itwbennett writes "Having previously denied demands from Germany that the company turn over hard drives with data it secretly collected from open wireless networks over the past three years, Google has reversed course. A Google representative said that it will hand over the data to German, French, and Spanish authorities within a matter of days, according to the Financial Times, which first reported this latest development on Wednesday. 'We screwed up. Let's be very clear about that,' Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the newspaper."

misof writes "Roughly a thousand teams from all around the globe have already registered for IPSC 2010, which takes place on Sunday, June 6. $3,000 in prize money (courtesy of Facebook, Inc.) is waiting for the best few of them. Participation is free and the contest is open to everybody. IPSC is what you could call a programming contest with a twist. Over the years, the problems always push the boundary and go beyond the usual stuff you see in a programming contest. For example, in past few years the contestants have had to understand how arithmetic in computers differs from that in mathematics, produce a sequence of cache requests that generates many page faults, solve a logic puzzle given as a Flash game, and recognize images to evaluate a rock-paper-scissors game."

Julie188 writes "Some 2,000 licenses cover the 230,000+ projects in Black Duck's open source knowledge base. While 10 licenses comprise 93% of the software, that leaves 1,980-odd licenses for the other 3% — and some of them have really crazy conditions. The Death and Repudiation License, for instance, requires the user to be dead."

mjn writes "In yet another backtrack from their privacy policy, Facebook has decided to retroactively move more information into the public, indexable part of profiles. The new profile parts made public are: a list of things users have become 'fans' of (now renamed to 'likes'), their education and work histories, and what they list under 'interests.' Apparently there is neither any opt-out nor even notice to users, despite the fact that some of this information was entered by users at a time when Facebook's privacy policy explicitly promised that it wouldn't be part of the public profile."

An anonymous reader writes "Author Salman Rushdie donated his papers and notes to Emory University a while ago. Not surprisingly, many of Rushdie's original notes, drafts, and correspondence existed in electronic form. Rather than printing them out or converting them to other formats, archivists at the university created an emulated image of Rushdie's old computer, complete with old software. Researchers visiting the archive can read his email in Eudora and his Stickies notes, or read drafts of his books in ClarisWorks. When you leave your legacy to future generations, would you like a virtualized copy of your personal system to be included?"

orzetto writes "I work at a research institute, and programming models of physical systems is what I do most of the time. One significant problem when modeling physical processes is finding thermodynamic data. There are some commercial solutions, but these can be quite expensive, and to the best of my knowledge there are no open source efforts in this direction. In my previous job, my company used NIST's Supertrapp, which is not really that expensive, but is written in Fortran, and an old-fashioned dialect at that. As a result, it is a bit difficult to integrate into other projects (praised be f2c), and the programming interface is simply horrible; worse, there are some Fortran-induced limitations such as a maximum of 20 species in a mixture. I was wondering whether it would be legal to buy a copy of such a database (they usually sell with source code, no one can read Fortran anyway); take the data, possibly reformatting it as XML; implement a new programming interface from scratch; and publish the package as free software. Thermodynamic data is not an intellectual creation but a mere measurement, which was most likely done not by the programmers but by scientists funded with our tax money. What are your experiences and opinions on the matter? For the record, I am based in Germany, so the EU database directive applies."

wandazulu writes "At the end of an article written by the creator of C++, where he talks about removing a feature from the new C++ standard, he drops a bombshell: The new C++ standard (typically referred to as C++0x) has been delayed until 2010 or later. What does this mean? No new C++ features like threads, proper enum classes, or hash tables. C++0x is dead, long live C++1x!"

An anonymous reader writes "When deploying new server/servergroup/cluster to your IT infrastructure, deployment (simplified) consist of following steps: OS installation: to do it over network, boot server must be configured for this new server/servergroup/cluster; configuration/package management: configuration server has to be aware of the newcomer(s); monitoring and alerting: monitoring software must be reconfigured; and performance metrics: a tool for collecting data must be reconfigured. There are many excellent software solutions for those particular jobs, say configuration management (Puppet, Chef, cfengine, bcfg2), monitoring hosts and services (Nagios, Zabbix, OpenNMS, Zenoss, etc) and performance metrics (Ganglia, etc.). But each of these tools has to be configured independently or at least configuration has to be generated. What tools do you use to achieve this? For example, when you have to deploy a new server, how do you create configs for, let's say, PXE boot server, Puppet, Nagios and Ganglia, at once?"

revjtanton writes "Last night a group calling themselves 'Anti-Sec' hacked ImageShack, one of the largest image hosting sites on the web, and replaced many of the site's hosted pictures with one of their own, which detailed their manifesto. The group's grievance is against full-disclosure of exploits, an issue that was debated recently after a presentation on an ATM exploit was canceled. Anti-Sec simply wants the practice within security circles to end, and they've promised to cause 'mayhem and destruction' if it doesn't. These people are taking direct aim against a sector of the IT industry that is already armed to fight the ... but they also already know that. It should be interesting to see how this plays out."

jpatokal writes "The National Portrait Gallery of London is threatening litigation against a Wikipedia user over his uploading of pictures of some 3,000 paintings, all 19th century or earlier and firmly in the public domain. Their claim? The photos are a 'product of a painstaking exercise on the part of the photographer,' and that downloading them off the NPG site is an 'unlawful circumvention of technical measures.' And remember, the NPG's taxpayer-funded mission is to 'promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media [...] to as wide a range of visitors as possible!'"

ZeroSerenity was one of many to write with news of a survey from the Pew Research Center which sought to find out how Americans feel about science and contrast that with the opinions of actual scientists. The study showed that "nearly 9 in 10 scientists accept the idea of evolution by natural selection, but just a third of the public does. And while 84% of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, less than half of the public agrees with that." 27% of the respondents said that the advances of the US in science are its greatest achievement, down from 44% ten years ago. The study is lengthy, and it contains many more interesting tidbits. For example: scientists decry the level of media coverage given to science, and they also think research funding has too much influence on study results. 32% of scientists identify themselves as Independent, while 55% say they're Democrats and 6% say they're Republicans.

Michael_Curator writes "Executives at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.-owned papers (including current Tory spokesman Andy Coulson) allowed reporters to hack into phone conversations of celebrities and then paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover it up. How did famously technologically-challenged reporters manage the feat without BT catching on? Voicemail." The New York Times says a preliminary investigation's been ordered, but the BBC's coverage indicates that a large-scale inquiry is unlikely.

DAMN MY LIFE writes "I'm going to Central Michigan University in the fall. Upon examination of their poorly organized network usage policies, I'm worried that using their internet service will expose my web browsing habits, emails, and most importantly, passwords. Another concern I have is the 'Client Security Agent' that students are required to install and leave on their systems to use the network. Through this application, the IT department scans everyone's computer for what they claim are network security purposes. Of course, scanning a person's hard drive can turn up all kinds of things that are personal. Do all colleges have such extreme measures in place? Is there any way that I can avoid this? There are no wireless broadband providers available in the area, I already checked."

suraj.sun sends in an update from TechCrunch on a story that generated a lot of controversy a few months back, "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?" "Now we've located another source for the story, someone who's very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta... Last.fm didn't hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. Here's what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for 'internal use only.' It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA. We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm's denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users."