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Censorship

41% of Chinese Websites Shut Down In 2010 203

Posted by CmdrTaco from the most-of-them-weren't-lolcats dept.
BinaryMage found a pretty shocking bit- apparently the Chinese government has shut down 1.3 million websites in 2010, an incredible 41% of all sites behind the great firewall. The usual reasons (pornography) are cited, as well as the reminder that China blocks Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from its citizens. Anyone behind the firewall know if Slashdot is currently blocked? I've heard it varies.
Idle

Submission + - Numbers Show iPhone Owners Get More Sex (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to OK Cupid’s survey of 552,000 user pictures iPhone users have more sexual partners than BlackBerry or Android owners. By age 30, the average male iPhone user has had about 10 partners while female iPhone users have had 12. By contrast, BlackBerry users hover around 8 partners and Android users have a mere 6.

As the blog’s author’s wryly observe: “Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren’t just getting fucked by Apple
Communications

Google Kills Wave Development 327

Posted by timothy from the harshing-on-mellow dept.
We've mentioned several times over the past two years Wave, Google's ambitiously multi-channel, perhaps plain overwhelming entry in the social media wars. Now, reader mordejai writes "Google stated in its official blog that they will not continue developing Wave as a standalone product. It's sad, because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses."
Google

Submission + - Google Remotely Nukes Apps From Android Phones (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Google disclosed in a blog post on Thursday that it remotely reached into your phone and removed two applications from Android phones that ran contrary to the terms of the Android Market. From the post:

Recently, we became aware of two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes. These applications intentionally misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads, but they were not designed to be used maliciously, and did not have permission to access private data — or system resources beyond permission.INTERNET. As the applications were practically useless, most users uninstalled [sic] the applications shortly after downloading them.

After the researcher voluntarily removed these applications from Android Market, we decided, per the Android Market Terms of Service, to exercise our remote application removal feature on the remaining installed copies to complete the cleanup.

The blog post comes a day after security vendor SMobile Systems published a report saying that 20% of Android apps are malicious.
Google

Submission + - Google Android: A Universe of Incompatible Devices (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Galen Gruman writes about the dark side of the recent flood of Android smartphones: versions run amok. 'That flood of options should be a good thing — but it's not. In fact, it's a self-destruction derby in action, as phones come out with different versions of the Android OS, with no clear upgrade strategy for either the operating system or the applications users have installed, and with inconsistent deployment of core features. In short, the Android platform is turning out not to be a platform at all, but merely a starting point for a universe of incompatible devices,' Gruman writes. 'This mess leaves developers and users in an unstable position, as each new Android device adds another variation and compatibility question.' In the end, Google's naive approach to open sourcing Android may in fact be precipitating this free-for-all — one that might ultimately turn off both end-users and developers alike."
Image

2009 Darwin Award Winners Announced 208

Posted by samzenpus from the dumber-and-dumberest dept.
Greg Lindahl writes "From the woman who jumped in a swollen creek to rescue her drowning moped, to the man who hopped over the divider at the edge of the highway to take a leak, and plunged 65 feet to his death, 2009 was a year both exceptional and unexceptional for Darwin Award-worthy behavior!"

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.
Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."

Comment CNN on Android developer fears (Score 4, Informative) 289

by maiken2051 (#30177172) Attached to: Some Claim Android App Store Worse Than iPhone's
CNN Tech article on developing for Android: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/17/android.wired/index.html Will developers get stuck building for the "least common denominator" of 'droid phones? Or develop for specific models / versions / capabilities? Throw in phone vendor and carrier OS customizations and the Android app marketplace could get hard to live with...
Linux

Submission + - Early adopters "bloodied" by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala 3

Submitted by Norsefire
Norsefire writes: The Register reports that early adopters are having a tough time with Karmic Koala, Ubuntu's latest release. 'Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers and log fresh bug reports in Ubuntu forums.'
Encryption

Generating Fast MD5 Collisions With ATI Video Cards 72

Posted by timothy from the how-to-get-grants-for-game-hardware dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday at Black Hat USA 2009, a talk entitled MD5 Chosen-Prefix Collisions on GPUs (whitepaper) (Both PDFs) presented an implementation written in assembly language for ATI video cards that achieves 1.6 billion MD5 hash/sec, or 2.2 billion MD5 hash/sec with reversing, on an ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2. This is faster than the much-publicized 1.4-1.9 billion hash/sec figure that was supposedly reached on a PlayStation 3 by Nick Breese at Black Hat Europe 2008 (he later noticed an error in his benchmarking tool). Compared to the cluster of 215 PlayStation 3s that was used to create a rogue CA in December 2008, Marc Bevand claimed a cluster of 12 machines with 24 video cards would be a bit faster, consume 5 times less power, and be 10 times cheaper."

Comment HTML5 gives me The Fear (Score 1) 500

by maiken2051 (#28355879) Attached to: HTML 5 Takes Aim At Flash and Silverlight
Right now you pretty much have to be Flash-literate to make singing/dancing ads that can annoy effectively across the browser genpop, and not many people are. FlashBlock puts today's little pests peacefully to sleep. What will I do when the enemy is indistinguishable from the page code, and anybody can hatch one with two lines of JavaScript?
Image

Head First Rails 57

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Anita Kuno writes "I suggested Head First Rails to a friend before I even finished it. He was asking me questions that I didn't have time to answer, and I knew the book could explain better than I. My friend is impatient, and I was uncertain what his experience would be. At first he was frustrated, but I assured him the answers were in the book. The incremental style of Head First Rails includes some exercises that are designed to fail to reinforce the learning process. I was confident that his answer would be found in the pages and he trusted me enough to go back and continue the exercises. He later told me he is very happy with the book and grateful that I suggested it." Read on for the rest of Anita's review.
The Internet

Researchers Warn of Possible BitTorrent Meltdown 294

Posted by kdawson from the domino-effect dept.
secmartin writes "Researchers at Delft University warn that large parts of the BitTorrent network might collapse if The Pirate Bay is forced to shut down. A large part of the available torrents use The Pirate Bay as tracker, and other available trackers will probably be overloaded if all traffic is shifted there. TPB is currently using eight servers for their trackers. According to the researchers, even trackerless torrents using the DHT protocol will face problems: 'One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only "stumble upon success", meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.'"

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