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Sci-Fi

Submission + - Darren Aronofsky to direct Wolverine 2 (sciencefictionworld.com)

Submitted by
bowman9991
bowman9991 writes: "Darren Aronofsky, director of the excellent science fiction/fantasy film 'The Fountain' will direct 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine 2' Hugh Jackman has revealed. Christopher McQuarrie, the man behind the complex, twist filled crime thriller The Usual Suspects, is writing the screenplay. The origins story will star Hugh Jackman as Wolverine dealing with ninjas in medieval Japan. This sounds like a fantastic mix and could potentially help Wolverine 2 avoid the usual hollywood comic book superhero cliches."

Submission + - Electrified Water Filter Zaps Bacteria (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Yi Cui, an Assistant Professor of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University, has invented quite the water filter. It’s inexpensive, is very resistant to clogging, and uses much less electricity than systems that require the water to be pumped through them. It also kills up to 98% of bacteria, as opposed to just trapping them, which is all that many existing systems do.
Security

Submission + - Mobile Passwords: When 3 Is Better Than 1 (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Entering passwords on smartphones is unnecessarily painful, says security research Markus Jakobsson. In addition to having to enter text on a tiny keyboard, there's no auto-correct feature, but there could be and it could be used securely if we use pass sentences instead of passwords. Consider the pass sentence 'frog work flat'. How secure is that? 'The frequencies of these words in the English language are 10 to the -5.13, 10 to the -3.20 and 10 to the -4.36. The combination therefore occurs with probability 10 to the -12.7 — the product of those three frequency values — or approximately 2 to the -42. That is a strong credential,' says Jakobsson.
Science

Submission + - Who Owns You? 20% Of Your Genes Are Patented (singularityhub.com) 1

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Here’s a disconcerting thought: for the past thirty years, genes have been patentable. And we’re not just talking genetically modified corn – your genes, pretty much as they exist in your body, can and have been patented. The US government reports over three million gene patent applications have been filed so far; over 40,000 patents are held on sections of the human genome, covering roughly 20% of our genes. Upset? You’re not alone.

Submission + - Google purchases Episodic (kvcwebhosting.com)

Submitted by mamedesign
mamedesign writes: Google has got its 5th acquisition in this year. Episodic (video service) is drafted for helping out with the helping out of the Google owned YouTube video service. Episodic is a San Francisco based company, which was founded by Noam Lovinsky and Matias Cudich. This company describes itself as a comprehensive platform for broadcasting live and on-demand video to the web or any web-enabled device. Episodic made the announcement of this acquisition in a blog posting on this Friday.
Data Storage

Submission + - WD Launches New, Faster 600GB VelociRaptor (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "With all of the press Solid State Drives are getting recently, it's safe to assume that R&D in spinning hard drives has declined. After all, hard drive capacities have seemingly hit a plateau at 2TB, performance can't come close to an average SSD, and it's hard to imagine hard drive prices falling any lower. However, Western Digital, despite releasing their own line of SSDs recently, continues to push the performance envelope with traditional hard drives. Today they launched the new WD VelociRaptor 600GB. Like the first-Gen VelociRaptor, the new 600GB variant employs a 2.5" form factor, with a 10K RPM spindle speed. This new VelociRaptor also has higher areal density per platter, more cache, a SATA 6Gb/s interface, and a dual-core controller; all features designed to crank performance up a notch or two."
Government

Finnish Court Dismisses E-Voting Result 114

Posted by kdawson from the go-back-jack-do-it-again dept.
wizzor writes in with a follow-up on the Finnish municipal election in which 2% of the votes were lost by a defective e-voting system, and which the Helsinki Administrative Court had found acceptable. Now the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland has rejected the election results (original in Finnish; bad Google translation here) and ordered the election to be re-run. The submitter adds, "Apparently 98% of the votes isn't enough to determine how the remaining 2% voted, after all."
Communications

Submission + - Skype caught out over video enhancement 'hack' (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by
superglaze
superglaze writes: "When Skype signed a deal with Logitech to enable "high quality" video calls, what it didn't make clear is that an option already existed within Skype to manually boost video quality. But Skype removed the feature, possibly to protect its new partnership. Guess what? The users of that feature cried foul, and now Skype has been forced to do a U-turn, reintroducing the option to manually increase resolution. Surely a victory for the consumer, albeit of a free product. I wonder how this will affect Skype's ongoing problem with being profitable."
Privacy

Submission + - Pirate Bay WILL NOT Be Shutdown After All (zeropaid.com)

Submitted by
Jared Moya
Jared Moya writes: "Considers filing charges for slander or official misconduct against the Swedish police officer involved.The decision to not include the Pirate Bay in this week's blocklist merely reinforces the fact that the charges were dubiously propagated by people higher up the chain in a bid to smear the Pirate Bay and get it shut down for good. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8891/The+Pirate+Bay+W ILL+NOT+Be+Shutdown+After+All"
Patents

Submission + - Johnathan Schwartz comits to patent defense?

Submitted by mowa
mowa writes: Following on the heals of his widely praised (and linked) initial response to Microsoft's patent threat; Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, seems to commit to a position of mutual defense with FOSS leaders Redhat and Ubuntu against patent aggression. It's good to see Sun taking an increasingly constructive and consistent stand.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft kills off J# language

Submitted by
twofish
twofish writes: "Microsoft have announced that J#, its Java clone for .NET, and the Java Language Conversion Assistant will be discontinued and will not appear in the next version of Visual Studio. At the same time they have announced pans for a 64-bit version of the J# Redistributable this year."
Linux Business

Submission + - Samba Success in the Enterprise?

Submitted by
gunnk
gunnk writes: "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is "amateur" software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"

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