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Submission + - FBI Prioritizes Copyright Over Missing Persons (techdirt.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FBI has limited resources, so it needs to prioritize what it works on. However, it's difficult to see why dealing with copyright infringement seems to get more attention than identity theft or missing persons. In the past year, the FBI has announced a special new task force to fight intellectual property infringement, but recent reports have shown that both identity theft and missing persons have been downgraded as priorities by the FBI, to the point that there are a backlog of such cases.
Security

Submission + - Cache on Delivery (slideshare.net)

Submitted by
jamie
jamie writes: "If you already know what memcached is, skim to slide #17. The jaw-drop will happen around slide #33. Turns out many websites expose their totally-non-protected memcached interface to the internet, including gowalla, bit.ly and PBS."
Government

FBI May Get Easier Access To Internet Activity 276

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
olsmeister writes "It appears the White House would like to make it easier for the FBI to obtain records of a person's internet activities without a court order to do so, via the use of an NSL. While they have been able to do this for a long time, it may expand the type of information able to be gathered without a court order to include things like web browsing histories."
Biotech

How a Key Enzyme Repairs Sun-Damaged DNA 97

Posted by kdawson from the one-proton-and-one-electron dept.
BraveHeart writes "Researchers have long known that mammals, including humans, lack a key enzyme — one possessed by most of the animal kingdom and even plants — that reverses severe sun damage. For the first time, researchers have witnessed how this enzyme works at the atomic level to repair sun-damaged DNA. 'Normal sunscreen lotions convert UV light to heat, or reflect it away from our skin. A sunscreen containing photolyase could potentially heal some of the damage from UV rays that get through.'"
The Courts

Facing 16 Years In Prison For Videotaping Police 878

Posted by kdawson from the we-are-watching-you dept.
krou sends this snip from the Maine Civil Liberties Union: "The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who faces as much as sixteen years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop. ... Once [the Maryland State Police] learned of the video on YouTube, Graber's parents' house was raided, searched, and four of his computers were confiscated. Graber was arrested, booked, and jailed. Their actions are a calculated method of intimidation. Another person has since been similarly charged under the same statute. The wiretap law being used to charge Anthony Graber is intended to protect private communication between two parties. According to David Rocah, the ACLU attorney handling Mr. Graber's case, 'To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, wearing a badge and a uniform, performing his official duty, pulling someone over, somehow has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist.'" Here are a factsheet (PDF) on the case from the ACLU of Maryland, and the video at issue.
Graphics

OpenGL 4.1 Specification Announced 167

Posted by kdawson from the gentlemen-start-your-coders dept.
WesternActor writes "The Khronos Group has announced full details for the OpenGL 4.1 specification. Among the new features of the spec, which comes just five months after the release of the 4.0 specification, is full support for OpenGL ES, which simplifies porting between mobile and desktop platforms. It'll be interesting to see what effect, if any, this new spec has on the graphics industry — more compatibility could change the way many embedded systems are designed. There are lots of other changes and additions in the spec, as well." Reader suraj.sun contributes insight from Ars, which brings OpenGL's competition into focus: "OpenGL 4.0 brought feature parity with Direct3D 11's new features — in particular, compute shaders and tessellation — and with 4.1, the Khronos Group claims that it is surpassing the functionality offered in Microsoft's 3D API. ... Whether this truly constitutes a leapfrogging of Direct3D 11 is not obvious."
Space

A New Take On the Fermi Paradox 388

Posted by Soulskill from the drake's-game-of-life dept.
TravisTR points out some new research that aims to update and supplement the Fermi paradox — the idea that if intelligent life was as common as we expect, we should have detected it by now. The academic paper (PDF) from scientists at the National Technical University of Ukraine is based on the idea that civilizations can't expand forever on their own. The authors make the assumption that an isolated civilization will eventually die out or go dark through some other means, which leads to some interesting models of intergalactic colonization. "In certain circumstances, however, when civilizations are close enough together in time and space, they can come into contact and when this happens the cross-fertilization of ideas and cultures allows them both to flourish in a way that increases their combined lifespan. ... Bezsudnov and Snarskii say that for certain values of these parameters, the universe undergoes a phase change from one in which civilizations tend not to meet and spread into one in which the entire universe tends to become civilized as different groups meet and spread. Bezsudnov and Snarskii even derive an inequality that a universe must satisfy to become civilized. This, they say, is analogous to the famous Drake equation which attempts to quantify the number of other contactable civilizations in the universe right now."

Comment Regret (Score 1) 145

by anstice8 (#32840484) Attached to: Google Struggles To Give Away $10 Million
They probably regret offering all that money. Now they realize how stupid everyone's ideas are and are delaying it, hoping SOMEONE will have a good idea that's actually feasible. They should've added "If we decide to use your idea, you will get the money" because now they're kinda stuck giving it to the "least bad" idea hehe.

Comment Re:150ms doesn't mean 150ms in this case (Score 1) 204

by anstice8 (#32840024) Attached to: OnLive Latency Tested
Not true. Many games update your location and refresh the screen long before you receive the "ok" for having moved. The server will only do something if you're hacking and have moved too fast in too little time. The reason for this is exactly what makes these "cloud" games unbearable, people don't want to wait 150ms to see their screen refresh after having pressed a button, they want to see the result asap and the server's keeping track of everyone and making sure no ones cheating. That's why in some games when you're sure you've headshotted someone and see them run off without injury, it's because of lag and you shouldnt start yelling "HACKER HACKER HACKER". So in the end the delay is extremely different. Games played locally atleast give you the impression theyre in real time, cloud games couldn't give you that impression without living next door to the data center.
Image

Prince Says Internet Is Over 450

Posted by samzenpus from the it-was-fun-while-it-lasted dept.
the_arrow writes "According to the artist currently known as Prince, 'The internet's completely over.' At least that what he says in an interview with the British newspaper Mirror. Quoting Prince: 'The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you.'"

Comment Felt it in Montreal, QC (Score 2, Informative) 560

by anstice8 (#32669950) Attached to: 5.5 Earthquake Hits Canada; Felt in US Midwest, New England
I felt it in Montreal, QC, It's the first one I've felt since i was born and I'm 21, so for anyone saying its common then do your research. Just because everyone's talking about it doesnt mean we're freaking out over it, I felt more shaking this morning with construction on my street, so it's not a big deal other than it being rare.
Crime

Chinese Internet Addiction Boot Camp Prison Break 177

Posted by CmdrTaco from the make-a-run-for-it dept.
UgLyPuNk writes "A group of inmates at the Huai'an Internet Addiction Treatment Centre decided they'd had enough of the 'monotonous work and intensive training.' Working together, they tied their duty supervisor to his bed and made a run for it. The 14 patients, aged from 15 to 22, hailed a taxi to take them to a nearby town — but were uncovered when the driver took them to the police station instead, suspicious of the identically dressed young men who were unable to pay the fare."
Image

The Design of Design 73

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
asgard4 writes "Coming up with sound, elegant, and easy to implement designs is not a trivial matter, as Fred Brooks, author of the classic book The Mythical Man-Month, acknowledges in his latest book The Design of Design. In many disciplines — especially in software development — the design process and how to produce good designs is relatively poorly understood. Teaching the design process to students is even more difficult. In the form of opinionated essays, Brooks attempts to summarize what we know about the design process, how it has changed over time, and how we can produce better and more elegant designs. Brooks has decades of experience designing large systems and is well known for his involvement in the design of IBM's OS/360. Even though Brooks is a computer scientist, the book applies equally well to many other disciplines outside of software development that have a formal design process, such as architecture. A lot of his examples come from other engineering disciplines and architecture. But of course he presents the obligatory OS/360 case study as well." Read on for the rest of Martin's review.

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