system was built on Oracle's Java software without permission.

Android, which was first released in late 2008, is used by several computer manufacturers as the operating system that runs smartphones and other computing devices. Oracle's lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, accuses Google of infringing on patents and copyrights that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

Google had no immediate comment.

But one analyst called the lawsuit surprising because Sun, whose engineers developed Java, decided several years ago to release key elements of the widely used programming language under an open-source license which allows others to use it freely. "Java is essential for Android," said Al Hilwa, a software expert at the IDC research firm. "But a big chunk of Java is open-source. Since Android has been out there for more than a year, most people would have expected they were in compliance with whatever license terms apply."

Mercury News: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15762198

Submission + - Wikileaks "a clear and present danger"

Submitted by
bedmison
bedmison writes: "In an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "WikiLeaks must be stopped", Marc A. Thiessen writes that "WikiLeaks represents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.", and that the United States has the authority to arrest its founder, Julian Assange, even if it has to contravene international law to do so. Thiessen also suggests that the new USCYBERCOM be unleashed to destroy WikiLeaks as an internet presense. From the article:

"With appropriate diplomatic pressure, these governments may cooperate in bringing Assange to justice. But if they refuse, the United States can arrest Assange on their territory without their knowledge or approval. In 1989, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum entitled "Authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Override International Law in Extraterritorial Law Enforcement Activities."

This memorandum declares that "the FBI may use its statutory authority to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if the FBI's actions contravene customary international law" and that an "arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment." In other words, we do not need permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world.

Arresting Assange would be a major blow to his organization. But taking him off the streets is not enough; we must also recover the documents he unlawfully possesses and disable the system he has built to illegally disseminate classified information.

This should be done, ideally, through international law enforcement cooperation. But if such cooperation is not forthcoming, the United States can and should act alone. Assange recently boasted that he has created "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking." I am sure this elicited guffaws at the National Security Agency. The United States has the capability and the authority to monitor his communications and disrupt his operations.""
Space

Submission + - Incoming! The Sun Unleashes CME at Earth (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "It's been an exciting day on the sun. This morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a "filament") erupted at the exact same time. It seems very likely that both eruptions were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption. A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae, a solar storm is coming..."
Security

Submission + - ATM hack gives cash on demand (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Windows CE-based ATMs can easily be made to dole out cash, according to security researcher Barnaby Jack. Exploiting bugs in two different ATM machines at Black Hat, the researcher from IOActive was able to get them to spit out money on demand and record sensitive data from the cards of people who used them. Jack believes a large number of ATMs have remote management tools that can be accessed over a telephone. After experimenting with two machines he purchased, Jack developed a way of bypassing the remote authentication system and installing a homemade rootkit, named Scrooge,"

Submission + - 73,000 blogs taken offline. ISP remains silent.

Submitted by
J053
<350J>" rel="nofollow">J053 writes: "BurstNet, hosting provider for over 73,000 blogs at Blogetry, has been shut down at the request of law enforcement — and the ISP claims they are not allowed to say why. If one (or even several) of the hosted sites contained copyrighted materials, why shut them all down?

http://gadgetsteria.com/2010/07/16/73000-blogs-taken-offline-isp-remains-silent/?sms_ss"
Games

Submission + - Roger Ebert Apologizes, Sort Of (suntimes.com)

Submitted by Jhyrryl
Jhyrryl writes: Roger Ebert has again posted about video games. It's an apology of sorts, for having publicly said that games are not art. He still holds that opinion, he apparently just wants to apologize for pissing people off.
Bug

Submission + - Windows XP Zero-Day Hits 10,000 PCs (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Nearly a month after a Google engineer released details of a new Windows XP flaw, criminals have dramatically ramped up online attacks that leverage the bug. The attacks, which are being launched from malicious Web pages, are concentrated in the U.S., Russia, Portugal, Germany, and Brazil, according to a report from Microsoft. The flaw being exploited resides in the Windows Help and Support Center software that comes with Windows XP. It was disclosed on June 10 by Google researcher Tavis Ormandy."
Technology

Submission + - Computing in the new world: Scaling to 1e6+ Cores (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by mattaw
mattaw writes: In my* blog post I describe a system designed to test a route to the potential future of computing. What do we do when we have computers with 1 million cores? What about a billion? How about 100 billion?

None of our current programming models or computer architecture models apply to machines of this complexity (and with their corresponding component failure rate and other scaling issues). The current model of coherent memory/identical time/everything can route to everywhere just can't scale to machines of this size. So where did the scientists** at the University of Manchester (including Steve Furber one of the ARM founders) and the University of Southampton turn for a new model? They took one straight out of their own heads. Quite literally: their brains.

Our brains just don't work like any computers we currently make. Our brains have a lot more than 1 million processing elements (more like the 100 billion), all of which don't have any precise idea of time (vague ordering of events maybe) nor a shared memory and not everything routes to everything else but anyone who argues the brain isn't a pretty spiffy processing system ends up looking pretty silly (assuming they have one). In effect modern computing bears as much relation to biological computing as the ordered world of sudoku does to the statistical chaos of quantum mechanics.

Read the article*** to see a preview of the brain turned into hardware (and of course you will read all the papers from Manchester's website before posting won't you). Who says science is boring?

* Note the subtle declaration of interest. I also work at the University of Southampton, UK.
** I am not and have never been one of these mighty people trying to change the world. I claim no credit. At best I helped some of the PhD students and staff with a few bits and bobs plus the odd ARM development kit.
*** No free lunch here /. You may have to actually read the source article.

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