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Privacy

Submission + - Facebook Masks Worse Privacy With New Interface 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook launched new privacy settings this week. Cosmetically, this means that the settings are explained more clearly and are marginally easier to manage. Unfortunately, some of the most significant changes actually make preserving privacy harder for its users: profile elements that could previously be restricted to "Only Friends" are now designated as irrevocably publicly available: "Publicly available information includes your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages" (http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=927). Where you could previously preserve the privacy of this information and remain publicly searchable only by name, Facebook now forces you to either give up this information (including your current city!) to anyone with a Facebook account, or to restrict your search visibility — which of course limits the usefulness of the site far beyond how not publicly sharing your profile picture would. That Facebook made this change while simultaneously rolling out major changes to the privacy settings interface seems disingenuous.
Games

Submission + - "Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores in Japan (ameba.jp)

Submitted by Riktov
Riktov writes: I came across this at Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo. This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures.
Books

Submission + - License for textbooks - GNU or CC? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm a college professor who is putting together an open-source textbook. I'm trying to decide between using the GNU Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. I don't really understand the difference
between these, though it seems with the Free Documentation License I need to include a copy of the license in my text.

Which do you advise using?
Biotech

Submission + - Self-Destructing Bacteria Create Better Biofuels (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: Researchers at Arizona State University have genetically engineered cyanobacteria to dissolve from the inside out, making it easy to access the high-energy fats and biofuel byproducts located within. To do this they combined the bacteria's genes with genes from the bacteriaphage — a so-called “mortal enemy” of bacteria that cause it to explode. Cyanobacteria have a higher yield potential than most biofuels currently being used, and this new strain eliminates the need for costly and energy intensive processing steps.
Robotics

Submission + - Pleo dinosaur maker Ugobe files for bankruptcy (largesound.com)

Submitted by
AshboryBassPlayer
AshboryBassPlayer writes: "Ugobe has filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy. According to the company, 100,000 Pleos were sold in 2008. CEO Caleb Chung is optimistic about the auction value of intellectual property held by the company.

The Pleo robotic dinosaur featured 14 servo joints, a camera, and an SD Card for storage. The final street prices were commonly between $275-$350, much higher than an earlier hoped for price point under $200."
Security

Submission + - Chinese Hackers Targetting NYPD Computers (nydailynews.com) 1

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "A network of hackers, most based in China, have been making up to 70,000 attempts a day to break into the NYPD's computer system, the city's Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, revealed Wednesday. Kelly suggested that "perhaps it is because of the NYPD's reach into the international arena" that they are being targeted for computer hacking "in much the way the Pentagon has been." The hackers are apparently using a botnet to make up to 5,000 attempts a day at various unsecured portals into the NYPD's files. China's foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang denied involvement in computer espionage. "Some people outside of China are bent on fabricating lies of so-called Chinese computer spies," he said last month. The obvious question is, why are the Chinese so interested in the NYPD computer network?"
The Internet

Submission + - UK govt to pay for broadband-for-all (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "The Government is backing the creation of broadband-for-all in the UK with an initial £250 million of funding. The budget pledge follows Lord Carter's Digital Britain report which recommended the creation of a universal service obligation delivering a 2Mbits/sec broadband connection to every home in the country by 2012. The chancellor, Alistair Darling, has now thrown the Government's weight behind the proposal, announcing that the USO will be backed, in part, by any money left over from the BBC's Digital TV switchover efforts."
Media

Submission + - Analyzing YouTube's Audio Fingerprinter (rit.edu)

Submitted by Al Benedetto
Al Benedetto writes: I stumbled across this article which analyzes the YouTube audio content identification system in-depth. Apparently, since YouTube's system has no transparency, the behaviors had to be determined based on dozens of trial-and-error video uploads. The author tries things like speed/pitch adjustment, the addition of background noise, as well as other audio tweaks to determine exactly what you'd need to adjust before the fingerprinter started mis-identifying material. From the article, "When I muted the beginning of the song up until 0:30 (leaving the rest to play) the fingerprinter missed it. When I kept the beginning up until 0:30 and muted everything from 0:30 to the end, the fingerprinter caught it. That indicates that the content database only knows about something in the first 30 seconds of the song. As long as you cut that part off, you can theoretically use the remainder of the song without being detected. I don't know if all samples in the content database suffer from similar weaknesses, but it's something that merits further research."

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