aesoteric writes "Microsoft has announced that it will open a new datacenter in Washington State housed in a 'modern' barn-like structure that is 'virtually transparent to ambient outdoor conditions'. It was not the first time Microsoft had toyed with the idea of a datacenter without walls. In September 2008, it successfully ran a stack of HP servers in a tent for seven months, apparently with no failures."

tekgoblin writes "Were you a fan of the original GoldenEye on the N64? Well, this Half-Life 2 mod called GoldenEye Source, five years in the making, has just come out of beta and been fully released for free. The game is a creation of fans with the objective to bring the original experiences from GoldenEye on the N64 back to life. I remember spending hours upon hours playing GoldenEye on the N64, and was sad seeing it go."

An anonymous reader writes "As if the current situation with software patents wasn't bad enough, it appears a new phenomenon is emerging: companies are watching the commit logs of open source projects for ideas to patent. In this case, Tandberg filed a patent that was step-by-step identical to an algorithm developed by the x264 project — a mere two months after the original commit. The particular algorithm is a useful performance optimization in a wide variety of video encoders, including Theora."

jnaujok writes "The Ninth Circuit court has declared that attaching a GPS tracker to your car, as it sits in your driveway, or by extension on a public street, and then using it to monitor every one of your movements, is totally legal, and can be performed by the police without needing a warrant. So, if you live in the Western United States, big brother has arrived."

An anonymous reader tipped a post up on Americablog revealing that BP Photoshopped a fake photo of their crisis command center and posted it on their main site. The blogger commented, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center." While this story was just being picked up by the Washington Post, an Americablog reader spotted another doctored BP photo on their website, this time of a "top kill" working group. How many others?

Lanxon sends in an intriguing piece from Wired: "This eerie wreck image is not computer-generated. It's the sonar image of Russian nuclear submarine B-159 (called K-159 before decommissioning), which has been lying 248m down in the Barents Sea, between Norway and Russia, since 2003. The Russian Federation hired Adus, a Scottish company that specializes in high-resolution sonar surveying, to evaluate if it would be possible to recover the wreck. 'The operation was complicated as the submarine was very deep, so we had to use the sonar equipment mounted on a remotely operated vehicle' [also pictured in the article], says Martin Dean, the managing director of Adus and a forensic-wreck archaeologist. 'We also had a problem with the surveying due to the density of North Atlantic cod attracted to the sound of the sonar and the light of the cameras.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Following months of small Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement leaks, the full consolidated ACTA text has now been posted online. The consolidated text provides a clear indication of how the negotiations have altered earlier proposals (see this post for links to the early leaks) as well as the first look at several other ACTA elements. For example, last spring it was revealed that several countries had proposed including a de minimus provision to counter fears that the border measures chapter would lead to iPod searching border guards. The leak shows there are four proposals on the table."

Lauren Weinstein writes "I've just deployed the first ever Broadband Survey under the auspices of GCTIP, which asks questions that the FCC neglected to ask about service types, promised vs. actual broadband speeds, user satisfaction (or lack thereof) with their ISPs and local ISP competition, etc. I'm already finding the detailed comments many persons are leaving on the survey form to be extremely illuminating and with sufficient participation I'm hoping my reports from this data will be useful to the Internet community broadly."

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Google, Inc. accused Viacom, Inc. of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday." As "statements from the corporate counsel's office" go, this post on the YouTube blog is pretty hot reading.

laron writes "In Israel, a new law is in the making: Holders of donor cards and their families would get preference if they should need an organ for themselves. Apparently this initiative faces resistance from Orthodox rabbis, who hold that organ donation is against religious law. Jacob Lavee, director of the heart transplant unit at Israel's Sheba Medical Center, and one of the draftees of this new law, hopes that a broader pool of organs will ultimately benefit everyone, but acknowledges that one of his primary motivations is 'to prevent free riders.' (Apparently receiving an organ is OK under religious law.)"

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."