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Security

Obama's Twitter Account "Hacked" 308

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-not-exactly dept.
Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "A 24-year-old living with his mother in France was arrested for 'hacking' into Obama's twitter accounts. (Warning: WSJ does obnoxious paywall things. Your miles may vary.) Apparently he guesses the answer to a question related to password recovery in order to break into the accounts of famous people; he has no computer science training or financial motive. He posted screenshots to a few boards and twitter found out within a few hours, either from a tip or from noticing when someone from France logs onto twitter as the President of the United States. (He did not actually tweet as POTUS, but just wanted to show he could break into the account.)"
Graphics

Acer Announces First NVIDIA Ion2-Based Netbook 94

Posted by kdawson from the one-less-underpowered-thing dept.
MojoKid writes "Acer has just taken the wraps off the new Acer Aspire One 532G netbook at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The machine is the first netbook with dedicated next-generation NVIDIA ION 2 graphics acceleration. The new Aspire One is also enabled with NVIDIA's recently announced Optimus technology to balance multimedia performance when needed, along with battery life savings, seamlessly switching to integrated Intel Atom/Pinetrail graphics when it's not required. Word is Ion 2 is going to be outfitted with twice the number of shaders for even more graphics horsepower as well."
Google

Google's Experimental Fiber Network 363

Posted by CmdrTaco from the contact-me-please dept.
gmuslera writes "Not enough speed from your ISP? Google seems to go into that market too. 'We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.' The goal isnt just to give ultra fast speed for some lucky ones, but to test under that conditions things like new generations of apps, and deployment techniques that take advantage of it." If they need a test neighborhood, I'm sure mine would be willing.
Apple

Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform? 531

Posted by kdawson from the triple-word-score dept.
andylim writes "recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a 'Jumanji (board game) platform.' The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you're on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, 'Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.' Now that would be cool."
The Courts

Submission + - Swedish ISP Deletes Customer ID Info (thelocal.se) 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "A Swedish internet service provider, Bahnhof, has begun deleting customer identification information in order to prevent its being used as evidence against its customers under Sweden's new legislation against copyright infringement via peer to peer file sharing. According to this report on 'The Local', it is entirely legal for it to do so. The company's CEO, Jon Karlung, is identified as 'a vociferous opponent of the measures that came into force on April 1st', and is quoted saying that he is determined to protect the company's clients, and that 'It's about the freedom to choose, and the law makes it possible to retain details. We're not acting in breach of IPRED; we're following the law and choosing to destroy the details.'"
Cellphones

EU Wants Removable Batteries In iPhones 320

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-do-i dept.
MojoKid writes "Current regulation, introduced with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) in July of 2006, primarily sought to prevent the unnecessary use of toxic metals in batteries as well as making it easier to recycle and dispose of used batteries. The updated 'New Batteries Directive,' as discussed in New Electronics by Gary Nevision, would go much further. Article 11 of the directive, as currently written, would require that devices must be made in such a way as to allow batteries, either for replacement or at end of life for disposal to be 'readily removed.' Of course, Apple's iPhones and iPods wouldn't meet this requirement, as it stands. It's obvious that an iPhone battery replacement program could be considered a cash cow for Apple as well."
Software

How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding 187

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the money-still-the-root-of-all-evil dept.
mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"
The Media

Sound Bites of the 1908 Presidential Candidates 410

Posted by kdawson from the hundred-years-of-blah-blah-blah dept.
roncosmos writes "Science News has up a feature on the first use of sound recording in a presidential campaign. In 1908, for the first time, presidential candidates recorded their voices on wax cylinders. Their voices could be brought into the home for 35 cents, equivalent to about $8 now. In that pre-radio era, this was the only way, short of hearing a speech at a whistle stop, that you could hear the candidates. The story includes audio recordings from the 1908 candidates, William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft. Bryan's speech, on bank failures, seems sadly prescient now. Taft's, on the progress of the Negro, sounds condescending to modern ears but was progressive at the time. There are great images from the campaign; lots of fun."
Software

An Open Source Legal Breakthrough 292

Posted by kdawson from the gpl-means-what-it-says dept.
jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."

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