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Robotics

Robot Film Festival Hits New York 20

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the i-for-one-welcome-our-robotic-tired-jokes dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wonder what life will be like when the robots take over? On Saturday, some of us might get a glimpse, when the first robot film festival kicks off in New York. Botskers (robot Oscars) will be awarded and the event will feature a red carpet, robotically milled statuettes, a robot-human comedy duo, and a rock band with robot musicians playing backup. 'We are trying to focus on celebrating robotics and thinking about positive futures,' says festival creator Heather Knight of Marilyn Monrobot."
Google

Gmail Creator Says Chrome OS Is As Good As Dead 349

Posted by samzenpus from the way-of-the-dodo dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Former Google employee, Gmail creator, and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit has come right out and said what many people are thinking (or hoping for). On his FriendFeed page, Buchheit made a post titled 'Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or "merged" with Android).' In it, he bluntly says that Google's netbook-centric Chrome OS is as good as dead. 'Yeah, I was thinking, "is this too obvious to even state?", but then I see people taking ChromeOS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason,' Buchheit writes. 'Because ChromeOS has no purpose that isn't better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).'"
Earth

EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Bees 410

Posted by Soulskill from the how-could-that-bee dept.
hether writes "The mystery of the disappearing bees has been baffling scientists for years and now we get another big piece in the puzzle. From Fast Company: 'A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined — electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.' Now environmentalists and bee keepers are calling for an immediate ban of the pesticide clothianidin, sold by Bayer Crop Science under the brand name Poncho."
Ubuntu

Preview of Ubuntu's Unity Interface 382

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-see-what-you-did-there dept.
itwbennett writes "In late October we learned that starting with the next release (11.04), Ubuntu would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface. Now we know a bit more about what that will (and won't) mean for users. The move to Unity doesn't mean that Ubuntu is abandoning GNOME. It also doesn't mean that users will be forced to use Unity; they'll still be able to revert to the old GNOME interface. What it does mean, mainly, is that users will be presented with a simple interface — probably too simple for nuts and bolts types. The more 'radical shift' will be switching Ubuntu's base graphics system from the X Window System to Wayland. There users can expect that it will take some time before things are in working order. 'In other words,' says Steven Vaughan-Nichols who reviewed Unity for ITworld, 'Wayland will be an option, and one that only people who don't mind having their desktops blow up on a regular basis should fool with, in Ubuntu 11.04. By Ubuntu 11.10, it will be workable, and come the spring release two years from now, Ubuntu 12.04, we should, if all goes well, see a stable Wayland-based Unity desktop.'"
Open Source

ProFTPD.org Compromised, Backdoor Distributed 152

Posted by CmdrTaco from the scary-world-we-live-in dept.
Orome1 writes "A warning has been issued by the developers of ProFTPD, the popular FTP server software, about a compromise of the main distribution server of the software project that resulted in attackers exchanging the offered source files for ProFTPD 1.3.3c with a version containing a backdoor. It is thought that the attackers took advantage of an unpatched security flaw in the FTP daemon in order to gain access to the server."
Government

Wikileaks Booted From Amazon 528

Posted by samzenpus from the you're-outta-here dept.
dakameleon writes "Wikileaks has been booted from its Amazon hosting, and has now shifted to being hosted in Europe. Senator Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement, 'This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the WikiLeaks website,' which raises the question whether this was requested by the government. Senator Lieberman said Amazon's decision to cut off WikiLeaks 'is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.'"
Math

Aussie Government Competition To Predict Commute Times 79

Posted by samzenpus from the the-road-less-traveled dept.
databuff writes "Last week, Sydney's Minister of Roads, David Borger, launched a $10,000 competition to develop an algorithm that predicts commute times on a major Sydney freeway. The winning algorithm will be used to power predictions on the Sydney live traffic website. The hope is that the predictions will help commuters make informed decisions about when to travel and on what routes, lowering the intensity of peak hour traffic. In its first week, the competition attracted entries from more than 50 teams and 19 countries."
Image

The World's Smallest Legible Font 280

Posted by samzenpus from the because-he-can dept.
hasanabbas1987 writes "From the article: 'Well 'technically' they aren't the smallest fonts in the world as if they were you wouldn't be able to read even a single letter, but, you should be able to read the entire paragraph in the picture given above... we did. A Computer science professor called Ken Perlin designed these tiny fonts and you can fit 500 reasonable words in a resolution of 320 x 240 space. There are at the moment the smallest legible fonts in the world.'"
Security

Cracking Passwords With Amazon EC2 GPU Instances 217

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sekrit-p4ssw0rd dept.
suraj.sun writes "As of Nov. 15, 2010, Amazon EC2 is providing what they call 'Cluster GPU Instances': An instance in the Amazon cloud that provides you with the power of two NVIDIA Tesla 'Fermi' M2050 GPUs... Using the CUDA-Multiforce, I was able to crack all hashes from this file with a password length from 1-6 in only 49 Minutes (1 hour costs $2.10 by the way.). This is just another demonstration of the weakness of SHA1 — you really don't want to use it anymore."
Censorship

TV Tropes Self-Censoring Under Google Pressure 393

Posted by samzenpus from the think-of-the-children dept.
mvdwege writes "The popular wiki TV Tropes, a site dedicated to the discussion of various tropes, clichés and other common devices in fiction has suddenly decided to put various of its pages behind a 'possibly family-unsafe' content warning, apparently due to pressure by Google withdrawing its ads. What puzzles me most is the content that is put behind this warning. TV Tropes features no explicit sexual content, and no explicit violence. It does of course discuss these things, as is its remit, but without actual explicit depictions. In fact, something as relatively innocuous as children being raised by two females, whatever the reason are put behind the content warning, even if the page itself doesn't take a stand on the issue, merely satisfying itself by describing the occurence of this in fiction."

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