htiawe - Slashdot User

Submission + - Battleheart developer drops Android as 'unsustainable' (electronista.com)

Submitted by mr100percent on Saturday March 10, 2012 @06:02PM

mr100percent writes: Battleheart's creator Mika Mobile in an update explained that it was dropping Android support. Google's platform was losing money for the company, since it spent about 20 percent of its time supporting the platform but only ever made five percent or less of the company's revenue. Much of the effort was spent on issues specific to Android, where the diversity was only creating problems rather than helping. "I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through," one half of the husband and wife duo said. "We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android."

Submission + - Behind The Mask, Accused LulzSec Members Left Trail Of Clues Online (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Saturday March 10, 2012 @02:50PM

Trailrunner7 writes: When the long arm of the law reached in to arrest members of Anonymous's senior leadership on Tuesday, speculation immediately turned to the identities of the six men behind the Guy Fawkes mask. With the benefit of hindsight, it turns out that many had been hiding in plain site, with day jobs, burgeoning online lives and — for those who knew where to look — plenty of clues about their extracurricular activities on behalf of the world's most famous hacking crew.

An investigation by Threatpost found that two of the accused, Darren Martyn (aka "pwnsauce," “raepsauce,” and “networkkitten,”) and Donncha O’Cearbhail, formerly known as Donncha Carroll (aka “Palladium”) sported outsize online footprints and made little effort to hide their affinity for hacking.

In other areas, however, Martyn (who was reported to be 25, but claimed to be 19), seemed to be on his way to bigger and better things. He was a local chapter leader of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) in Galway, Ireland. He spent some of his free time with a small collective of computer researchers with Insecurety Research, under the name “infodox.”

Submission + - What Happens After the Super-Hero Movie Bubble? (esquire.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99 on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @06:02PM

mattnyc99 writes: In the wake of a not-that-exciting Comic-Con come some (perhaps premature) reports on the so-called "Death of Superheroes" — what one financial group calls "the top of the (comic book) character remonetization cycle." In response, Esquire.com's Paul Schrodt has an interesting look down Hollywood geek road. From the article: "What happens after The Avengers, or Christopher Nolan's third and final Batman movie — after we've seen all there is to see of the best comic-book blockbusters ever made?"

Submission + - Russia Wants to Dump Space Station in Ocean

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @04:41PM

An anonymous reader writes: Once the International Space Station has finished its celestial journey, it will head to a new great unexplored region: the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

A similar fate awaited Mir, the predecessor space station to the current one, which was committed to its watery grave in 2001 after spending 15 years in space. Essentially, Russia and its partners are trying to avoid littering. Space waste is becoming an increasingly visible problem, with a stray piece of debris narrowly missing the space station last month.

How To Prove Someone Is Female? 1091

Posted by kdawson on Saturday August 22, 2009 @05:59PM from the who-can-replace-a-man dept.

krou writes "Caster Semenya won the 800m at the World Athletics Championship in blistering style, leaving her competitors in the dust, but she has been thrown into the midst of a scandal amidst claims that she's not really a woman. According to the many press reports, she's believed to shave, is flat chested, has a very masculine physique, previously preferred playing physical games with boys, and shunned traditional female activities and clothing. Questions about her gender have dogged her entire career. Previously, acceptance that she is a women relied on simple inspection of female genitals. But now the IAAF claim that they want to conduct further tests to see if 'she may have a rare medical condition that gives her an unfair advantage.' An IAAF spokesmen noted that 'The [testing] process was started after Semenya made her startling breakthroughs — a 25-second improvement at 1500m and eight seconds at 800m, just some weeks ago.' I'm curious what the Slashdot community thinks: what can be considered proof of someone being male or female? Is it simply a case of having the right genitals, or are there other criteria that should be used? Is the IAAF right in claiming that someone should be prevented from competing because they have a rare medical or genetic advantage?"

Submission + - Fatty foods affect memory and exercise (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

Death Metal

on Saturday August 15, 2009 @11:56PM

Death Metal writes: "Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people.

Other studies have suggested that that long-term consumption of a high-fat diet is associated with weight gain, heart disease and declines in cognitive function. But the new research shows how indulging in fatty foods over the course of a few days can affect the brain and body long before the extra pounds show up."

Submission + - Google Wave Preview Opens Up on Sept 30th (infoq.com)

Submitted by

snitch

on Saturday August 15, 2009 @06:48PM

snitch writes: "With the Google Wave Preview scheduled for public availability on September 30th, Wave API Tech Lead Douwe Osinga has posted on the Wave Google Group about what the team has been working on along with some future directions.

Up until now with the limited availability of testing accounts there have been complaints on the Google Group from users that wanted to get their hands on this new technology but didn't have access to the sandbox. As Douwe explains the team has been busy all this time with stability issues and more"

Submission + - Obama's DOJ defends $1.92 million fine (cnet.com)

Submitted by

Death Metal

on Saturday August 15, 2009 @09:25AM

Death Metal writes: "In a legal brief filed Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice said the whopping $1.92 million fine that the Recording Industry Association of America slapped on Thomas was perfectly constitutional.

Federal prosecutors argue the relevant law is "carefully crafted" and consistent with "due process" and part of a necessary "regime to protect intellectual property. Under current law, copyright holders can sue for up to $150,000 per work (such as an MP3 file, DVD, or book).

Hope! Change! Hope! Change!"

Licensing Dispute Threatens Future of Skype 282

Posted by timothy on Friday July 31, 2009 @04:53AM from the it-puts-the-lotion-on-the-remote-kill-switch dept.

tomlins writes "eBay is faced with the prospect of having to close down the hugely popular VoIP app Skype due to its reliance on proprietary code still owned by Skype's original founders, who are threatening to pull the plug on the licensing agreement they have with eBay."

The Pirate Bay Ordered To Block Dutch Users 255

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday July 30, 2009 @01:01PM from the can't-catch-a-break dept.

secmartin writes "In a totally unexpected ruling, a Dutch court has decided that The Pirate Bay should block visitors from the Netherlands within 10 days or face a fine of €30,000 per defendant per day. Peter Sunde has already announced that he will appeal the ruling. Even though the defendants sent a letter explaining that they were unable to come to the hearing and provided arguments in their favor, these were ignored by the judge because they failed to appear in his court. The full text of the ruling was just published (in Dutch, PDF) by Peter Sunde, and further coverage is available at Forbes."

CentOS Project Administrator Goes AWOL 492

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 30, 2009 @09:29AM from the going-out-for-smokes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Lance Davis, the main project administrator for CentOS, a popular free 'rebuild' of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, appears to have gone AWOL. In an open letter from his fellow CentOS developers, they describe the precarious situation the project has been put in. There have been attempts to contact him for some time now, as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds. One can only hope that Lance gets in contact with them and gets things sorted out."

New DoS Vulnerability In All Versions of BIND 9 197

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @10:02PM from the binding-with-briars-my-joys-and-desires dept.

Icemaann writes "ISC is reporting that a new, remotely exploitable vulnerability has been found in all versions of BIND 9. A specially crafted dynamic update packet will make BIND die with an assertion error. There is an exploit in the wild and there are no access control workarounds. Red Hat claims that the exploit does not affect BIND servers that do not allow dynamic updates, but the ISC post refutes that. This is a high-priority vulnerability and DNS operators will want to upgrade BIND to the latest patch level."

Apple Kills Google Voice Apps On the iPhone 541

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @04:08PM from the hey-wait-isn't-he-on-our-board dept.

molnarcs writes "Apple pulls Google Voice-enabled applications from its App Store, citing duplication of functionality. The move affects both Google's official Google Voice and third party apps like Voice Central. Sean Kovacs, main developer of GV Mobile, says that he had personal approval for his app from Phil Shiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, last April. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid suspects AT&T behind the move."

Gamerscore Hacking and Its Underground Economy 85

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @03:43AM from the achievement-unlocked-account-locked dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There's a writeup on SpywareGuide that explores the world of Xbox Gamerscore hacking, and how high Gamerscores are proving to be a big target for hackers and phishers. It also talks about how a recent release of a Gamerscore-altering program onto forums for hacking & cheating is proving to be lucrative business for both eBay sellers and those who want to artificially inflate a Gamerscore before selling that account, or trading it for credit card details."

Submission + - The Web of Data, beyond what Google and Yahoo show

Submitted by jccq on Sunday July 26, 2009 @05:56PM

jccq writes: Both Google and Yahoo have been supporting Semantic Web markup (RDFa, RDF and Microformats) for weeks and months respectively. What they do, at the moment, is use the markup only for visual feedback by returning better looking, more functional "page snippets". But how would it look if you could get all these bits and compose them automatically to form a single structured information page about what you're searching for? The folks at the DERI institute have just released Sig.ma , is visual browser and mashup generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources to combine together when answering a user query. Also comes in API mode to reuse the information Sig.ma finds inside applications. The screencast and a (blog post, with semantic web geeks details).

Slashdot Top Deals