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Feed Ars Technica: Feature: Advertisers get hands stuck inside HTML5 database cookie jar (arstechnica.com)

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Even casual Internet users know that if you want to hold your privacy in check, it's good practice to clear out your browser cookies every once in a while. Our recent coverage about "zombie" Flash cookies has shown us, however, that simply clearing your browser cookies the old fashioned way isn't always enough. As highlighted by a study out of UC Berkeley, some companies have begun using Flash-based cookies that not only recreate themselves when deleted without the user's knowledge, they reach into the Flash storage bin for the just-deleted user info so that they can keep tracking you and your stored history instead of starting anew.

It's because of this behavior that some of our readers drew our attention to something called RLDGUID, a Safari database that has been popping up more and more on iOS devices. What is it, who put it there, and what purpose does it serve? The company behind this database, Ringleader Digital, is basically using some of the modern HTML5 capabilities of mobile browsers to perform the same tasks as a traditional cookie, but out of sight of most users. We decided to dig in and see what RLDGUID is all about, and what we found was sometimes confusing. More importantly, however, it highlights why users should be made more aware of what their browsers are storing about them.

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Piracy

Submission + - Pirate Bay down, police raids across Europe (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou
Stoobalou writes: BREAKING NEWS Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe.

Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning.

According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden.

Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized.
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.

Comment Re:Azure Data Grab (Score 2, Interesting) 278

by Onemadboy (#31842978) Attached to: Microsoft Unveils 'Pink' Phones As Kin One and Two
Microsoft Global Compliance Handbook from wikileaks - http://file.wikileaks.org/file/microsoft-spy.pdf Any agency can issue a subpoeana and Microsoft will comply for an account over 180days old. Under that a court order is required. Verizon has basically the same policies without any account age restriction http://www22.verizon.com/about/privacy/policy/#info
Space

Armadillo Aerospace Takes Level 1 Lunar Lander Prize 50

Posted by Soulskill from the easy-money dept.
jedibfa writes "Las Cruces International Airport came alive with applause and cheers yesterday afternoon as John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace took the first place prize for the Level 1 challenge of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, winning $350,000 and bragging rights. Adding to the excitement of the day, shortly before completing their second qualifying flight, Armadillo Aerospace and The Rocket Racing League announced a joint program to develop a sub-orbital tourist vehicle that will fly out of the New Mexico-based Spaceport America and cost less than $100,000 per ticket. On Sunday, the team will have three opportunities to go for the Level 2 challenge that more closely approximates the required performance for a real lunar landing. Good luck, Armadillo Aerospace, both on Sunday and in your new endeavor!" We discussed preparations for the challenge last week. Several other readers have contributed additional coverage, including the Space Fellowship's live blog of the event, the website for Truezer0, another team participating in the challenge, and a VentureBeat article discussing the economic downturn in space exploration, and how the X-prize competitions figure in. Today's Level 2 challenge will be covered live via webcast.
The Internet

Opera Develops Search Engine For Web Developers 31

Posted by Soulskill from the web-devs-need-love-too dept.
nk497 writes "The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set." Additional coverage is available at Computerworld, and a deeper explanation is up at Opera's Dev site.
Quickies

Submission + - Weapon found in Whale blubber from the 1800's (cnn.com)

Submitted by LABarr
LABarr writes: AP and CNN are carrying this story. "A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time. It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890." One tough whale...

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