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Submission + - Silent Circle follows Lavabit by closing encrypted e-mail service (cnet.com)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Silent Circle shuttered its encrypted e-mail service on Thursday, in an apparent attempt to avoid government scrutiny that may threaten its customers' privacy. The company announced that it could "see the writing on the wall" and decided it best to shut down its Silent Mail feature. The company said it was inspired by the closure earlier Thursday of Lavabit, another encrypted e-mail service provider that alluded to a possible national security investigation.

Submission + - Herschel space telescope finishes mission (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The billion-euro Herschel observatory has run out of the liquid helium needed to keep its instruments and detectors at their ultra-low functioning temperature. This equipment has now warmed, meaning the telescope cannot see the sky. Its 3.5m mirror and three state-of-the-art instruments made it the most powerful observatory of its kind ever put in space, but astronomers always knew the helium store onboard would be a time-limiting factor.

Submission + - AMD details next-gen Kaveri APU's shared memory architecture (techreport.com)

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: AMD has revealed more details about the unified memory architecture of its next-generation Kaveri APU. The chip's CPU and GPU components will have a shared address space and will also share both physical and virtual memory. GPU compute applications should be able to share data between the processor's CPU cores and graphics ALUs, and the caches on those components will be fully coherent. This so-called heterogeneous uniform memory access, or hUMA, supports configurations with either DDR3 or GDDR5 memory. It's also based entirely in hardware and should work with any operating system. Kaveri is due later this year and will also have updated Steamroller CPU cores and a GPU based on the current Graphics Core Next architecture.

Submission + - DragonFly BSD 3.4 Released, with new packaging system

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: DragonFly BSD has released version 3.4. This version is the first BSD to support GCC 4.7, and contains a new experimental Aptitude-like binary package installed called DPorts, which uses the FreeBSD ports collection as a base.

Submission + - Grocery delivery is greener than driving to the store (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Those trips to the store can take a chunk out of your day and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But now University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions, but there are even benefits with delivery to rural areas.

Submission + - GLOBE at Night Aims to Map Global Light Pollution (globeatnight.org) 1

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: Light pollution is a big problem this days, affecting not only astronomers and wild life, but also everyone else because of wasted energy. GLOBE at Night aims to raise awareness by urging people to go outside and find out how much light pollution there is in their area. "The campaign is easy and fun to do. First, you match the appearance of the constellation Orion in the first campaign (and Leo or Crux in the second campaign) with simple star maps of progressively fainter stars found. Then you submit your measurements, including the date, time, and location of your comparison. After all the campaign’s observations are submitted, the project’s organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide."
Businesses

Submission + - Companies accused of spectrum hoarding (cio.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The National Association of Broadcasters, asked by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and some lawmakers to give up television spectrum for mobile data uses, has fired back by accusing several other companies of hoarding the spectrum they hold. In recent weeks, the NAB has gone on the offensive by suggesting that several spectrum holders, including Verizon Communications, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, have not developed the spectrum they already have."
Android

Submission + - Motorola Sholes Bootloader Unlocked (droid-life.com)

Submitted by teh31337one
teh31337one writes: Motorola's locked bootloader for their sholes-family devices (Droid OG, Milestone, DroidX, Droid 2 etc, not Atrix 4G) has finally been cracked.

@nenolod explains on his website: The Motorola(r) sholes platform uses a trusted bootloader environment. Signatures are stored as part of the CDT stored on the NAND flash. mbmloader verifies the signature on mbm before passing control. mbm verifies all other signatures before allowing the device to boot.

There is a vulnerability in the way that Motorola generated the signatures on the sections stored in the CDT. This vulnerability is very simple. Like on the PlayStation 3, Motorola forgot to add a random value to the signature in order to mask the private key. This allowed the private key and initialization vector to be cracked.

This comes at the time when HTC are also stepping up their attempts at locking down their phones. The recently released LTE flagship — ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date... They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They also locked the memory.
Google

Submission + - Google Accuses China of Interfering with Gmail 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Guardian reports that Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with Gmail. According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month and attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other services have generated problems for Gmail customers. The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the firm said it had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target." The search firm is not commenting further on this latest attack, but technology experts said it seemed to show an increasingly high degree of sophistication. "In the wake of what is happening in the Middle East I don't think China wants to be seen making heavy-handed attacks on the internet, that would draw too much attention," says one internet executive who wished to remain anonymous adding making it look like a fault in Google's system was extremely difficult to do and the fact that these attacks appear to come and go makes the attack look "semi-industrial and very, very sophisticated.""

Submission + - "An Internal Brain Drain" (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: Dr. Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis computer science department, argues that US citizens are avoiding "Science Technology Engineering Math" (STEM) careers, because US citizens see those fields as being ruined by massive offshoring, and inshoring.
Java

Submission + - Making Java Fun with Mirah - Ruby Syntax For Java (arbia.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Java is performant, widely adopted and eminently portable, however, its syntax is largely inherited from C++ along with some of it's esoteric unfriendliness. Mirah aims to place a friendly face on Java through the implementation of a syntax who's primary concern is developer friendliness, think ruby/python/groovy, and route of least surprise. The result is a truly cogent alternative syntax delivering readability, expressiveness and some compelling new language features.

Submission + - Righthaven Copyright Lawsuit Backfires

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Steve Green reports in the Las Vegas that US District Judge James Mahan has ruled that the Center for Intercultural Organizing, an Oregon nonprofit, did not infringe on copyrights when it posted an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal story on its website without authorization and that there was no harm to the market for the story. Mahan stressed that his ruling hinged largely on the CIO's nonprofit status and said the copyright lawsuit would be dismissed because the nonprofit used it in an educational way, didn't try to use the story to raise money, and because the story in question was primarily factual as opposed to being creative. "The market (served by the CIO) is not the R-J's market," says Mahan. This is the second fair use defeat for Righthaven and is significant since it involved an entire story post rather than a partial story post. Green says that Righthaven's strategy of suing 250 web site and demanding $150,000 in damages plus forfeiture of the web site's domain name has clearly backfired and now Righthaven, the self-appointed protector of the newspaper industry, has left the newspaper industry with less copyright protection than if they never filed their lawsuits at all. "Righthaven may argue its lawsuits have deterred rampant online infringements of newspaper material — but there's no proof that infringements it usually targets involving bloggers and special-interest websites ever affected newspaper revenue in the first place," writes Green. "While these aren't binding precedents upon other judges, these rulings can now be used by special-interest websites to justify their postings of what used to be copyright-infringing content. These, clearly, are setbacks for all newspapers interested in protecting their copyrights.""

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