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Businesses

Submission + - How corruption is strangling US Innovation (hbr.org) 1

Submitted by
hype7
hype7 writes: "The Harvard Business Review is running a very interesting piece on how money in politics is having a deleterious effect on US innovation. From the article:

if you were in any doubt how deep inside the political system the system of contributions have allowed incumbents to insert their hands, take a look at what happened when the Republican Study Committee released a paper pointing out some of the problems with current copyright regime. The debate was stifled within 24 hours. And just for good measure, Rep Marsha Blackburn, whose district abuts Nashville and who received more money from the music industry than any other Republican congressional candidate, apparently had the author of the study, Derek Khanna, fired. Sure, debate around policy is important, but it's clearly not as important as raising campaign funds.

"

Comment Re:refreshing! (Score 1) 115

by Pelekophori (#39604529) Attached to: Bogus Takedown Notice Lands $150k Settlement In Australian Court

Actually what's more refreshing is that for a change, a foreign court was granted jurisdiction in America, rather than the other way around. And no-one got to be deported in the process!

i dunno, throwing in a few deportees in the other direction might help bring about a sense of proportion about the merits of copyright law uber alles.
DRM

Submission + - Ubisoft Games Won't Work Next Week (itproportal.com) 2

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Several of Ubisoft's biggest titles won't be playable as of next week thanks to a server move by the publisher and the restrictive DRM that was used in their development. This isn't just multiplayer either. Because Ubisoft thought it would be a smart plan to use always on DRM for even the single player portion of games like Assassin's Creed, even the single player portion of that title won't be playable during the server move. Some of the other games affected by this move will be Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. The Mac games that will be broken during this period are Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers. This move was announced this week as part of a community letter, with Ubisoft describing how the data servers for many of the publisher's online services would be migrated from third party facilities to a new location starting on the 7th February. The publisher didn't reveal how long the transfer would take.
Businesses

Submission + - Tech's Dark Secret: It’s All About Age 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Universities really should tell engineering students what to expect in the long term and how to manage their technical careers. But since they're not, Vivek Wadwha uses his TechCrunch bully pulpit to give students a heads-up about the road ahead. Citing ex-Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch's belief that younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative, Wadwha warns that reports of ageism's death have been greatly exaggerated. While encouraging managers to consider the value of the experience older techies bring, Wadwha also offers some get-real advice to those whose hair is beginning to grey: 1) Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design; switch to sales or product management; jump ship and become an entrepreneur. 2) If you're going to stay in programming, realize that the deck is stacked against you, so be prepared to earn less as you gain experience. 3) Keep your skills current — to be coding for a living when you're 50, you'll need to be able to out-code the new kids on the block. Wadwha's piece strikes a chord with 50-something Dave Winer, who calls the rampant ageism 'really f***ed up,' adding that, 'It's probably the reason why we keep going around in the same loops over and over, because we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so.' Well, Microsoft did struggle with problems that IBM solved in the '60s.
Security

Submission + - 5 Million Domains Serving Malware via NS (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A compromised widget provided by Network Solutions was serving malware on otherwise legitimate websites. But, as bad as this discovery was, it was bound to be overshadowed a couple of days later by another revelation: the widget is automatically included on every "parked" domain by Network Solutions! A quick search on Google and Yahoo! revealed that there are around 500,000 and 5,000,000 domains affected and serving malware, respectively. A manual check of some 200 parked domains on the list showed that all of them were provided with the malware-serving widget.
Google

Submission + - Google kills Wave (blogspot.com)

Submitted by mordejai
mordejai writes: Google stated in it's official blog that they will not continue developing wave as a standalone product. It's sad because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses.
Graphics

Submission + - OpenGL 4.1 Specification Announced (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: The Khronos Group has announced full details for the OpenGL 4.1 specification. Among the new features of the spec, which comes just five months after the release of the 4.0 specification, is full support for OpenGL ES, which simplifies porting between mobile and desktop platforms. It'll be interesting to see what effect, if any, this new spec has on the graphics industry--more compatibility could change the way many embedded systems are designed. There are lots of other changes and additions in the spec, as well.

Submission + - Study that 99.7% of torrents are "illegal" flawed (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Caledfwlch
Caledfwlch writes: techdirt, and others, point to an analysis by TorrentFreak of the recent report by Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) of Australia that only 0.3% of torrents contain legal content. One of the data points was that the movie The Incredible Hulk was the number one seeded torrent "the fact that the release is nearly two years old should have sounded some alarm bells. It appears that the researchers have pulled data from a bogus tracker, and it wouldn’t be a big surprise if all the torrents in their top 10 are actually fake.". The study had been widely picked up a couple of days ago by the media, here, at ArsTechnica, and others.

Submission + - Is Valve's Anti-Cheat software faulty? (rockpapershotgun.com)

Submitted by HaymarketRiot
HaymarketRiot writes: There have been reports that Valve's Anti-Cheat software (VAC) has recently banned a large number of Modern Warfare 2 players. A banning from VAC is especially strict in that there is no chance of appeal, as that would show a fault in supposedly perfect software. Word from the associated Steam Group indicates that the problem may be the fault of the game's developers, Infinity Ward.
Microsoft

Submission + - Will Ballmer be replaced as Microsoft CEO? (thedailybeast.com)

Submitted by Strudelkugel
Strudelkugel writes: The Beast reports unhappiness with Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft: Sources say the talk around Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters—which has grown increasingly louder ever since Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization—-is that the company's stock suffers from a "Ballmer discount," and that the CEO is on the clock to significantly move the needle on its share price over the next two or three quarters or face a potential move to oust him. "Ballmer is on the list of mega-executives under pressure," says a banker who has negotiated deals for Microsoft. "If he was asked to leave the building, I suspect there would be more happy than unhappy people."

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