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Submission + - Kim Dotcom Wins Case Against NZ Police (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by Mistakill
Mistakill writes: It would seem the case against Kim Dotcom for the NZ Police isnt going well, with Kim Dotcom scoring another victory in his legal battles.


"Police have been told they must search everything they seized from Dotcom and hand back what is not relevant to the US extradition claims."

Justice Helen Winkelmann told police their complaints about the cost and time of the exercise were effectively their own fault for indiscriminately seizing material in the first place.
Education

Submission + - Internet-Deprived Kids Turning to 'McLibraries'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: After the school computer lab and public library close for the night in many communities, the local McDonald's is often the only place to turn for students without internet access at home. 'Cheap smartphones and tablets have put Web-ready technology into more hands than ever,' reports the WSJ's Anton Troianovski. 'But the price of Internet connectivity hasn't come down nearly as quickly. And in many rural areas, high-speed Internet through traditional phone lines simply isn't available at any price. The result is a divide between families that have broadband constantly available on their home computers and phones, and those that have to plan their days around visits to free sources of Internet access.' The FCC says it can make broadband available to all Americans by spending $45 billion over 10 years, but until then the U.S. will have to rely on Mickey D's, Starbucks, and others to help address its digital divide. Time to update that iconic McDonald's sign?
Power

Submission + - US Deserves Transparency From Oil Refineries

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Gregg Laskoski writes in US News and World Report that virtually all of the retail gasoline price volatility that Americans experienced this past year was connected to significant problems at refineries and it was those refineries' vulnerability that subjected US consumers to the year's highest average price ever, $3.63 per gallon. February delivered the BP refinery fire in Cherry Point, Washington that led to gasoline price spikes all along the Pacific coast, refinery problems in the Great Lakes region pushed Chicago gas prices to an all-time high of $4.56 per gallon, and over the summer, west coast refineries incurred outages, and California saw record highs in most markets, with Los Angeles gasoline's average price peaking at $4.72/gallon in October. Finally after Reuters reported that some 7,700 gallons of fuel spilled from Phillips 66's Bayway refinery in Linden, NJ, after Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey environmental protection officials said they were not made aware of a major spill at the Bayway plant, and the refinery failed to respond to inquiries from Reuters reporters. "Too many times, history has shown us, the Phillips 66 response or lack thereof characterizes the standard practice of the oil industry. Refineries often fail or are slow to communicate problems that create significant disruptions to fuel supplies and spikes in retail gasoline prices. More often than not, scant information is provided reluctantly, if at all," writes Laskoski. "When such things occur is silence from refineries acceptable? Or does our government and the electorate who put them there have a right to know what's really going on?""
United States

Journal Journal: Kentucky police search homes without a warrant based on smell/sounds 6

Journal by AHuxley
The nytimes reports on how Justices Look Again at How Police May Search Homes after a case in Kentucky where police smelled burning marijuana coming from an apartment and kicked the door in.
Justice Kagan said, “is going to enable the police to penetrate the home, to search the home, without a warrant, without going to see a magistrate, in a very wide variety of cases.”
"He said a sensible criminal would a
Businesses

Submission + - IRS Nails CPA for Copying Steve Jobs, Google Execs 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Silly rabbit, $1 salaries are for super-wealthy tech execs! The WSJ reports that CPA David Watson incurred the wrath of the IRS by only paying himself $24,000 a year and declaring the rest of his take profit. It's a common tax-cutting maneuver that most computer consultants working through an S Corporation have probably considered. Unlike profit distributions, all salary is subject to a 2.9% Medicare tax and the first $106,800 is subject to a 12.4% Social Security tax (FICA). By reducing his salary, Watson didn't save any income taxes on the $379k in profit distributions he received in 2002 and 2003, but he did save nearly $20,000 in payroll taxes for the two years, the IRS argued, pegging Watson's true pay at $91,044 for each year. Judge Robert W. Pratt agreed that Watson's salary was too low, ruling that the CPA owed the extra tax plus interest and penalties. So why, you ask, don't members of the much-ballyhooed $1 Executive club like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt get in hot water for their low-ball salaries? After all, how inequitable would it be if billionaires working full-time didn't have to kick in more than 15 cents into the Medicare and Social Security kitty? Sorry kids, the rich are different, and the New Global Elite have much better tax advisors than you!
Businesses

Submission + - Chinese IP Acquisition Tactics Exposed (sina.com.cn)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: In an interview published in Sina.com.cn (here is the google translation,) Chinese rail engineers gave a detailed account of the history, motivation, technologies of Chinese high-speed rail system. More interestingly, they blatantly revealed the strategies and tactics used in acquiring high-speed rail techs from foreign companies. Here is the summary and paraphrase. At the beginning, China developed its own high-speed rail system known as the Chinese Star which achieved a test speed of 320km/h; but the system was considered not reliable or stable enough for operation. So China decided to import the technologies. The superior (leaders) instructed, "The goal of the project is to boost our economy, not theirs." A key strategy employed is divide-and-conquer: by dividing up the technologies of the system and importing multiple different techs across different companies, it ensures no single country or company has total control. "What we do is to exchange market for technologies. The negotiation was led by the Ministry of Railway [against industry alliances of the exporting countries]. This uniform executive power gave China huge advantage in negotiations," said Wu Junrong, "If we don't give in, they have no choice. They all want a piece of our huge high speed rail project." For example, [Chinese locomotive train] CRH2 is based on Japanese tech, CRH3 on German tech, and CRH5 on French tech, all retrofit for Chinese rail standards. Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contains more and more Chinese made parts. "Some exporters were reluctant to transfer technologies. But we have explicitly requested such from the beginning. They cooperate eventually because they find profits in this huge project. This is business. There is no stealing [of technologies]." In conclusion, Wu boasted that now there are a dozen countries, including the US, are interested in Chinese high-speed rail techs, because they know more than any other single company and the Chinese version is cheaper too.

Submission + - USCG Sues Copyright Defense Lawyer (escapistmagazine.com)

Submitted by ESRB
ESRB writes: The US Copyright Group has sued Graham Syfert, an attorney that created a packet of self-representation paperwork for individuals sued for P2P sharing of certain movies and moved to have sanctions placed against the defense attorney. Syfert sells these packets for $20, and the USCG claims the 19 individuals that have used it have costed them over $5000.
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Breathing new life to old DirectDraw games (gfxile.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for windows, and these use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll, using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on.
Space

Submission + - Astronauts To Repair Cooling System On ISS

Submitted by GWMAW
GWMAW writes: NASA Astronauts will conduct a spacewalk on Thursday to repair part of the cooling system of the International Space Station. The cooling system is essential for maintaining the temperature inside the station. There are two "loops" in the system, one that uses water and draws heat from the inside of the station and one that dumps the heat into space, which uses ammonia as the fluid. Ammonia is used because it freezes at a much lower temperature than water. On Saturday the pump that controls the flow of ammonia through the system shut down.
IT

Submission + - Managing the Most Remote Data Center in the World (youtube.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Imagine that your data center was in the most geographically remote location in the world. Now imagine that you can only get to it 4 months of the year. Just for fun, add in some of the most extreme weather conditions in the world. That's the challenge that faces John Jacobsen, one of the people responsible for making sure that the data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory makes it all the way from the South Pole to researchers across the world. In an interview recorded at OSCON, Jacobsen talks about the problems that he has to face, which includes (surprisingly) keeping the data center cool. If you're ever gripped because you had to haul yourself across town in the middle of the night to fix a server crash, this interview should put things in perspective...
Businesses

Submission + - The Good and Ugly Side Of GPL 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Matt Mullenweg (the creator of wordpress open source blog software), after review by various legal experts, is sticking to his guns that themes and plugins that "extend" Wordpress violates the GPL if they are not themselves distributed under the GPL. Matt has gone so far as to post this on Twitter. Accoding to Matt, premium template called thesis should be under GPL and the owner is not happy about it. WordPress is willing to sue the maker of thesis theme for not following GPL licensing. The webmasters and thesis owners are also confused with new development. Mark Jaquith wrote an excellent technical analysis of why WordPress themes inherit the GPL. This is why even if Thesis hadn't copy and pasted large swathes of code from WordPress (and GPL plugins) its PHP would still need to be under the GPL. The Open Source / GPL vs Thesis debate continues further and some claims that Matt Mullenweg is anti-capitalist, the GPL is a communist ideology, and why users should moving away from WordPress.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Has No Plans to Patch New Flaw (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft has acknowledged the vulnerability that the new malware Stuxnet uses to launch itself with .lnk files, but said it has no plans to patch the flaw right now. The company said the flaw affects most current versions of Windows, including Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7 32 and 64 bit.
Meanwhile, the digital certificate that belonging to Realtek Semiconductor that was used to sign a pair of drivers for the new Stuxnet rootkit has been revoked by VeriSign. The certificate was revoked Friday, several days after news broke about the existence of the new malware and the troubling existence of the signed drivers. Stuxnet is an odd case. It is spread via infected USB thumb drives, which contain the rootkit code, along with two drivers that researchers say are used to hide the existence of the malware both on the USB drive and on the PC, once it's infected. The drivers are signed using a valid digital certificate owned by Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, and Stuxnet uses .lnk shortcut files to launch as soon as the USB drive is opened on a PC.

Submission + - IE 8 XSS Filter Exposes Sites to XSS Attacks

Submitted by Blue Taxes
Blue Taxes writes: The cross-site scripting filter that ships with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser can be abused by attackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks on websites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to this threat. The IE 8 filter works by scanning outbound requests for string that may be malicious. When such a string is detected, IE8 will dynamically generate a regular expression matching the outbound string. The browser then looks for the same pattern in responses from the server. If a match is made anywhere in the server’s response then the browser assumes that a reflected XSS attack is being conducted and the browser will automatically alter the response so that the XSS attack will be unsuccessful. The researchers figured out a way to use the IE 8's altered response to conduct simple abuses and universal cross-site scripting attacks.
Botnet

Submission + - Microsoft Fuzzing Botnet Finds 1,800 Office Bugs (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Microsoft uncovered more than 1,800 bugs in Office 2010 by tapping into the unused computing horsepower of idling PCs, a company security engineer said on Wednesday. Office developers found the bugs by running millions of 'fuzzing' tests, a practice employed by both software developers and security researchers, that searches for flaws by inserting data into file format parsers to see where programs fail by crashing. 'We found and fixed about 1,800 bugs in Office 2010's code," said Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, who last week co-hosted a presentation on Microsoft's fuzzing efforts at the CanSecWest security conference. 'While a large number, it's important to note that that doesn't mean we found 1,800 security issues. We also want to fix things that are not security concerns.'

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IBM Advanced Systems Group -- a bunch of mindless jerks, who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes... -- with regrets to D. Adams

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