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Submission + - Police arrest teen for "virtual furniture" (expatica.com)

Submitted by
ekes
ekes writes: "According to the German Press Agency (DPA) Dutch police have arrested a teenager and are questioning four more about the "theft" of "virtual furniture" from the online Habbo Hotel http://www.habbo.com/hotel
A police spokesman said the suspects will be charged on two accounts: hacking and burglary.

English report on Expatica http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=1&story_id=45939"
Patents

Northeastern University Sues Google Over Patent 159

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the who-isn't-suing-google-these-days dept.
kihbord writes to mention that Boston's Northeastern University and Waltham, Mass. based company Jarg have brought suit against Google for apparently infringing on a distributed database system developed by Kenneth Baclawski. "The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned to Northeastern University, which licensed it exclusively to Jarg, according to the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas."
Businesses

Submission + - Obese Air Passengers Could Face Higher Prices (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
s31523
s31523 writes: "It has happened to all of us. You walk down the narrow airplane to your seat only to find someone sitting next to you that is extremely overweight. An Australian nutritionist is urging airlines to charge obese people more for their tickets. Even here in the states, Southwest Airlines already has a similar policy, which states "Many Americans are "overweight" or "clinically obese." . . . If a Customer cannot lower the armrest (and is unable to comfortably travel with it in the down position), he/she is required to pay for the additional seat occupied""
Media

Submission + - Patenting the Photoshop Process (photographybay.com)

Submitted by hawridger
hawridger writes: Scott Kelby's 7 Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 is due to release on October 19th and sounds really promising. So promising, in fact, that he's applied for a patent on this "7 Point System." If a patent issues, will readers be forbidden from discussing the techniques on forums, blogging about it, posting youtube videos of the "system" in action? Is there a license to "use" the patent included with the purchase of the book? This seems like a big dang deal for photographers and anyone else that uses Photoshop (or any other image-editing software for that matter). This could open a huge can of worms in the photography/digital illustration industry.
Networking

Submission + - Will Your Home Network Survive After You're Gone?

Submitted by glhturbo
glhturbo writes: I have a small home network that includes a wireless access point, wired and wireless network clients, a shared NAS, and Linux (mine) and Windows (wife and two kids) computers. I also have a Linux-based firewall PC in the mix. I'm a bit concerned that if I get hit by a bus, my non-technically-inclined-wife will have to try to figure this stuff out, especially the NAS, which has ALL of our data on it (pictures, music, etc), but has EXT3 formatted drives. Short of trying to keep some kind of living document for all of this, does anybody have suggestions for "survival plans" and/or "rescue plans" for their data and network in case of incapacitation or death?
XBox (Games)

Submission + - Halo evolution (gamespot.com)

Submitted by
Jynx
Jynx writes: "Gamespot is running a great feature with comparisons between all 3 Halo games. Weapon, environment and vehicles models are all compared side by side and it really highlights how far the franchise has come since its original release on the Xbox. FTA — "The original Halo map designs made for confusing gameplay because many of the levels had rooms that looked, for all practical purposes, identical. Halo 2 helped alleviate the endless corridor problem by adding more room variation. But Halo 3 has solved the problem altogether by making every room, hallway, and outdoor area unique. You'll rarely get confused as to which way you're supposed to go. Indoor areas have better lighting and textures, while outdoor environments have much more foliage. Water, whether in a river or an ocean, looks vastly better.""
Security

Submission + - Picture theft through hole in Google's Picasa (heise-security.co.uk)

Submitted by
devkhadka
devkhadka writes: "The finders of the URI holes in Firefox and Windows are now targeting Google. In their blog, Billy Rios and Nate McFeters have described how attackers may steal all pictures organised using Google's picture gallery software Picasa from users' hard disks: It seems that they were able to load pictures from a PC onto a manipulated web server by combining various attack methods, such as cross-application scripting, cross-site scripting, URI tricks and a flash with ActionScript."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - First quantum chips made

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: The first quantum computer chips have been made by two US groups, New Scientist reports. Both NIST and Yale demonstrated chips where information was transferred between two superconducting qubits using a 'quantum bus'. The bus is made from a cavity that traps a single microwave photon as a standing wave — the NIST group also managed to use the bus to store data from one qubit for a short time.
XBox (Games)

Submission + - The Halo Bug (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Woody
Woody writes: The Washington Post reports... Halo 3 Takes Toll on Workforce

Call it the Halo holiday, or the Halo bug.

Some gamers are going to be a little sleepy this week at work or school, if they show up at all. With yesterday's release of Halo 3, the highly anticipated video game for the Xbox 360 console, many gamers are taking some personal time. "In my group of friends, we're all taking the day off," said one Halo fan waiting in line late Monday night at a GameStop store in Rockville.
Security

Submission + - Unisys investigated for covering up cyberattacks

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Unisys, a major government IT contractor, reportedly is being investigated for allegedly failing to detect cyberattacks, and then covering up its failings. Two US congressmen have called for an investigation into cyberattacks aimed at the Department of Homeland Security, along with a contractor charged with securing those networks.

In the letter they say the House Committee on Homeland Security's investigations led them to believe the department is under attack by foreign powers, and could be at risk because of "incompetent and possibly illegal activity" by a U.S. contractor. The congressmen didn't name the contractor in the letter. However, the Washington Post on Monday reported that the FBI is investigating Unisys, a major information technology firm with a US$1.7 billion Department of Homeland Security contract, for allegedly failing to detect cyber break-ins traced to a Chinese-language Web site and then trying to cover up its deficiencies.
Music

Submission + - Music industry wants credit card nums in ID3 tags (michaelrobertson.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an obituary for AnywhereCD which closes in one week, MP3.com founder Michael Robertson chronicles how at least one record label wanted him to put credit card numbers of buyers into songs. Fascinating story about how at least some of the labels still don't get it and why AnywhereCD is about to buried.
Patents

Submission + - Company selling IP rights to P2P spoofing on eBay (ebay.com)

Submitted by
tuomasr
tuomasr writes: "A Finnish software company Viralg is selling their IP rights to their software that provides "the necessary key technology for the only possible effective protection against illegal P2P sharing" on eBay. The company claims that the software can create fake files for P2P-networks with hashes identical to the real files, hence feeding garbage to the download."
Biotech

Submission + - Velociraptor had feathers (physorg.com)

Submitted by
Spy der Mann
Spy der Mann writes: "A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers. A paper describing the discovery, made by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History, appears in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science."

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