An anonymous reader writes "I love cabbages has reverse-engineered Adobe's ADEPT DRM (e-book protection). On February 18, I love cabbages released code that decrypts EPUB e-books protected with ADEPT and followed that up on February 25, with code that decrypts PDF e-books protected with ADEPT. On March 4, I love cabbages was given a DMCA take down notice. And there's plenty of evidence he got it right. DS:TNG (Dmitry Sklyarov: The Next Generation)?"

rrohbeck was one of several readers to note the passing of Forrest J. Ackerman at the age of 92. Ackerman, who coined the term sci-fi in 1954, has been called the 'world's biggest fan.' Over a long career he acted as literary agent for Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Hugo Gernsback, and L. Ron Hubbard; he published Ray Bradbury's first short story in a fan magazine in 1938. Ackerman wrote over 2,000 articles and short stories, including, oddly enough, lesbian fiction in the 1940s. In recent years, mounting health bills forced him to sell his home, the 'Ackermansion,' and most of the 300,000 items of memorabilia it stored.

bcrowell writes "The NYTimes has an editorial plugging Flat World Knowledge, a startup that will offer college textbooks inexpensively (~$30) in print, and free as PDFs. They plan to make their profits from add-ons like podcast study guides and mobile phone flashcards. Books will be licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike. Mashups and customizations are encouraged, but the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia. Other companies trying to find a workable business model for free textbooks include Ink Textbooks (revenue from online homework) and Freeload Press (revenue from ads inside the books). So far, none of these companies seems to have succeeded in building up much of a catalog of books; it seems more common for authors of free textbooks to take a DIY approach, putting PDFs on their own web pages, and sometimes arranging on-demand printing with vanity-press publishers like lulu.com. Lots and lots of web sites exist to help people find free textbooks, and CalPIRG has an active campaign pushing for affordable textbooks."

chromatic writes "Google and O'Reilly have published the Call For Open Source Awards 2008 Nominations. These awards, given at OSCON 2008, recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of open source software. The nomination process is open to the entire open source community, and nominations close on May 15. Here's your chance to sing the praises of previously unsung hackers."

Roland Piquepaille writes "If you live near the sea, chances are high that your home is built over sandy soil. And if an earthquake strikes, deep and sandy soils can turn to liquid with disastrous consequences for the buildings built above them. Now, US researchers have found a way to use bacteria to steady buildings against earthquakes by turning these sandy soils into rocks. 'Starting from a sand pile, you turn it back into sandstone,' the chief researcher explained. It is already possible to inject chemicals into the ground to reinforce it, but this technique can have toxic effects on soil and water. In contrast, the use of common bacteria to 'cement' sands has no harmful effects on the environment. So far this method is limited to labs and the researchers are working on scaling their technique. Here are more references and a picture showing how unstable ground can aggravate the consequences of an earthquake."