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Submission + - The Million-dollar business of video game cheating (pcgamer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you play games online against other people, chances are you've come up against somebody who's obviously cheating. Wall hacks, aimbots, map hacks, item dupes — you name it, and there will always be a small (but annoying) segment of the gaming population who does it. Many of these cheating methods are bought and sold online, and PCGamer has done some investigative reporting to show us rule-abiding types how it all works. A single cheat-selling website manages to pull in $300,000 a year. The people running the site aren't worried about their business drying up, either — game developers quickly catch 'rage cheaters,' and players cheating to be seen, but they have a much harder time detecting the 'closet cheaters' who hide it well. Countermeasures like PunkBuster and VAC are sidestepped quickly and easily.

Submission + - Toyota Describes Combustion Engine That Generates Electricity Directly

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: While electric cars are now more available than ever, combustion engines will remain for decades to come. Now auto engineers are working to refine combustion power as part of cars that are increasingly electrified, including plug-in hybrids. Toyota's new 'Free Piston Engine Linear Generator' (or FPEG) shows us one potential way. Linear engines eliminate the rotating crankshaft of conventional engines in favor of a single chamber, in which a piston moves forward and backward. A linear engine has no crankshaft, nor connecting rods. In their place is a gas-filled chamber, the compression of which functions like a spring — returning the piston after the expansion / combustion phases of a typical combustion cycle. This back-and-forth motion can be turned into energy, when you haven't got a crankshaft and the mechanically-useful rotation it produces. While linear engines are far from new, and Toyota's test units are only 10 kW (13 horsepower), a pair of them can still produce enough electricity for a Yaris or Corolla-sized vehicle to cruise on the highway at 75 mph.

Submission + - Astronomers determine the length of day of an exoplanet

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: Astronomers have just announced that the exoplanet Beta Pic b — a 10-Jupiter-mass world 60 light years away -— rotates in about 8 hours. Using a high-resolution spectrometer and exploiting the Doppler shift of light seen as the planet spins, they measured its rotation velocity as 28,000 mph. Making reasonable assumptions about the planet's size, that gives the length of its day. This is the first time such a measurement has been achieved for an exoplanet.

Submission + - OpenSSH no longer has to depend on OpenSSL (gmane.org)

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: What has been planned for a long time now, prior to the infamous heartbleed fiasco of OpenSSL (which does not affect SSH at all), is now officially a reality — with the help of some recently adopted crypto from DJ Bernstein, OpenSSH now finally has a compile-time option to no longer depend on OpenSSL — `make OPENSSL=no` has now been introduced for a reduced configuration OpenSSH to be built without OpenSSL, which would leave you with no legacy SSH-1 baggage at all, and on the SSH-2 front with only AES-CTR and chacha20+poly1305 ciphers, ECDH/curve25519 key exchange and Ed25519 public keys.
Space

Submission + - Incoming! The Sun Unleashes CME at Earth (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "It's been an exciting day on the sun. This morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a "filament") erupted at the exact same time. It seems very likely that both eruptions were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption. A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae, a solar storm is coming..."

Submission + - Google Attorney Slams ACTA Copyright Treaty 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Cnet reports that Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel at Google, says ACTA has "metastasized" from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an sweeping international legal framework for copyright and the Internet that could increase the liability for Internet intermediaries such as, perhaps, search engines. "You don't want to play Russian roulette with very high statutory damages." One section of ACTA says that Internet providers "disabling access" to pirated material and adopting a policy dealing with unauthorized "transmission of materials protected by copyright" would be immune from lawsuits but if they choose not to do so, they could face legal liability. "It looks a lot like cultural imperialism," Keller said at the Legal Frontiers in Digital Media conference. "It's something that really snuck up on a lot of people," adding that ACTA, is "something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like," without public scrutiny. Both the Obama administration and the Bush administration had rejected requests for the text of ACTA, with the White House last year even indicating that disclosure would do "damage to the national security." After pressure from the European Parliament, however, negotiators released the draft text two weeks ago."
Power

Submission + - Reverse-engineering the Netherlands dyke system (www.nrc.nl)

Submitted by
vikingpower
vikingpower writes: "Built in reaction upon a major flood that killed 1800 in the '50s of the last century, the Dutch system of dykes, sluices, surge barriers and dams has been dubbed "one of the seven wonders of the modern world" by the American Society of Engineers. Now, there are proposals to use the system differently, e.g. as tidal power plants by punching holes in them. Any civil engineer will probably be mouth-watering when thinking of the mega-projects this could give rise to."
Games

More Evidence For Steam Games On Linux 256

Posted by Soulskill from the come-on-valve-spill-the-beans dept.
SheeEttin writes "Back in November 2008, Phoronix reported that Linux libraries appeared in the Left 4 Dead demo, and then in March, Valve announced that Steam and the Source engine were coming to Mac OS X. Now, Phoronix reports that launcher scripts included with the (closed beta) Mac version of Steam include explicit support for launching a Linux version."
Security

Submission + - Microsoft refuses to patch infected PCs (pcpro.co.uk) 2

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: Microsoft has revealed that its latest round of patches won't install on XP machines if they're infected with a rootkit. In February, a security patch left some XP users complaining of endless reboots and Blue Screens of Death. An investigation followed and Microsoft discovered the problems occurred on machines infected with the Alureon rootkit, which interacted badly with patch KB977165 for the Windows kernel. Now Microsoft is blocking PCs with the rootkit from receiving its new patches. "This security update includes package-detection logic that prevents the installation of the security update if certain abnormal conditions exist on 32-bit systems," Microsoft cautions in the patch notes.

Submission + - U.S. Rejects Demands For ACTA Transparency (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Trade Representative issued a release just prior to the launch of the New Zealand round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations that has left no doubt that the U.S. is the biggest barrier to official release of the ACTA text. Unlike most other ACTA countries that have called for transparency without condition, the U.S. has set conditions that effectively seeks to trade its willingness to release the text for gains on the substance of the text.
Space

Submission + - Apollo 13 Mission Manual to be Auctioned (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "On April 13 in New York City, Bonhams will auction off pages from the Apollo 13 mission manual, with handwritten notes by flight commander Jim Lovell. I'm thinking the chances of actually outbidding a rich space enthusiast is slim to none, but having a chance at owning a piece of spaceflight history should be popular nonetheless."

Submission + - Landmark Canadian link case goes to Supreme Court

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Vancouver businessman Wayne Crookes is trying to have the decision by BC Supreme Court judge Stephen Kelleher that linking is not the same as publishing reversed. He’s been given permission to appeal it to the Supreme Court of Canada. If he wins, it'll mean the end of the net in Canada and will reverberate around the world. "The notion that someone might be considered a publisher merely by linking to someone else's content, I think could have a potentially huge chilling affect [sic] and, for that reason alone, is going to have a major impact on the shape of the Internet in Canada," says Ottawa law professor Michael Geist. Hyperlinking is what the web is all about, says p2pnet founder Jon Newton. "Without it, the Internet would become a drab and pale facsimile of the exciting news, data and information medium it is today. Instead, each item would be isolated from every other item, and online defamation lawsuits aimed at anyone and everyone with a Web site would instantly become commonplace."
Canada

Submission + - EU Demands Canada Gut Its Copyright & Patent L (michaelgeist.ca) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Late last year, a draft of the European Union proposal for the intellectual property chapter of the Canada — EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement leaked online. The leak revealed that the EU was seeking some significant changes to Canadian IP laws. Negotiations have continued and Michael Geist has now obtained an updated copy of the draft chapter, complete with proposals from both the EU and Canada. He says the breadth of the demands are stunning — the EU is demanding nothing less than a complete overhaul of Canadian IP laws including copyright, trademark, databases, patent, geographic indications, and even plant variety rights.
Microsoft

Submission + - Open Source, Open Standards under Attack in EU (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: A battle for the soul of European IT is taking place behind closed doors in Brussels. At stake is the key Digital Agenda for Europe, due to be unveiled in a month's time. David Hammerstein, ex-Member of European Parliament for the Greens, tweeted last week: "SOS to everyone as sources confirm that Kroes is about to eliminate "open standards" policy from EU digital agenda; Kroes has been under intense lobbying pressure from Microsoft to get rid of interoperability and open source goals of EU." This is confirmed by the French magazine PC Inpact, which also managed to obtain a copy of the draft Digital Agenda. It's currently supportive of both open source and open standards — but for how much longer?

Submission + - Obama Backs MPAA, RIAA, and ACTA 1

Submitted by
boarder8925
boarder8925 writes: "In a move sure to surprise no one, Obama has come out on the side of the MPAA/RIAA and has backed the ACTA: "We're going to aggressively protect our intellectual property," Obama said in his speech, "Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people [...] It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it's only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can't just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.""

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