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Submission + - Comcast turning Chicago homes into Xfinity hotspots... 1

Submitted by BUL2294
BUL2294 writes: The Chicago Tribune is reporting that, over the next few months in Chicago, Comcast is turning on a feature that turns customer networks into public Wi-Fi hotspots. After a firmware upgrade is installed, "visitors will use their own Xfinity credentials to sign on, and will not need the homeowner's permission or password to tap into their Wi-Fi signal. The homegrown network will also be available to non-subscribers free for several hours each month, or on a pay-per-use basis. Any outside usage should not affect the speed or security of the home subscriber's private network. [...] Home internet subscribers will automatically participate in the network's growing infrastructure, although a small number have chosen to opt out in other test markets." The article specifically mentions that this capability is opt-out, so Comcast is relying on home users' property, electricity, and lack of tech-savvy to increase their network footprint...

Submission + - Legal motion: hyperlinks are protected by the First Amendment (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lawyers acting for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist facing more than 100 years in prison for having posted a hyperlink to hacked material, have called for his case to be dismissed on grounds that it violates his First Amendment rights to free speech and would chill the internet. The main allegation against him – spanning 12 counts — is that he posted a hyperlink on an internet chat room to a website containing material hacked from the private intelligence firm Stratfor. The hack included email addresses of 860,000 Stratfor subscribers as well as 60,000 credit card details.

In a legal motion lodged with a federal court in Dallas, Texas on Tuesday, Brown’s lawyers argued that the charges against him should be dropped ahead of trial because they were too vague and were in breach of his constitutional right to free speech. By hyperlinking to the hacked material, Brown did not “transfer” the stolen information as he arguably would have done had he embedded the link on his web page, but merely created a path to files that had already been published elsewhere that were in the public domain. Brown’s case is being closely watched by First Amendment lawyers, publishers and activists who fear that a conviction could set a precedent that would criminalise the very act of linking on the internet.

Submission + - Object Blocking Giant Tunnel Borer Was an 8" Diameter Pipe (seattletimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago we discussed news that a tunnel boring machine measuring 57.5 feet in diameter was halted underneath Seattle after running into a mysterious object. Project engineers have now figured out what the object is: an 8-inch-diameter pipe. In 2002, researchers for another project — the replacement of the Alaskan Way viaduct — drilled down into the ground to take water samples. They used the 115-ft-long pipe as a well casing. As it turns out, this well site was listed in the contract specifications given to all bidders for the tunnel's construction. In addition, the crew manning the machine noticed that it was chewing up pieces of metal, and they removed part of the pipe and kept going. Only later did they realize that significant damage had been done to the machine's cutting face. Officials aren't sure how long repairs will take, or how much they will cost.
Yahoo!

Submission + - Mayer Terminates Yahoo's Remote Employee Policy

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reported and tweeted that Marissa Mayer (CEO since July 2012) has just sent an all-hands email ending Yahoo's policy of allowing remote employees. Hundreds of workers have been given the choice: start showing up for work at HQ (which would require relocation in many cases), or resign. (They can forget about Yahoo advice pieces like this). Mayer has also been putting her stamp on Yahoo's new home page, which was rolled out Wednesday. She's also been fixing the customer service 'hold' music. Oh yeah, and she recently gave birth to a baby boy.
Network

Submission + - Check your phone bill: You're probably being overcharged for data (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "A recent study conducted by UCLA professor Chunyi Peng shows that carriers generally count data usage correctly, but those customers who commonly use their device in areas with weak signal strength or to stream audio or video are often overcharged. Peng and three other researchers used data gleaned from an app installed on Android smartphones on two different carriers. The issue appears to be in how the system is set up to count data usage. Under the current scenario, data is charged as it is sent from the carrier’s network to the end user. What does not exist is a system to confirm whether the packets are received, and thus preventing charges for unreceived data. Peng demonstrated this in two extreme circumstances. In one case, 450 megabytes of data was charged to an account where not a single bit of it had been received. On the flipside, Peng’s group was able to construct an app which disguised data transfers as DNS requests, which are not counted by the carriers as data usage. Here they were able to transfer 200 megabytes of data without being charged. Overall, the average overcharge is about 5-7% for most users. While that does not seem like much, with unlimited plans gone and data caps in style that could pose potential problems for some heavy data users. Could you be going over your data allotment based on data you never received? It’s quite possible."
Linux

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Best distro for a dynamic file server? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm in charge of developing for my workplace a particular sort of "dynamic" file server for handling scientific data. We have all the hardware in place, but can't figure out what *nix distro would work best. Can the great minds at Slashdot pool their resources and divine an answer?

Some background:
We have sensor units scattered across a couple square miles of undeveloped land, which each collect ~500 gigs of data per 24h. When these drives come back from the field each day, they'll be plugged into a server featuring a dozen removable drive sleds. We need to present the contents of these drives as one unified tree (shared out via samba), and the best way to go about that appears to be a unioning file system. There's also requirement that the server has to boot in 30 seconds or less off a mechanical hard drive.

We've been looking around, but are having trouble finding info for this seemingly simple situation. Can we get FreeNAS to do this? Do we try Greyhole? Is there a distro that can run unionfs/aufs/mhddfs out-of-the-box without messing with manual recompiling? Why is documentation for *nix always so bad?

(posting as AC due to silly workplace security policies)
Security

Submission + - Lawsuit: Ex-Data Center Worker Wiped Out TV Show (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The creators of 'Zodiac Island' say they lost an entire season of their syndicated children's television show after a former employee at their Internet service provider wiped out more than 300GB of video files. eR1 World Network, the show's creator, is suing the ISP, CyberLynk of Franklin, Wisconsin, and its former employee, Michael Jewson, for damages, saying CyberLynk should have done a better job of protecting its data.
Piracy

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5

Posted by Soulskill from the five-button-discount dept.
Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.
Idle

Submission + - Nigerian Scammer Gets A Laptop From Me (notla.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: After switching to a Mac recently, I decided to put my old laptop up for sale to help recoup a little of the Mac cost. I received an email almost immediately from a girl named Rebecca and we had this email exchange
Idle

Submission + - Man Sues neighbor Claim Wi-Fi made him Sick (chicagotribune.com) 2

Submitted by OrangeMonkey11
OrangeMonkey11 writes: The Santa Fe plaintiff claims to suffer from 'electromagnetic sensitivities' set off by cellphones, routers and other electronic devices
"In September 2008, Arthur Firstenberg bought the home on Barela Street, a few blocks from the newly redeveloped downtown rail yard here.

But last October, when a friend of his rented a house on the next block that backed up to Firstenberg's property, the familiar waves of nausea, vertigo, body aches, dizziness, heart arrhythmia and insomnia returned — all, he says, because she was using an iPhone, a laptop computer, a wireless router and dimmer switches.

Firstenberg, 59, wanted Raphaela Monribot to limit her use of the devices. "I asked her to work with me," he said. "Basically, she refused."

So he sued Monribot in state district court, seeking $530,000 in damages and an injunction to force her to turn off the electronics."
Technology

Iron Alloy Could Create Earthquake-Proof Buildings 107

Posted by samzenpus from the shake-all-you-want dept.
separsons writes "Researchers at Japan's Tohoku University designed a new shape memory metal alloy. The super elastic iron alloy can endure serious stretching and still return to its original shape. The scientists say that once optimized, the material could be used in everything from braces to medical stents to earthquake-proof buildings!"

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