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Submission + - Jammie Thomas hit with $1.5 million verdict (cnet.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who has been fighting the recording industry over 24 songs she illegally downloaded and shared online four years ago, has lost another round in court as a jury in Minneapolis decided today that she was liable for $1.5 million in copyright infringement damages to Capitol Records, for songs she illegally shared in April 2006.

The trial is the third for Thomas-Rasset, after one jury found her liable for copyright infringement in 2007 and ordered her to pay $222,000, the judge in the case later ruled that he erred in instructing the jury and called for a retrial. In the second trial, which took place in 2009, a jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for $1.92 million.

Thomas-Rasset subsequently asked the federal court for a new trial or a reduction in the amount of damages in July 2009. But earlier this year, the judge found that amount to be "monstrous and shocking" and reduced the amount to $54,000.

CNET News: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20021735-93.html
Firefox

Submission + - Do Firefox users pay more for car loans? (consumerist.com)

Submitted by
RandyOo
RandyOo writes: "Someone wrote in to The Consumerist to report an interesting discovery: while shopping online for a car loan, Capital One offered him different rates, depending on the browser he used! Firefox yielded the highest rate at 3.5%, Opera took second place with 3.1%, Safari was only 2.7%, and finally, Google's Chrome browser afforded him the best rate of all: 2.3%! A commenter on the article claims to have been previously employed by Capital One, and writes: If you model the risk and revenue of applicants, the type of browser shows up as a significant variable. Browsers do predict an account's performance to some degree, and it will affect the rates you will view. It isn't a marketing test. I was still a bit dubious, but at least one of her previous comments backs up her claims to have worked for a credit card company. Considering the outcry after it was discovered that Amazon was experimenting with variable pricing a few years back, it seems surprising that consumers would be punished (or rewarded), based solely on the browser they happen to be using at the time!"
Wine

Submission + - Apps that officially support Wine (winehq.org)

Submitted by
David Gerard
David Gerard writes: "Wine (the Windows not-an-emulator for Unix) runs Windows applications more often than not. (Certainly more often than Vista does.) Dan Kegel on the wine-users mailing list/forum has started gathering apps that declare Wine a supported platform, and there's now a page on the Wine wiki: the Wine Support Honor Roll. We need more apps that work with Wine stating that they consider it a supported platform. If you write Win32 open source or shareware, please open yourself to the wider market!"
Operating Systems

Motorola Moving to Android, Windows Mobile for Smartphones 136

Posted by Soulskill from the changing-horses dept.
nerdyH writes "Motorola will ditch its MotoMAGX Linux stack and UIQ Symbian stack in favor of Google's Android Linux/Java stack and Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7, it announced today. The news comes after five years selling millions of Linux phones in Asia, and after a year during which many of Motorola's top US phones used the homegrown Linux stack. Motorola's current Linux phones in the US include the RAZR2 v8, E8, EM30, U9, ZN4, and ZN5." This also comes alongside news that Motorola's financial hardships are causing them to cut 3,000 jobs. It also puts into perspective their recent plans to hire hundreds of Android developers.
Security

Submission + - Police raid 51 CeBIT stands over suspected piracy 2

Submitted by LeCaddie
LeCaddie writes: On Thursday (March 6) German investigators raided 51 exhibitor stands at CeBIT, the German information technology fair in Hanover, looking for goods suspected of infringing patents. Some 183 police, customs officers and prosecutors raided the fair on Wednesday and carried off six cartons of electronic goods and documents including cellphones, navigation devices, digital picture frames and flat-screen monitors. Of the 51 companies raided, 24 were Chinese, including three from Hong Kong, 12 from Taiwan, nine from Germany and one each from Poland, the Netherlands and Korea. Most of the patents concerned were related to devices with MP3, MP4 and DVB standard functions for digital audio and video, blank CDs and DVD copiers, police said.
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA Performance On Linux, Windows, & Solari (phoronix.com)

Submitted by AtomBOB
AtomBOB writes: Phoronix has up an article comparing the performance of a Quadro graphics card on Windows Vista Ultimate, Solaris Express Developer, and Ubuntu Linux. The graphics card used was a NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 mid-range workstation part. The cross-platform testing used was SPECViewPerf 9.0 from SPEC. This workstation OS graphics comparison comes a few months since they last carried out cross-platform consumer tests. From the article: "Using the Quadro FX1700 512MB and the latest display drivers, Windows Vista wasn't the decisive winner, but the loser...Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 with the 169.12 driver had overall produced the fastest results within SPECViewPerf. In only three benchmarks had Solaris Express Developer 1/08 outpaced Ubuntu Linux, but with two of these tests the results were almost identical."
Security

Submission + - Vista & XP Security Flaw - Rootkit exploit in (antirootkit.com)

Submitted by
Paul
Paul writes: "In early Devember 2007 a new rootkit that hides itself in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of a users disk was spotted in the wild. Up until then this was more of a proof of concept (POC). This goes to show how much effort rootkit authors are putting in to creating new ways of evading Anti Rootkit software. This is a new vector of attack for malware writers and gives them control from outside the Operating System."
Government

Submission + - Guantanamo deleted detainee IDs from Wikipedia (ljsf.org) 1

Submitted by James Hardine
James Hardine writes: The New York Times and The Inquirer are reporting that Wikileaks, the transparency group that published two manuals leaked from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba earlier this month has now caught US armed forces personnel there conducting propaganda attacks over the Internet. The activities uncovered by Wikileaks include deleting Guantanamo detainees' ID numbers from Wikipedia, posting of self-praising comments on news websites in response to negative articles, promoting pro-Guantanamo stories on the Internet news focus website Digg, and even altering Wikipedia's entry on Cuban President Fidel Castro to describe him as "an admitted transexual". Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Bush blasted Wikileaks for identifying one "mass communications officer" by name, who has since received death threats for "simply doing his job — posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo". In response Wikileaks has posted independent confirmation of their analysis by security expert Bruce Schneier.
KDE

KDE 4 Uses 40% Less Memory Than 3 Despite Eye-Candy 566

Posted by Zonk from the optimization-in-action dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Pro-Linux reports that KDE 4, scheduled to be released in January 2008, consumes almost 40% less memory than KDE 3.5, despite the fact that version 4 of the Free and Open Source desktop system includes a composited window manager and a revamped menu and applet interface. KDE developer Will Stephenson showcased KDE 4's 3D eye-candy on a 256Mb laptop with 1Ghz CPU and run-of-the-mill integrated graphics, pointing out that mini-optimizations haven't even yet been started." Update: 12/14 22:40 GMT by Z : Or, not so much. An anonymous reader writes "The author of the original KDE 3.5 vs KDE 4.0 memory comparison has come out with a more accurate benchmark. In reality, KDE 4.0 uses 110 MB more memory than KDE 3.5.8.

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